Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
Independent Media Thrives as Corporate Media Plummets
BY HARRISON BERGER: Three major announcements by Rumble this week show why corporate media's attack on it are destined to fail
April 14, 2023
Guest contributors: HarryBerger
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Credit: Nasdaq Exchange, September 22, 2022

 


Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube, this week introduced two prominent and popular internet personalities to its platform: hip hop podcaster DJ Akademiks and the YouTube star JiDion. While this is something of a standard content contract, the implications of the deal are important nonetheless; it represents a larger exodus of successful content creators away from Big Tech and its rigid window of permissible thought, toward new independent platforms which promise to respect the free flow of ideas online. 

It’s exactly that characteristic of independent media that attracted me to my new job here in Rio working with Glenn Greenwald at his SYSTEM UPDATE show on Rumble. As someone who has long followed the work of Greenwald and his independent contemporaries like Matt Taibbi and Aaron Mate, it is surely an exciting time for people like myself who have wanted their work to reach larger audiences.

Though we have been discussing it for some time now on System Update, the growing success of independent media platforms has become such a significant and undeniable phenomenon that even mainstream outlets can’t help but make note of it. A surprisingly fair article from New York Magazine titled “The Only Success Story in Right Wing Media,” published in February explained Rumble’s recent accomplishments.

Founded in 2013 as an alternative video-hosting service, Rumble more recently rebranded as a “neutral video platform” designed to be “immune to cancel culture.” In 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company had taken investment from “a group of prominent conservative venture capitalists,” including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance (now the junior U.S. senator from Ohio), and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton. Rumble went public last year during the SPAC mania, and shares in the company (ticker symbol: RUM) now trade on the NASDAQ; it is worth just over $3 billion. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that Rumble was among the “best performers this year among firms that merged with a special-purpose acquisition company” and that it’s “sort of” a meme stock. Last year, Rumble announced it would take over hosting and advertising duties for Truth Social and plans to offer “cloud services” more widely. According to its latest quarterly public disclosures, Rumble claims 71 million monthly active users (up from 36 million the year prior) and lost $7.8 million on $11 million in revenue, while sitting on $356.7 million of “cash and cash equivalents.” Its IPO reportedly made the founder, Chris Pavlovski, a billionaire.

Earlier this week, it was also announced that Rumble will be the exclusive partner of the Republican National Debates, clearly an encouraging milestone for the nascent company. The rapid success of Rumble ought to be contrasted with the catastrophic failure of CNN’s flagship corporate news streaming service, CNN+, a project which pitifully dissolved within its first few weeks. 

And it’s obvious why Rumble is successful and CNN is failing. It’s because nobody trusts or watches cable news anymore. I’m a recent college graduate. I don’t know a single person my age who watches CNN. And just about the only time I see anyone watching cable news is when it’s on at the gym and there’s no way to change the channel. Younger generations largely prefer independent media. It has broad appeal that transcends the ideological limitations imposed by corporate news which usually makes for much more interesting and entertaining content. More than that, it’s really conventional wisdom among my generation that it’s the job of the corporate media to lie. That’s a point that was best made by the popular podcast, Full Send, when they recently hosted Tucker Carlson. 

TUCKER CARLSON: I've spent my whole life in the media. My dad was in the media. That is a big part of the revelation that has changed my life is the media are part of the control apparatus ... I know, you're younger and smarter and you're like, "Yeah?" What if you're me and you spent your whole life in that world? And to look around and all of a sudden you're like, "Oh wow, not only are they part of the problem, but I spent most of my life being part of the problem." Like, defending the Iraq War. I actually did that. Can you imagine if you did that? 

 

FULL SEND: What is one of your biggest regrets in your career?

 

TUCKER CARLSON: Defending the Iraq War. 

 

FULL SEND: That is it? 

 

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I've had a million regrets. Not being more skeptical. Calling people names when I should have listened to what they were saying. When someone makes a claim, there is only one question that is important at the very beginning, which is: "Is the claim true or not?" So I say you committed murder, or you rigged the last election. Before you attack me as a crazy person for saying that, maybe you should explain whether you did it or not. You know what I mean? 

 

And for too long, i participated in the culture where anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a "conspiracy theorist." And I just really regret that. I'm ashamed that I did that. And partly, it was age and the world I grew up in. 

 

So when you, look at me and say, "Yeah, of course [the media] is part of the means of control." That's obvious to you because you're 28, but I just didn't see it at all -- at all. And I'm ashamed of that. 

 

FULL SEND: Isn't that what the media tries to do though?

 

TUCKER CARLSON: It's their only purpose. They're not here to inform you! Really? Even on the big things that really matter like the economy and the war and Covid, things that really matter and will effect you, no. Their job is not to inform you, they're working for the small group of people who actually run the world. They're their servants, they're the Praetorian Guard. And we should treat them with maximum contempt because they have earned it. 

 

Tucker’s absolutely right. That’s why when I go on road trips with friends, we listen to The Joe Rogan Experience, not The Rachel Maddow Show or whatever conventional podcasts cable networks are producing (I don’t know the names of those corporate shows because, again, they’re unpopular. Hardly anyone listens to them). Audiences, especially younger ones, overwhelmingly prefer independent media like Joe Rogan and recent ratings confirm this.

Compare that to the Trump years, where Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program, with its perpetual hysteria over the now debunked Russiagate hoax, became incredibly successful, at one point earning the spot for the highest rated cable news show on television. In a media climate filled with egregious errors on that particular story, Maddow’s show surely stands alone for its manic conspiratorial approach to nonexistent Russian collusion.She built her audience on that single story.  And so when Robert Mueller’s investigation very undramatically deflated, so did Rachel Maddow’s audience. Now nobody watches her. Once a primetime liberal media darling, she currently hosts an hour slot on MSNBC for one night a week. On Mondays. 

And this broader trend makes sense too. You can find all sorts of views on Rumble while on cable news, where tribal dogmas constrain debate, that’s rarely ever the case. Consider Russiagate. While that narrative ultimately turned out to be a wild distortion of reality, those who initially urged skepticism were swiftly cast to the margins of civil debate, An illustrative example of that was in 2017, when Matt Taibbi went on All in With Chris Hayes to assert very mildly that perhaps mainstream media was extrapolating too heavily from visible evidence to make the claims they did about Donald Trump and Russia. For urging that Hayes and his colleagues apply greater scrutiny to their convictions, Taibbi was never invited back on that network. And when Taibbi ultimately broke one of the biggest stories of the past few years - The Twitter Files - there was a virtual media blackout from CNN and MSNBC. The revelations of that reporting, of course, continue to be relevant, increasingly so, given the vast scope of security state interventions into internet discourse and the repeated affirmations by prominent liberal Democrats to see their political enemies banished from online debates. 

The pervasive disinterest toward Taibbi’s bombshell revelations among the media elite makes sense when you consider what the real role of corporate media is. Real journalism requires an adversarial relationship between reporters and their subjects. There is supposed to be tension between those two groups; journalists and politicians are not supposed to be friends. 

And yet it is difficult to find a more cozy relationship inside the beltway than the one between the media and political classes. It’s perhaps the most destructive alliance against government transparency and accountability that exists and it’s one that’s celebrated every year at the lavish and opulent black tie event, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. So the collusion between public officials and the corporate journalists meant to hold them to account is pretty obvious; it’s done openly. If you need more convincing of that collusion between government and media, simply turn on cable news, where you can find a panel of former state officials turned TV stars. Jen Psaki, Biden’s former press secretary, now hosts a show on MSNBC. 

So does the former communications director for the Bush/Cheney White House and 2004 re-election campaign (now the Typhoid Mary of disinformation), Nicole Wallace. On Wednesday, it was announced that MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller will replace former MSNBC analyst Ned Price as spokesperson for the Biden State Department. The reason MSNBC reporters and White House spokespeople can interchange roles with such ease is because there is very little difference between the two jobs. Both are propaganda arms for the Democratic Party. As Greenwald points out , it’s just a lateral career move. As Tucker Carlson helpfully reminded us earlier, serving tribal factions is “their only purpose. They're not here to inform you.” Remember that we are often told that government control of media is a hallmark of despots and authoritarians yet in the US, there is virtually no separation between those two groups.

American audiences are clearly perceptive to this and the rise of independent media as an alternative to that corrupt media culture is a predictable reaction. Though cable network producers may disagree, audiences don’t enjoy ideology shoved down their throats. Again, nobody watches those networks anymore and hardly anyone trusts American mainstream media. This is exactly why, as new data suggests, independent media is growing as a viable alternative to traditional corporate news with more and more popular content creators choosing to stream with Rumble rather than YouTube. Given the size of each of their audiences, JiDion and DJ Akademiks joining Rumble is clearly big news. So is Rumble’s exclusive streaming partnership with the Republican National Debates. And as long as corporate media continues to operate under its broken model, it can be expected that more and more popular and interesting creators will gravitate from that dying industry toward the increasingly successful world of independent media. 

That is exactly why the mainstream media has tried so hard to malign new platforms like Rumble; it’s because they correctly perceive the rapid success of independent media as a threat to their existence. Consider how corporate media frames their competitor, Joe Rogan, who I just documented is vastly more popular than anyone on cable television. A concerted effort has been made to cast Rogan out as “right wing,” “racist,” and “a conspiracy theorist.” That last label concerned Rogan’s skepticism of US government claims regarding masking efficacy and COVID origins, opinions which have been increasingly vindicated. 

Last year, a CNN reporter published an article titled Don’t pretend you don’t know what Joe Rogan is all about which presented an argument which, though unconvincing, is nonetheless important to grapple with since it has now become a conventional liberal view:

The real issue isn’t about whether to cancel Joe Rogan (although some have advocated for Spotify to end its relationship in wake of the controversy). It is about exposing who Rogan really is and admitting that his brand of conversation, which at times traffics in conspiracy theories, cultural intolerance and blatant racism, attracts millions of avid listeners and corporate sponsors hungry to advertise their wares to such followers. Rogan is, in fact, an agent of these social ills, which he packages and sends out to his audience clothed in the language of moderation and moral equivalence. For example, in addition to his uses of the n-word, Rogan has made waves by suggesting that because “you can never be woke enough … it’ll eventually get to [where] White men are not allowed to talk.” Rogan laughed uproariously when comedian Joey Diaz, one of his guests, described pressuring women into performing oral sex on him. Rogan has horribly and deliberately misgendered a trans MMA fighter. He’s discouraged young people from getting the Covid-19 vaccine, hosted guests who question its validity and given a platform to climate skepticism from controversial clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.

A pot-smoking comedian on the internet is an “agent of social ills,” apparently. Look at the evidence presented for that claim. He’s against woke culture, he “deliberately” misgendered a trans MMA fighter, and he used the n-word. Ok. Maybe you agree with CNN that those are horrible things (I certainly don’t agree with everything Joe Rogan has said on all 2,000 of his episodes). 

Yet if you apply that same scrutiny to corporate media, you can see why CNN’s argument is just silly. Keep in mind that this is the same corporate media that convinced the American public to support a war based on lies in Iraq. There is little doubt about how damaging that coverage was - to America but more importantly, to the country of Iraq. And despite the glaring inconsistencies in the Bush administration’s Iraq narrative, there was no bigger cheerleader for that war than corporate media. That war killed a few hundred thousand people, perhaps a million depending on who you ask. How does anything Joe Rogan has even said or done compare to that? And yet we are constantly told to ignore Rogan and trust corporate media. 

But the broader narrative that Rogan is some sort of “right winger,” is total fiction. A recent article from Reason magazine explains why that’s the case.

Rogan and his supporters insist that he's simply open-minded and likes to talk to people from across the political spectrum—and a quick glance at some of his repeat guests would certainly suggest this.

 

Liberal actress Amy Schumer has been on Rogan's show four times, while Trump-loving actress Roseanne Barr has been on three times. Liberal director Kevin Smith has been a guest (four times), as has conservative rocker Ted Nugent (three times). Sex advice columnist and podcaster Dan Savage, Cenk Uygur of the left political show The Young Turks, whistleblower and civil liberties advocate Edward Snowden, and former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) have all been on Rogan's show. As have conservative commentators and entertainers like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones.

 

Many of Rogan's guests don't fit into neat political categories. For instance, politically independent YouTuber Bridget Phetasy has been on four times. Rogan also likes guests from the atheist and skeptic communities. Neuroscientist, podcaster, and author Sam Harris—best known for his writings on atheism and debates with religious believers—has been on eight times. Psychologist and author Steven Pinker (famous for books like How The Mind Works and The Blank Slate) has been on twice. Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer has been on six times.

Indeed, it’s difficult to find a podcast with as diverse a field of guests as JRE. Many of Rogan’s guests have little to do with politics at all. Those who say that Rogan is “right wing,” clearly have never watched his show. Popular episodes feature the magician David Blaine, the country musician Luke Combs, and the record producer Rick Rubin. It’s Rogan's broad range of interests, removed from any single ideology, that attracts so many people to his podcast. That last point is exactly why the mainstream media has tried so hard to malign Joe Rogan as “right wing;” it’s because that successful model of non-ideological content is an existential threat to their own model of tribal partisanship. 

Considering how corporate media frames Joe Rogan, it should be no surprise how those same interests now portray their increasingly successful competitor, Rumble. Describing Rumble’s new content deals, Vibe magazine’s headline reads: “DJ Akademiks Inks Deal With Right-Wing Platform Rumble.” Hip Hop Wired had a similar framing, describing Rumble as a streaming service “popular with the alt-right,” and which hosts “Andrew Tate.” It’s as if corporate media is reading from the same script. 

It takes very little effort to see why that narrative is both cynical and obfuscatory. Some of the most popular shows on Rumble are from creators who many would consider to be part of the political left - Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand, and of course my now-colleague, Glenn Greenwald among others. These are critics of American foreign policy and defenders of civil liberties - traditional left wing stances. But more importantly, Rumble, like The Joe Rogan Experience, is not a political platform. Its goal is to be a competitor to YouTube with a wide range of video genres and that is what it is increasingly doing. 

On Rumble, you can find everything from Dana White’s “Power Slap,” competition to Fortnite live streams. So the framing of Rumble as some sort of Alt-right platform makes very little sense at all. Luckily though, the only people who will hear Rumble maligned in that way are consumers of corporate media, a demographic that is shrinking by the day. Given the ominous prospects for the future of corporate media, we can expect for these sorts of disingenuous attacks against their increasingly viable competition to increase.

 

 

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February 07, 2025

FYI Glenn, Scott Adams hosts a daily show using Rumble Studio that appears simultaneously on Rumble, YouTube, Locals and possibly X. After a typical hour long show, he somehow disconnects all streams except his Locals subscribers. It takes no more than 30 seconds to make the changeover. To me, viewing the Rumble stream, the image loses focus, the audio stops and a Locals logo appears center screen while he continues the stream with subscribers only.

His show and studio offer nothing approaching the production values of System Update and he doesn't use a different studio for his Locals program so I don't know if he can be of any help.

I can say he holds you and your work in high regard and may be able to offer suggestions how you might achieve the melding of System Update with the Tuesday/Thursday Aftershow for your Locals subscribers.

Thanks for the work you do,
James

February 07, 2025
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February 07, 2025

🤣🤣🤣We are truly living in extraordinary times.🤣🤣🤣

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Glenn Reacts to Trump's Gaza Take Over
System Update Special

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!


Good evening, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of System Update. The reason we wanted to do this is because we talked last night on our show about how President Trump had proposed a rather remarkable, extraordinary, stunning plan, to put that mildly, for Gaza and for resolving the conflict between Israel and Gaza. At the time that we had gone on air, however, he had only revealed a partial aspect of this plan. He gave his press conference in the Oval Office, he then met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office as well, answered questions and basically said that his plan and his vision for Gaza was to remove everybody who lives there, the 1.8 million people – and we'll get to that number, which is very strange in just a moment – clean it all up, rebuild it into something beautiful, and then basically allow some of them back in. 

We talked about the reasons why that kind of population transfer, forcible population transfer – the people of Gaza have made extremely clear they have no intention of leaving; they don't trust the United States or Israel that just destroyed their society – to say you'll just leave for a couple of years and you'll be allowed back, obviously, they were expelled from what they consider their homeland, which is now Israel, in 1948, and never came back, through generations they've been waiting to do so. They're never going to leave voluntarily. But it was really only after that press briefing with Prime Minister Netanyahu that President Trump gave another press conference in which he revealed the most significant part of this plan. And he didn't just speak off the cuff. 

He was reading from a prepared statement, which meant that it was actually a policy that people in the White House had concocted and created, which was not for Israel to go in and govern Gaza, as many Israelis, including in Netanyahu’s government, wanted to do, but that the United States would go in and, as he put it, would own Gaza, would rebuild Gaza, would turn it into whatever he envisions, and having a bunch of beachfront casinos and hotels and golf courses and who knows what else. 

When he was asked, well, the people of Gaza are saying that they refuse to leave and the Arab countries in the region are saying they will absolutely never accept such a solution, he basically said: “Well, I think they will leave because they wouldn’t want to say there, and if they don't, they're going to have to.” Meaning we're going to go make them. He also very clearly alluded to the fact that the United States government is going to go there. We're going to clear out the rubble. We're going to disarm that ordnance that is there. We're going to get rid of the buildings that are precarious because Israel has destroyed it all with the United States and the Biden administration funding and arming it. So, obviously, if the Gazans aren't going to voluntarily leave – which they're not – then the question is going to become, well, who's going to make them? How are they going to leave? Who's going to force them to leave? And President Trump was making very clear that he would. He would do what's necessary to make them leave. 

So, the plan is essentially two weeks into the Trump administration not to focus on Ohio or Michigan or jobs and inflation, although, obviously, things are being done about that. But now somehow the United States government, the Trump administration, is going to assume responsibility for Gaza, wants to clear the entire population out of Gaza to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Arabs and forcibly transfer the population of Gaza out of Gaza so that we can then go in, clean it all up and rebuild the society there because it used to be there but it has now been destroyed, over the past 15 months. 

That is quite a remarkable deviation from the America First foreign policy ideology President Trump has long advocated, which he ran in this campaign. It is certainly a deviation from the idea that we have to remove ourselves from entanglements in the Middle East. He specifically heaped scorn on the idea of regime change or nation-building, which is exactly what he was describing last night, and you already see a lot of Republicans, like Mike Johnson – who, for religious reasons, is a stark and stalwart supporter of not just Israel, but a greater Israel, as they call it, which is not just the internationally recognized borders of Israel, but having the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel – as well as members of Congress like Nancy Mace, who is trying to prove that she is the most loyal Trump supporter, saying things like, we're ready for a Mar-a-Lago in Gaza. 

So, I want to analyze these events because of how obviously significant they are without capitulating to hysteria or melodrama but, at the same time, underscoring the seriousness not only of the plan itself – which, as we've seen with Trump, may not happen because he often offers plans that are part of a negotiating strategy – but even the discussion of this can have a lot of serious implications. The whole idea of the Trump negotiating strategy is when you say things you're going to do or threaten things when you're going to do out a negotiating strategy if you don't get what you want, then of course, you have to follow through and do that because if you don't, that negotiating strategy will never have any credibility anymore. If you say either you give us X, Y and Z, or we're going to do A, B and C, and you don't get X, Y and Z, and then you don't do A, B and C, no one's going to trust your negotiating strategy any longer because you've proven essentially that that's a bluff. 

Setting up this plan where we're saying that we would go do this, we would take over responsibility and ownership of Gaza and we would clean it all out, we would forcibly remove the people who are there, all of them, so we can rebuild it and make it nice for, as he calls it, “the people in the region” – just the plan itself is already causing reverberations in the Muslim world. So, let's talk about a few parts of this. 

First of all, the Trump negotiating strategy is something that we do have to start with because we have seen in the past that he says things all the time and then doesn't follow through on them precisely because they're only intended as negotiating leverage. He talked about imposing a 25% tariff on both Canada and Mexico – he didn't just talk about it but implemented it. People went ballistic and now it turns out that he ended up not doing it, in part because he got some concessions – you can question how many concessions he really got, whether those are actual concessions or not but that is clearly part of the Trump negotiating strategy: to say that he's going to do things. So, the fact that he's saying he wants to go into Gaza, clear it all out, rebuild it, forcibly remove the population, doesn’t, in fact, mean that's going to happen. So, I do want to concede that point. Nonetheless, the whole purpose when a politician floats an idea of this kind is to allow people to respond. 

If you think it's a terrible idea – and I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons I've laid out last night – but an even worse idea, now that I know the details of this plan. When I say a bad idea, I mean strategically, pragmatically, ethically, morally, legally to try and go into the Middle East and turn it all over, after all the failures we've had with our Middle East engagements, with our attempts at nation building. 

The whole point is when a politician says something like this, this is the time to speak up; not when they're already going to do it, but now so that the administration understands that there are a lot of people who are opposed to it. Seeing a lot of really disturbing things from Trump supporters along the lines of, “Look, if he says something, you just trust him to know best, he clearly has some kind of 10-dimensional chess plan going” – No, that's not the way democracy works. The president's not a father figure. You don't trust in him that he knows best. You make yourself heard, especially when what is being proposed is such a radical deviation from what was promised. 

The entire plan depends upon somebody going in and paying for the renovations and for the rejuvenation of Gaza. Even if he can get those people out and he's clearly thinking that the people who are supposed to do this are the very wealthy people in that region. He said, “Lord knows there's a ton of major money in the Middle East,” which there is because of oil, and it's in the hands primarily of the Gulf state tyrants, the dictators who are our allies because we have those dictators there to prevent the popular will from being expressed, those countries being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and Jordan and Qatar. That's where all that money that Trump is very enamored of is. He loves the Saudis. He loves the Emirates, Jordan. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done a lot of deals in those regions because there's so much money there and Trump obviously thinks that it's their responsibility to come in and pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. 

The problem is that the entire Trump plan rests on the assumption that the people of Gaza don't care about that land, that it's sort of like if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin and you look around and you say, “You know what? It's too cold here, I'm getting older and I don't really like the conditions here any longer, it's not conducive to my quality of life, I'm just going to go to Florida and Arizona. They have great developments there. They have new golf courses and nice homes, and the government's going to move there. What's the difference? I don't care about Ohio or Wisconsin.” That's not the way people who are Palestinians think, nor is it the way that Israeli Jews think. 

The reason the conflict has been so intractable for 70 years now and a lot longer before that but really 70 years since the formation of the state of Israel is because the Israeli Jews have become convinced that they have a sacred religious right to the land and the Palestinians believe the same thing. This land is holy. And both Judaism and Islam – as well as Christianity. The Palestinians have endured so much. Years and years, decades of bombing campaigns and starvation efforts and blockades and occupations with the backing of the most powerful country on the planet and they've never left. They've never been driven out. 

This was a plan by Joe Biden as well. This is not something Donald Trump invented. Joe Biden tried to pressure the Egyptians into accepting, quote-unquote, “refugees” temporarily from Gaza to give them a safe corridor to leave Gaza and the Egyptians understood very well what that plan was really about, which was taking the land away from the Palestinians. And they knew that no one in Gaza was going to voluntarily leave their homes especially if the plan was not just to go there until the bombing ended but go there for two or five or seven years, which is what they're saying is the time frame to clear out the rubble and to detonate the unstable and structurally compromised buildings. 

Nobody in Gaza, virtually nobody, is going to give up that land to Donald Trump knowing that he has Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and Jared Kushner, people who are in bed with the Israelis – in the case of Miriam Adelson, she is an Israeli. It's basically turning over the land to Israel. If the Gazans were willing to do that, they would have done that a long time ago. They're never going to do that. The only way this plan would work is if somebody is willing to go in and wage a war against Hamas, against Gaza. We just watched the IDF for 15 months with zero terms of engagement, with zero limits, trying to destroy the population and drive them out – and it failed. They all marched back to their homes triumphantly the minute that cease-fire was in effect. 

If you think that it's going to be easy to go in and drive out 1.8 million people and if you're an American, is that a war that you're willing to send yourself or your children or your family members to go fight? Do you want to go fight a war in the Middle East for Israel again this time to secure their biggest dream of ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank of all Arabs so that Israel can then have the layman's realm at once or that Trump can turn it into some kind of Dubai 2.0? It's never going to happen. There's no possibility that that can happen and that's what Trump is proposing. 

Trump is saying that the only way this plan can work, obviously, is if the Gazans have someplace to go and the place he wants them to go is Egypt and Jordan. The problem is that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are dictatorships that care a lot about their unstable population. We just saw an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, get overthrown in 2011 by a very restive population which can obviously happen to General Sisi as well. King Abdullah, of Jordan, has a large population of Palestinians already in his country and the population is not going to tolerate watching, with their cooperation, the United States and Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza. So, they're saying “We're not going to take any “refugees”,” but Trump's point is we give Egypt a ton of money. We give Jordan a ton of money. Without that money that we give them, those regimes would collapse. We give them that money to keep the peace with Israel. I think he thinks he has the leverage to force the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept the Gazans but, again, even if they do, and they're adamant that they won't, how do you get the Gazans to voluntarily leave even if their society has been reduced to rubble? 

Then you have the issue of these other countries – Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, and Qatar, and Jordan. Trump's vision for normalization and stability in the Middle East, the one that he pursued in his first term and wants to expand in his second is to facilitate normalization between all those countries and Israel, isolate Iran, eventually do a deal with Iran so they don't get nuclear weapons – he talked about that today – and then have a stable, peaceful Middle East. That's part of what his legacy is (in his mind that’s what he wants it to be). 

The problem is that the governments that I just named have been vehement and adamant, from the beginning, that they absolutely will not consider any attempt to normalize relations with Israel, which Donald Trump says is in the interests of the United States, unless the Palestinians first have a fair outcome to their own state, basically. And it's not because these dictators and tyrants love the Palestinians or care about the Palestinians. Maybe some do, but it's not that. It's that even tyrants have to worry about their own populations, no matter how repressive they are. We've seen some of the most repressive tyrants in history be overthrown when the population gets too angry and feels like they're being too disregarded. 

If the population of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or even Lebanon, watch these countries cooperate with the forced ethnic cleansing and population transfer of Gazans out of Gaza so that Israel and the United States could work together to own it and take it over or even handed over to the Saudis to run like Saudi Arabia as part of normalization, the population would never tolerate that. There would be a conflagration, an uprising throughout the Middle East, which is why even Trump's mere mention of a plan like this, even if he doesn't intend to follow through on it, can be so destabilizing and so dangerous. 

But the fact that we are now so quickly at the point where you see Republican lawmakers willing to endorse a plan that very easily could entail a new war in the Middle East, either fought by the United States, fought by Israel, fought by Arab allies of the United States and Israel, meaning we would pay for that, we would arm it again and Republicans are right on board, is extremely alarming to this whole notion that Republicans are also on board with the idea that we don't need any more foreign entanglements, we shouldn't be involved in nation building – as always there's a gigantic Israel exception. To so many right-wing conservative principles, including free speech as we've gone over many times. Obviously not for all conservatives or everyone on the right, but certainly for a disturbingly large number of people that we're seeing yet again play out here. Collective punishment, population transfers, ethnic cleansing, these are all horrific war crimes that are barred by basic morality, by ethics and, if you care about it, by international law and there's no question about what Trump is promising. 

The other bizarre aspect of what we're seeing is that for 15 months under the Biden administration, reporters questioned the State Department, questioned the White House and would say, we're providing arms, all the arms, and we're paying for the Israelis to engage in a war of indiscriminate destruction against Gaza. They're destroying everything. They're carpet-bombing it. They're flattening Gaza. And the U.S. government was saying, “No, they're not. They're being very, very discriminating. They're being very targeted. They're only bombing where Hamas is. This isn't carpet bombing. This isn't the complete destruction of Gaza. They're being humanitarian about it. This is the world's most moral army.” 

Now that the cease-fire is in effect – and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that cease-fire; he also deserves credit for seemingly pressuring Netanyahu to maintain it and to move to the second stage, which is part of Trump's overall plan – now we're hearing the U.S. government say the opposite: “Look, the reason we need to transfer the Gazans out of Gaza is because Israel has completely destroyed the entire society. It's apocalyptic, everything is rubble. There's no civilian infrastructure, there's no sewage, there's no water, there's disease. Nobody can live like this.”

This is what the world was saying for the 15 months that Joe Biden was overseeing this war when the State Department and the Biden administration were denying this is happening as well as the Israelis. Now, suddenly, the cease-fire is taking place and the Trump administration wants to justify the forcible transfer of all the people out of Gaza. Suddenly, now the truth is being acknowledged that Israel flattened all of Gaza and made it uninhabitable, which was always the plan: to drive those people out so that Israel could take over Gaza. 

Is any of this that Trump is talking about in the interest of the people who voted for him, of the American worker, of the American economy, of all the things that we were told were going to be the focus of Trump's presidency if he won? Of course not. This is serving Miriam Adelson and Bill Ackman and all the neocons who are celebrating because it's Israel's wet dream along with getting the United States to bomb Iran. This is Israel's wet dream: to have the United States remove all the Arabs and ethnically cleanse Gaza. The Israelis tried it and failed and, out of frustration, reduced all Gaza to rubble. 

The other thing that I want to note – and this is something that has happened several times now, so it's worth noting, it's not just a mistake off the cuff – pre-October 7, the population of Gaza was universally estimated to be 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 million people. Definitely in excess of 2 million people. Every time Trump talks about the population of Gaza, he now talks about it as being 1.8 million. He says, “We need to move all of those people out of Gaza, all 1.8 million” and he said that figure several times. Clearly, that's the figure he was given. 

If I've got a difference there of 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 people between the pre-war population of Gaza and the number that Donald Trump is giving of the number of Arabs who now live inside Gaza. Remember, these are Muslims and Christians. So, I think that deserves a lot of explanation as well. I have no doubt that the official death numbers that we've been given for Gaza are vastly lower than the reality. There are huge numbers of people buried under the rubble that have never been discovered. There are people who are missing. There are people who died as a result of this war because of food deprivations or medical deprivations, to say nothing of the people who were just blown up, shot and killed, who never were accounted for. So, you have this big discrepancy in terms of the numbers that were given for the pre-war Gazan population and the current population. 

But to me, the bigger question is: is the MAGA movement going to sacrifice every one of its values, every one of the agenda items it said it believed and every one of the changes to foreign policy it said it was going to implement at the altar of yet again serving Israel or making sure Israel can expand? Trump just said in the press conference that Israel is too small and a very small country when asked whether or not he would endorse its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. This would be a policy strictly to serve Israel. 

On some level, it is also ironic because evangelicals in the United States have even greater devotion to Israel than many Jewish Zionists. Their religious belief is that Israel has to be united under the control of the Jews for the Messiah to return, not that it gets divided and Gaza is controlled by Jared Kushner and Miriam Adelson and a bunch of hedge funds that turn it into casinos. This is supposed to be the holy land that unites under the Jews and that's the precondition for the Messiah returning. And also that's what Israel wants too; Israel wants to control these lands. It wants it to be greater Israel not have Donald Trump and the United States own it, as Donald Trump put it. 

I just find it quite disturbing that parts of the Trump movement seem to be willing to go along with anything, no matter how contradictory it is to the ideology and the policies that they had been led to believe they were going to support. They deserve credit, we saw in the case of the H-1B visa, which we covered, that the Trump administration stood up and said, no, we're not about expanding H-1B visas. We don't want to replace American workers with foreigners; we want to do the opposite and there was a huge debate and conflict within the movement over that. This is exactly the same thing. I mean, Trump, since 2015, has been railing against the idiocy and dangers of involving ourselves in nation-building and engagements in the Middle East overseas. How disastrous that has been. And now he turns around and proposes something like this that not only has that dimension but also this massively criminal dimension, acts that would absolutely entail violence and the use of military force. 

There has been some walk back today of this by some Trump administration officials going to the press but if you look at the briefing by the White House press secretary, she was repeatedly asked, “Is Donald Trump proposing that military force be part of the plan if the Palestinians, as they've all said repeatedly, won't leave voluntarily and peacefully?” She said: “President Trump has not endorsed military force yet.” 

Again, I get that's the negotiating strategy of Trump: he keeps every option on the table because it gives him more leverage, etc. but it's hard to know what he's even negotiating for here because at the end of the day, even if he wants the Arab state dictators to go in and do this job and not have the United States do it, it's still going to require somebody to go in and forcibly remove the Gazans, which is central to Trump's plan and there's no way that can be done short of war. And that is absolutely something Trump is proposing. That would be horrific in countless ways, exactly what the United States does not need: another war to serve this foreign government in Tel Aviv and its interests. It would be a catastrophe of humanitarianism on an indescribable scale. 

So, I think this doesn't deserve hysteria. I don't think this deserves the kind of falling apart and unraveling that so often Trump statements do because they're not intended to necessarily predict what will happen but it absolutely deserves a lot of opposition so the Trump administration knows that nobody's going to tolerate more Middle East engagements, more wars, more nation-building – not even for the United States interest to be served, but for the state of Israel to be served and that is exactly what's happening here. 

All right. So, I wanted to respond quickly. I watched that press briefing today. I've seen this unfold today. I thought it deserved a lot of commentary and analysis and reaction and dissection because it's really Trump's first war, and he's been overtly threatening. I mean, he alluded to military force in Panama, but not a plan this explicit. I think it's very important to make clear as much as possible that Americans don't want this kind of war. They don't want to send their kids to these kinds of wars. They don't want to pay for these kinds of wars. We've done enough to serve the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States and something like this would be in an entirely different universe which makes it utterly unacceptable.

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Tulsi and RFK Jr. Approved by Key Senate Committees | Trump Meets Netanyahu: Wants to Cleanse Gaza | Pro-Palestinian Group Suspended at UMich
System Update #402

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!


Two of Donald Trump's most controversial nominees, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, each took a major step forward to being confirmed. 

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington today to become, unsurprisingly, the first foreign leader received by President Trump since his inauguration and Trump again stated his support for moving all the Palestinians out of Gaza, a series of events that could and should and only can be described as ethnic cleansing. 

And then, the investigative reporter Dave Boucher, will be here to talk about yet another pro-Palestinian group, this one at the University of Michigan, which was suspended as a result of their activism in speech as the ongoing assault on free speech to protect Israel in the United States continues unabated. The Students Allied for Freedom And Equality, also known as SAFE, were suspended from all campus activities for two years. 


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We've been extensively covering the nomination by Donald Trump to two critical positions inside the cabinet, both of whom have a long history of being heterodox thinkers and anti-establishment officials and, as a result, have created more controversy than almost any other official. We've seen people like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik and John Ratcliffe at CIA get approved unanimously with all Democrats voting but because both Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to make Director of National Intelligence, and RFK Jr., whom Trump wants to make Secretary of Health and Human Resources, have a history of contesting, challenging and denying a whole bunch of establishment orthodoxies, as well as condemning the corruption of the agencies that they would lead, those have created more controversy than almost any other up there – with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and, certainly, Matt Gaetz, the most controversial, who never made it to a confirmation hearing. 

Today, however, both of them had major successes, cleared major hurdles, and have substantially increased the likelihood that they will actually be confirmed by the full Senate. I don't want to say that it's 100%. It still does need to go to the Senate floor but here is the Senate Finance Committee voting today on the confirmation of RFK Jr. to become Health and Human Services Secretary. 

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Rubio's Shift: What is Trump's Foreign Policy? | Trump/Musk Attack CIA Fronts USAID & NED: With Mike Benz
System Update #401

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!


Ever since Donald Trump entered the White House to begin his second term, there has been – by design – a flurry of highly significant orders, policies and changes, most of which, for better or worse, were promised during the campaign. The rapidity of these changes has created the impression for some that there is no coherence behind them, that they are all just designed to appease Trump's base voters with symbolism or to impose frantic vengeance.

If one digs deeply enough, one can locate a coherent worldview, especially when it comes to Trump's foreign policy changes. When Trump began nominating a series of conventional establishment Republicans to key positions after the election, people like Marco Rubio at State and Elise Stefanik at the U.N. and others – many people demanded of us that we denounce these picks, given that they signaled that Trump's pledge for a new kind of foreign policy was clearly a fraud. In response, my answer was always the same: even though I didn't like some of those picks, I never thought that one could reliably read into every one of Trump's choices some sort of tarot card about what Trump would do given that I kept hearing from Trump's closest circle for a long time now that they were determined to ensure that all of Trump's picks this time around would follow rather than subvert his vision as laid out in the campaign. 

Marco Rubio just gave an interview to Megyn Kelly late last week that strongly suggests this is true, as Rubio sounded far less like the standard GOP warmonger he has been for years and a lot more like a committed America First advocate, with a series of surprising acknowledgments, highly unusual for someone occupying a high place in U.S. government officialdom. We’ll look at that, as well as the Trump administration's foreign policy actions thus far to determine which consistent and cohesive principles can be identified. 

Then: Our guest is Mike Benz, a former State Department official during the first Trump administration who has become one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable critics of the US Security State. In the last year, he has appeared on the shows of both Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson to do so. He has become a font of information about why USAID in particular is such a destructive, toxic and wasteful agency – as Democrats march to protect it - and he'll be here with us to talk about why that is.


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Donald Trump often railed against the toxic and evil influence of neocons, particularly in American foreign policy, throughout 2023 and 2024, as he attempted to return to the White House. He seemed convinced of it and had a lot of policy initiatives designed to undermine the promises of neoconservatism and, in the process, alienated a lot of them, beginning with things like his opposition to or at least skepticism about the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, the U.S. making NATO a central part of our foreign policy, even though the original purpose which is to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, obviously no longer applies, and a whole variety of other pieties of the foreign policy establishment Donald Trump was waging a frontal assault on. 

Once Trump won the election and began choosing his national security cabinet, a lot of people immediately concluded that all of that must be a fraud because Trump was choosing people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, like John Ratcliffe at the CIA, like Mike Waltz to be his National Security Advisor, who have a long history similar to Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley or even Liz Cheney in endorsing this sort of posture of endless war, of having the U.S. dominate the world in exactly the way that would please most neocons. 

Although, as I said, I wasn't thrilled with those picks, I wasn't the one elected, so my choices would be much different. I was very resistant to the idea that simply because Trump was choosing some, by no means all, but some politicians who have a long history of establishment dogma. Those are the ones who sped through confirmation in the Senate, of course, including with lots of Democratic support. It didn't mean that those people were going to be governing foreign policy in the Trump administration because it was clear that Donald Trump knew that he was the one who won this race and intended to impose his vision on the world and wanted loyalists around him who would carry out those visions. 

In contrast to the first term, when he had a lot of people there who were deliberately sabotaging his foreign policy, often applauded by the media, including members, by the way, of the U.S. military, which meant that the U.S. military was essentially seizing civilian control of foreign policy, seizing control from democratically elected officials and assigning it to themselves so that they would often counter or even ignore his foreign policy decisions and they would be celebrated by the press as the adult in the room. This was all something that I knew from hearing from many people inside the Trump circle, both on the show and otherwise, that they were most determined to avoid. And so, when they were picking the Marco Rubios and the Elise Stefaniks, I wasn't happy about it but I also knew that it wasn't proof that Trump was going to lead a conventional U.S. foreign policy because it was clear that they were picking people who, beyond any particular set of beliefs, was willing to be loyal to Donald Trump's worldview and his agenda, because that's what had just been ratified by the American people. 

Even The New York Times in the wake of Trump’s victory in November, and I'm not sure they meant this as a compliment or as a warning, but either way, they were the ones who were coming out and saying, look, these people were neocons for sure, but they've now made radical, visible and palpable changes to the way they talk about foreign policy. Here, The New York Times headline:

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