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March 18, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:26:55
Hunter Biden Sues Laptop Repair Shop—Confirming Authenticity, ICC Issues Arrest Warrant for Putin, Kamala Beclowns Herself (Again), & More

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Good evening, it's Friday, March 17th.
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.
Tonight, Hunter Biden is suing the now famous Delaware repair store where he left his laptop, alleging that they invaded his privacy and otherwise harmed him when distributing materials from that laptop.
Despite Hunter Biden's attempt to pretend otherwise, this is necessarily an admission that the laptop on which the New York Post's pre-election reporting about his father's business activities in China and Ukraine was based was entirely authentic all along.
Authentic!
And that in turn means that we have yet more dispositive evidence to add to the large mountain proving that most corporate media outlets spent the weeks before the 2020 election spreading an outright lie that came directly from the CIA.
Namely, that the laptop materials weren't authentic at all, but instead were, quote, Russian disinformation.
We'll once again examine the implications of these new revelations, including the fact that not one corporate outlet that spread that lie has yet retracted it or even accounted for it, and why they did it and never will do so, I promise you, no matter how high this mountain of evidence rises.
The corporate media has been in virtual panic mode ever since it was reported that the most elite team of virologists at the U.S.
Energy Department, as well as the FBI and their top scientists, have concluded that the most likely origin of the COVID pandemic was a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The very same theory that the corporate media, at the direction of Dr. Fauci, spent years telling the public was a crazy conspiracy theory that had been, quote, debunked.
We'll look at the New York Times new attempt today to salvage the theory that COVID was naturally occurring and the implications of this very significant media lie as well.
Then, the International Criminal Court today issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of various war crimes.
The corporate media is ecstatic.
We'll examine the multi-pronged absurdity of this indictment, the media reaction.
And then we'll welcome to our show our regular guest and our friend Nick Cruz of the Revolutionary Blackout Network to examine what he calls, and I certainly endorse, the NATO left's cowardly silence over the proxy war in Ukraine, and we'll also discuss the newest and latest Self-humiliation of Vice President Kamala Harris.
As a reminder, all of the episodes of System Update are now available in podcast version on Spotify, Apple, and the other major platforms.
We publish them 12 hours after the episode first airs live here on Rumble.
To follow the show, simply follow us on those platforms, including Spotify and Apple, which helps the visibility of the program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
So I'm seriously considering amending my will to stipulate that my tombstone has to make some reference to the Hunter Biden story.
Because honestly, I am likely to go to my grave completely shocked and with my anger over this story unresolved.
Because even though I know I shouldn't be, I am genuinely astounded at what has happened here and what continues to happen here.
As a reminder, on October 14th, just three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the nation's oldest newspaper, the New York Post, reported about Joe Biden's business activities, both in Ukraine and then the following day in China, that raised serious ethical questions about those business activities regarding the presidential frontrunner.
And as they said, the investigation they were able to do was based on materials taken from a laptop from Joe Biden's son, Hunter.
And they obtained that laptop because he left that laptop at a Delaware repair store to get fixed, but then failed to pick it up within 90 days.
And according to the agreement he signed when leaving it there after 90 days, he forfeits ownership rights to the laptop and it becomes the Property of the store, a very common agreement.
And the store then looked at the laptop, realized it was his, turned it over to the FBI, as well as Rudy Giuliani, who gave it to the New York Post.
And we were able to get a lot of reporting, previously unknown information, about what Joe Biden and his family were doing in both China and Ukraine, trading on his name, in order to profit off those family connections.
And the media's reaction, the corporate media's reaction to that reporting, instead of investigating it, talking about it, noting it...
Was exactly the opposite, because as we all know, barely requires debate.
The vast, vast, vast majority of the corporate media, including the media outlet which I founded in 2013 and at which I work during this moment, was desperate, desperate to ensure Donald Trump was defeated and Joe Biden won.
And as a result, any reporting that had the opportunity to undermine Joe Biden's chances to win or that ...reflected poorly on him in any way, such as this New York Post reporting, had to be not just demeaned and maligned and discredited and dismissed, but buried, censored.
And as a result, the CIA created a lie, an absolute lie, about these materials.
They said that these materials that came from Hunter Biden's laptop were not actually authentic.
They didn't come from Hunter Biden's laptop at all.
Although the CIA had the decency, these ex-intelligence officials from the intelligence community like John Brenner, James Clapper, all the standard career liars had the decency to admit they had no evidence for their claims.
They said that it was kind of this intuitive feeling they had deep in their gut from their decades of experience that this was likely the Russians who were involved in procuring this information and that the information wasn't authentic but instead was disinformation.
And based on the claims from those XCA and other intelligence agencies, and based on those claims exclusively, the corporate media spent weeks, weeks, over and over and over and over and over telling Americans an absolute lie, namely that the materials on which the New York Post reporting was based was Russian disinformation.
They refused to air any dissent to that claim.
They could spread it over and over because they were desperate that Americans not hear this reporting.
And as a result of that lie, both Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story.
Twitter outright banned any discussion.
They locked the New York Post out of their account for the two weeks leading up to the election.
And Facebook, in ways they've never explained, algorithmically suppressed the spreading of the story on the grounds that they believed it was Russian disinformation.
So every power center in America virtually, the U.S.
Intelligence Agency, Big Tech, and the U.S.
Security State, united to lie about this story in order to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 election.
We now have a mountain of evidence proving that the media lied and the CIA lied, that this information had nothing to do with Russia, was not remotely disinformation but instead was fully authentic.
The reality is it was obvious all along that it was authentic.
Right-wing media, which doesn't count as real journalism in most corporate media, had the proof That it was real.
I've talked about this many times before, about my work authenticating large archives like the Sandra Biden Archive.
The question when you get it as a journalist always is, how do I know it's true, either in whole or in part?
And there are certain ways that you go about authenticating it.
It's what we did in the Edward Snowden case.
It's what I've done many times reporting with WikiLeaks on the large archives that they've reported.
It's what I did when sources in Brazil handed me a gigantic archive of hacked conversations among Brazilian judges and prosecutors proving corruption.
In each case, I had to authenticate those materials before I could report them.
And I used standard journalistic means to do so and concluded they were authentic and therefore put my name on them.
In each case, they were authentic.
And I knew before the election that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic, which is why I tried to report on it too.
And when The Intercept precluded me, prohibited me from doing that reporting, because The Intercept a week earlier, like most outlets, had published the CIA lie that this information was not real, but instead was Russian disinformation, that was when I quit The Intercept.
And I did that because I knew it was authentic.
It was easy to see.
But since that election, the proof that this laptop was real all along has no longer come from rightly media or from my journalistic, not just intuition, but investigatory knowledge, but instead has now come from the very media outlets that they trust the most.
The New York Times is the first.
To admit that they had authenticated that laptop here on March 16, 2022, so almost a year ago to the day, the New York Times, if we can put that on the screen, published an article in which they reported on the investigation into Hunter Biden's tax fraud, alleged tax fraud.
According to the Justice Department and the FBI, they're investigating Hunter Biden for possible crimes committed.
The New York Times wanted to report on exactly what happened.
And in order to do that, they used, the New York Times did, the information on Hunter Biden's laptop because a year and a half after the election, they were prepared to admit That the material on that laptop was fully authentic.
So there you see the headline, Hunter Biden paid tax bill, but broad federal investigation continues.
So in other words, he had paid his tax bill, found the money with his father as president.
Congratulations to Hunter for finding the money to pay off his tax debt.
But that doesn't mean that whatever he did previously is resolved.
So the New York Times wanted to explain what this case was about.
And this is what they said, quote, Last year, prosecutors interviewed Mr. Archer and subpoenaed him for documents and grand jury testimony, the people said.
Mr. Archer, who was sentenced last month in an unrelated security fraud case in which the decision to set aside his conviction was reversed, had served with Mr. Biden on Burisma's board starting in 2014.
People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer, and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity.
Where did those emails come from?
The ones that these investigators are using for their investigation?
Quote, those emails were obtained by the New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.
The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.
And then they go on in some of the emails, Mr. Biden displays a familiarity with FARA and a desire to avoid triggering it.
So with Joe Biden safely elected, The New York Times was prepared to admit that they had independently authenticated these materials, which meant it wasn't Russian disinformation at all.
It came exactly where everyone said it came from, which was the repair shop in Delaware.
Russia had nothing to do with it, and the information was not disinformation, but was fully authentic, which was why the Times was using it to do their reporting.
After that, the Washington Post did the same thing.
CNN did the same thing.
CBS News did the same thing.
And in fact, months earlier, before that New York Times article even emerged, a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, who's a really good reporter, whose work I've gotten to know, wrote a book called The Bidens.
And he had, as part of that book, done a lot of independent research, FOIA requests in other countries, to obtain emails that were in the archive and was able to compare the emails he got from independent sources to the emails in the archive and was able to prove in his book That the email in the archive was word for word what the actual emails were, proving the archive was authentic, proving that it was not Russian disinformation.
That book was largely ignored because it proved that the media lied repeatedly to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 election.
So we have today yet another piece of evidence, very, very conclusive evidence, proving that this laptop is authentic.
In particular, Hunter Biden is now suing The Delaware repair store on the grounds that they invaded his privacy when they disseminated the materials from the laptop.
Needless to say, the only way the laptop could be responsible for invading his privacy is if that material they disseminated was in fact authentic.
That's the necessary implication of the lawsuit.
There you see the Washington Post headline from today, Hunter Biden sues laptop repair shop owner citing invasion of privacy.
The lawsuit, a counter move against John Paul MacIsaac, escalates the legal battle surrounding the president's son at a sensitive moment.
Here's what the Washington Post says.
Quote, Hunter Biden has filed a sweeping countersuit against the computer repair shop owner who said that Biden dropped his laptop off and never claimed it.
A legal action that escalates the battle over how proactive, how provocative data and the images of the president's son were obtained nearly four years ago.
In the counterclaim filed on Friday morning in the U.S.
District Court in Delaware, Biden and his attorney say that John Paul Mac Isaac, that's the repair store owner, had no legal right to copy and distribute private information.
They accused him and others of six counts of invasion of privacy, Including conspiracy to obtain and distribute the data.
The 42-page filing goes into significant detail on the ways Hunter Biden's data became public, a development that propelled it into the maelstrom of the last presidential campaign, and since January to the center of a Republican-led congressional investigation of the president's son.
The lawsuit could further draw attention to a sordid chapter in Hunter Biden's life, One involving nude photos, sensitive audio, and a trove of personal texts and emails.
That's how the media always wants to display it, to depict this, as though it's about Hunter Biden's nude photos, and it's about how Aye.
And let's go back to that, how it's about Hunter Biden's nude photos and all kinds of personal information, when the reality was, and is, that the key part of the emails, the reason they became significant, is precisely because they were about not Hunter Biden, but Joe Biden.
What Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine to help Burisma, what Joe Biden and his family were doing to pursue profitable deals, 10% of which, according to a deal memo, would go to Joe Biden himself.
It wasn't about Hunter Biden's naked photos or his drug use, which I personally don't care at all about and don't think is relevant to the public.
What made it relevant, and if you go look at the first two New York Post stories, you will see that the focus of this investigation, journalistically, was what Joe Biden was doing in China and Ukraine, not What Hunter Biden was doing with prostitutes and drugs, but this is how the media pretends, tries to minimize the importance of it and justify their lying about it by saying, okay, we may have lied about it, but it wasn't important anyway.
It was extremely important.
Because it called into question the integrity and ethics of Joe Biden and his willingness to trade on his power and his name for profit.
The article goes on, quote, the lawsuit could draw further attention to a sordid chapter in Hunter Biden's life.
Oh, we just read that.
So apologies to the people I just yelled at in the control room for going back.
They were right.
We need to skip forward.
Now, The Washington Post goes on and says this, quote, Hunter Biden is seeking a jury trial to determine any compensatory and punitive damages.
The suit also asked the court to require Mac Isaac and others to return any copies or partial copies of any data belonging to the president's son.
So he's asking for this information back on the grounds that it was his all along.
That is an implicit admission that the laptop that was given to the FBI and Rudy Giuliani by this laptop owner was in fact Hunter Biden's materials and his laptop, otherwise this suit would make no sense.
Now, Hunter Biden, knowing the implications of this for the media, inserted paragraphs into the complaint to try and deny that this is an admission that this is his.
The Washington Post says, quote, still, the legal move required delicate positioning by the president's son, who has never explicitly confirmed that the laptop was his.
Hunter Biden does not concede in his lawsuit that he dropped off the laptop, received an invoice, or neglected to pick it up.
In response to such claims by Mac Isaac, the filing states, Mr. Biden is without sufficient knowledge sufficient to admit or deny the allegations.
But he does acknowledge that some of the data that has been released publicly belongs to him and concedes that Mac Isaac could have obtained it in April 2019.
Quote, this is not an admission by Mr. Biden that Mac Isaac or others in fact possessed any particular laptop containing electronically stored data belonging to Mr. Biden, the filing says.
Rather, Mr. Biden simply acknowledges that at some point Mac Isaac obtained electronically stored data, some of which belong to Mr. Biden.
That is a joke.
This is a paragraph designed to allow the media and Biden's defenders to deny that Hunter Biden is admitting this was his because he says this is an admission.
Of course it's an admission.
It has to be an admission or the whole lawsuit doesn't make any sense.
Now, One of the reasons why Hunter Biden has to deny that he's admitting finally that the laptop is his is because he's been lying about this the entire time, pretending that he was in such a stupor from his drug use that he simply doesn't know whether he dropped the laptop off or not.
Here was him telling that lie with The CBS morning show in April 2021 in a series of interviews he was doing when he released his book and wanted to promote his book.
Watch what Hunter Biden says when asked if this was his laptop.
It was delivered to the FBI by the owner of a Delaware computer store.
You make just one reference to it in the book.
Yeah.
Is that laptop yours?
You don't need the laptop.
You got a book.
You got the book.
It's all in the book.
And I don't know.
I truly... You don't know?
The serious answer is that I truly do not know the answer to that.
Did you leave a laptop with a repairman in Wilmington?
Not that I remember.
Not that you remember?
No.
No.
But whether or not somebody has my laptop, whether or not it was hacked, whether or not there exists a laptop at all, I truly don't know.
Are you missing a laptop?
Not that I know of, but you know, you read the book and you realize that I wasn't keeping tabs on possessions very well for about a four-year period of time.
I mean, not only does lying run in that family, but very, very poorly skilled lying runs in that family.
That's a complete and total joke.
So now we're supposed to believe that there's this blind owner of a tiny little laptop repair store in Delaware who somehow got Hunter Biden's laptop in a way other than Hunter Biden dropping it off to get it repaired.
I mean, it's the most implausible thing manageable.
Of course, everybody knows that Hunter Biden dropped off his laptop at this Delaware repair store and forgot to pick it up because he was in a drug stupor.
Of course, that's what happened.
But whatever else is true in this lawsuit, he is admitting That the materials that got to the New York Post were real, and that alone proves the media lied when they said it was Russian disinformation.
And as I said, we know from many other sources, including the New York Times investigation, the Washington Post investigation, CNN, all of whom concluded long ago that this material is authentic.
Now, I could spend, it's 8.27, or 7.27 rather, I could spend literally the next 50, 60 minutes doing nothing but showing you media lives in video form and in text form.
Where they spent three weeks on every show on CNN and MSNBC and NBC and CBS and ABC and every article in Politico and Huffington Post and The Intercept and every scummy Brooklyn-based liberal digital magazine that asserted over and over and over and over and over again what everyone now knows is an absolute lie.
Which is that this material's authenticity was in doubt, it's likely Russian disinformation.
So I'm just going to show you a couple of illustrative examples, in part because I don't want to spend the whole show doing that, in part because I've done it many times before.
Here, for example, on October 2020, October 19, is Jen Psaki, the extremely honest Biden White House press secretary who brought honesty back to politics and journalism according to then CNN now fired CNN host Brian Stelter.
Here she is tweeting, quote, Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinformation, dozens of former Intel officials say.
It now has context added to the tweet that reads, quote, on March 17, 2022, the New York Times confirmed that the Hunter Biden missing laptop is real, as first reported by the New York Post prior to the 2020 election.
She was referring to the very first article that was published with this lie that of course came from Natasha Bertrand, the single greatest liar in media over the last six years, who has been repeatedly promoted as a result of spreading CIA lies mindlessly and uncritically.
There you see the headline that kicked off this whole October 19th, 2020.
Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinformation, dozens of former intel officials say.
More than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter casting doubt on the providence of a New York Post story on the former vice president's son.
Here's Mother Jones, quote, Giuliani and the New York Post are pushing Russian disinformation.
It's a big test for the media with its new Biden story.
Murdoch's tabloid is a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
They just didn't even pretend to be in doubt at all.
They just simply stated this is Russian disinformation and anyone who spreads it is an agent of Vladimir Putin.
Whenever Joe Biden was asked about this laptop, including in the presidential debate, he claimed that this was all Russian disinformation because his friends in the media lied for him, as did the CIA.
And when a CBS reporter asked Joe Biden about it, Bo Erickson, he was mauled by most of the media claiming that Bo Erickson was doing the job of Vladimir Putin by even raising this question with Joe Biden.
It was one of the sleaziest, scummiest Most toxic, most unjustified, and most destructive lies I've ever seen in journalism.
Because it was intended to alter the outcome of the election.
And because it wasn't one outlet that told the lie, it was virtually all of them.
Fox News debunked it.
The New York Times, to its credit, expressed skepticism over it.
They ran articles saying, we're not really convinced because we don't have the evidence.
But pretty much every other media outlet Affirmed it over and over and over and over and over again.
Here, for just as one example, is what Erin Burnett did.
She called on James Clapper, President Obama's former national security senior official, the Director of National Intelligence, and you can just watch what they did.
This is October 17th.
A bunch of questions from this.
Let me just start with this.
How much does the source matter, right?
So you hear the story of this laptop, we don't know a lot.
We do know that the way that this information is getting out is through Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.
How much does the source matter here?
Well, the source matters a lot.
And the timing matters a lot, I think.
And to me, this is this classic textbook Soviet-Russian tradecraft at work.
He just goes on like that.
Classic Soviet tradecraft at work.
CNN tweeted that out repeatedly affirming this career liar's lie that this was Soviet tradecraft at work.
And the thing that is most amazing about this story is despite the fact that we now have, as I said, a mountain of proof that all of these people right here lied over and over and over again with the obvious intent to manipulate the outcome of the election and with the possible success of having done so, we will never know the counterfactual of how many people would have heard this story
How much it would have played into the pre-existing concern that Joe Biden has trouble with the truth, and as a sleazy longtime DC politician, we'll never know.
It was a very close election.
It would have only had to swing a few votes in a few states for it to change the outcome, but what we know for sure is that the media lied.
And it's Journalism 101.
That when you make a mistake, as you're going to do as a journalist, even big ones, the first thing you do is you go to your readers or your viewers and you say, I reported this, I've since learned it was false, this is why I got it wrong, I apologize, I retract it, and here's what we're doing to ensure it never happens again.
That's what you do if you are actually a journalist.
That's journalism 101.
If you don't do that, You have no business claiming that journal, that title.
Not one single corporate outlet, not one, not a single one, every single time there's more proof that they lied, has even acknowledged the evidence showing that they lied, let alone accounted for what they did, let alone retracted for it.
And they never will.
Even now that Hunter Biden is suing the repair store in Delaware, Implicitly acknowledging that that laptop was his all along, that he left it at the Delaware Repair Store.
These people have no, not the slightest pressure to even acknowledge what they did or to retract it because they are not journalists.
They are there to lie on purpose.
This is their mission.
Why would you, if you have a job and you perform your job poorly, You apologize.
If you perform your job well, you don't apologize.
They're showing you what their job is by not apologizing.
Their job is to lie.
Their job is to spread lies on behalf of the U.S.
security state and the Democratic Party, to please their audience and to serve the political agenda that they all have.
And that's what they did here, effectively.
And that's why they will never retract it.
And the reason I say I want to put it on my tombstone is because it is amazing to me that nobody pressures them about this, that nobody says, how is it that you can possibly purport to be the guardians of the truth, the arbiters of disinformation, to censor the internet, to remove false claims when you yourselves are the most toxic and casual and aggressive and frequent liars?
And the proof is so easy to see.
It is not a complicated case.
And so, every time there's new evidence of this, I'm going to report it, I'm going to note it, I'm going to talk about it.
As I say, I'll probably do it until I die.
And I know for sure, Hunter Biden could go on camera and say, I now have a recovered memory.
I remember clearly bringing my laptop to this repair shop and that I abandoned it there.
And I recognize every document that was published by the New York Post as my own.
And that therefore the way the New York Post claimed they got the story is in fact how they got the story.
He could swear to that under oath and they still will never apologize for the lies that they spread for weeks before the election.
Because lying is their mission and they know that.
And that's the only conclusion you can reach from that.
Now, speaking of the media lying and knowing that That's their job.
Let's look at another episode from today regarding the extremely disturbing to the media revelation that the Wall Street Journal reported just a few weeks ago that no one in government denies.
In fact, everyone in government acknowledges.
There you see the headline from February 26.
Noel Ablique is the most likely origin of COVID-19 pandemic.
Energy Department now says the U.S.
agency's revised assessment is based on new intelligence.
When you dig into this article, what you find is that it's not just the Department of Energy, but also the FBI that concludes, not with certainty, but likelihood, that the most likely way that COVID and the pandemic ended up being created and entering humanity was not through natural evolution or a zoonotic leap from species to human, But rather through a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That is, the formal assessment of the Department of Energy and the FBI.
The CIA is agnostic and other agencies continue to claim that it's more likely it came from a natural evolution, including Dr. Fauci.
Now, the Washington Post, a couple of days after this article was published, Reported that this is not just any old part of the Department of Energy.
This is the most elite team of virologists at the Department of Energy, which is the agency responsible for supervising the United States' own biological research labs.
The labs that we claim we do gain-of-function research in, not in order to weaponize bioweapons, but instead simply to produce defenses against them.
But there's no question the U.S.
weaponizes biological weapons.
Remember, according to the FBI itself, the anthrax attack of 2001 Which we were told at the time was extremely sophisticated weaponized anthrax came from Fort Detrick, an army research facility, because they were working there to take anthrax and weaponize it and make it far deadlier and far more transmissible.
Not perish the thought to use as a weapon against anyone else, but simply to develop defenses in case the bad countries do it to us.
So we know the government does this.
It's the Department of Energy that oversees that work.
Obviously, they have the best virologist overseeing this work.
And it's that elite team of scientists that concluded that the lab leak theory is the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID.
And the reason that's so alarming is because as we reviewed the chronology a few days ago, Dr. Fauci worked desperately behind the scenes to coerce and bully scientists early on who were telling him this came from this lab and not naturally occurring to switch their view and to create a consensus, a false consensus
To convince the public that the natural origin of COVID had been proven and the lab leak was a crazy conspiracy theory that only hateful bigots trying to stir up anti-Asian animus would actually Affirm, and as a result, Big Tech censored that claim too, just like they censored the true New York Post story.
Two stories of major significance that was censored on the ground that it was disinformation.
The Hunter Biden reporting and the Lab League theory.
That's how you know that when people claim that they are disinformation experts, they are fraudulent.
Those are the people who want to hide the truth by calling dissent disinformation and getting it censored from the internet.
Now, this is a huge problem for the media, for Big Tech, for the U.S.
government.
Everybody remembers that they were told that the lab leak theory is a crazy conspiracy theory.
That was debunked and that nobody with any knowledge would actually believe, only to learn that major agencies inside the US government, including its most elite virology unit at the Department of Energy, believe not just that it is viable, but the most likely theory.
That's a huge problem.
How in the media can you defend yourself now, having spent two years telling people that this crazy conspiracy theory is one that you should laugh at, only to learn that the government's own scientists at the highest levels believe that that's the explanation?
So the New York Times today published an article trying to salvage what they did.
It has a very strong headline.
There you see it.
New data links pandemics origins to raccoon dogs at the Wuhan market.
That's a pretty bold headline.
New data, new discovery proves a link between the wet market in Wuhan and the pandemic's origins.
Genetic samples from the market were recently uploaded to an international database and then removed after scientists asked China about them.
That's the New York Times article today.
It starts off, quote, an international team of virus experts said on Thursday, That they had found genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.
Now, look at the language here.
You have this gigantic, bold, bombastic headline leading people to believe that new evidence was just found by scientists proving Or at least strongly suggesting it came from the wet market.
And already in the first paragraph...
What we learn is these experts are saying it.
There's no paper that you can read.
There's no scientific data that has been published.
There's no peer review survey.
It's just experts claiming this.
And then even The Times in the very first paragraph is already backtracking from that headline.
Look at this language, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited.
By an infected animal.
So already they're saying this is not actually proof.
There's no new study.
It's just some experts saying we think we might have found something, suggesting that this may have happened.
The genetic data was drawn from swabs taken from in and around the human seafood wholesale market starting in January 2020, shortly after the Chinese authorities had shut down the market because of suspicions that it was linked to the outbreak of a new virus.
By then the animals had been cleared out.
But researchers swabbed walls, floors, metal cages, and carts, often used for transporting animal cages.
In samples that came back positive for the coronavirus, the international research team found genetic material belonged to animals, including large amounts that were a match for raccoon dogs, three scientists involved in the analysis said.
This is not how scientific research works, that anonymous researchers make claims to the New York Times about evidence you can't evaluate, not published in peer-reviewed journals.
Now here's the real paragraph that you have to really focus on.
Quote, the jumbling together of genetic material from the virus and the animal does not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected.
And even if a raccoon dog had been infected, it would not be clear that the animal had spread the virus to people.
Another animal could have passed the virus to people, or someone infected with the virus could have spread the virus to a raccoon dog.
In other words, This proves nothing.
It says, but the analysis did establish that raccoon dogs, fluffy animals that are related to foxes and are known to be able to transmit the virus, deposited genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the virus was left, the three scientists said.
That evidence, they said, was consistent with the scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.
The new evidence is sure to provide a jolt To the debate over the pandemic's origin even if it does not resolve the question of how it began.
It most certainly does not resolve the question and then it mentions the new Department of Energy.
Study, which is why this New York Times is saying this, and then we get the following.
But the genetic data from the market offers some of the most tangible evidence yet of how the virus could have spilled into people from wild animals outside a lab.
And it then says, Angela Rasmussen, this is how it ends, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
Who worked on the analysis said that the human genetic material was to be expected, given that people were shopping and working there and that human COVID cases had been linked to the market.
Dr. Goldstein, too, cautioned that while we don't have an infected animal and we can't prove definitively there was an infected animal at that stall, genetic material from the virus is stable enough, he said, that it is not clear when exactly it was deposited at the market He said anything that the team was still analyzing, the data, and that it had not intended for its analysis to become public before it had released a report.
But he said, given that the animals were present in the market, were not sampled at the time, this is as good as we can hope to get.
So, you take that analysis in the headline, which seems extremely conclusive and revelatory, and by the time you get to the end of the article, not only is there no study, but it basically proves nothing.
I think we have a tweet from my former colleague, The Intercept, Ryan Grim, who analyzed the flaws in this article.
There you see the tweet, and it says, quote, there are a lot of reasons people don't trust the media, some good, some bad.
But look at these last three paragraphs, the ones that I just read to you, and compare it to the headline, and you'll see one very stark example of why trust in the media is collapsing.
They had to create a headline that gave people who want to believe in the zoonotic theory some way to believe new evidence was discovered as proof to get rid of this lab-like theory that just got a lot more credibility when the article itself, once you read it, almost says nothing and certainly doesn't match the promises of the headline.
Now, before we begin Nikon, Let me just report on one issue that happened today.
I'm going to bring on Nick in just a second.
The International Criminal Court today, which is based in The Hague and is designed to punish leaders for war crimes, issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin claiming he committed war crimes within their jurisdiction in the war in Ukraine.
Here you see the CNN anchors responding to this with great excitement and glee.
Some breaking news.
Some really important breaking news to turn to right now.
Moments ago, we were just now learning that the ICC, the International Criminal Court, has issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and another Russian official.
Both are at the center of an alleged scheme to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia.
This is a topic that we've been talking about so much on this show.
Let me get back to Ivan Watson.
He's back in here.
He's joining me now with more on this.
Ivan, what are you hearing about this?
Well, I mean, the headline here is that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the President of the Russian Federation.
All right, incredibly important news, extremely exciting, shocking.
There's only one problem with it, which is the relationship of the United States to the International Criminal Court is quite noteworthy.
In particular because the United States is not a signatory to the International Court, considers itself exempt from the International Court, Congress has refused to ratify the treaty that Bill Clinton wanted to sign making the United States a member, and not only that, the United States reserves unto itself the right, using a 2002 law, to use military force
To rescue any American soldiers or officials who are put on trial at the International Criminal Court.
In other words, the United States treats the International Criminal Court like an enemy.
Belize has no jurisdiction or credibility to judge other nations, and certainly not the United States.
And as a result, here you see the Voice of America News, which is generally pro-America.
You see the headline there, the ICC issues arrest warrant for Putin, and it explores some of these difficulties.
"The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant Friday for Russian President Vladimir Putin accusing him of war crimes for his alleged involvement in the abduction of children from Ukraine.
A prosecutor presented the allegations, which were reviewed by independent judges who decided, quote, "there is sufficient reason to believe these crimes have been committed by these persons.
And as a result of this consideration, the arrest warrant was issued by the court today," ICC President Piotr Hofmanski, a Polish official, told VOA.
officials appear hesitant to publicly cheer the ICC action given past American antipathy for the court.
The United States is one of only seven countries, along with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen, to vote against the court's establishment in 1998 at the United Nations.
Considering the sometimes, quote, very tense history between Washington and The Hague, quote, it would not be surprising that it would take them a moment to think through their position, Laila Sadat, a Yale Law School fellow, an international criminal law professor at the University of Washington in St. Louis, told VOA. an international criminal law professor at the University of Washington So basically, if you wanted to try Vladimir Putin at The Hague for war crimes, good luck trying to arrest him.
I'd like to know how that's going to happen.
But beyond that, you have to explain why George Bush and Dick Cheney aren't on trial there for the Iraq War, which wars in the last 30 years haven't entailed war crimes, and how the United States can possibly applaud Prosecution by a court that it regards as illegitimate and from which it has exempted itself.
It's the kind of morass and contradictory values that all you have to do is just dig an inch deep, something of course these CNN anchors are incapable of doing, and suddenly you'll discover the kind of quicksand on which all of these moralistic narratives Our base.
Now, let me bring in our guest tonight, who is Nick Cruz.
He's an independent journalist, a founding member of the Revolutionary Blackout Network, and a now, let's call him regular guest, certainly friend of our show, System Update, as I find him a very astute and independent-minded observer of American politics.
We have a couple things to discuss, beginning with the silence of the American left.
When it comes to the U.S.
proxy war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as the latest very cringeworthy embarrassment by our Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Nick, good evening.
How are you?
What's popping, Glenn?
Always fun to do this show.
If you don't mind, I do want to chime in on the ICC thing, because I'm actually very happy to do that.
I was going to bring you in on that.
I knew you had a lot to say, so by all means.
I thought about it first, and then I was like, you know what, let me just get through this.
But go ahead, by all means, tell me what you think.
Yeah, absolutely.
I love that they did this because they opened a can of worms.
What the U.S.
media is not telling you that the Pentagon and the Biden administration wasn't all the way in on this.
They actually, as you reported, not cheering this on because they wasn't They didn't want to do this because they didn't want to open United States citizens and the military-industrial complex into war crimes.
So I'm glad that they opened this can of worms, because I don't know how much you've been following discourse, because now that this happened, now everyone's like, what about George W. Bush?
What about Benjamin Netanyahu?
What about all these war criminals in the United States government?
And it's hilarious to me, because they're liberals right now, that they really believe that Vladimir Putin has a higher kill count than Joe Biden, than Barack Obama, than George W. Bush, than Bill Clinton.
That's why when this stuff happens, you open this conversation up.
Well, I'm like, okay, if you think Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, explain Syria.
Explain Libya and Barack Obama.
And this is the conversation that liberals will want to avoid, but they walk right into the trap.
So narrative-wise, I think it's good for anti-imperialists and people who want to hold the war machine accountable, because they walk right into this trap.
And for the people that you see propping this story up, and they celebrating Putin being charged with a war crime on ICC, I have no respect for these people, especially the NATO left that we're going to get into here later, because there's no one the height of cowardice Yeah, I love it too.
And that's why the U.S.
You live in the most violent empire.
You benefit from U.S. imperialism.
But you spend all your time focusing on Putin and the adversaries of the biggest criminal empire that humanity has seen in recent age.
They're the biggest cowards, and you should focus on calling your own state out.
But that just began to the tip of the iceberg on my comments on ICC.
I love that this happened because it's supposed to be the hypocrisy of Western imperialism.
Yeah, I love it too.
I mean, and that's why the U.S. is extremely uncomfortable.
How can they possibly applaud a court who they not only regarded as illegitimate, but had previously threatened with sanctions for daring to charge Americans with war crimes?
And they reserved the right to invade the Hague militarily in the event that the Hague were to put any American soldier or American official under the war.
On trial.
So, not only that, you know, there's this whole kind of discourse tactic that liberals in particular and their media allies have been trained to use, which is anytime you make this point, so you say, oh, Vladimir Putin is being tried for war crimes at the ICC, why wasn't George Bush and Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama put on trial for war crimes as well.
And then immediately they'll say, oh, that's whataboutism.
They've been trained with this word to basically refuse to ever allow the inquiry of, are you subjecting yourself to the same set of rules that you're purporting to impose on other people?
The most basic requirement of morality, which is that everyone can go around pointing their fingers at other people and saying, they did this and they did that.
The question is, if you yourself are doing it and even doing it worse, what credibility do you have to judge others?
That's such a good point.
They use whataboutism to reflect their lack of principles, their lack of morals, because we hold the mirror up at them.
The same way I did with Trump.
They had all this criticism of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is funding ICE and the Border Industrial Complex more than Trump.
Funding the police more than Trump.
Funding the military more than Trump.
AOC literally did a whole photo shoot with her crying at the border, but Biden is doing the same thing.
He's doubling down on Trump's policy.
There's nowhere to be found.
So it's not whataboutism to point towards your party.
We call out their lack of inconsistency.
And that is what the liberals have.
That's what literally makes my skin crawl.
And I thought the progressive, what I call now the NATO left, I thought they were supposed to be better than this.
But they walk around with these contradictions.
Walk around, praise Joe Biden.
Bernie Sanders offered Biden in 2024, even though Joe Biden has funded multiple genocides.
But meanwhile, Bernie Sanders also condemned Vladimir Putin.
These are the contradictions that we cannot tolerate.
Now, to the point with the United States and their opposition to the ICC, it's very alert because you had John Bolton.
I don't know, you saw his unhinged speech in 2019 where he called for the prosecution of the ICC and U.S. sanctions on the ICC, which kind of rebuked the ridiculous talking point from where I come from, that Donald Trump was here to drain the swampy.
He hired John Bolton, Mike Pompeo.
Steve Mnuchin's son of the war swamp monsters, and then those swamp monsters came and protected the other swamp monsters from war crimes.
So I want people to understand it's the UNI party, both parties are going to continue to support war.
Don't believe the narrative.
The president and the Sanders and Congress, they followed the direction of the military industrial complex.
That is their boss at the end of the day.
Yeah, I mean, I want to get to that point that you just made, but, you know, just to kind of finalize this part about the ICC, it's insanity to say.
That you can't examine a system of justice for whether or not there's consistent application.
It would be like if the government were only enforcing laws, let's say traffic laws, against Democrats but not Republicans.
So you're a Democrat, you get ticketed if you speed.
If you're a Republican, you don't.
The idea that that's not a valid point to bring up...
Yes.
That all you should do is say, well, look, the liberals broke the law.
All that you should care about is that they're being punished.
Who cares that the Republicans?
Of course, that's a valid critique.
Because if it's not being consistently applied, it's not actually a system of justice.
It's just a cynical, corrupt way of wielding power, which is exactly, of course, what international law as it's used actually is.
All right, let's move to the issue that, the thing that caught my attention that I wanted you to come on and talk about.
one of the things, which is this tweet that you raised, If we can bring that tweet up.
Do we have Nick's tweet about the needle up?
We're about to bring this up.
There it is on the screen.
It says, the only political group in Washington that refuses to speak on the Ukraine war is the NATO left.
There is a great debate after the DeSantis comments and Tucker Carlson asking all Republican candidates about it.
Meanwhile, the NATO left Congress people have nothing left to say.
Cowards.
Now, Nick, earlier today, I saw this video that I found super interesting in the state of Maine.
The main legislature, which is run by Democrats, they have a majority in both houses of the main legislature, decided for whatever reason, I guess they have nothing else to do, that they wanted to vote on a resolution applauding Joe Biden and NATO for supporting the war in Ukraine and urging that more weapons and more money be spent I'm fueling this proxy war.
And in the Senate, it passed 27 to 4.
Four Republicans voted no.
The rest voted yes.
In the House, the vast majority of Republicans voted no.
53 out of 63 Republicans voted no, but it still ended up passing because enough Republicans joined with every Democrat.
To vote yes.
But here was one Republican, I'm not going to play you the whole thing, but he gave a speech, he stood up, he's a state senator, and he explained, it's Eric Brakey, why it is that, it says Democrat from Maine, he's actually a Republican, why he refuses to join in on this resolution.
Let's just listen to a little bit of what he has to say.
I rise in opposition to this resolution in the strongest terms possible, as a piece of war propaganda that I will not have my name or my vote attached to.
This resolution on the war in Ukraine is riddled with half-truths, historical omissions, and dangerous conclusions that urge our nation down the path towards a potential global nuclear war, the likes of which no one alive or dead on this earth has ever seen, and one that humanity will never experience twice.
Rather than urging peace talks to bring an end to this dangerous border dispute halfway across the world, this resolution presents a simplistic narrative, with no grounding in the realities of foreign policy or the history of Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War,
In order to justify a continued blank check now over 100 billion dollars, much of it totally unaccounted for, from the pockets of US taxpayers to the Ukrainian government, in an undeclared proxy war with no exit strategy, and in which continued escalation endangers the entire world.
Nick, why are we hearing that from Republicans all over the state legislatures in the United States and in the United States Congress?
Not all Republicans.
In fact, most Republicans support Biden's policy, but a lot of them.
And not hearing this from any elected official on the left in the United States?
It is my opinion that the Ukraine crisis has been one of the things that exposed the NATO left the most.
It exposed them as cowards and not the best among us, but active agents of the Democratic Party and the imperialist war machine.
You heard the video there.
Right now, the doomsday clock is closest to midnight than it has ever been right now.
Right now the military-industrial complex is making record profits.
Japan doubled its military budget.
Germany is now a militarized country again.
The U.S.
is forcing Europe to militarize at the force of a gun.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and the progressive left has no criticism of this.
This is something that is not even on their radar, which is mostly a lie.
The last time they voted, they actually voted for it.
The last time they had to weigh in whether to authorize $40 billion on top of the $15 billion immediately authorized at the start, every last Democrat including Bernie and AOC voted yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that gets to my point.
I don't know if you saw that shameless interview that Bernie Sanders did when he was asked about this.
One of the few corporate media heads that had the balls to ask Bernie about Ukraine.
He said, oh, this hasn't been on my radar.
But you voted for Ukraine funding.
You are in support of this war.
And he planted the ball and said, "Oh, actually, I support the president on this.
I support Joe Biden on this endless crusade to provoke World War III." And he said, "I'm not involved." You vote for this stuff.
You are 100% involved.
And that is a lie and a coordinated strategy.
And after seeing this go on for last year, 100% these progressives was told not to talk about this, to take the side of the Democratic Party, allow the quote unquote bad guys like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, That's why I believe they are allowed to speak out about this, because the establishment want stand up against the Ukraine proxy war scam.
They want that to be considered a right-wing position.
So they told Bernie Sanders and the NATO left, you go on board with what we're doing, and you shut up and only allow the right-wingers to speak on this.
So that's why anyone who told the truth about this war, they seem to be a right-winger.
Are you repeating what Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying?
No, AOC should be saying what Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying, because it's a longstanding leftist belief that they are now throwing under the bridge, and they are now ignoring.
And you have joke progressives.
You got people like Marianne Williamson, who says she went to primary Joe Biden, but she agrees with the commander-in-chief on a very important policy like Ukraine.
How are you going to primary a president, the commander-in-chief, meanwhile, you agree with them on foreign policy?
It's a joke.
This is who the NATO left is, and this is why I have revolutionary blackout.
We have no tolerance for people who are directly responsible for the explosion of the military-industrial complex.
That is a stain that will forever be on Bernie Sanders' AOC record.
They did a vote.
That vote led directly to Raytheon having record profits.
That is a stain on their record, and we will continue to hold them accountable on that, and all these faux progressives like Maxwell Frost and Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, who's a coward, who bowed their head to the military-industrial complex on this.
So Nick, that last point that you made is the one I want to focus on, because Bernie's been around for a long time.
He's been very engaged in foreign policy.
Going back to the 80s, he would visit Cuba and Nicaragua and El Salvador.
He was very outspoken in a left-wing foreign policy.
It's not like he hasn't been involved in foreign policy.
And he actually wrote a good article Right before the Russian invasion of Ukraine when it became inevitable that they were highly likely that they were going to invade, laying out all the dangers.
That came from the United States' possible involvement in this war.
It was still unclear what role the U.S.
would play.
They were still saying at the time, it's really dangerous for us to get involved.
It could lead to escalation.
And Bernie wrote an article in The Guardian saying, look, I condemn Putin.
I think this invasion is wrong.
Here's all the reasons why it would be remarkably foolish and dangerous for the U.S.
to get involved in this war.
Three months later, when the vote happened, not only did Bernie abandon all those arguments and snap into line and vote yes, but Cory Bush, he mentioned, Voted yes as well, and she issued a statement that read exactly like what someone smart would have said if they had voted no.
She said, my worry is all this money is really going to go to Raytheon and the CIA and corrupt people in Ukraine.
My worry is this isn't going to save the people of Ukraine but kill them, that it's all going to disappear in corruption.
And yet she still voted yes.
So clearly some of these people, at least, know these arguments.
What are they so afraid of?
Why are they so subservient to the Democratic Party staying in line and doing what they're told when Bernie and the squad ran?
Their whole reason to exist was that they were going to challenge the Democratic establishment.
Yeah, and that's why one of the crucial errors that many progressives in the United States have made, they believe that you can root out corruption if you get rid of quote-unquote corporate money, and that's what AOC and Bernie Sanders claim.
They say, we don't take corporate money, so we are not corrupted.
But the problem with this analysis is they ignore the many ways that you can become corrupted.
You can just be like, there was an article that was written how Nancy Pelosi tamed a squad just by being nice to them, offering them to go out to lunch, giving them committee assignments, assuring them that they're on the right side of history.
And then you get used to being paid $170,000 a year, plus security benefits, plus lifetime pension.
So a lot of people pretend it's only the corporate money.
If you don't take corporate money, you won't be corrupted.
But you get part of the Democratic Party influence, which is impossible to overcome.
Every single one of these progressives who had a lot of great things to say, they became part of party apparatus and they flipped.
And Glenn, I tell you, the person that made me make my mind up that this project is a failed project of the Democratic Party is the president.
It's Cori Bush.
I live in Missouri.
I knew who Cori Bush was long before she was elected.
She was a legend in activism in St.
Louis.
The fact that they turned her...
Like, she was a serious nurse, working class activist, that was calling out William Leslie Clay for his corruption with the St.
Louis PD.
You won't get anyone who is more well-meaning than Cori Bush, but she got elected and she sold out to the machine because of the comfy benefits, being part of high society, being told you're doing great things by the media, getting magazine deals.
Cori Bush got a book deal.
What the fuck she had to say?
Nothing!
But they gave her a book deal because she plays along and this stuff is It's intoxicating.
You become addicted to this Washington behavior.
So it's more than corporate money.
And that's just a very short summary of why these people sell out.
Bernie, I at least give credit because, as you said before, he was a very harsh critic of Ronald Reagan.
Michael Crankey later said he had criticism of Bernie Sanders after Yugoslavia.
That was around the 90s.
But he had a long time of being an anti-imperialist fighter to actually call out the Operation Condor and all this stuff.
But now, after a few decades, he gave up.
And now he's wanted to be a PR machine in the Democratic Party.
But what's shameful about AOC, Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman, these people, there's not even no honeymoon period.
No active resistance and then giving up.
They immediately folded to the establishment.
The second that Jamal Bowman was endorsed by Barack Obama, he was all in.
There was no resistance.
That's why I put a lot of my focus towards these people because they pulled to what I view one of the biggest political frauds I have ever seen since Barack Obama and what they promised to do versus what they actually carried out. - Yeah, you know, Chris Hayes, Before he had his MSNBC show in primetime, I think he still at that point had his MSNBC show on the weekend that nobody watched that he tried to make elevated.
I was on that show several times.
It was actually a pretty interesting show.
Kind of like very off the beaten path.
They didn't really care what he did.
He wrote a book called Twilight of the Elites.
And I interviewed him, I read the book, I read a book review of it and then I interviewed him about it and his argument was that these institutions of power are constructed so that no matter how well intentioned you are when you enter them, no matter how determined you are to subvert and resist them, no matter how smart you are or strong of character you are, that it is inevitable That it will, what he called, cognitively capture you.
That you will start to see the world through their prism because every day the people with whom you're speaking are reinforcing the value system that they want implanted in your head.
And every incentive scheme around you punishes you for deviating from their value system and rewards you for affirming it.
And human beings basically cannot withstand, he argued, The kind of institutional pressures that have been cultivated over decades for how to co-op people.
And I remember I asked him, I said, Chris you're about to get You know, your own primetime show and a big contract from one of the largest media corporations on the planet, Comcast.
What have you done to prepare yourself for this, especially since you're saying that it's inevitable?
And you can go and read the interview.
There's a transcript on Salon.
He said, I really haven't thought about it.
And he should have, because he is Exhibit A, along with Rachel Maddow, and how well that happens.
But oftentimes, I think you're exactly right that you want to kind of look for some very nefarious You know, these people sold out, or there's some kind of corrupt dealing going on, when in reality, they just get kind of have this like trivial but very enticing reward system thrown at their feet, but the price to pay is sacrificing all their principles.
Absolutely.
And that's why at Revolutionary Blackout we stress strongly for horizontal movement building.
And this is what the boutique left, the professional managerial left, has gone wrong for decades.
They ignored the teachings of Fred Hampton.
They ignored the movement that was born through the Civil Rights Movement, through the Black Panthers.
And there's a debate about whether you should have a movement that's built on leadership or a leadership movement.
We have done panels on revolutionary blackout where we talk about the pros and cons of both.
But the most important thing is having horizontal where you listen to the people in the movement.
There's got to be accountability that comes from the people.
That way, even if you do have a leader in your movement, you have people that can hold them accountable.
You got systems of accountability that keeps the movement going.
But with the progressive boutique left, what they have done, they have anointed heroes.
They anointed these people who are the chosen gods of the left, and they don't listen to us.
They don't attend our actions.
They don't listen to our recommendations like Force the Vote and many others.
They say, you guys shut up.
Fall in line with what we are doing.
There is no horizontal movement building.
It's nothing but talk.
top-down, manipulative structures that is meant to fail the working class.
And at RBM, we try to educate people about these organizational techniques because they are purposely leading people off the cliff.
It's not they are getting these things accidentally wrong.
They are purposely choosing to organize their left structure in an inefficient way that directly opposed to what worked in other movements.
Like, for example, one of all of you that people most know about in Frank Hampton and the Black Panther Party, they purposely avoid this.
This is why we call them the professional manager class, the boutique left, the people who abandon what it actually means to be an organizer, to be a leftist, to challenge power, and they just go off vibes.
That's really what it is.
Spread toxic positivity, vote Democrat every four years, and pray that everything will be okay.
That's not how movements are built, and that's why we implore people to get involved.
Build organizations, get involved in mutual aid.
Find something that you can do to help each other, because relying on these heroes that are going to sell you out anyway is a waste of time.
Yeah, you know, you mentioned the debate that takes place within the Republican Party, and there really is a real debate.
I mean, most of the Republican establishment, Mitch McConnell, like Marco Rubio, and all those people are absolutely fully supportive of Biden's war in Ukraine, but you have a substantial wing of the Republican Party in the conservative media, led by Tucker Carlson, the most watched commentator on the right, who are vehemently opposed.
Making speech is very similar to the one that I just showed you From the main legislature, and say what you want about Fox News, but the reality is you hear so much more vehement and virulent criticism of Republican leaders from Fox than in a million years you would ever hear of Democratic leaders from MSNBC and CNN.
And the reason for that, there are many, but the main one in my view is what you're saying, which is Conservatives hold their leaders, their political leaders, with great skepticism and even kind of scorn.
Whereas liberals, and the sort of left, the kind of part of the left that's now loyal to the Democratic Party, views their political leaders with reverence, kind of like royalty, or like a rock star, or like a Hollywood celebrity that you would just kind of revere.
And you can really see The way in which that manifests.
And so I just want to tell people out there, you know, one of the things I hear people saying a lot is that there was kind of this old left that was very anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, and that a lot of people on the populist right have respect more for that kind of left and more in common with that left than this new left that's very authoritarian and Worshipful of the establishment.
So even if you're not on the left, I really hope you will follow and watch the Revolutionary Blackout Network because if you're not on the left, you're not going to agree with them on anything.
That's what it means to have a coalition of people who don't agree on everything, but they really are the sort of anti-establishment, anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian left.
That I respect from decades ago, and I think if there's going to be a coalition on various issues like war and corporatism of right and left-wing populists, that's where it's going to come from.
So I can't recommend that enough.
All right, before I let you go, we have to talk about our beloved Vice President, speaking of the kind of pro-establishment Left.
You know, I think it's worth saying that nobody on the left really was ever fooled about Kamala Harris.
She was always regarded with a huge amount of distrust and a huge amount of skepticism given the fact that she began her career as a prosecutor, spent a lot of time prosecuting with great zeal and what seemed like glee, even non-violent criminals, putting them into prison, not resisting the death penalty.
She looks to me always like somebody who just walked out of a Board of Directors meeting of Aetna.
Like, she just seems like she has that vibe all the time.
But I have to say, she's turned into something totally, like, embarrassing and unrecognizable as Vice President.
There's so many examples.
Let's just look at the latest one.
I honestly feel bad for her watching this, but we're going to have to get through it.
Let's watch her on Stephen Colbert.
Any discussion in the White House about what the blowback would be for approving the Willow Oil Project?
Because people have gotten quite upset about it.
I think there's some protesters outside right now.
Well, I think that the concerns are based on what we should all be concerned about.
But the solutions have to be and include what we are doing in terms of going forward, in terms of investments.
So, Nick, their concerns are based on what we should all be concerned about, but the solutions have to be based on what we're doing going forward.
What happened to her?
Why does she speak in these nonsensical, blatantly vapid phrases?
I mean, one could only guess.
I mean, my only theory is I think Tulsi Gabbard really broke her brain.
Because I feel like that was a real turning point.
Remind people what happened there.
So that was when Kamala Harris, I don't know if you guys remember, was polling like number one, number two within the margin of error after her debate where she called out Jim Crow Joe.
She called out Joe Biden for his segregation policies that she 100% forgot about when she was elected as Vice President, but we'll talk about that another time.
She basically strongly implied that he was a racist, that he was on the side of segregationists, and anti-busing, and that had he gotten his way, she said the little girl that was her would not have been able to go to the white school she went to, or the predominantly white school that she went to, because she was bused.
She basically implied he was a racist.
That was a big moment in the Democratic debate.
As you say, the media started thinking maybe she can win.
Had a big jump in the polls.
And then the next debate, what happened?
They had Tulsi Gabbard that ruined that.
There was a direct correlation to that debate from her free fall when Tulsi Gabbard called out Kamala Harris' criminal justice record and her psychopathy in the criminal justice system.
And I think when you look at her in her early performances, I feel like she was more allowed to be free.
And then she had that moment with Tulsi Gabbard.
She had a few other embarrassing moments.
And then you had the Hillary Clinton people who was advising her.
A lot of people forgot.
She had a meeting with the Hamptons with the Clinton people waiting for the primary.
So they was grooming her.
You saw the awful job they did with Hillary Clinton.
So they did Kamala Harris no justice as well.
So she became this overly coached thing, especially after Tulsi, because that was a very devastating moment.
Once again, that's just my theory.
After that, she became a shell of herself.
As you said, the left, no one was fooled by her.
But I remember during the Brett Kavanaugh trial, she was putting on very charismatic performances during the Senate hearings with the liberals' love, with the political normies' love.
So my very bad prediction, Glenn, which is funny to me to this day, as someone who supported Bernie, I was part of the campaign at the time, I was definitely afraid of Kamala Harris.
Because I don't know if you remember, she pretended to be a progressive very early on when she was high in the polls.
She pretended to be for Medicaid fraud.
She was running on this nonsense that she's a sort of progressive prosecutor.
So I saw this woman who was sold as very charismatic during the Brett Kavanaugh trials.
And since then, she has performed in such a way that is embarrassing that no one can predict.
Which might be happening because she could have been a threat.
Like she was going to be the next Obama.
That with hijacking the Bernie message, she could have been a threat.
But Kamala Harris is the perfect example how there's no meritocracy in the liberal system.
And that's being shown between her and Pete Buttigieg.
They are chosen by the establishment for a really weak reason for identity politics because Kamala is a somewhat attractive woman the same way Pete Buttigieg.
She's gay.
So they push these people.
But it doesn't mean they're talented.
And that was shown with Kamala Harris.
They pushed her.
But they didn't realize she has no talent.
She is not a victim.
She's not climbing the system because of her own merit.
So that's shown now with her vice president.
Biden, you know he regrets picking her because there was rumors that they might replace her on the ticket.
Democrats begging for a new option because now her brain is completely mushed.
She sounds no different than Sarah Palin and Trump.
Uh, Michelle Glockman, all these old school conservatives, the same style of speaking.
It's just very funny to watch.
It almost made, like you said, it's almost sad to see how much she struggled.
It's almost like this person was just thrown out on the big stage.
And it hurt her in the long run the same way it hurt Pete Buttigieg, where he thought he was going to be propelled to the national spotlight.
But his lack of efficiency cost him in the long run, in my opinion.
Yeah, you know, I think it's important when there are people you dislike ideologically or politically to kind of be aware of what their skills are.
You know, I don't play video games, but I've seen my kids play video games enough to know that, like, when they're preparing to, you know, do combat with someone who they're gonna, like, try and stab in the neck or whatever horrible thing the video game forces them to do to win, you know, they, like, analyze the strengths of the person they're about to fight to know their, like, you know, strength and their speed and their agility.
So, I never had trouble admitting, you know, when I saw Dick Cheney as this incredibly grave threat to everything I valued, that he was very smart.
Dick Cheney's very smart.
I don't have problems admitting that about Liz Cheney.
So, I always thought Kamala was smart.
You know, when I watched her in the Senate, I recognized those skills.
Those are skills of like a very adept lawyer.
You know, like her ability to construct questions, to trap people in these logical you know, kind of corners.
That is a certain skill that requires a kind of intellect to think about where people are going to anticipate what their argument is, to force them into corners.
I think the problem became that she kind of got overwhelmed because the reality is if you look at what she's done in her life, she doesn't know anything about foreign policy.
Like she went to Guatemala to resolve the root problems of Guatemalan immigration and then she has to go to like Eastern Europe.
She knows nothing about this.
And I think they like the combination of like being overwhelmed and And having her confidence destroyed, as you said, through the Tulsi thing, through her presidential campaign being a complete failure.
But also I think they're constantly warning her, you cannot err even by one word.
And there's no freedom to what she speaks.
There's no confidence.
Her confidence is destroyed.
And to watch this, you know, Very poised and confident and skillful and intelligent woman become this like object of pity because she can't even articulate a single sentence of any substance is really strange and bizarre to watch and I agree all you can do is speculate but it's it's and like I think the Democrats are really screwed because I think the reality is you know Biden said he was only gonna be a one-term president
He's going to be 82 when he runs for re-election.
That means he's going to be 86 if he finishes his term.
Of course they're going to look for alternatives.
The problem is, who do they have?
They can't just sweep Kamala aside for like Gavin Newsom and just put a white male in front of Kamala.
But they can't run Kamala because they know she's going to get destroyed.
She's incredibly unlikable.
At this point, she can't even speak.
So they're really kind of in a terrible position because of her.
Can you imagine a debate between Donald Trump, because I don't know if you saw Donald Trump's comments on Ukraine.
Imagine a debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and the issue of Ukraine comes up.
And I have no respect for Trump's overall intellect.
But if you look at his speeches and general statements on Ukraine, there's no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump will run circles around her on Ukraine, because as you said, she had no knowledge of foreign policy.
And you make another great point, because she was amazing at prosecuting, and she was great at the Brett Kavanaugh trials.
But just because you're a great prosecutor and you're great at these controlled environments don't mean you're going to be able to speak on the fly and be a great politician.
It is the same with Ben Carson.
There's no doubt this man was a legendary brain surgeon.
But if you ask him about foreign policy, this man's head is going to explode.
If you ask him about history, his head is going to explode.
And that's what Kamala Harris.
And they made a mistake because they saw those troll trials and they thought they're going to transition to being a politician, in which it did not.
Another point I want to make because at Revolutionary Blackout, we have a group of black leftists that want to call and hold the ruling class accountable.
I think one of the biggest obstacles to the black community have been blackness leadership.
Kamala Harris, I love that she exists because she's like the perfect example of this.
Think about all these black sellout leaders that you see promoted by the Democratic Party because they can hide behind their skin color even though they support imperialism, even though they support the criminal justice, the prison system.
Corporate power, corporate power, all of that.
Yeah, corporate power, Wall Street.
You have Hakeem Jeffries, who's the biggest the biggest gun to Wall Street, the biggest Zionist, the biggest supporter of Ukraine, You have Eric Adams, who's a giant police state bootlicker.
You have Karine Jean-Pierre, who's a traitor to the Haitian people and support U.S.
occupation of Haiti.
You have Lori Lockfoot, right, who's absolutely horrible.
Jim Clyburn, who's absolutely horrible.
So my first piece, I wrote in my sub stack, I talk about this like, this is a conversation you never hear, also because people are afraid of calling these people out, because if you target black politicians and you get called out as a racist, they can't use that against me.
So I've been calling these people out, Kamala Harris, Lori Loughlin, for all these black misleaders.
You have Emanuel Cleaver in Kansas City, who's a big Wall Street goon against Medicare for All and everything.
The Black Congressional Caucus sold us out, and the Democrats prop up black leaders who suck.
Who far cry from Malcolm X. I have no other way to say this.
They are intellectually shallow.
Do you guys think Lori Lockfoot is an intellectual?
Do you guys think Eric Adams is an intellectual?
Or King Jeffries?
No.
They prop up the biggest bootlickers.
The people who want to sell the community the most.
And we need to call them people out.
It's easier for me because liberals hide behind identity politics to deflect criticism.
And that's why they choose these people.
It's extremely, extremely nefarious what they pull off.
I think the Pete Buttigieg point is a really good one, too, which is if you look at him on paper, like Kamala Harris, he has, like, the perfect kind of profile for what a smart person is supposed to do and be and sound like.
You know, his background of education is impressive.
He went to McKinsey.
He learned, like, a limited skill set, just like Kamala did.
He exercises it very well.
But you can't just put him at Secretary of Transportation and think he's going to know anything about the transportation system.
And as a result, he's been a complete and utter disaster.
Like, everyone knows he has no idea what he's doing.
And I think that you're exactly right that this kind of liberal artifice, this structure that they've built of who you're supposed to respect as a smart and inspiring leader is all starting to crumble.
Because at the end of the day, I think there's, you know, enough diversity in politics.
We had a black president we've elected twice.
We now have a black female who's been the vice president.
A lot of these barriers are now broken.
And I remember one thing that Obama said that I actually really thought, you know, in Obama classic form was good was, you know, I remember his first press conference.
They said, do you think Americans are going to kind of be inspired emotionally by seeing you and your family walk into the White House, this black family, the first ever to be in the White House?
And he said, you know, I think there's going to be an emotional Punched to that for like a day and then starting on the second day people are gonna want to know like what are you doing for me?
What are you doing for my life?
And identity politics is not going to take the Democratic Party very far at all.
And the more kind of failures and frauds and people who are completely incompetent, they continue to advance, thinking that identity politics or liberal resumes are enough to dress up ineptitude, I think the more this is all going to collapse on them.
And Kamala is just a particularly weird and vivid and extreme example of watching that happen in front of us in real time.
Yeah, and I cannot stress enough the damage that the liberal establishment and their ideology does to real, legitimate ideas.
Like, when you look at what the Black Panthers spoke about, when you listen to Malcolm X and all these people, there's a uniting, positive the idea behind identity politics.
I, as a black man, have this struggle.
That struggle is the same struggle that you have, even though you're poor and white, the same struggle that you have, even though you're a poor Latino.
Let's combat these struggles together.
This is identity politics.
When we talk about the Palestinian struggle, that's identity politics.
When we talk about the police state and how much it robbed our community to be a civil asset forfeiture, and us connecting these struggles, that is identity politics.
Me as a black man saying that you as a poor white man in Missouri, we got a lot in common, that's me using identity politics for us to connect each other.
But what the liberal establishment does, they took identity politics and the positives of that, and they bastardized it into turning into, oh my God, look at this black woman in a high position of power, even though she's a warmonger.
Oh my God, they're this gay person even though he supports Wall Street.
They turn into, oh my God, look at this person who has a job.
That is not what the original idea has been, and that's why it has been poisoned, because liberals have applied this very toxic connotation to something that should be uniting.
Now it's something that's considered divisive, so people see how the Democratic Party is weaponizing that.
But once again, that's just one of many ways that the Democratic Party, through their rhetoric, through their politics, actually does a lot of harm to our community.
But I can write a book on that.
Absolutely.
So I was going to, you know, once again encourage people to watch, including those of you who aren't leftist.
I purposely try and find the smartest people who are the proponents of the ideologies I don't support.
So even if you're not on the left, maybe especially if you're not, look at Nick and his colleagues at the network that are... I've had Sabby on my show before, who's also incredibly smart.
The thing I like best about what you guys do is you never speak without a very strong basis in knowledge.
You read, you prepare, you study.
None of it's dogmatic or reflexive without actually having really grappled with the substance.
That's the thing I appreciate about you guys the most.
There you see his...
Twitter name on screen, or at least it's been on screen the whole time.
Maybe we can put that on there again.
You can find Nick on Twitter, and that has all the links to where he appears as well on their YouTube show.
They have great guests.
They just interviewed Matt Taibbi.
They cover issues in a really interesting way, as I think you can see from this discussion.
Nick, thank you so much for coming back on.
We're going to continue to harass you and coerce you back onto our show in the future.
It's always a pleasure.
I hope you have a great evening.
Yeah, the show's always very fun to do.
It's very therapeutic.
So thank you for having me on.
Yeah, for me too.
It's kind of a good start.
All right, Nick, have a great night.
Yeah.
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