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 want to cover multiple stories in a more rapid-fire style than we normally do, beginning with comments that Vice President JD Vance made today in an interview with the NYT's Ross Douthat. When asked about rulings that courts have been issuing against the Trump administration, placing limits on the administration's actions regarding immigration, Vance accused courts of seeking to impede what most Americans said they favored during the election.

In our second story, the current FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, surprised many people, in a recent interview on Fox stating in the most matter of fact and I would say awkward way that they are 100% certain that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact commit suicide in prison, that nobody killed him. Okay, that's possible. However, the far bigger and still unanswered question about this entire Epstein matter remains oddly unanswered, namely, did Jeffrey Epstein work for or with any foreign intelligence agencies? Why can't we know the answers to that, given the administration has promised full transparency on the Epstein files? 

Then, Jake Tapper continues his humiliation tour, trying to justify how he and others like him in the media can still possibly pretend that they did not know about Biden's cognitive decline, even while most Americans do. We also have several short items regarding Brazil, including the testimony that Mark Rubio gave today in Congress, which are as hilarious and pathetic as they are consequential. We wanted to share those with you.

All right, so there's been, of course, a series of judicial rulings which have been adverse to the administration almost from the very beginning, after Donald Trump was inaugurated, first coming from federal district courts, then appellate courts, and after that, from even the Supreme Court. While the narrative has been that these are all leftist activists, judges trying to commandeer American policy independent of the election, the reality is that a lot of the judges who have ruled against the Trump administration aren't just conservative judges, but Trump-appointed judges in many cases. 

The Supreme Court twice ruled 9-0 against the Trump Administration: one in the question of whether people being deported under the Alien Enemies Act have the right of habeas corpus – all nine justices in the Supreme Court said they did – and then also on the Abrego Garcia case where the government admitted that they accidentally or mistakenly deported him given the immigration hold that had been placed on him and the Supreme Court said, the government must do everything it can to facilitate his release and that's going back to the court, based on the apparent decision by the Trump administration to do nothing to try to facilitate it.

It's not true that these are left-wing judges. Many of them are the most beloved conservative judges and the most beloved Trump-appointed justices throughout the federal system. A Trump-appointed district court judge ruled that Trump can't even invoke the Alien Enemies Act, to begin with, because we're not at war, as the statute envisioned it. That has been upheld by an appellate court, too. 

Vice President JD Vance gave an interview, published today, to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. They talk about a lot of things, including the new Pope, Catholicism. I always think JD Vance is a very smart and interesting figure. We'll see that even more, I think, once he is no longer the Vice President but will presumably run for president on his own, and then he's not as bound by the Trump administration and their policies. Obviously, no vice president can come out and contradict the president; it's really not their job to do that, but still, he does speak openly and often expresses his ideas very coherently. 

He said something today with Ross Douthat about these court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, that I think is very notable because it's a very tendentious argument, if not a false argument, about how our American founding, how the system of government was created. JD Vance went to Yale Law School. He understands the law extremely well. So, let's just take a look at this part of the conversation: 

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

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

The Israeli government is finally recognizing that the world is becoming repulsed by what it is doing. Indeed, long-time supporters of Israel, media, politics and government, are now denouncing that state's atrocities. As a result, the Israeli government today announced that it would allow some humanitarian aid to enter Gaza – though when doing so, it said explicitly that the amount of food they allow in will be minimal, and that they are only doing it, this is their words, because the world won't allow them to proceed to their final solution, destroying all of Gaza and then expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip or putting them into camps. 

Then, when it comes to an attack on Iran, there have long been two camps inside the Trump administration: one that does not want a deal with Iran but rather wants a war, and the other that wants a deal to avert a war. Given how many times Trump has made clear that he is determined to get a deal, the strategy of the war hawks is never to simply come right out and oppose a deal because that would make Trump feel alienated. Their strategy, instead, is to put conditions on the deal. 

And then, finally, Joe Biden's team issued a statement yesterday announcing that he has advanced an aggressive prostate cancer that has already metastasized to his bones. Democrats are despicable, exploiting the announcement of that illness to demand that everyone immediately stop talking about the 2024 cover-up that they perpetrated on the nation, because it's in bad taste to pursue that scandal now that   Biden is sick. We'll examine all that and tell you about the latest. 

Something extremely cynical and I would even say repugnant is currently going on with Israel's war on Gaza. Now that's been true for quite some time, but every now and then they go an extra distance to be morally repellent in a way that you previously didn't expect that they would do and that's certainly been the case for the events of yesterday. 

The Israeli government has seen a reversal in all sorts of prior allies, people who have long supported Israel and everything they've done, who have defended the war in Gaza, are now suddenly saying, “Wait a minute, this has gone way too far. I don't want to be associated with this anymore” and suddenly, they are even admitting things like, “Oh, I made a mistake in supporting it.” Major Western outlets and Western governments, even people inside the Trump administration, are now saying that, “Sorry, but mass famine, deliberate starvation of two million people, half of whom are children, that's not something we're going to stand by and watch.” 

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!

President Trump's 3-country trip to the Persian Gulf States this week, as well as a foreign policy address he delivered while in Saudi Arabia, has many people believing that the President laid out a radically new foreign policy vision that sharply departs from the bipartisan dogma of the last 60 years. And it's not just his words, but his actions that have many people believing this: from Ukraine and Iran to Syria and Israel. How real is this new foreign policy vision, how new and how concrete is it? 

We really can't think of many people better to explore this with than Curt Mills. He's the Executive Director of the journal The American Conservative – long identified with the paleoconservative tradition and the non-interventionist wing of the American right. He has been one of the most vocal voices from that wing on Trump's foreign policy and the urgent need to move the U.S. away from its bipartisan foreign policy of fighting endless wars all over the world that have no benefit to the American people or its country, but much harm to the country and the world. 

Every Friday night, we have a Q&A session where we take questions from our Locals members and do our best to answer as many as we can. As is usually the case, the quality of the questions is quite high and the range is far-reaching, so we look forward to doing our best to discuss the questions raised by our members. 

Curt Mills is the Executive Director of The American Conservative and has long been one of the most informative voices on foreign policy, especially the paleoconservative version of it, the non-interventionist version of that. Just as a side note, the American Conservative happens to be the first magazine ever to pay me to publish an article. That was back in 2005, maybe 2006, right when I was just starting. They asked me to write about the dangers of the Bush-Cheney assault in the name of the War on Terror. I ended up writing several other articles for them over the next few years against the War on Terror and the wars that it entailed. So, there's been a lot of alignment between me and that magazine, not fully, but a lot of alignment because they come from this part of the Republican Party, that I do happen to have a lot in common with, and we're very excited to have Curt with us. He's a really interesting thinker who ponders these questions quite a bit. And so, we have a lot to talk to him about tonight. 

G. Greenwald: Curt, good evening. Welcome to the show. It's great to see you. 

Curt Mills: Good evening. Thanks. It's an honor.