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!

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.  

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

We 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. 

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 the Israelis attacked Iran on Thursday night, many of Donald Trump's most passionate supporters have raised questions about the extent to which Trump knew or was involved in this new war. In one sense, that concern is understandable. Many of them believe Trump's repeated promises for years to keep the U.S. out of new wars, especially new wars in the Middle East, and they did not want to believe that he had violated that promise so radically and so quickly, less than five months in office by sanctioning and involving the United States in a new war with Iran. 

But those denials have grown increasingly implausible every day as Trump has now boasted of his involvement and repeatedly made clear the central role that he and the United States played in the planning, launching and coordinating of this war. Whatever remaining doubts still lingered about whether Trump's role was as significant as he claimed were completely crushed by Trump himself today, as the President issued a series of tweets – one more unhinged and war-drunk than the next – proclaiming that we – "we" meaning the United States – now dominate and control the skies over Tehran. He also ordered the Iranians to accept the deal that he told them to sign, threatening them with serious devastation if they refused. 

We’ll also talk to the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who breaks many stories, genuinely breaking stories on his Substack, where he went after wisely deciding to quit the Intercept last year. He receives many leaks from sources inside the intelligence community – not the official and authorized leaks: those are for Barack Ravid at Axios – but he gets the unauthorized ones from mid-level or even low-level employees of the U.S. Government. 

Ken has a new story out tonight about war plans of Trump for Iran that were leaked to him, regarding the Israelis and the Americans' designs on Iran. We’ll discuss that as well as a variety of other issues concerning this brand-new war, various happenings in Washington, and more.