Good evening. It's Tuesday, April 22nd. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. I was away the last couple of nights, mostly because I was under the weather, traveling in New York City, got home, just felt a little unwell, but happy to be back, fully recovered, and ready to go.

We have a lot to talk about.

Tonight, there is a highly unusual and clearly consequential purge of some of the highest national

security officials taking place for the Trump administration.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in particular has had his long time and most trusted confidants whom he chose just two months ago for the most influential policy-making positions reporting directly to him now fired.

And while this sort of bureaucratic intrigue is often opaque in Washington, and Heggseth, the ultimate team player for Trump, is insisting

that there is nothing out of the ordinary taking place.

One cannot help but notice that several of his fallen advisors are among the most vocal skeptics,

if not outright opponents, of a U.S. military conflict with Iran, beginning with his longtime friend

and the former reign Dan Caldwell. All of this is taking place against a backdrop of increasingly

intense and increasingly public pressure being placed on Donald Trump and his administration

to endorse either a direct U.S. military strike against Iran or give

a green light for Israel to do so, which, as always, would depend on heavy U.S. military backing

and would certainly drag the U.S. into that conflict. Having the U.S. bomb Iran with the

ostensible but futile goal of disabling its nuclear energy

capabilities, but with the real goal being regime change, has long been the number one

priority of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, going back decades, as well as his legion

of very powerful loyalists spread throughout the US.S. government and in virtually every American

major power faction. We'll examine what is clear in all of these events and whether the war drums

that are clearly beating more loudly and more loudly every day in Washington against Tehran

can't really be stopped. Then one of the primary topics of our show over the last three months, I think by necessity,

since Trump's inauguration has been the seemingly daily issuance of new censorship programs

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