Media & Biden Admin Get Far Too Cozy at WHCD—Revealing Rotten Core of US Journalism. Plus: Lula/Google Ominous Online Censorship Battle
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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, the corporate media on Saturday threw itself a gaudy, glitzy celebration of itself at the White House.
As it does every year, employees of large media corporations who bear the HR title journalist made a pilgrimage to the White House to gush over their own importance, desperately try to secure selfies with mid-level Hollywood celebrities, and toast to their own courage, all as they swoon over President Biden, the person they pretend to hold accountable.
It is both easy and entertaining to spend time mocking this monument to their debauchery, and we will certainly spend some time doing exactly that.
But the way in which these journalists are just so giddy and eager to spend just a night of glitter and glamour behind the walls of Versailles, admitted to the royal court for one night for good behavior, is more than just repellent to watch.
It is deeply revealing of their true function, and while I will not feign being above delighting in the mockery this provides, it is also a vivid window into the specific ways that our corporate press corps is so deeply rotted and corrupted.
Then, we try in this show to report on developments in Brazil only when there are important implications beyond that country.
And that is definitely the case with the extraordinary events taking place right now and all week long in that country.
The government of Lula da Silva is on the verge of implementing one of the most repressive and dangerous internet censorship laws yet seen in the democratic world.
One that we've reported on multiple times because it is being eyed by the EU, Canada, and eventually the U.S.
as the model for ending a free internet as a means of expressing and organizing meaningful dissent.
While the law is technically being sponsored by Lula's government, its most aggressive proponents, as is true in the U.S., are Brazil's highly powerful media corporations.
Which know that their ability to maintain their hegemony over the flow of information depends upon ending social media as a venue for legitimate dissent and that is why they are such ardent supporters of this bill.
This law in Brazil does nothing less than empower the government to silence and criminalize dissent.
And the means that are being used to all but outlaw opposition to this law as it's being debated, including by legally banning Google, Facebook, and Spotify from criticizing the law, and then ordering their executives to appear for interrogation at the Brazilian equivalent of the FBI, and all things that and then ordering their executives to appear for interrogation at the Brazilian equivalent of the FBI, and all things that happened just today are deeply alarming but also very aligned with the spirit of the bill itself, one that has already begun to
If you care about internet freedom, it is imperative that you care about these developments.
As a programming note, we were off the last few days of last week as well as yesterday, largely due to my need to attend to family matters, which I've discussed on the show before, And for that reason as well, we won't have our live after show on Locals tonight, but we'll be back with it on Thursday night.
To gain access to that live after show every Tuesday and Thursday night, simply join our Locals community by clicking the Join button right below the Rumble screen.
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It appears 12 hours after we broadcast this show live here on Rumble.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
As repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy.
It actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are.
And it's become kind of like the Oscars in the sense that, in many senses actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night but many days leading up to it where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend.
But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is
That these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars in gowns and tuxedos and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest, sleaziest event you can possibly imagine, held at the White House, hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering.
And so in the days leading up to the event, they spent a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing.
And within those discussions, within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think.
Like I said, it's a mask dropping event.
They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides.
It's really why they do their job to be around power, to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the royal court.
And so it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know That it's one of the most revealing lights that ever gets shined on them.
So let's take a look at a couple of the pre-event discussions that took place as they tried to explain to the public, prepare the public, for the nauseating sight to which they were about to be exposed.
And we're going to begin with a program that is on MSNBC.
It is hosted by a former advisor to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Simone Sanders.
She has her own MSNBC show on Saturday.
And here she is speaking to Joe Biden's former White House press secretary, who now also has her own show on MSNBC.
So you can see these roles are completely interchangeable.
You can go and work at the White House.
You can go and work for NBC News.
And you don't have to change a single thing.
No one notices anything that you do different because you don't do anything different.
It's the same exact role.
You're propagandizing the public.
On behalf of a Democratic president.
That's what the role of NBC News is.
That's what the job of all of their employees are.
That's who their audience is.
And so on this show with Simone Sanders, they had on Jen Psaki, who, as I said, has her own show.
And Jen Psaki was being interviewed about her relationship with the press and the way in which she saw both it and the importance of this event.
And listen to what it is that she said.
With the White House Correspondents Association.
You know, I will say the majority of the time they were really incredible partners because when we were navigating COVID, even though that was some of the hardest times, it was also some of the most collaborative times.
Okay, so just let's stop right there because that is an extraordinary statement.
Here is a person who worked for the Biden White House.
Her job was to spin and deceive and disseminate propaganda on behalf of the Biden White House.
And the way in which she saw journalists were not as her adversaries, not as the people around whom she had to work or against whom she had to work, but instead her very good partners, which of course is exactly what the media is.
They are partners to the government, to the state.
Now obviously there's nobody in the Trump White House who would ever call this part of the media, or any part of the media other than very small segments of it, partners, because they played a very different role when the Trump administration was in power.
She's talking here about her role in the Biden administration and the way in which she sees the media writ large, the corporate media, and the first word she uses for them are partners.
Not just partners, but very good partners.
Listen to her explanation about why she sees it that way.
What was your best day with the White House Correspondents Association?
You know, I will say the majority of the time they were really incredible partners because when we were navigating COVID, even though that was some of the hardest times, it was also some of the most collaborative times.
I mean, when I was the press secretary, Zeke Miller from the Associated Press at the time was the president.
Long may he reign, I used to say, even after he was no longer the president.
OK, so that part is amazing, too.
So Zeke Miller is a White House reporter for the Associated Press, and he was long the president of the White House Correspondents Association, the group that sponsors this glitzy, nauseating affair at the White House.
And she is so enamored of Zeke Miller The person who's the head of the press organization.
And she's talking here not as a member of the press, but as a member of the state.
But again, you're seeing there's really no difference.
And she's saying she was so enamored of him.
He was such a dedicated partner to what she was doing.
They were collaborative, she said.
The opposite of adversarial.
That her phrase used to be, Long may he reign.
Long may Zeke Miller reign.
You may have seen the footage of a couple of weeks ago where a reporter from Africa, who is not part of this clique, tried to question the White House and the White House Press Secretary before he was called on, and all of the journalists there were extremely agitated, angry with him, because it was the day that they got to see the cast of Ted Lasso, and they were incredibly excited.
And this journalist wasn't interested in the cast of Ted Lasso because he's actually a journalist.
He wanted to ask the Biden administration about their Africa policy and his colleagues in the media We're incredibly hostile to him.
We're telling him to shut up.
We're lecturing him.
We're treating him like, you know, as he said, like just some kind of a black interloper is how he described it.
He definitely thought there was a racist dynamic to it.
But either way, they were very hostile to him.
And the reason was because they're not there to ask questions about policy.
They wanted to see the stars of Ted Lasso.
And it was Zeke Miller, long may he reign, who on behalf of the entire press corps apologized for this journalist To the White House Press Secretary, this very sycophantic apology that he made to her on behalf of all journalists because there was one journalist there wanting to do his job.
So this is how Jen Psaki sees the press and the person who is the leader or has long been the leader of this organization who reports supposedly on the White House for the Associated Press.
A collaborator, a partner, someone about whom she says, long may he reign.
We had to navigate through a very difficult time in history, a time where we wanted to return access to the press, show value and respect for the media, but also do it in a way that was keeping people safe.
They're also very important and valuable partners when there are foreign trips.
I mean, you know this when you're going to a war zone, you do go to the Correspondents Association and you say, hey, we're going to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere that is a challenging security place to be.
I need to work with you on how we Create a press pool for that.
I mean, have you seen anything less adversarial in your life than Jen Psaki's view of the White House press corps?
She regards them as what they are, her partners.
It's just bizarre that she's forgetting that that's not supposed to be how it works.
That's not supposed to actually be what their function is.
That's not what they pretend it is.
But for some reason, I think probably because she was speaking With her current colleague and her prior colleague at the White House, they forgot that there's cameras on and that there's a fraud that's supposed to be maintained about the relationship between the White House and the media.
They're not supposed to be described publicly as partners, collaborators, friends, people with whom you work towards the same aim, but that is the reality, and that's why this clip was so revealing.
Now, equally revealing was...
A reporter, I believe, from the Wall Street Journal.
We don't see her name here yet, but we're about to see her.
And this is a guest, as well, talking to Simone Sanders on the same show about the role of the media.
Let's listen to what she says.
Let's just be honest.
You're not always going to get a straight answer from the podium in the briefing room.
If you are traveling with the president or the vice president, you're not going to always get a straight answer from the president or vice president.
Heck, I used to be one of the people helping people craft maybe some not-so-straight answers.
So, how do you... Alright, well, so there first of all is Simone Sanders saying that her job at the White House Was to craft answers that weren't direct, honest, informative, or straight for journalists.
She was supposed to deceive journalists.
Jen Psaki evidently thought they were very happy with that.
They were great partners as she did that.
So that's the admission.
So we're going to get her name in a second.
She's currently the White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
She used to be at The Guardian.
I want you to listen to hear to her as she describes how she sees her role and her relationship to the current White House.
Balance the fact that these are folks who have to continue to work with right being Asking the tough questions, but also not necessarily being confrontational.
Well, I think that's exactly the point you're not supposed to Inherently be confrontational nor is a relationship supposed to be adversarial their name is Sabrina Siddiqui Did you hear what she just said?
You're not supposed to be inherently confrontational Nor is the relationship adversarial That's the exact opposite of what journalists for decades have claimed, that their relationship with political officials and the state is adversarial.
And I don't know why they're being so honest.
Maybe they're just so excited and giddy about the dresses they get to wear and the celebrities they're going to meet and their proximity they're going to have to Joe Biden that night or the next night that they're forgetting to maintain the fraud that usually they wear by instinct.
But I have never in my life heard a journalist this candidly acknowledge what she just said, which is the role of a journalist is not to be inherently confrontational with or adversarial toward the government.
Let's listen to her say it again.
It's not supposed to inherently be confrontational, nor is a relationship supposed to be adversarial.
I think what everyone has to understand is that we as journalists are doing our jobs in trying to keep the public informed, and then those who are working at the White House...
That's a picture of her with her little pink luggage, doing a little glance over her shoulder as she's heading toward Air Force One.
Look, she looks very excited.
Remember, her job is not to be adversarial to the people on that plane.
Why would she be adversarial?
She gets to ride on the Air Force One, she gets to see the President, Jen Psaki, and all the important people who know her and like her and talk to her.
Why would she be confident?
And so, it's like a tourist picture.
Does this look like a picture to you that they're showing of somebody who's ready to go and investigate what the government is saying on your behalf and expose their deceit and propaganda?
They're doing their own jobs as aides, as spokespeople, trying to stay on message and control the narrative.
So I found those two segments incredibly illuminating and it isn't a surprise that what we got was a perfect reflection of those very candid remarks.
Now just to give you the Kind of quick news headline about what the White House Correspondents Dinner is.
Here you see from NBC News on April 29th at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Biden vows to fight for Americans detained overseas.
The White House Correspondents Association Dinner comes under the shadow of Russia's detainment of American journalist Evan Gershkovich.
So that is just kind of a summary of what they wanted to portray as this event being about, about press freedom, about crusading against Russia because they're detaining journalists.
Here, though, in the New York Times, I thought they had a much more interesting segment.
It was from yesterday.
It was a list of who the best-dressed people were at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Who were they, said the New York Times.
The answers may surprise you.
They covered it exactly like what it was, which is like the Oscars or the Met Gala.
Kamala Harris made the list of the best-dressed people.
There you see her in her glittery blue gown.
There were some of the journalists who were on the list, including the current head of the White House Press Association, who is an NPR reporter.
She was also one of the best-dressed people.
So we have a couple of videos of what took place at this event.
One of them, you're about to see the head of the White House Press Association, Zeke Miller, long may he reign, no longer is there.
Instead, it's this NPR reporter who was one of the best-dressed people, and who can argue with that?
There's that strapless blue dress.
And she's gonna give an award, an extremely prestigious award, called the Aldo Beckman Award.
To the person who apparently has done the best job, according to the White House Press Association, in covering President Biden, and it happened to be Matt Visor of the Washington Post, who, if you had asked me, and I'm not kidding, I'm not exaggerating, two weeks ago, who is the single most sycophantic and embarrassingly worshipful figure in the American media when it comes to Joe Biden, I would have said Matt Visor of the Washington Post.
So I'm utterly unsurprised that he was the one on whom they bestowed this award, because he deserves that award from them, because as Jen Psaki said, their relationship is to be partners with the White House, and nobody is a better partner to the White House, to the Biden administration, than Matt Feisal.
So congratulations to him.
Well deserved award.
Let's listen to this NPR reporter who very deservedly made the best-dressed list on the New York Times fashion page about this event bestowing that visor with this award.
You'll see him getting to hug Joe Biden.
It's a very moving scene.
I want to warn you in advance for those of you who are a little bit emotional, but we do want to show you the whole thing. -The award for overall excellence in White House coverage is named for a former association president, the late Chicago Tribune correspondent, Aldo Beckman. This year, the award goes to Matt Visor of The Washington Post. The judges said Matt Visor stood out among his competitors for work that went beyond the humdrum of covering the managed events of the presidency in the White House.
Visor captured the spirit of Joe Biden, particularly with stories about the president's brother and how his Catholic faith influenced his strategic vision of the office.
Okay, so this is what Matt Theiser did to win this award.
He deeply investigated Joe Biden, proved that a lot of his statements were false, exposed war propaganda and corruption.
I'm sorry, he did none of that.
What he did instead was he captured the spirit of Joe Biden, the true spirit of our leader, by reporting on his brother and explaining how Joe Biden's deeply held Catholic faith informs his vision of leadership.
That is what Matt Visor did to win this award.
He stood up so bravely to the most powerful institutions in the United States by heaping sycophantic praise on the president.
By the way, just by the way, that there is the NPR, the Empire Reporter, who's the head of the White House Press Corps Association, sitting very closely to Joe Biden, who has his arm draped around the back of her chair.
That's a very affectionate pose.
Also, I think illustrating the partnership that these two institutions, the state on the one hand, the corporate media on the other, have.
The person bestowing this award is an ABC News reporter.
They're all completely interchangeable.
They all do the same thing.
So I'm not really too apologetic about confusing them because who cares?
But that is who's who.
So here's Matt Visor.
He's extremely excited, you're going to see, to get this Aldo Beckman Award for exposing the true spirit of Joe Biden and the way his Catholic faith shapes his vision of leadership.
An incredibly brave thing to do.
A lot of people go to prison for that in other countries.
He could have gone to prison for it but barely escaped.
Watch him come up and get his award.
An award to Matt Visor.
Look at that adversarial relationship there.
Have you ever seen anything more adversarial than this?
Joe Biden standing up, he has no idea who this is, but at some point he'll be told that he's the person who informed America that it's Joe Biden's deeply held Catholic faith as well as his relationship with his brother that are the two key prongs for understanding his vision of leadership.
And you can just see the hostility and the adversarial energy oozing between these two.
Joe Biden knows that this person holds him accountable.
And Matt Visor is very excited to have gotten his award because the person whom he is constantly exposing is right there to congratulate him like a proud uncle.
You're putting up.
Look at that.
That is adorable.
Tell me that is not adorable.
That's Joe Biden.
That's Matt Visor, our nation's most intrepid investigative White House correspondent.
And there is the reporter from NPR, who's the head of the White House Press Association.
Who won, who was named to the New York Times Best Dressed List.
She actually explained that she wore this blue and white polka dot dress that the New York Times is so fond of because she saw Broadcast News, the film with Holly Hunter, growing up and that informed her idea of what journalism was.
I don't recall Holly Hunter in that film.
She was like this hard-hitting news producer going to glamorous parties to being around celebrities and Have the president's arm wrapped around your chair.
But apparently that was her recollection of what journalism was and she wore the same dress Holly Hunter wore in that film.
It's very inspiring.
Anyway, there's the three of them.
They couldn't be happier and giddier.
And I think it's a very illustrative photo of what the relationship is between the media and the state, in case you didn't believe when Jen Psaki and the Wall Street Journal reporter explained exactly how collaborative and friendly and cooperative it is.
All right, well, that was incredibly moving.
Now, we do need to turn to an issue that's a little bit less emotional, or at least uplifting, which is something that Joe Biden said to great applause at this event.
Joe Biden stood up and he gave a very spirited defense of the vital importance of press freedom when it comes to other countries like Russia and China.
Here's what he said.
A lot of ways this dinner sums up my first two years in office.
Actually, this is not that comment.
This is a different comment.
This is Joe Biden making a joke, and the media thinks they're laughing with him, when in reality, Biden is laughing at them.
Listen to what he says.
In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office.
I'll talk for ten minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away.
No, that is actually true.
Joe Biden has given fewer press conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan in his second term, when it is widely known by historians now that Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer's.
And even Reagan gave more Press conferences than Biden, or I believe Biden gave, Reagan gave almost the same number.
So Biden has given fewer press conferences.
And what he does is he comes and reads, prepared remarks to the media for 10 minutes.
He ignores them as they ask questions and he walks out.
He rarely gives interviews.
Just this week, he was caught with a paper in his hand of what seemed to be advanced questions submitted by the Los Angeles Times for an interview.
So he's mocking them.
for the fact that they will worship him and revere him and gush over him even though He treats them with contempt.
He doesn't even bother to feel the need to give them any kind of interviews or access to him or to answer any questions that they might actually be posing.
So there he is laughing at their expense.
Now, the issue that I was referring to was the one that I referenced earlier, which is here where Joe Biden gave this kind of tribute to the need to defend press freedoms overseas.
And I just, before I want to show you that, I just want to show you, I would really be remiss if I didn't, a couple of the works of Matt Visor that he did this year that have been so brave that warranted this award.
Here on April 13th in the Washington Post is a Matt Visor article entitled Biden, The American president seems awfully at home in Ireland.
Biden this week has repeatedly wondered how anyone could leave the Emerald Island.
So that was Matt Visor's very intrepid and brave article from a couple weeks ago.
Here's another from the end of last year, also by Matt Visor.
For Biden family, the holidays are both somber and celebratory.
Biden and his family on Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of a car crash that killed his wife and daughter.
So, is there any wonder that Matt Visor won this award?
To whom else could you possibly give it?
My bet for next year's winner would be on Natasha Bertrand, even though she's not technically a White House correspondent, her service to the CIA, her willingness to publish anything the CIA passes to her is legendary.
She's been repeatedly promoted over the years as a result, and Even though it wouldn't be technically within the rules since she's not technically a White House correspondent, I would put my money on her given the service she provides to the government.
Now, it was Biden's defense of press freedom that caught some attention because there's a little bit of an irony to it of Joe Biden prancing around as the defender of press freedom.
Namely, Joe Biden, right this moment, is prosecuting, attempting to extradite to the United States and prosecute under espionage laws one of the most important and accomplished journalists in the West of his generation, if not the most important, Julian Assange.
Literally every press freedom group and civil liberties group in the West has condemned this prosecution as a grave threat to press freedom.
And even some of these media outlets like the New York Times have recognized that the attempt to prosecute Assange would be a grave threat to their press freedom as well.
That any theory that says that Assange is a criminal could be easily used to justify the criminalization of investigative journalism in general.
And yet despite the fact that the purpose of this event, the ostensible purpose, not the real purpose, which I've gone over, the pretend purpose, is to defend press freedom, not a single one of these journalists, not a single person who spoke the entire evening even mentioned the name Julian Assange.
Not even mentioned it.
That's how cowardly they are, how worthless and vapid they are.
That they had the opportunity in front of the political leader responsible for Julian Assange's imprisonment in a high security prison in the UK, trying to bring him to the United States in order to prosecute him under espionage laws and imprison him for the rest of his life for the reporting that he did in 2010 and 11,
All of them had the opportunity to raise the issue of Julian Assange, to confront Joe Biden about how he could possibly, with a straight face, pretend to care about press freedom when he is overseeing and is responsible for the prosecution of one of the most accomplished journalists of this generation.
And one of the reasons they're all afraid to do that is, as we just saw earlier, they don't see themselves as adversarial, they don't see their role as being confrontational, but a lot of them just hate Julian Assange principally because he is what they pretend to be.
He actually takes risks and sacrifices his own liberty to expose the lies and secrets of the world's most powerful institutions.
He wouldn't be caught dead going to the White House Correspondents Dinner.
You couldn't pay him enough money to go there.
You couldn't get him to go there if you told him that's how he could get out of prison.
And that's why they hate him, because he's a real journalist and always has been.
And the proof is that power centers hate him.
They don't hug him and give him awards.
And there are actually people in that room, like Jim Sciuto, who considers himself a journalist for CNN.
Who has not just ignored the Assange case, but explicitly justified his prosecution.
Here he is in 2021 saying quote, Assange was a cutout to disseminate stolen emails for campaign of Russian election interference, not a journalist.
Julian Assange has broken more major stories than Jim Sciutto would break if he had a thousand lifetimes.
Julian Assange has broken more major stories than every single one of the people who was in that room at the White House on Saturday night.
But they don't see him as a journalist precisely because he's not part of their clique.
So they don't only just ignore the issue of Julian Assange and the fact that Joe Biden is on the one hand purporting to crusade for press freedoms when it comes to condemning Russia while presiding over the prosecution of a journalist.
They support that.
They cheer it.
Because they are not journalists.
They are, as Jen Psaki said, the partners to the state.
The thing about this, though, is that almost everywhere else in the world outside of these insular, gaudy media corporations, this contradiction is recognized.
The fact that the United States, Joe Biden, has zero credibility.
To pontificate on the importance of press freedom at the same time they're prosecuting Julian Assange, one of the most important journalists in the country.
Here, for example, is the authoritarian leader of Azerbaijan, who is being interviewed by a British journalist who accused him of disrespecting press freedom in Azerbaijan.
And let's listen to his answer.
How do you assess what happened to Mr. Assange?
Is it a reflection of free media in your country?
We're not here to discuss my country.
No, let's discuss.
Let's discuss.
In order to accuse me, saying that Armenians will not have free media here, let's talk about Assange.
How many years, sorry, how many years he spent in Ecuadorian embassy?
And for what?
And where is he now?
For journalistic activity.
You kept that person hostage, actually killing him, morally and physically.
You did it, not us, and now he's in prison.
So you have no moral right to talk about free media when you do these things.
Returning to the conflict.
Yeah, better return to the conflict, because this is not what you like.
You like only to accuse, only to attack.
But look at the mirror.
Look, I tell many times, before coming and lecturing us, and in your question, accusing me, it's not a question, it's accusation.
You talk like a prosecutor.
Why?
If you're so democratic and so objective, why you keep Assange in prison?
For what?
You keep him in prison because of his journalism?
I mean, anybody who had any sort of sense of clarity would be making that point.
Let me just make a comment about this idea that these journalists go and condemn Russia or China or Azerbaijan or whomever.
There is nothing easier in the world, nothing easier in the world, than being an American citizen, an American journalist, sitting in the United States in some studio in New York or Washington, and looking in the camera and criticizing leaders on the other side of the world who are enemies or adversaries of the United States government, over whom you have absolutely no influence.
It's the easiest thing in the world to do.
It requires no courage at all.
In fact, it's almost a requirement for career advancement.
China's evil, Russia's evil, I hate Putin, I hate Iran, all of that.
Just read that from a script.
That's the easiest thing to do in the world.
People constantly ask me why don't I spend more time talking about the oppression in Russia or China or Iran because I'm not Russian or Chinese or Iranian.
I don't have a show in China or Iran or Russia.
I don't speak those languages.
I don't have an audience there.
I don't have influence in those countries.
That's why I spend time focused on the acts of my own government and my own country where I can actually make a difference.
And so to go to the White House and pretend that you're there in the cause of press freedom and be right in front of the political leader who is prosecuting and imprisoning an actual journalist and not have the courage, not one of them,
To mention his name, let alone press Biden about how it is that he can continue to do that, shows how vapid and cowardly they are, how contemptible and despicable they are, and what their real function is.
And that's why I started with those pre-event interviews because it was such a great moment of candor when Jen Psaki and Simone Sanders and this Wall Street Journal reporter, for whatever reason, I think they were just kind of, it was the spirit that was contagious that they were getting to go to a party at Versailles.
Behind the walls with the French aristocracy was their moment to be admitted to the royal court for behavior very well comported, services rendered in a very loyal way, to get to go and be near the royalty whom they served that they were just giddy.
They were excited.
They were happy.
It was a moment of celebration.
And they talked about what their real relationship is.
And it got reflected in that event and it gets reflected in the propaganda to which we're subjected on a daily basis masquerading as journalism in the United States.
Now let's turn to the second story.
Which, as I indicated, involves Brazil.
And I know that there's a lot of times a tendency when I say, oh, I'm going to talk about something in Brazil or some other country, to say, well, I'm not really sure why this is relevant to me.
So I always make a very strong effort to only talk about things in other countries when it actually matters to what's happening in the United States, especially when it comes to Brazil, since it's a country to which I have a very strong connection.
And I founded a media outlet there.
I do reporting in Brazil.
So I try and be very cognizant of the fact that this is a show in English for a largely American audience, some Europeans, some Brazilians, but primarily an American audience.
And so I try and talk about Brazil when it really has consequences for you.
And I can't think of any moment where that's been more true than what is happening right this moment, right today.
I mean, I've been covering politics for a long time.
I've covered politics in several different countries.
I've gone around the world doing reporting in many different countries.
And the events of the last 48 hours here in Brazil are some of the most alarming and shocking I've ever seen.
And I'm not using hyperbole for that.
I'm going to show you why.
As we've been telling you for a while now, there is a law that is being proposed in Brazil that will become one of the most repressive laws in the democratic world that controls the content that can be published and expressed on social media.
It empowers the state, the government, with extreme, virtually unlimited power to ban and punish any speech that in their sole and unilateral discretion, they declare to be either hate speech or disinformation. they declare to be either hate speech or disinformation.
We've talked many times about how this disinformation industry, this term, is the Rosetta Stone for how Western governments and democratic governments are attempting to destroy a free internet because they realize that they can no longer maintain their repressive rule and allow a These two things are not compatible.
That was the realization of the Democratic Party in the United States government when things got too free and it led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 which was never supposed to happen.
And when the United Kingdom ignored their elites and adopted Brexit and when Brazilians voted for Jair Bolsonaro, things started getting too unstable for the neoliberal order and they decided that they could no longer tolerate a free internet and the primary justification
For censorship laws they're now trying to impose is that there's too much disinformation online, it's too destructive and harmful, and obviously whoever gets to determine what is and isn't disinformation wields enormous power, given that, like most things, it's in the eye of the beholder.
And what the Brazil law would do is it does not say you get to go to courts and ask courts to decide whether or not something is disinformation or hate speech and then have them order it removed.
It says that the social media companies are responsible to remove it the minute it appears.
And if they don't, they can be held both civilly and criminally liable for whatever the results are of Those postings.
And again, it's completely in the discretion of the government and whoever the officials or bodies are that are determining disinformation and hate speech to make those assessments.
And it's completely open-ended.
There's no concrete definition of it.
These are all subjective terms.
And obviously, the point of it is to ensure that there's no more dissent on the Internet.
And in Brazil, the leading institutions in support of the censorship law, just like in the United States, Are the most powerful media corporations because they know the internet is what has caused them to lose control over their ability to dictate the flow of information.
And the only way to get that back is to take away freedom of the internet.
There's also financial motives there.
Part of this law determines a better distribution of profits to media outlets instead of Google and Facebook.
But it also empowers the state to censor the internet in the name of disinformation and free speech.
And although it's Lula's government who, if it passes, will end up implementing it, it's the media outlets in Brazil that have led the way.
And agitating for these laws in the Brazilian left, not entirely, but largely, is marching behind these media corporations, just like they do in the United States, thinking, somehow, that they're going to be immune from application of these censorship laws.
So here is the article we published back in February on a locals platform, describing what the law is.
There you see the headline.
New law sought by Brazil's Lula to ban and punish, quote, fake news and disinformation threatens the free internet everywhere.
And then the sub-headline was, many nations seem poised to abandon the core lesson of the Enlightenment.
No human institution can or should be trusted to decree absolute truth and punish dissent from it.
And that ultimately is the point.
That was the lesson of the Enlightenment.
Prior to the Enlightenment, we did have institutions, monarchs, churches, emperors, who dictated truth.
And nobody was permitted to dissent or deviate from those decrees.
You were punished, you were killed, you were imprisoned, you were exiled.
And the point of the enlightenment of Voltaire and John Locke and the philosophers from France and Britain and the rest of Europe that ended up being the foundation for the American founding and modern day liberties throughout the democratic world is that what should dictate truth is human reason and a free debate.
Not centralized control.
We're reverting back to the pre-Enlightenment era, where institutions of authority dictate to us what truth is.
That's what this law is for.
Now, I described what the law is.
I'm going to skip that for the moment.
I basically have demonstrated, just described what it is.
And those of you can go and read it.
It's available to everybody on the Locals platform.
But what happened over the last week is really amazing.
So we are Headed in Brazil, the Congress is to a vote.
It was supposed to be scheduled for today.
It may still happen tonight.
They're only going to hold the vote if that passes.
They're struggling to get a majority in Congress for it.
I believe it might have already been delayed.
It's a little unclear.
The news reports right before we went on air.
But they're working very hard to kind of barter and trade to get to get a majority for this bill to ensure that it passes.
And as I said, the leading advocates of this law are media outlets in Brazil, giant media corporations like the Globo Corporation that has ruled Brazil forever, as well as centrist and left-wing political factions that believe, probably rightly, that at least in the short term, it will largely be used against the Bolsonaro movement, as censorship powers in Brazil have been used to silence Bolsonaro supporters for the last four or five years, something we've also covered on this show.
Obviously, in the future, if someone else gets hold of the mechanisms of this censorship machine, it will be turned on whomever they view as a dissident.
People don't care about the mid-term or long-term.
They just want short-term power and the ability to silence their adversaries.
But what has happened is the opponents, the most vocal opponents of this bill, aside from conservatives in Brazil and some free speech advocates on the left, are the tech platforms, are social media companies like Google and Facebook and Spotify and Twitter.
And they have begun a public campaign to convince people that the government is spreading disinformation about this law, trying to convince people that if this law is passed, it'll not only destroy internet freedom, but actually make it more difficult to rid the internet of disinformation.
Because what is and is not disinformation will no longer have some sort of outside arbiter, but instead will be determined by the state.
And, And what will likely happen if you're a social media company operating in a country where the government has said that you will be held civilly or criminally liable if you allow disinformation or hate speech to appear is you'll just censor everything other than I love Lua or the most tepid kind of comments.
You'll just preemptively ban everything out of fear that you will be held liable.
And these companies are also concerned that they're being forced into servitude to government propaganda.
And so Google and Facebook in particular have been advocating publicly against the law, trying to use their platforms the way Brazilian media outlets have been using theirs in favor of the law to explain to people why it's not in their interest for this law to pass.
And the fact that Google and Facebook and Spotify and other tech companies that operate in Brazil have been advocating against this law has infuriated the government so much that they are now banning, banning, prohibiting these companies from criticizing this law any longer.
And not only have they done that, but they have also ordered the presidents of those three companies, Google, Facebook, and Spotify in Brazil, To appear before the Brazilian FBI equivalent called the Federal Police to be interrogated about their campaigns against this bill.
So, here from today in O Globo, which is the newspaper of the media outlet that is most aggressively advocating for this law, here you see the headline that we've translated for you.
It's about a Supreme Court judge who we've covered on this Show before his name is Alexander Demarest and I just need to go back and show you who he is.
He has become, here's an AP article on him, notorious in the West because he simply rules Brazil with censorship orders.
Here you see the AP article from January 2023, crusading judge test boundaries of free speech in Brazil.
I did a show where I reported on a secret order of his where he ordered multiple Platforms, including Rumble, Facebook, Google, to ban the accounts of elected officials, of podcasters, of journalists, with no explanation, secret orders, no due process, and gave them two hours to comply under threat of heavy fines, daily fines, if they failed to comply.
And this has been the judge that the left used to regard as fascist and authoritarian.
He was actually long on the right.
And now they regard him as a hero because he has taken on the role of censoring speech in Brazil.
His primary targets were supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom he's ordered imprisoned without trial, whose houses he's ordered searches and siege, whose journalists he's forced into exile.
And who has undertaken the unilateral power to censor the internet and ban people from it with no trial of any kind.
So it's this judge that is so authoritarian that even Western media outlets have begun to object.
The New York Times has at least twice run articles on him, who today issued an order on his own, barring Google and Facebook and Spotify from criticizing this proposed law any longer, even though this law will have a gigantic impact on how Facebook, Google, Spotify and other companies operate.
Media outlets in Brazil that are aligned with the government's agenda that support this law are completely free to do what they've been doing, which is drowning everybody in propaganda about the necessity of this law.
But the most influential critics of this law, the tech companies, are now banned by law from arguing against this law.
And not only are they banned by law, but they are now being forced to appear at the federal police for interrogation.
One of the things Google did, here you see, if you go to the Google front page in Brazil, yesterday, They had a headline that appears right on the front page of Google with a link that essentially that in Portuguese, the English translation is, the fake news law proposed can make your internet worse.
And you click on that link and it brings you to a blog from Google that explains their arguments about why this law is bad.
This is no longer allowed.
They were ordered today to remove this blog, to remove this link.
And the head of Google in Brazil is now forced to appear before the federal police because the Justice Minister of Lula da Silva has opened a criminal investigation into whether or not these companies have committed crime somehow by arguing against this law.
Here, yesterday, Something truly bizarre happened, which is a journalist from CNN Brazil, which is every bit as bad as CNN in the United States, she went on air live on CNN and she tried to post a tweet Advocating for this law.
These journalists are not pretending to be objective.
CNN, Global, and Brazil are the leading agitators for the censorship law, just like journalists in the United States are the leading censorship advocates here.
She tried to post a tweet defending the censorship law, but when she tried to post the tweet, she got an error message from Twitter.
Now, anybody who has ever used Twitter over the past several years, but especially in the last several months since Elon Musk fired 80% of the workforce or so, understands that Twitter often has technical difficulties.
But instead of concluding that that might be why she was unable to post her very important tweet in favor of this law, she instead immediately concluded that she was so important that Twitter was censoring her.
And she went on the air and she held up her laptop and she showed how she was unable.
She kept pressing the button, post, post, post.
And she got this error saying, I can't post.
And then the proof that she thought that she was being censored was she went to her phone and she was able to post an image on her phone on Twitter and that proved that Twitter was analyzing the content of her advocacy and Elon Musk and others at Twitter were so incredibly obsessed with what this TV host on CNN Brazil was saying about a law that Elon Musk didn't even know existed until I talked to him about it today and censored her.
The pro-censorship activist group Sleeping Giants that here in the United States tries to get Fox News' advertisers canceled also exists in Brazil where they do the same thing.
They claim to be very against disinformation.
They try and get everybody censored and their advertisers lost whoever is on the right.
They too claimed they were being censored by both Google and Twitter for the same reason.
Here you see urgent, desperation hit.
Google is using its own platform to attack the law and Twitter is logging out of people's accounts to get in the way.
The big tech companies are afraid of losing their fortunes gained over the devastated lives of our children and are using everything to try to stop the law.
So, they also claim Twitter was censoring them because they got logged out of their accounts several times yesterday.
Now, soon as I saw all of this, I knew that the whole thing was a hoax, a fraud, because I had exactly the same problems on Twitter yesterday, even though I only spoke once about this law and I spoke against it.
I was signed out of Twitter involuntarily at least six or seven times.
I kept trying to post tweets and was getting the same error message that she was getting.
But I assumed, not that there was some conspiracy to silence me on the part of Twitter, but that Twitter was just having technical difficulties.
And yet the Justice Minister in Brazil, Flavio Dino, who is probably the leading advocate of this censorship law, he's the one who wants to control the internet.
He's the one who also ordered Google and Facebook and Spotify to cease.
of engaging in advocacy against the law that he wants upon some huge penalty that Congress hasn't approved and that the courts haven't approved either, went onto Twitter.
He retweeted both the crazy, deranged CNN host claiming Elon Musk had censored her and sleeping giants claiming the same thing.
And he said, he retweeted both of those tweets and he said, I am forwarding the matter to the analysis of the National Consumer Secretariat, an agency of the Ministry of Justice, in view of the possibility of configuration of abusive practices by companies.
Now, almost immediately when these tweets went up, The community notes function of Twitter, which is one of the best innovations Elon Musk has brought, it's an ability of a community of people in Twitter to fact check journalists and others, politicians when they lie, immediately noted that Reuters had a report that everyone could go and read online about the global technical problems and instability Twitter was experiencing yesterday.
And that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Twitter users were experiencing exactly the same problems as Sleeping Giants and the CNN host, only they all understood that it was because of tech problems that Twitter faced and not because they were being targeted as some set free speech martyrs.
But this Justice Minister took that and threatened Twitter with criminal prosecution and is also threatening these other companies from opposing this law.
No, as I said, I spoke to Elon Musk about this today to try and get Twitter's response.
He then went online and mocked the CNN host and said Twitter had global problems all day yesterday because so many people were logging on that the bandwidth needed to be expanded.
And when they expanded it, the problems were solved, which is exactly what Reuters said and thousands of other people in Brazil said that they were experiencing, including ones who never even mentioned this at all, let alone supported it.
And yet, they refuse to, the CNN host, these other journalists who spread the claim that they were being censored, refuse to retract it, just like in the United States, no matter how much you disprove their lies, they stick with them.
But the important thing is this.
This bill is used as a model in Europe and Canada.
There have been multiple conferences over the last three months where Brazilian journalists, Brazilian politicians, Brazilian activists are invited to Paris and Berlin and London and Toronto and they have conferences over how to regulate the internet and they're looking at Brazil to see how far Brazil can go and how much they can get away with.
Because the EU wants to copy this law, and so does Canada, and so does the United States.
The United States will have a harder time because of the First Amendment, but as we've seen, the Democratic Party has made no bones about the fact that they explicitly crave greater censorship of the internet in the name of both disinformation and hate speech, and they will find a way around it.
But the EU and Canada have already adopted laws like this.
In Canada, there's a pretty extreme law already that Justin Trudeau succeeded in enacting, though it doesn't go as far as this Brazilian one, because this Brazilian one has almost no limits.
And that's really what they want.
They want the ability to proclaim anything to be disinformation.
So imagine if this law had existed yesterday in Brazil, while the CNN host, in her hysteria and derangement, was hallucinating that Twitter was censoring her, and she was supported not only by other journalists, but also by the government, by the Justice Minister.
Imagine if someone like myself or somebody else had gone on and said, that's not happening.
They could have proclaimed our denials to be disinformation and banished us as a result.
That's the power this law gives.
It prevents things from being debated.
That's what they did throughout the COVID pandemic when people who dissented from the pronouncements of the World Health Organization or Dr. Fauci were banned from the internet, even though so many of those things ended up being true.
It's what dissidents to the narrative in Ukraine are suffering constantly online.
There is an absolute attempt in the West to ban dissent.
And they recognize that the internet, because of the empowerment it gives to individuals, the ability for us to have a show like this, without needing a corporation approving of what we're saying or moderating it or paying for it, is too powerful of a weapon to allow it to be free any longer.
And all of these laws, starting with the one in Brazil this week, are models that are coming to you in whichever country you are, including the United States.
And the fact that the Brazilians, the Brazilian government, is not only seeking an authoritarian law, but has been so thuggish and authoritarian in preventing criticism of the law in order to shove it down everyone's throat, to the point of silencing some of the most powerful tech companies in the world and ordering their executives to appear before the police for interrogation, illustrates the repressive and tyrannical mindset driving all of this.
I know we were all taught that tyranny is something that happens in China and Iran and North Korea.
Not in our ally countries, not in Western Europe, not in Canada, not when there's a nice liberal left leader that the Biden administration likes in Brazil and certainly not in the United States.
But ultimately, what defines despotism and tyranny are the actions of the state, the actions of institutions of power.
And if laws like this and the means of getting them implemented are not despotic and tyrannical, I really don't know what would qualify.
So that concludes our show for tonight.
Before we leave, I just want to say that last week on Friday was the last week for our colleague Anthony Tobin, who moved to Brazil to work with me even before the show began.
He was instrumental in its launch and in its debut.
He had just graduated and came to Brazil.
Just in order to work with us, he was an incredibly important part of getting this show off the ground.
He's decided to go back to the United States, pursue further graduate studies.
I'm certain he'll be nothing but extremely successful.
We're very appreciative of his efforts and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.
I'm sure he'll be super successful in whatever he does.
As I said, we will be back on Thursday night for the After Show on Locals, where we take your questions and respond to your feedback.
