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Feb. 7, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
57:42
Glenn Announces Major Changes to the Show and to Our Journalistic Platform

Glenn announces major changes to our show and discusses the future of independent media.  ------------------------------- Subscribe to Glenn on Substack Watch full episodes on Rumble Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Live Nightly Show Appeal 00:15:17
Good evening.
It's Friday, February 6th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that has for the last three years aired every Monday through Friday, more or less, exactly starting at 7 p.m. Eastern, more or less, here on Rumble, which is the free speech alternative to YouTube.
And we're here basically tonight to announce some major changes, major announcements, all of which I'm excited by about not just this show, but about the way in which we want to do journalism going forward, the places where we intend to do journalism, the changes to the type of journalism that we've been doing.
And as you might imagine, being me, I have a lot to say, not just about the announcement of the changes itself, but some of the broader implications and themes for why we've made these changes, for what we think are the high levels of potential in what we're going to do, given media trends and independent media, corporate media, and the larger just political ecosystem in general.
But before I delve into all of those kind of more thematic explorations, I want to just give you basically the bottom line of what it is that we're doing.
So this show aired in its current manifestation as a nightly show every Monday through Friday in December of 2022, which was essentially three years ago.
And the deal that we had with Rumble at the time was a three-year deal to do the show for three years.
And then at the end of the deal, see where everything stood.
And I have genuinely loved doing this show.
It has been challenging.
It has been interesting.
We've talked to a very large, wide array of people.
I got to do some interviews of a lot of people who I think needed to be interviewed in certain ways.
Just opened up a lot of opportunities.
And it has been something that I have thoroughly enjoyed.
At the same time, and I remember when I was contemplating the possibility of doing this, I spoke with several friends of mine who have done similar things, namely hosted or produced nightly news shows that aren't just once a week or twice a week, but every single day, Monday through Friday.
And each and every last one of them who has done it in whatever context on TV or cable or on the internet all said the same thing, which is, look, if you're going to do this, you have to realize it's extremely time and energy consuming.
It's great.
It's exciting.
It's engaging, but it won't leave you with very much time to do pretty much anything else.
This will be the thing that you do more or less to the exclusion of everything else.
And maybe it was a little bit of hubris, but I remember thinking, I tend to be very prolific.
I could do things very quickly.
Maybe that was your experience.
I don't really expect it to be mine.
And it was a good lesson that if you're about to do something that you've never previously done and you have you're fortunate enough to have friends or other people that you can speak with who have done it, it's a good idea Idea not just to go through the ritual of hearing what they have to say, but actually listening to it.
And especially if they're all saying pretty much the same thing, to assume that it's not just for them that that's true, but also for you.
And so, to the extent that there has been a kind of cost or an opportunity cost from doing this show every night, as much as I love doing it, it has been principally that, that when you're doing a show every night,
when you're anchored to a studio and to a team with whom you have to work and are required to do a show more or less every night, it really does render you almost unable to do a whole wide range of things that I not only like to do and want to do and think are productive for me to do, but that I've always done in the past that have been a crucial part of my journalism.
Probably the primary example has been the fact that I have typically been a journalist who relies on writing, on writing articles, on writing analysis.
That has always, that's how I started entering journalism with writing articles, long articles, doing reporting in written form.
And obviously, there's been other components to my presence in the discourse, giving speeches, appearing on their shows, doing interviews on television.
But by and large, the impact that I've always made, the primary activity that has composed the part of my journalism that has been most fulfilling and most consequential is my ability to kind of take a step back to interview, to consult, to analyze, and to write articles that I think are, as I try and make them, very in-depth, very analytical, very evidence-based.
And I really found that in many, on many instances where I really wanted to do something in written form, I just simply couldn't.
I didn't have the time.
I didn't have the energy because of the fact that the show every night was always lurking.
And so probably the biggest reason why we've decided to put an end to this show, not entirely, there will still be system update.
We still intend to do a lot of video content, but to put an end to the show as a live nightly show every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. is for no reason other than the fact that as much as I have enjoyed it and I think would continue to enjoy it,
it just prevents me from doing other things that I have a high level of interest in doing, a high level of passion for, and that I think can produce impact on our politics and our journalism in a way that doing sort of a hosting style daily or nightly show can't by itself do.
And so what we're basically doing is we're no, this is going to be the last episode of what you've known is system update, this live nightly show.
And I'm going to move from Rumble and Locals where we are.
I'm not going to leave Rumble and Locals.
We're still going to post our content here, video and written.
But my principal place of doing journalism is going to be Substack, which is where I was and where I came from when I moved to Rumble to do this show in the first place.
And there's a lot of reasons where we're going to make Substack our principal home.
For one, I do think Substack is a place where written political reporting and articles can have by far the greatest reach.
It's a place that has become known when I went there in 2020 after I was forced to leave the intercept because of their attempt to censor my reporting.
I went to Substack really just abruptly without any expectations.
And at the time, Substack was not very well known.
There were a couple of writers with large audiences that were already there, including Matt Taibi, who's my friend, and gave me a little sense.
But when I went to Substack, it was not a very well known.
It was still in its incipient stages.
And I'm proud of the fact that I was a part of helping it, helping it grow.
And the reason why it worked so well for me, and I'm going to talk in a second about why I have nothing but good things to say, both about Rumble and Substack.
But the reason it worked for me was because I was able to write when I had things to say that I thought worth saying.
I only had to write for my audience that has, I think over time, developed into an audience that does not expect partisan fealty or ideological loyalty.
Or necessarily to come and always be uh hear things that vindicate their, their beliefs.
I feel like i've developed, over 20 years, an audience that wants sometimes to be challenged and to hear things with which they don't agree, as long as they believe, as I think my audience does, that i'm always doing my best to to reveal and explain things as I see them in its most truthful way, without any regard to partisan or ideological allegiances.
Nobody is perfect in that regard, but that is something that I strive for above all else, and Substack really enabled me to find a larger audience than I had ever had before, whether at the Guardian or UH Salon or my own blog, or or even at the Intercept uh, where I had been for the prior uh five or six years.
So I I love Substack.
They they like Rumble, are a company that doesn't just talk the talk about preserving and supporting free speech and opposing censorship.
They have walked the walk like Rumble.
They've suffered for it the way Rumble has.
Um, they have been the target of all sorts of boycotts and attempts to bully and censor them uh and coerce them into removing uh fringe or hateful voices, as the liberal mobs see them from their platform, just like Rumble has, and so the fact that they are an authentic defender of free speech like Rumble is, and and there are very few significant platforms, there are a lot of them that claim to be that there are a few that are really going to adhere to those values when the rubber meets the road,
mainly when it's time for them to suffer consequences for adhering to those values.
Both Rumble and Substack are examples of platforms that have done that, and so I had nothing but a great experience at Substack at the time though, like I said, it was kind of in its incipient stages.
It was considered this very fringe site.
It was heat.
It was scorned and despised by people on mainstream media, constant attacks on Substack, how it was a threat to real journalism uh, and Substack in in so many ways in the last three years has transformed radically in.
In one way, it has actually become more mainstream, which I don't necessarily love.
That wasn't what I was hoping for it.
But it's just only mainstream in the fact that so many journalists who have gotten fired from their news organizations and can't get other jobs kind of had to go crawling to Substack as their only alternative, despite all those years they spent heaping scorn and mockery on it um, but the mainstreaming of it in that sense hasn't affected the fact that they still are uh, vehemently devoted to uh ensuring that every voice, every type of person, every type of journalist,
every viewpoint has a home there and a guarantee that they will not be censored because of it.
So that part hasn't changed.
But what has really dramatically expanded that is is a big appeal to me is that when I was there, it was mostly a place just to write articles.
That was what the capacity was.
The articles were incredibly professionally looking.
They had great support from the Substack team.
You were able to kind of produce articles that had the full appearance of being like any other professional outlet, But there wasn't a lot else going on in Substack.
And now Substack basically offers a home to do everything.
And so as I said, we still intend to do a lot of video content because some things are particularly conducive to video.
I think interviews, people appreciate being able to see the interaction and watch people being able to exchange ideas rather than just reading a transcript or a journalist summary of them.
There are certain things that you can show in video form that aren't as conducive to being shown in written form.
And now Substack has an incredibly advanced video platform.
It also has a lot of community building tools, which have always been very central to the kind of work I've done.
I mean, the reason why I was able to build a big audience when I started my blog in 2005, despite being utterly unknown in the world of journalism and politics, I was still practicing law, was because I devoted myself so much to interacting with my readers and building a very vibrant comment section.
So when I would write something, lots of people who were good faith readers, good faith critics would come with critiques or questions, and I would spend a lot of my day answering them.
And that was all often the most valuable part was the ability not just to be a journalist who speaks from a mountaintop and hands down wisdom and monologue form, like the 10 commandments, but being able to interact with your audience in a very continuous way.
And Substack now has a lot of tools that not only enable that, but facilitate and encourage it, including what is now intended to kind of be a place where you can express ideas without having necessarily to turn them into very formalized 1,000 or 2,000 word articles.
They're almost intended to be a slightly longer form of, say, Twitter, where you make observations throughout the day, limited points that aren't expressed in their full context, but that nonetheless provide readers with some information, with some ideas that then produce discussion.
And that vibrancy and that interactivity really, really appeals to me.
So in essence, Substack, in the years since I've left, and I loved it and didn't leave because it was inadequate, I loved it because Rumble gave me the opportunity to do something different that I had never done before, which is host a video show.
And I've always tried in my career to make sure that I'm never stagnant, that I'm always doing different things in part to maintain my passion.
So it never becomes like the drudgery of a job and it is always a way to challenge myself.
But also because you have to constantly try and innovate ways that you can make an impact.
At the end of the day, some people go into journalism for careerism.
And I don't think they accomplish very much, which is fine.
It's like going into any other career.
Some people are just careerists and journalism becomes their career.
But I think most people who do it, especially people who weren't on the journalistic path, I didn't go to journalism school.
I didn't go and work at a major newspaper.
I just did it because I had things that I felt like needed to be said, but that weren't being said.
If you enter it with that kind of passion, there's only one reason you do so.
And that's because you want to have some impact that you think is positive.
And, you know, you're humble about it.
You don't think you can just change the world single-handedly.
Very few people can, if any, but you want to, on some level, it means that you implicitly believe in your ability to reach people, to persuade, to affect, to influence in a way that you think is positive.
And if that is your goal, and that has always been my goal, that's always been my interest in journalism.
I don't think of it as an art form.
It's just this beautiful activity unto itself.
To me, good journalism necessarily means impactful journalism.
And to have impactful journalism, you need to think about ways to reach as many people as you can, especially because we're not in the era 20 years ago where, you know, there was one newspaper in town that everybody was captive to read.
So if you work for them, you were assured that people would read what your columns or articles were, or you had three networks.
And if you were on one of those, people would hear, you know, there's an infinite number of choices.
And so you have to find ways to get people interested in what you have to say.
You have to offer something unique.
And I obviously came to realize that there are a lot of people, especially younger people, but not only who strongly prefer to consume news or even exclusively consume news solely through video.
And if you're only writing articles and not producing video content, you're purposely excluding huge numbers of people that you might be able to reach that otherwise would be reachable if you were just willing to expand how you were doing journalism.
Continuing Content On Rumble 00:05:40
So a big part of the appeal of coming to Rumble was, like I said, just kind of a personal challenge to see whether I could do this sort of thing that I've never done before to try and make it as good as possible, but also to find a new audience through video.
But in addition, I really wanted to support Rumble because as I think anybody who is at all familiar with my work knows, preserving free speech on the internet is one of my very, very, very top causes, which I see as a journalistic value, if not my top cause.
And I could see that Rumble was not only growing rapidly, but I got to know its leadership, especially its founder, Chris Pavlovsky, who is its CEO to this day, and was extremely impressed by and enthusiastic about what I really believed was his genuine willingness to take his commitment to free speech all the way to its logical conclusion and never compromise it, even if it meant suffering some short-term losses, which has happened many times to Rumble.
A refusal to comply with unjust censorship orders has meant that Rumble has been excluded from, banned, kicked out of major countries like Brazil and France and others.
And that to me is proof that Rumble has always been and still is a very serious, genuine defender of the values that it not only claims to believe in, but actually believes in.
So for all those reasons, I wanted to come to Rumble.
And my three years here have been nothing but spectacular.
My relationship with Rumble has been close to perfect.
They've been nothing but supportive in everything we have done.
We've always tried to do what we could for Rumble, whether it's promoting them or speaking of the importance of Rumble, not because I owed anything to them in that regard, but because I really believe it.
We did a lot of work in Brazil, I did, to try and work against and bring awareness to that country about how unjust it was that they had been banned from the entire country because they allow free speech.
So it's been a very symbiotic relationship, a very positive relationship.
I don't really see myself as leaving Rumble in the sense that we intend to continue to post a lot of video content that we produce.
We can just still put it on Rumble.
I don't have any exclusivity deal with Substack.
We can put whatever we want anywhere we want, which is a big part of the appeal.
Written articles we can continue to post on locals as well.
So, you know, we hope that you will go in and join our Substack page, become a supporter of our Substack page by subscribing.
But if you're already a subscriber of our work at locals, you'll end up getting a lot of the content that we produce anyway, because we continue to, well, we intend to continue to post it here as well.
It's just that Substack will really be kind of ground zero, like the centerplace, the centerpiece for where we do all forms of our journalism, written, video, interactive, kind of like commentary throughout the day.
We had last time when I was at Substack, a really successful vertical for guest writers where we could invite paid write and pay writers who would contribute things that I thought were really valuable for our readers to hear.
So going back to Substack, given that it's also a company that I feel exactly the way I feel about Rumble, great relationship with the two founders, Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best.
Very impressed by their commitment to the values they don't just use as corporate branding, but claim to believe in.
And most of all, the expansion of Substack in every way, much bigger subscriber base, many, many more readers, many more different components.
I don't have to do a nightly show or a show even every day.
So it will free me up to do a lot of the writing I want to do, even longer magazine essays or books, things that have been kind of impossible for me over the last three years.
The only writing I've really done in the last three years is an occasional article for locals.
And I have a column in Folio of Sao Paulo, which is the largest newspaper in Brazil.
I've done a lot of reporting for Folio when we've had reporting to do.
I'm a columnist there, but I don't have a schedule.
So I just write when I want.
And even that's been limited, but that's been mostly the bulk of my writing.
And I want to definitely get back to writing about the things we cover here.
So essentially, this is the last night of what you've known as system update in its current iteration.
We won't have any more nightly shows.
We won't be here at 7 o'clock PM Eastern Live on the dot every Monday through Friday, as we always without fail have been.
Instead, we will continue to produce video content that you'll see here if this is where you want to be, put some writing and stuff on locals.
But the bulk of our work and our home base is going to be at Substack.
And I wish nothing but the best for Rumble.
I continue to be a huge supporter of Rumble.
I will be an outspoken supporter for Rumble.
Have tons of gratitude for the opportunity they gave me here, for the way that it worked.
We expanded our audience rapidly throughout these three years, reached whole groups of people that were not previously familiar with my work, which has been something that has been very gratifying.
I mean, when you've done this for 20 years, you sometimes feel like, okay, the people who know you and like you, they know you and like you and the people who don't don't.
But, you know, every year there's a whole group of people who are newly entering the realm of political consumption and attention.
Outside the Corporate Media 00:03:54
And to be able to reach new people is like gold, especially, as I said, if you're somebody who cares about the impact you're having, which at the end of the day is the thing I most care about.
So we'll be going to Substack.
We'll be starting officially on Monday, the Substack page, which is just GlennGreenwall.substack, like it was previously, is already there.
It's not quite ready yet in terms of the content.
But if you want to subscribe, you're free to do so.
We hope you will do so.
And Monday is when we're going to actually begin to promote it beyond announcing it, which we wanted to do first to our viewership here.
So that's the bottom line of what we're doing.
I want to talk about a couple of the issues that I think are highly relevant, not just the decision that we've made, but to why I think that what we do continues to have a value that I would call, I hope without a lot of boasting or conceit that I would call unique.
And, you know, I think I'm going to talk a little bit first about independent media and then corporate media, because independent media is a term that for me at least has always had extremely valuable connotations.
I mean, I go back to, you know, I got my career started and without realizing I was starting a career when at the time when blogs were first starting to become prominent and had an impact.
And I first began reading them.
And that was for the first time, what made me realize that there's whole vibrant perspectives outside of, you know, when I wasn't paying a lot of attention to politics, the journals I was reading that I thought made me a high-end consumer, you know, New York Times every morning, the Atlantic and the New Yorker every week.
That was the first time when I really started getting alternative views and realizing not only are there things wrong with what I had been consuming, I always knew that, but that were fundamentally and radically wrong.
Like it was not even the project that I thought it was, that most people think it was, is, which is to inform the world, isn't even the project in which they're engaged.
And that obviously opened my eyes a lot.
And then I wanted to make sure that I, there were even with the ascension of blogs, there were a lot of issues that I felt like I had the expertise and the passion for covering.
Things like the erosion of civil rights under the war on terror, the neoconservative attack on the foundations of American foreign policy and how costly that was.
I was using my expertise as a constitutional lawyer, but also my passion for civil liberties, which I've always had for all sorts of reasons since teenage years when I thought that ACLU lawyers who defended Nazis and Skokie were the embodiment of heroism and some of the people whose work I really wanted to kind of replicate.
And I do think I was able to bring a kind of unique perspective to that issue, to that component.
And so for me, independent media was always that.
I mean, I regarded us as independent media back then because we were reporting, we were providing information and analyzing and informing people in a way completely outside of and in no way reliant upon corporate media, not their financing, not their advertisers, not their constraints.
So for me, independent media has been something I've considered myself part of from the beginning, but I guess it really took on its own identity and has really become talked about as independent media only within, say, the last decade or so with the ascension of podcasts as some of the programs with the largest audiences, more so than network news that don't follow the corporate media pattern, but as well as, you know,
the ability of articles on Substack, like the ones we were writing or shows like the ones we've been doing here to reach very large audiences without having corporate bosses.
The Easiest Path To Success 00:15:39
I don't have corporate editors.
I don't have corporate corporate managers that can try and control what I think.
And especially after my experience when I formed The Intercept.
And most of you probably know that history, but just briefly, in 2013, we had the most important journalistic story in the world, the most important one in many years, which was the Snowden archive and had a lot of leverage.
And I was at The Guardian and my colleague Aura Poitras, my principal colleague in doing that reporting, was freelancing in a lot of different places.
And we decided we wanted to start our own media outlet to kind of rectify the barriers and problems structurally we had seen, even in the best corporate media outlets with which we worked.
And we were able to form the Intercept.
We got the backing of Pierre O'Meniar, the billionaire founder of eBay, who promised and kept to his promise never to interfere in our editorial content.
But amazingly enough, in 2020, in the lead up to the 2020 election, when intercept editors were petrified that they would once again get accused of what they got accused of in 2016, when we did a lot of reporting on Hillary Clinton from the WikiLeaks files and other material to report negatively on Hillary Clinton, which they allowed us to do because they just assumed she would win anyway.
And then when she lost, they all felt like they were responsible.
They were very traumatized in their liberal circles in Brooklyn.
They were accused of having helped Trump win.
And in 2020, they were determined, desperate not to repeat that.
And they weren't going to allow anything that could be interpreted as undermining Joe Biden.
And even though I had a contract that prohibited them from editorial interfering in anything I wanted to publish, like I always had with every other outlet, they did it anyway.
When they realized I was writing an article about the Hunter Biden laptop materials and what it revealed about Joe Biden, they just basically prevented me from publishing it.
They calculated that censoring me against the contract, against the way we've always done things was worth it, given their fear that I would publish something that would once again lead them to be blamed for Trump's victory.
And so I quit, you know, kind of abruptly with no plan because I would never stay at a place where I was interfered with editorially.
And I had no plans, but I knew Matt Taibbi was at Substack and doing well.
I knew a couple of other people at Substack.
And so I just went and opened a Substack with no expectations.
And it worked incredibly well.
And that was when I really started considering myself full, a fully fledged advocate for the kind of modern iteration of what has become independent media.
And I can't imagine ever, ever going back to anything resembling, even with one foot in there, corporate media.
I mean, I do work with Folia, as I said, the largest newspaper in Brazil, but that's only because my work with them has always been incredibly smooth.
They've been very supportive, given me full autonomy to do things, even things that have been contrary to the prevailing establishment sentiment.
And that's the only way I would say the place.
But by and large, I consider myself a fully fledged, permanent member of independent media.
And independent media for me has always been this overwhelmingly, in fact, uniformly positive development.
And I still consider independent media to be absolutely vital and essential to our ability to make sure that information and ideas and reporting are not re-centralized in the hands of a tiny number of homogenized corporations that keep control.
I see the governments around the West, and I've seen this for many years.
We've reported on it constantly, are desperate to regain control of the internet and to ensure that it no longer is a place where free speech and free reporting and dissent can thrive beyond their control.
And so I still consider that to be one of the most important missions because without the free flow of information and the ability for dissent to be freely expressed, almost everything else is impossible.
Combating propaganda, combatting power centers, and they know that too, which is why they've prioritized control over the internet.
And so I can't imagine anything that would ever cause me to abandon my commitment to and my activism for independent media and its need to thrive and proliferate and grow and remain free.
That said, like anything, even though you love it at the beginning and are very enamored of it and don't see the potential for any negative sides, there are some parts of independent media that have become liabilities, things to avoid, things that are dangers.
And I think probably the biggest one is that the economic model of independent media for the most part is that how much money you make determines is determined by how large your audience is, but especially how loyal they are to you.
How much, how many people are willing to pay for and support what it is you're doing.
And that has created this incentive scheme where I can tell you with 100% certainty that the easiest, most reliable, and close to the most guaranteed way to grow in independent media, to make tons of money in independent media.
And there are a lot of people making enormous amounts of money in independent media because they have very large audiences who aren't just listening, but are very loyal, is to plant your flag in a political camp.
I am pro-Trump and I'm MA, and this is a pro-MAGA show, and everything you're going to hear is pro-Trump and pro-MAGA.
And so come here if that's what you believe and that's what you want to hear.
And there's huge numbers of people who are pro-MAGA and pro-Trump.
And if they get to go to a place where they're constantly hearing, without any exceptions, a constant stream of affirming dialogue or guests, they're going to feel like this is their community and they're going to pay a lot of money for it.
And the same thing, if you say, I think Trump is a monster, a unparalleled danger.
I think the only thing that matters is electing Democrats.
I'm a never Trumper.
I'm a Democrat who doesn't really care about much other than defeating Trump and getting Democrats back into power.
Needless to say, that has been proven to be a gigantic moneymaker.
I mean, since 2016, starting from Rachel Maddow to the Lincoln Project to just endless numbers of other examples, people have gotten extremely rich, exploiting the fears and hatreds that people have for Donald Trump with no other ideology and promising to be the ones to constantly feed them anti-Trump adjuprop, no matter what it is, on a daily basis to make them feel like they're energized, they're part of a group that's doing something.
And, you know, you can do the same thing.
I plant my flag here in this ideology.
I'm left-wing, but I'm still a Democrat.
Those are the easiest ways.
And I don't necessarily begrudge people who do that.
It's an effective commercial model, very, very effective in many cases.
And there are some people who see the world that way.
It's not necessarily cynical.
There are some people who just see themselves as I'm a Republican and that's all I care about, or I'm a Democrat, or I'm on the left, or I'm on the right.
And everything I say and tell you and everything you're going to hear from me is going to be aligned with whatever that ideological or partisan project is that I've announced in the beginning.
I'm devoted to.
And I think, you know, like everybody, there are criticisms that people can make of us and of me and the work that we do.
But the one criticism I don't think people can make is that we are subject to that kind of audience capture, nor have we ever tried to build an audience based on that very crude and kind of most simplistic model.
I don't think there has been a single time in my 20 years of journalism where every four years when the control of the White House changes party that I haven't alienated a huge part of my readership by, For example, the first time it happened, asserting a belief in a whole range of principles that caused me to be a very outspoken opponent of the war on terror and the civil liberties erosions that it entailed.
And then when Obama got into office and he started expanding a lot of those, let alone extending them, I was just as critical of him as I was of George Bush.
And obviously, there were a lot of people who were listening to me, not because they believed in those principles, but because I was an opponent and critic of George Bush and Dick Cheney, who thought that I was on their side as a Democrat.
And when they saw me doing the same thing to Obama, they just said, I don't want to hear this.
I'm not here for criticism of Obama.
What happened to him?
I thought he was a good Democrat.
And the same thing throughout the Obama administration, constantly criticizing Obama on these basis.
And then when Trump got elected, from the beginning, I had nothing but contempt for the Russiagate narrative that had become central to the attempt to destroy Trump.
And in general, even though I had a lot of concerns about Trump's policies, I believe that the far greater power was not Trump in the White House.
It was the first time he was there.
He didn't know much about Washington.
He was easily manipulated.
But it was this power faction, this united power faction of Wall Street and the deep state and the media that were constantly colluding and conspiring to undermine Trump, which, whatever you thought of him, was the elected leader in a way that I thought was very dangerous.
And they were doing so with all sorts of false narratives.
And I became a vehement opponent, not a supporter of Trump, but a vehement opponent of the tactics being used to destroy his presidency, even though he was elected.
And obviously, lost a lot of readers who at the time, even if they were willing to hear critics of the Democratic Party, did not want to hear defenses of Donald Trump.
And yet, every time as well, you're kind of replacing the people you lose, never necessarily one by one, but over time, you're building a certain credibility among an audience that, even though it takes time to build for me, is of much higher quality, which are people who aren't coming with the expectation that they know exactly what you're going to say every time and are going to want to hear everything that you're going to say.
But sometimes you're going to say things to them that aren't their views.
And as long as you're being respectful of those views, you're not patronizing them or offering some deceitfully weak version of it, but are engaging with it, offering arguments against it.
As long as people really believe that you are doing your best, regardless of who it angers or who it pleases or which agenda it advances or impedes, to find the truth, to see clarity, to do to break through propaganda and lies as best as you can.
I think we've proven that you can have a very large audience.
I don't have the largest audience or readership on the internet.
There have been times when I've had among the largest audience of readership.
And then there are times when it's withdrawn a little and rebuild.
But I've always maintained a very significant audience, despite what I am proud of of avoiding the kind of seductive crack to build an audience by just feeding people what they want to hear.
And I think, again, you can criticize me, valid criticisms a lot as anyone else, but the one thing I think you can't argue is that we haven't done our best to avoid audience capture or to avoid the easiest ways to succeed and profit on the internet.
And that I think continues to play a very unique role.
I'm not saying there's nobody else who does that.
There are definitely other people who do it, but the overwhelming majority of independent media has started to, like human beings will always do, look for the easiest ways to benefit, to grow, to succeed, to profit.
And I often think it comes at the expense of journalistic integrity.
I'm not saying I'm the beacon of journalistic integrity or anything else, but I do think people who are in my audience know that that is the overarching objective that I have in everything that I do, along with the adherence to the principles that I believe in, the causes that I believe in, that I'm very open about preserving free speech in general, preserving a free internet, preventing state censorship,
opposing imperialism and a rejuvenation of neocon wars, fighting wars for other countries like Israel, and the corruption and propaganda that pervades corporate media.
These have been my causes from the start.
They continue to be my causes.
And I try and pursue those causes, no matter who it is who's attacking them or whatever it is that's violating them.
And I think that's created a trust between myself and my audience over many years that I value probably more than anything else.
If you told me tomorrow, all I had to do was wake up and become a Democrat and just praise the Democratic Party every day or praise Trump every day, my income would triple or quadruple.
I promise you, I wouldn't even give it a second of thought.
There's nothing that could make that would compensate for losing the love I have for what I do, the passion and belief I have in it.
And that comes from the fact that I feel like I have always been free and have always created an audience that will not just tolerate, but wants me not to be attracted to those sorts of tactics, but instead to speak as freely and independently as possible.
So and I think getting back to writing articles, which again is even though there are people who only consume news through video, there's still people who only want to read articles.
And I do think that's the most effective way for us to do what we can.
That's a big part of why I'm deciding to refocus what I primarily do, not exclusively, but primarily on the written form.
And I think it's something that independent media, if it's to be valuable, not just lucrative, but valuable, is going to need a lot more of.
All right.
And so the related point I wanted to make is about corporate media.
Because in a lot of ways, corporate media, and I don't think this is as appreciated, is as appreciated as it should be, has fallen prey to exactly the same incentive models as independent media.
If you go back and read the reporting on corporate media in the late 2010s into the 2010s or sorry, the late 2000s into the 2010s through 2014, 2015, it was doomsday for the media.
None of these major outlets, these legacy outlets could figure out how to maintain a profitable model when the internet collapsed everything that they used to do.
No one wanted these newspapers delivered to their doorstep anymore.
People were only consuming it online.
There was an expectation that everything online was supposed to be free.
So getting people to pay for things was extremely challenging.
The ad model of corporate ads that would appear on major pages, entire pages in the middle of the front section of the New York Times of Washington Boston, those were gone.
Facebook and Google were getting ads far more so than these major media outlets.
The Decline Of Legacy Journalism 00:12:24
And so they were all on the verge of collapse, all struggling.
And in so many ways, ironically, Trump is who saved all of their jobs.
Nobody was watching MSNBC.
Every host there was on the verge of getting fired, the whole thing being dismantled.
The ACLU was struggling.
And Trump was a goldmine for all of them.
The problem was it was always going to be a short-term kind of drug high, like a sugar high, because it didn't change the fundamentals.
some point, this like pervasive fear and interest in Trump was going to dissipate.
And these media models were still going, these media outlets were still going to be left the question of how is it that we can possibly sustain ourselves financially when people no longer really need us or care about us.
There's so many other alternatives now that they can go to.
And then on top of that, These outlets have completely discredited themselves.
This is too obvious to even talk too much about, but every poll shows that the trust and faith that people have in corporate media has completely collapsed.
And so the only conceivable thing that they had to offer that was unique in this rapidly growing media landscape was, oh, we're CBS News.
We're the Washington Post.
You know us.
You can trust us.
You can't trust what you hear in these new blogs or these podcasts.
They don't have a history of reporting news in a responsible way like we do.
The problem is people opened their eyes and realized that among the most untrustworthy and propagandistic sources of deceit are these major media outlets.
And it completely tarnished the brand.
No one trusts them.
No one believes in them.
No one thinks that they're doing journalism.
They believe they're engaged in political activism.
And so what these papers did, and even though the Washington Post this week just laid off 300 people, a third of its staff, because it's losing $100 million a year and Jeff Bezos decided he was done subsidizing it, even though that happened, it's worth noting that there are major media outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic that are actually doing very well financially.
The New York Times has no debt.
They have, I think, 15 million digital subscribers.
By every metric, financially, they're doing well.
Same with the Wall Street Journal.
But the reason for that, and the Washington Post started doing okay too, but the reason for that was they all decided that they were going to basically give up the pretense of being a nonpartisan, politically neutral, journalistic outlet and instead just identify almost blatantly and overtly as an anti-Trump outlet.
And it worked in the same way that podcasts or independent media that plant their flag in an ideological camp will attract a lot of people.
I mean, yes, the New York Times has 15 million subscribers, but the overwhelming majority of them are people who are liberals or Democrats or otherwise opposed to Trump.
And the Washington Post tried that.
I don't know if you recall, but right when Trump was elected and was about to be inaugurated, the Washington Post very pointedly changed its motto to democracy dies in darkness, which generally is a perfectly fine, even, you know, creative logo or slogan for a newspaper to have, but it wasn't adopted arbitrarily.
It was adopted to signal that there was something uniquely sinister about Trump and the Washington Post was going to change the way they operated in order to combat what they were announcing was this unique danger in the Republican Party.
And those were the two newspapers that went all in on the fraud of Russia Gate, even gave themselves Pulitzers for it.
On top of that, once COVID happened, they were the ones who endorsed every government orthodoxy to the point of excluding dissent and insisting that anyone who didn't disagree with it was immoral or worse.
So this constant flow of partisan propaganda in some way worked.
It worked for the New York Times.
Liberals love it because they think it's an important tool for the Democratic Party.
But what was so interesting was the Washington Post, what really harmed the Washington Post more than anything, was right before the 2024 election when they predictably were going to issue a editorial supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.
Jeff Bezos intervened and basically said, I don't want the paper taking sides.
I don't want it endorsing a candidate.
There's already a perception. that we and most media outlets are too biased in favor of democrats and opposed to conservatives.
That's why they've stopped reading us.
And once he killed that editorial, that pro-Kamala editorial, the Washington Post lost, and this is very rare.
People cancel their subscriptions out of anger all the time to everything, to Netflix, to this, to that, and it generally doesn't make much of a dent.
The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers overnight, basically in two, three days, once Bezos killed the pro-Kamala editorial.
And that shows what kind of audience they had been cultivating, what their business model was.
Their business model was to position themselves as an anti-Trump outlet.
And very rarely in any of these outlets would something appear that was not quite a defense of Trump, maybe something more neutral or criticism of the Democratic Party.
And these readers went crazy in anger, threatening to cancel subscriptions.
They also got audience captured and are still audience captured.
Wall Street Journal is sort of its own thing.
It caters to the business world, to affluent people.
They still do, I would say, probably, you know, I put Financial Times and The Economist kind of up there with good reporting that tries to be stripped of ideology, although they all have it.
But the Wall Street Journal, although it's political reporting, sometimes falls prey to it, like as a whole, it's still, I understand why affluent people buy the Washington Wall Street Journal and subscribe to it and they do in large numbers and it's very profitable.
But most of these media outlets and corporate media aren't really that distinguishable any longer from independent media in terms of the seductive influence of cultivating a solely ideological or partisan crowd.
And this for me is what has ruined journalism more than anything.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being a partisan or an ideologue.
We need those.
That's ultimately a big part of politics.
Like you have a system of beliefs.
And as a citizen, you want to engage in activism in defense of those.
As I said, I have my own set of values that I'm very upfront about that I don't try and hide.
Though I don't think they're partisan or ideological, I just think they're journalistic and constitutional.
And I make no bones about the fact that I devote myself to these values.
I try and promote them.
But when it comes to journalism and reporting and commentary and analysis, being a prisoner to political parties or ideologies is the very opposite of journalism.
It is the kryptonite of journalism.
It's the poison that kills it.
And increasingly for financial reasons and other reasons, I think a lot of people and media outlets who live on, you know, in the East Coast, went to liberal colleges, genuinely do believe all this stuff about Trump because everyone around them believes it.
And, you know, I'm not somebody who downplays the dangers of Trump.
I've been extremely critical over the last year of many of his policies as quite dangerous and friends of civil liberties.
But I've always seen him as an extension of our political tradition, not some grave radical aberration.
But whatever it is, corporate media has become as partisan.
And if you look at polling data, the reason why people have lost faith and trust in those media institutions is because people who are not dumb, even if they're not, even if they can't cite all nine justices of the Supreme Court or name, you know, the chairs of important subcommittees,
even though they don't keep up with politics that way, oftentimes people who do that are actually more misinformed because they're so entrenched in Washington political discourse and have to embrace every conventional wisdom within it in order to succeed.
Most people don't have that need.
They kind of just watch it from a distance and they kind of use common sense and intuition.
I don't mean to be patronizing, but sometimes that does produce greater awareness.
And polls show that the reason people have lost faith and trust in journalism and the media outlets is because they believe far more often than not that these outlets are saying things and reporting things, not because they're true or because they're pursuing journalism, but because they're engaged in partisan and ideological activism, which is fatal to these institutions.
And I mean, it was amazing to watch every time we have a major layoff at some news outlet, happened, used to happen with all these digital outlets that have mostly died like BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and those types, but then now extending into other places.
And the Washington Post really was a massacre.
I mean, this is one of the largest layoffs of, you know, one day layoffs of a newsroom, maybe ever.
And the tone that always emerges like a ritual where these journalists come forward, not just the ones who are laid off, but their colleagues and other outlets, and they talk about all of this like they're entitled to these jobs, that something that they are owed, that they divinely possess has been unjustly taken away from them.
And it's always half grieving and half like self-importance about all the immensely important work that they've done and our, you know, the reward is that they get summarily laid off or fired.
And what's so obviously missing, not just from these layoff events, but from all discussions of the difficulties and failures of media is any kind of self-introspection.
Nobody in media, corporate media, especially practically ever asks the question while they're constantly lamenting their failing audience, their disappearing trust.
They have all kinds of explanation about why it's happening that is always blaming other people or external fact.
They never, ever, ever in these moments say, wait a minute, the Washington Post is losing $100 million a year in part because people have lost faith and trust in our work.
Have we done things?
Are we doing things that are a contributing factor or even the main driver of the failure of these institutions that are now forced to lay us off?
This introspection is absolutely absent.
And this is part of the problem in journalism generally, is that they don't think about or believe for one second that they are anything other than the most self-important, self-righteous, noble truth tellers.
And no matter how many times they get caught propagating scandals that are based on nothing and fabrications or insisting on orthodoxies that end up being proven false or admitting that they excluded all sorts of dissent that should have been, no matter how many times their failures are acknowledged and documented and clear.
Remember, they all said Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
They just all affirmed it and it was a complete lie.
And they all just moved on like it never happened.
And there's a zillion of those examples that they just they're incapable of looking in the mirror and asking what it is that they're doing that's causing the collapse of the foundation of the profession, which is the trust and faith in the public.
Goodbye Substack, Hello Future 00:04:29
And so they're.
Really I don't see any prospect for them to change, and we have to diagnose the problem in order to change it.
And since the problem is them and they refuse to admit that there's no way for them to change it, they believe that they should be able to continue what they've been doing and just be guaranteed free jobs and endless resources by some billionaire who, for whatever reason, decides to just shower them with largesse.
It was amazing to watch that discourse this week, although i've seen it many times, but not quite to the extent as this week because of the magnitude of the layoff, because the Washington POST is this revered institution because of past accomplishments, so this is the state of journalism that I feel like we're operating within.
I've always felt like one of the things i've tried to do is not just be a critic of it, like a kind of distant critic of it, but instead trying to do the type of journalism that I think rectifies the flaws that i'm identifying, like the systemic flaws that i'm identifying, and so being at Rumble the last three years, being able to do this show, figuring out the best way to do video and have a video show, taking advantage of the unique advantages it provides,
so happy i've done it, so proud of the relationship we have with Rumble, of what they represent, of what they do.
Uh, i'm always going to be a supporter of theirs, provided they continue with this mission and I have no doubt that they will.
But I also feel like it's time for me to rebalance the work that I do to be able to get back to a lot of what I think has the greatest impact.
That I just haven't been able to do, because my friends warned me but I ignored it that a deli show would prevent me from doing, not just in terms of time, but even just mental energy and focus uh, which is writing.
Uh, and not just writing long articles, but even shorter kind of pieces I don't have to put on twitter.
I can.
I can put.
There's a function on on uh substack.
Now that's great sort of designed to just, like I said, be kind of informal thoughts throughout the day that let the community react and I can interact with it and we can build something together that I think really uh promotes and emphasizes the, the parts of my work, um that are most consequential and most impactful, impactful without having to abandon video, which I continue to think offers some exclusive benefits.
Just, can't do it every night.
Uh, a highly produced show at 7 p.m.
Um, it was great doing it, but it was definitely exhausting in all ways and, I think, more importantly, had lots of opportunity.
Costs that uh, although i'm thrilled that we were we did it for three years very thankful to our audience that has been large and growing and faithful um, and to our locals members who who made it all possible.
Nothing but gratitude and and genuine thanks, and I hope you'll obviously continue to be a big part of what we do, whether staying at locals or moving to Substack, where you can subscribe to The full panoply of what we're doing.
Either way, but you know, all good things come to an end.
And I don't really even see this really as an end.
I see it just kind of like incorporating all the things I've been doing into one centralized place that is really now built to facilitate in the best way possible, not only your ability to do it, but to reach as large of an audience and to build a community that's engaged with your work, which has always been central to everything I've done.
And it's been in many ways part of the most fulfilling part of what I've done.
So that's it for tonight and for system update as it has existed the last three years.
Once again, thank you so much for all of you who made this show a success and who have been so loyal as audience members and local subscribers.
We hope to continue to see you, whether here or at the new Substack page.
Like I said, is ready to have subscriptions, even though the content will all be unveiled on Monday.
And we really look forward to doing the kind of work that we believe we are doing in a way that's very positive and that the sectors of media, corporate media, and independent media need a lot more of.
I hope you have a great evening, a great weekend.
This is goodbye in one sense, and that we're ending the show in this form, but we hope and expect to continue to see you and all the other various manifestations of the work that we're going to do moving forward.
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