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May 17, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

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Durham Report Obliterates FBI for Russiagate Misconduct. Major Changes at Twitter Raise Serious Questions. And Reflections on the Extraordinary Life of David Miranda | SYSTEM UPDATE #83

Durham Report Obliterates FBI for Russiagate Misconduct. Major Changes at Twitter Raise Serious Questions. And Reflections on the Extraordinary Life of David Miranda Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	. GOOD EVENING.
	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.
	As many of you know, our show has been on a brief hiatus due to the death on May 9th of my husband, David Miranda.
	He had been hospitalized since August 6th of last year when he was at a campaign event for his bid to be reelected to the Brazilian Congress representing Rio de Janeiro when he began experiencing severe abdominal pain.
	He was admitted to the ICU with the diagnosis of severe inflammation of his gastrointestinal region that had spread to multiple organs including His kidneys and liver and lungs due to sepsis and he remained in ICU for the next nine months fighting an extraordinary battle that allowed us, me, our children, his family and friends to share some really profound moments with him as he was very awake, alert, communicative and fully present especially over the last several months.
	After a personal loss this devastating, it's very difficult to know when to go back to work.
	There's really no perfect time or no right way to do it.
	I was largely inspired in my decision to come back today by my kids, who yesterday were adamant in their insistence that they wanted to go return to school.
	I figured it is so rare to see young teenagers all but demand to go to school, despite my concerns that it was too early for them, and then come back home and declare how gratified they were by their decision that there must be some wisdom in that.
	I can't say it's easy to be here.
	It has often been a real struggle over the last nine months to do many of our shows, but I think it's the right thing to do for myself and our kids, and I hope for our audience as well.
	As our last segment tonight, I will share some thoughts about David's life.
	There was a very public, significant public component to his work as first an activist and a journalist who played a vital role in the Snowden story, often one that was overlooked, and then in his life as an elected official.
	And I always believe that there are some really vital lessons to learn from how David lived that part of his public life.
	And also share a few insights that I've developed over the last nine months and especially the last week about gratitude and the importance of human and spiritual connection that I hope and believe are worth hearing.
	I'm really just not a person who can speak about anything, including our political conflicts and my journalism, without speaking in the most genuine and truthful way I can.
	And today, at least, that requires my talking about the most difficult and challenging moment of my life in a way that I hope will be enriching for everybody who hears it.
	But before that, as our top story, we will examine the devastating revelations, I mean the devastating revelations, from the so-called Durham Report, the final investigative document filed by Special Counsel John Durham who, in April 2019, ...was appointed and assigned by the Justice Department as someone long widely respected in Washington as an apolitical and trustworthy prosecutor to investigate the single most scandalous aspect of Russiagate.
	Not the fictitious and ultimately non-existent collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election.
	And most certainly not the completely unhinged, deranged, and wildly melodramatic conspiracy theory that dominated our political discourse for years.
	Mainly that the Kremlin had effectively seized control of the levers of American power through a combination of sexual, financial, and personal blackmail over Donald Trump.
	Instead, the most scandalous part of all of this was the abuse of power, the flagrant abuse of power by the FBI and other parts of the US security state to concoct a completely baseless investigation With the clear and improvable intent to interfere in and manipulate the 2016 election to ensure the defeat of Donald Trump.
	The 306-page report sent to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week is full of extremely incriminating indictments of the FBI and its senior leadership.
	We'll review the key findings and, most importantly, place them in the context of the last seven years of full-scale, highly illegal, and profoundly anti-democratic interference by the U.S.
	security state in our domestic politics and in two consecutive presidential elections.
	And then, after that, there have been several significant developments of Twitter over the last two weeks.
	The announcement that Tucker Carlson, now fired by Fox News, will be bringing his show to Twitter in ways that, at least to me, still appear quite unclear.
	The hiring of a new CEO, Linda Iaccarino, who is currently Senior Advertising Executive with NBCUniversal and who has a history, a recent history, of some very disturbing comments about how she believes social media should function.
	And then the revelation that Twitter censored the accounts of specific oppositional figures right before the presidential election in Turkey held on Sunday upon threat of being banned entirely from the entire country if it failed to comply.
	There are many significant implications in these events and in the reaction to them.
	Given that the battle over Twitter, whether it will become a free speech platform along the lines of Rumble, or if the establishment will succeed in corralling it once again into a platform that they control, is really of the highest importance.
	And we will examine what we think is the meaning of all of these events.
	Finally, in conjunction with the Return Today of System Update, we launched a long-planned campaign, an ad campaign, that will appear on multiple media and online platforms that conveys what we have done with this program thus far, and more importantly, where we want to take it.
	We wanted to share this ad campaign with you, so please take a look.
	The largest media corporations in the United States have become the opposite of adversarial to power.
	Do you want to go get some ice cream over there?
	They have become the leading propagandists, the leading messengers.
	Go ahead.
	No.
	Probably best I don't.
	That is not what we do. - I mean, this is massive and extraordinary.
	People need to get out.
	I share this with Glenn Greenwald for exposing truth.
	To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?
	Charges against the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald.
	Press freedom groups were appalled by these charges.
	Every night at System Update, we bring you real reporting.
	Questioning establishment narratives rather than amplifying them.
	Russia games.
	Twitter files.
	Dr. Fauci.
	Julian Assange.
	Real assault on press freedom.
	When we finally got out of Afghanistan six months later, the arms industry gets this brand new war.
	Yeah, where did the anti-war Democrats go?
	It's ridiculous that Nancy Pelosi has never faced a big speakership challenge.
	This is a scam.
	Increasingly, the only trustworthy form of journalism is independent journalism, fearlessly operating with no establishment constraints.
	That is what Rumble provides, and that is what System Update is.
	So as I said, that will appear on multiple online platforms across the internet over the next several weeks and perhaps even longer, and we obviously hope that it will attract an even larger audience that we've been able to assemble thus far.
	One that has really, thanks in large part due to Rumble, exceeded our expectations.
	This being Tuesday night, we ordinarily would have our live interactive show on Locals, but given the need for me to ease back into my return to work this week, we will not hold that show tonight.
	But we will be back with it as soon as possible, but in all events, no later than next Tuesday.
	To have access to that show exclusively, just join our Locals community by clicking the join button right below the video on the Rumble page.
	As a reminder, System Update appears in podcast form as well, 12 hours after we air live here first on Rumble.
	It appears on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple, Spotify, and the rest.
	To consume the show in podcast form, simply follow us on those platforms.
	You can share and rate the show, which spreads visibility as well.
	Well, for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	One of the top three or four most significant political events of the last decade in the United States was the release in April 2019 of the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller.
	It may be easy to forget how significant that was and that's because there has been a very concerted effort to foster this forgetting on the part of the American public about just how dominant that scandal was.
	It's not an exaggeration to say that Russiagate was the leading news story from mid-2016 when it first appeared as part of a campaign ad by Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump through at least The middle of 2019 when Robert Mueller finally concluded his investigation.
	And the reason I say the publication of the Mueller report was such a significant event, one of the two top three or four or five political events of the last decade, is because the impetus for Russiagate, the core allegation That caused so much political turmoil and that suffocated and drowned our politics and that ultimately led to the appointment of George Bush's post 9-11 FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel was the claim
	that again emanated first from the Clinton campaign and then was spread by media outlets all over the place, driven by leaks from the intelligence community, was that the Trump campaign had colluded, a word we heard every day for years and then none since, had colluded with the a word we heard every day for years and then none since, had colluded with the Russian government in its attempts to hack into the emails of the Democratic National Committee as well as
	And the claim was that there was a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign on the one hand and the Russian government on the other to use foreign power and foreign influence to interfere in our democratic election.
	That was the central allegation.
	If you go back and read contemporaneous accounts of what led to the Mueller investigation, you will find with great clarity that that was the central accusation.
	And the reason I say the Mueller investigation report, the final report, was so significant is because it obliterated that accusation.
	It obliterated it.
	It concluded in extremely explicit ways that despite 18 months of an investigation that had unlimited resources, supposedly the dream team of the most aggressive and skillful prosecutors in the country, and full subpoena power, That they were unable to find evidence that established that core allegation, namely a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
	The evidence was simply non-existent to prove that that conspiracy existed.
	A conspiracy which our leading media outlets not only entertained, But insisted had been proven true.
	In fact, any questioning of that conspiracy theory, and I say this from firsthand experience, led one to be excluded and relegated to the fringes of most major liberal institutions.
	That is how deceitful the narrative was.
	And it wasn't just a narrative on the side, it was the leading narrative in our politics.
	Beyond that, when the Mueller investigation concluded, it meant one overarching fact would be true and would forever be true.
	Namely, not a single American citizen, not one, not Donald Trump or his family,
	Not senior officials of the Trump campaign or the Trump White House, not low-level Republican operatives or Trump operatives like Carter Page or anyone else, George Papadopoulos, not a single American was indicted and accused of criminally conspiring with the Russian government, the core allegation that gave rise to the entire political controversy, let alone was anyone convicted of that accusation.
	The entire thing proved to be a scam, a hoax.
	When the Mueller investigation concluded with no indictments of that kind, and then the report explicitly concluded that they've searched everywhere and yet found no evidence for the core accusation that there was collusion.
	Beyond that, if you want to say there was something even more dominant than the narrative that there was collusion, was the truly deranged, unhinged, mentally unwell conspiracy theory That almost every major media outlet in this country embraced, while feigning scorn for conspiracy theories, and almost every major political leader in the Democratic Party, and even many in the Republican Party, affirmed to be true.
	Namely, that the Russians had essentially seized control of the levers of American power
	As a result of sexual, financial, and personal blackmail leverage over Donald Trump, a claim that was first put into the bloodstream of American politics by the Steele dossier and the Steele report, that CNN first reported the existence of, and then BuzzFeed published the dossier itself, all while admitting that they could not verify any, let alone all of the claims within it.
	So preposterous was this conspiracy theory that the Russians effectively controlled the United States and could force Trump to take actions against American interests and in servitude to the Kremlin that the Mueller investigation barely even mentioned it.
	Let alone debunked it or even bothered to discuss the evidence for it.
	There was no evidence.
	It was a gigantic fraud.
	One that every major leading liberal institution of power in journalism, in politics, and in corporations, all collectively affirmed.
	And that is why the far more scandalous aspect of The Russiagate narrative was not Russiagate itself, but how this fraud was perpetrated on our country.
	Who it is that abused the power of the American government to launch an investigation based on nothing, and then continuously leaked
	Often very illegally, the most incriminating information possible to the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC News principally, to try and affirm and fortify and fuel what all along was a completely fictitious narrative, to the point that the Washington Post and the New York Times showered themselves with Pulitzers in 2018 for their supposedly brave and intrepid work in investigating what all along was a complete hoax.
	It was a long time, very respected prosecutor, renowned for his bipartisan respect and for his reputation for apolitical independence and his doggedness as a prosecutor, Don Durham, who was appointed in April 2019 by the Justice Department, the same month the Mueller investigation concluded and the Mueller report became public.
	He was tasked with investigating the origins of this hoax.
	How is it that American politics were drowned for at least three years in a completely fraudulent conspiracy theory?
	One that put a stranglehold on the U.S.
	government, that distracted almost all of our attention on a daily basis away from what mattered onto this complete fairytale.
	And the investigation by John Durham has lasted four years.
	It officially closed last week, late last week, when the report that he authored, the 306-page report that he authored, was sent by Merrick Garland to the Congress as the official report of the Durham investigation.
	And one of the things we find is that even in very unlikely places, including the media outlets, which most aggressively and relentlessly and single-mindedly promoted this conspiracy theory, were forced to admit that this report is devastating.
	To the FBI and to the Russiagate narrative and highly exonerating of Donald Trump.
	So let's just take a look at one example which is Jake Tapper who I regard, I suppose, as probably the fairest, or who attempts to be the fairest-minded host or personality on CNN, which isn't saying very much at all, but is something that I would say for him if I were forced with a gun to my head to choose.
	And here's what he said about the Durham investigation.
	You know that every single CNN viewer, the shrinking number that they still cling to, hated to hear this.
	That it infuriated them to hear it.
	But hear it they did, because in Jake Tapper's view, there was nothing else he could say after having reviewed the findings of that report.
	Regardless, the report is now here, it has dropped, and it might not have produced everything of what some Republicans hoped for.
	It is, regardless, devastating to the FBI, and to a degree, it does exonerate Donald Trump.
	And there you see the crayon on the screen, which typically is written in almost comically anti-Trump tones, which reads, Special Counsel Durham concludes that the FBI should never have launched The Trump-Russia probe.
	It was an abuse of power, this report concluded, for the investigation even to be launched at all because they had no evidence that could possibly have justified an investigation of this type.
	In fact, they had ample evidence proving that it was a fraud to begin with.
	And what John Durham uncovered was abundant proof that the senior leadership of the FBI James Comey who was the director, Andrew McCabe who was his deputy, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the lovers who ended up playing a crucial role in the investigation all while talking openly about the vital need to use the FBI to sabotage the Trump campaign, that all of them had only one goal in mind.
	When pursuing this investigation that had nothing to do with legitimate law enforcement functions and everything to do with their desire to abuse the FBI and its vast powers to manipulate the 2016 election.
	That was where the corrupted interference came from.
	Not from Moscow and the Kremlin.
	Not from WikiLeaks or Jill Stein.
	But from the senior leadership of the FBI under President Obama, who obviously wanted his close friend and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and his party to win the 2016 election and allow the FBI to abuse its power to do so.
	So let's take a look at a couple of the key findings, and I want to say we have a lot to cover tonight.
	The report could really justify an entire 90-minute show, and my guess is we will at some point soon devote our entire program to digging deep into these findings.
	But I wanted to show you a few of the key components of it, and more importantly, place in context What these findings mean.
	There has been reporting over the last several days about the substance of this report.
	I just showed you Jake Tapper essentially saying that it doesn't give the Republicans everything they wanted, but pretty much gave them most of what they wanted, exonerated Trump, proved the FBI should never have launched this fake investigation.
	But I want to put it in context, kind of take a step back and see what it means.
	So here is the transmissible letter, the transmittal letter from Merrick Garland on May 12th.
	Or rather, from John Durham to Merrick Ireland, where he submits his final report.
	And this is where he says, quote, the office also considered, as part of its investigation, the government's handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016.
	This is now quoting from the report.
	That is, John Durham defining the scope of his investigation.
	That intelligence concerned the purported, quote, approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.
	This was not an investigation that emanated from the FBI.
	This was a narrative, a campaign tactic, that emanated from the Clinton campaign, which obviously had all sorts of vital connections to the senior leadership of the US government under President Obama, who was still president during the 2016 election.
	Durham goes on, quote, we refer to that intelligence hereafter as the, quote, Clinton plan intelligence.
	Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified the following information about the Clinton plan intelligence in September 2020 and conveyed it to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
	Quote, in late July 2016, U.S.
	intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S.
	presidential campaign Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
	The intelligence community does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
	But according to his handwritten notes, CIA Director John Brennan, now of course with NBC News, subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including, quote, the alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, as a the alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, as a proposal by one of her senior policy advisors to vilify Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian
	This is incredibly devastating, this finding.
	Because it proves that this was not a legitimate law enforcement investigation, nor was it a legitimate intelligence investigation.
	It was cooked up as a campaign tactic by Hillary Clinton.
	And then that was briefed to President Obama and to CIA Director John Brennan, which means the highest levels of the government knew that it was Hillary Clinton's intention to concoct this false claim linking Donald Trump to the Kremlin and to try and claim that the Trump campaign participated with or conspired with or colluded with the Kremlin in their hacking of
	The DNC and John Podesta's email, essentially accusing them of a crime and then using the FBI, weaponizing the FBI to go off into an investigation even though there was no basis under the law for launching that investigation that had only one purpose, a political one, to sabotage Trump's campaign.
	There were people inside of the FBI in late October of 2016 who wanted it to be known that there was no evidence linking Donald Trump and the Russians because by this point it had become one of the predominant themes of the 2016 campaign.
	Every day it's vital to remember leading media outlets, The Times, The Post, CNN, NBC News were headlining This fairy tale that came from the bowels of the Clinton campaign and then connected to the FBI.
	And here you see the New York Times, and they were vilified for this truthful article.
	Do you see the headline?
	Investigating Donald Trump, FBI sees no clear link to Russia.
	Quote, for much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign.
	Agents scrutinized advisors close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead, which they ultimately came to doubt.
	About a possible secret channel of email communications from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.
	Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.
	And even the hacking into Democratic emails the FBI and intelligence officials now believe was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
	Now, I can't overstate the rage and indignation that was directed at the New York Times for this article, both when it appeared and since.
	Because the predominant view of the American elite class in politics and journalism is that there is only one valid goal in life, in politics, in journalism, and that is the destruction of Donald Trump and his political movement.
	And they really do believe, they have really come to believe over time, that the most significant and the most ethically obligatory mission of everybody, of every relevant institution, is that single-minded goal.
	And that anything that deviates from that goal, that overarching paramount goal to destroy Donald Trump and his movement, anything that deviates from that mission is inherently improper, is inherently unethical, even if It means that journalists are telling the truth while they do it.
	That was, for years, the dominant ethos in American journalism, that you do not tell the truth if there's any possibility it might help Donald Trump.
	Instead, you're required to endorse disinformation and to lie because the goal of defeating Donald Trump is so paramount That it renders everything including lying and deceit and censorship and disinformation justified.
	That was what made that Sam Harris video resonate so virally was that he was one of the few people unwittingly to be so candid that world view that has corrupted almost every major liberal institution in the United States.
	And it continues to this very day and will continue into the 2024 campaign.
	Now, at the time that this tactic was first unveiled, trying to link Donald Trump to the Russian government, I wrote my first article on Russiagate, which was on August 8th, 2016, because I could see the emergence of this tactic.
	And every day I was seeing the FBI and the CIA leaking information to the Washington Post, to the New York Times and NBC News designed to forward and advance this McCarthyite script that was dug up from the deepest levels of the CIA, these crusted scripts from the 1950s trying to tie your political opponents to the Kremlin, argued that you're disloyal to the United these crusted scripts from the 1950s trying to tie your political opponents to the Kremlin, argued that you're disloyal With the Russians.
	And the headline of my article which you see there was, quote, Democrats' tactic of accusing critics of Kremlin allegiance has a long and ugly history in the United States.
	Democrats are mimicking and echoing many of the most shameful people and tactics of the 20th century.
	Because I really couldn't believe that something so blatantly McCarthyite, something that we were all taught to regard as one of the most shameful moments in American history, the baseless accusations that a huge number of people who had no ties to the Kremlin, in fact, were loyalists to the Kremlin, had been dredged up, rejuvenated by the Clinton campaign and specifically By U.S.
	security state agencies.
	And I want to show you the very first video that the Clinton campaign launched in mid-2016 that made me recoil instinctively.
	And I couldn't believe, I genuinely couldn't believe that every Democrat and every liberal and especially every leftist who had been inculcated with the evils of McCarthyism were not reacting in similar ways because the script was so blatantly scummy and baseless.
	let's take a look putin's been a very strong leader for russia i He kills journalists that don't agree with him.
	At least he's a leader.
	Putin did call me a genius.
	He said very nice things about me.
	President Trump always seems to upend American foreign policy tradition in a way that benefits Vladimir Putin.
	The prime objective of the foreign policy of Putin has been to destroy NATO.
	NATO is obsolete and it's extremely expensive to the United States.
	Manafort has represented the pro-Vladimir Putin prime minister in Ukraine, Yanukovych.
	So you get the gist there, this kind of sinister music playing, every kind of scummy tactic of guilt by association that this person said nice things about this person.
	And the fact that Donald Trump was doing what should have been done a long time ago, but he was really the first politician to have the courage to do, which is to stand up and question the ongoing viability of NATO, a military alliance that was created to protect Western Europe from a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union.
	And it's something that we were pouring enormous amounts of money into, way beyond what the Europeans were bearing.
	And even though they have, in many ways, their citizens a better quality of life than huge numbers of Americans, questioning the viability of NATO, asking why the United States should be willing to risk a war with the world's largest nuclear-armed power over Ukraine, a country that Barack Obama repeatedly said had no vital interest for the United States, just the attempt, essentially, to equate
	Questioning of American foreign policy with disloyalty and allegiance to Moscow, the ugliest tactics that have been used.
	These were the ones being launched by the Clinton campaign.
	And then very quickly, it was weaponized.
	The FBI's powers of investigation were weaponized in order to give credence to it.
	Now, let's look at a couple more Passages from the Durham Report because I think it's vital to understand what it is that he concluded.
	Quote, based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S.
	law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion In their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
	Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the investigation of the FBI into Trump-Moscow links.
	There was no evidence in their possession of collusion at the time they launched that investigation.
	Instead, he says, quote, Upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence from Australia, the FBI swiftly opened the crossfire hurricane investigation, in particular at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was later fired for lying to the FBI.
	Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok opened crossfire hurricane immediately.
	at a minimum had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump.
	The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.
	Further, the FBI did so without one, any significant review of its own intelligence databases, two, collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S.
	intelligence entities, and three, Three, interviews of witnesses essential to understanding the raw information it received, or four, using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.
	Had the FBI done any of that, again, as set out in sections 4A, 3B, and C, the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analyst had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials.
	Nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of State aware of such evidence concerning the subject.
	In addition, FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March of 2017 showed that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign, anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials.
	It was not until mid-September that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators received several of the Steele reports.
	Within days of their receipt, the unvetted and verified Steele reports were used to support probable cause in the FBI's FISA applications, targeting Page, a U.S.
	citizen, Carter Page, who for a period of time had been an advisor to Donald Trump.
	As discussed later in their report, this was done at a time when the FBI knew that the same information Steele had provided to the FBI Had also been fed to the media and others in Washington.
	Now, again, there are a huge number of highly incriminating components of this report, which we will cover in a later show, including the fact that, unlike the investigation into Trump's ties with Russia, for which there was no evidence in the FBI's possession to justify an investigation, there was abundant evidence in the FBI's possession to justify investigating whether or not Hillary Clinton And the Clinton Foundation had received illegal foreign donations.
	That was where the foreign influence was coming from.
	And yet Comey and McCabe, according to this report, squashed every attempt to investigate that.
	There are other incredibly incriminating parts of this report.
	And we know, for example, that a senior FBI lawyer ultimately pled guilty To submitting false information to the FISA court to justify spying on Carter Page.
	Remember the Trump accusation that Obama spied on his campaign?
	It was not only absolutely true, but it was done by lying to the FISA court to the point where an FBI senior lawyer was forced to plead guilty to having done that.
	Now, what I find really interesting and amazing is that The investigator here, the prosecutor here, John Durham, is somebody who had long been talked about as being a highly respected and apolitical actor.
	This is not someone they can dismiss as being Clarence Thomas or some right-wing Trump appointee.
	John Durham has been around forever.
	And he's always been talked about in the most respected terms.
	Here, for example, is the New York Times in 2008 in an article entitled, Prosecutor Who Unraveled Corruption in Boston Turns to CIA Tapes.
	And this is what they said about him at the time.
	Michael Clark, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who worked with him for years in Connecticut, said that Mr. Durham's experience in unraveling the corrupt relationship in Massachusetts, as well as in convicting public officials in Connecticut, including former Governor John Rowland, demonstrate why his methods may be well-suited to his new task. demonstrate why his methods may be well-suited to his new Mr. Clark, now first selectman in Farmington, Connecticut, said the investigation of Mr. Rowland was fraught with political pitfalls and detours.
	But, quote, John's style is dogged and focused, Mr. Clark said.
	Because he is so intent on following the facts, he refused to become involved in any political dimension or detour.
	He said Mr. Durham was undeterred by, quote, certain roadblocks people wanted to put in the way.
	He has been and remains, by all accounts, a man of moderation and some modesty.
	Jeffrey Meyer, a law professor at Quinnipiac University who worked as a junior prosecutor under Mr. Durham, described him as both stringent and fair in his approach to cases.
	Professor Meyer recalled that when he went to work in the office, he excitedly told Mr. Durham of what he thought was a strong criminal case.
	Mr. Durham, he said, gently disagreed and proceeded in the kindest terms to remind him of the obligation of prosecutors to consider mitigating circumstances and to use their authority carefully.
	So here you have and this is amazing that this is not the top dominant story in the United States and it isn't because our media institutions are irrevocably and fundamentally corrupted to the extent they weren't When Trump emerged, they most certainly are now.
	So here you have one of the most respected federal prosecutors in the country, who has long been given politically fraught cases to investigate because of his reputation for being apolitical, for following the facts wherever they take him.
	And he just issued a 306-page report that concludes with ample evidence that the powers of the FBI were radically and consistently and repeatedly abused for overtly political ends.
	Not just for any overtly political ends, but with the specific intention of coercing an outcome in the 2016 election that the ideologically and politically motivated agents of senior leadership of the FBI wanted.
	We've read Peter Strzok's emails to Lisa Page, talking about how everything must be done to ensure Donald Trump never becomes President of the United States.
	These were the people, Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, Who were in charge of the FBI, who steered the FBI to abuse its powers in the most extreme way, in the most corrupt way, in the most illegal way, to interfere in our domestic politics.
	Exactly what the U.S.
	security state was never supposed to do.
	The worst sin of the U.S.
	security state.
	That is what this report by a highly respected prosecutor documents in great detail.
	How is this not the biggest story in the United States?
	It is because they have purposely encouraged people to forget how dominant this scam was for years, how affirmed it was by every institution that insists to you that they are the guardians against disinformation, that you have to empower them to protect you from lies because they are the owners of truth.
	It destroys the credibility Of every leading media outlet, with a few exceptions in the United States, and of the FBI, and of the Obama administration that permitted this and oversaw it, and overseen, saw it, knowing that this emanated from the Clinton campaign.
	So this has to be erased.
	It has to be dismissed as yet another nothing burger.
	It got some coverage for one day, and now it's gone.
	They're counting on you to just Embrace your own impotence to decide that it's just too much corruption, that there's nothing that can be done about it.
	That's the learned helplessness they try and foster in the population.
	And I think what is so worth realizing is that this is not an isolated case.
	We already knew that the 2020 election was exactly the byproduct of the same abuse of power from the same agencies, the U.S.
	security state, That reporting that the New York Post was able to do about Joe Biden and the pursuit of profit in Ukraine and China and elsewhere through his son and brother had the potential to sabotage Joe Biden's campaign.
	Joe Biden barely was declared the winner of the 2020 election.
	And they were desperate to discredit that reporting by concocting another lie.
	Not the one that they used for the 2016 election, that Trump was in bed with the Kremlin.
	Instead, the lie that the Hunter Biden reporting and the laptop was Russian disinformation, which was used not only to discredit the reporting, to not only stigmatize everyone who raised it, but to censor it from Facebook and Twitter.
	And the fact that this was done by 51 former intelligence operatives was always proof that this actually was done by the CIA.
	There's no such thing as former intelligence operatives.
	When you reach the highest level of the CIA, you can go work for NBC News or CNN.
	You are still an intelligence operative.
	Everyone knows that.
	But we recently discovered, in case anyone had doubts about that or that more proof was required, That in fact, the CIA itself was directly involved in the creation and dissemination of that lie.
	Here from the Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2023, you see the headline, Biden-CIA assist in the 2020 presidential election.
	So it's two elections in a row.
	security state is intervening on behalf of the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.
	Quote, well there you see the sub-headline, the agency, not only retirees, but the agency itself, the CIA, turns out to have worked on the Hunter excuse letter.
	Quote, it seems President Biden's, President elect, It seems President-elect Biden on November 4, 2020 owed thanks not only to a cobble of former intelligence officials, but to the CIA itself.
	That's the big takeaway of this week's interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Andrew Biden's laptop.
	An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden's campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S.
	spies that claimed the laptop had, quote, all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.
	That letter provided Democrats, journalists, and social media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter's influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father's path to victory.
	Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter.
	The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley.
	I don't think it's possible to overstate the danger that these events reveal that we face in the United States.
	The people who prattle on about the need to protect democracy from authoritarianism are authoritarians.
	The media outlets and the billionaire-funded organizations that claim that they need to protect you from disinformation are the most aggressive purveyors of disinformation, spreading it constantly and with no constraints of any kind.
	But the most dangerous development of all in the United States is that the intelligence agencies, the security state,
	is fully liberated, out in the open, not only to place their senior operatives at our major media outlets, as they have done, but to use their investigative powers and their intelligence and surveillance mechanisms to manipulate our politics, control the outcome of our elections, to destroy any political leader that gets in their way.
	The interview I've shown you many times of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being stupid for confronting and criticizing the intelligence community because, as he put it, everyone in Washington knows not to do that because they have six different ways to Sunday to get everyone in Washington knows not to do that because they have six different ways to Sunday to get back to you, is really a perfect reflection of the despotic
	If our intelligence agencies, vested with billions and billions of dollars of budget and the most invasive spying technologies and the most aggressive law enforcement authorities, are now in the business of controlling the flow of information in the United States, of are now in the business of controlling the flow of information in the United States, of censoring the information that flows on social media, which we know they did from the Twitter files, and of deciding which candidate they want to win and
	and of deciding which candidate they want to win and which candidate they want to lose, and then abusing those powers to ensure that that outcome is the one that happens, we really are a democracy in name only.
	That is the definition of a deep state.
	A permanent power faction that operates in the dark and with no constraints and that has no constraints of any kind on their power.
	That is absolutely the reality in the United States.
	Anybody who denies it is inherently a disinformation agent and I think there is no greater danger To all of our interests, to our core political values, then the abuse of the U.S.
	security state's powers as revealed by multiple investigations now culminating with this 306 page report.
	We will definitely devote a show in the future to the granular detail and evidence because seeing the whole story matters so much.
	But putting it in context reveals that it is far from an isolated event.
	It is now the way we do business in the United States, and nothing is more menacing and disturbing and anti-democratic than that.
	So let us now turn to the second story we want to do tonight, which is some recent events at Twitter.
	That I think are really worth looking into.
	Not so much because of what they say about Twitter because I think a lot of the questions about Twitter are unresolved and we won't really know the answers to where it's going and what it will do until we see how things unfold, especially with the hiring of this new CEO.
	But there are things that have happened relating to Twitter and at Twitter that I think tell us a great deal, not only because of these events, but the reaction to them.
	So I want to take a look at some of the recent events over the last couple of weeks and deconstruct what it means in ways that I think hasn't quite yet been done.
	So one of the precipitating events that caused a lot of controversy was the fact that, as you see in the Washington Post headline from May 13th, quote, Twitter says it will restrict access to some tweets before Turkey's election.
	The move comes as the country's right-wing leader, President Erdogan, faces a tight contest at the polls on Sunday.
	So essentially, the Turkish government submitted requests for censorship to Twitter.
	Threaten Twitter that if it doesn't comply they will be banned from the entire country and Twitter decided it was best to do the censorship than to be banned entirely from Turkey.
	The post article says, quote, Twitter is blocking some posts in Turkey ahead of the country's high-stakes election on Sunday.
	The American-based social media company announced Friday night.
	The company tweeted, in English and in Turkish, that it has, quote, taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey beginning Friday, but added the blocked content would remain available in the rest of the world.
	Twitter did not specify which tweets it would block and why it would block them.
	The decision once again puts Twitter CEO Elon Musk's controversial free speech policies into the spotlight.
	This time critics say he is ceding to demands from Turkey's right-wing leader.
	Much of Turkey's media is under government control and critics accuse Erdogan of cracking down on social media companies to stifle opposition voices as he tries to stay in power.
	Now, I am extremely suspicious, to put that mildly.
	Anytime institutions like the Washington Post or liberal commentators suddenly decide that they're disturbed by censorship online, Given that as recently as six years ago, there was no such thing as a censorship regime online with big tech.
	There was some censorship here and there, but there was no systemic regime that had been imposed.
	It was imposed Because liberals and media outlets and large media outlets and Democratic Party officials explicitly demanded it, they were threatening Big Tech, that if they don't begin to censor far more, the political opponents of establishment leaders and Democratic Party policies That they would start to punish Big Tech in retaliation.
	That's the reason we got this censorship regime.
	We got constant narratives in the media that Big Tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg would have blood on their hands or their legacy would be fascism if they defied censorship demands.
	So speaking of Liberal authoritarians.
	One of the people who first drew attention to the alleged hypocrisy of Elon Musk was the highly partisan Democratic Party operative, blogger, substack journalist, Matt Yglesias, who went to Twitter and wrote, quote, the Turkish government asked Twitter to censor its opponents right before an election and Elon Musk complied.
	Should generate some interesting Twitter files reporting.
	Which he's, of course, being Sarcastic there by suggesting that the Twitter files reporting was about how the US government was influencing Twitter to censor political content it disliked, which absolutely is what the Twitter files reported.
	And now he's asking, where's the Twitter files reporting about this?
	I personally think it's a lot more damaging to have our own government censoring political content.
	But you don't want foreign governments doing it either.
	I think that's a legitimate concern.
	And in response, Elon Musk replied.
	We have the tweet here.
	Did your brain fall out of your head, Iglesias?
	The choice is to have Twitter throttled in its entirety or to limit access to some tweets.
	Which do you want?
	In other words, he's saying, I was faced with a choice.
	I was told by the Turkish government You can either censor a few individual politicians before the election, or if you don't, we'll simply block you from anyone in Turkey having access to your To your platform.
	And Elon Musk's excuse for why he complied with the Turkish censorship demands was it's better to have a few people silenced than to have all of Turkey right before the election lose the ability to use Twitter for political debates.
	Now, it is a controversial decision because Elon Musk, since he's bought Twitter and before, was waving the banner of free speech absolutism.
	We've covered before ways in which he departed from that position.
	His view of free speech absolutism is that free speech means allowing anything to appear on Twitter that's not illegal.
	And yet, he did things like ban Kanye West for posting a swastika, even though that's clearly not illegal.
	He banned Nick Fuentes for anti-Semitic comments, even though that's not even conceivably illegal.
	I suppose some people might be willing to give Elon Musk a little bit of flexibility because he's trying to attract advertisers and it's not consistent with that goal to allow those kinds of inflammatory political statements.
	But once you start making those compromises, you lose the ability to proclaim that you are a free speech absolutist and that you're unwilling to censor for financial gain, given that's exactly what he did in those cases.
	And that's clearly what he did again here.
	One of the reasons I find the reaction to this decision, this kind of purported anger by liberal elites over the fact that Musk made this calculation, is that this is a calculation that big tech has been making for years.
	One of the things I've been trying to do over the past six months or a year is to get people to understand how extreme the censorship regime in Brazil has become.
	Not only because I care about Brazil, but because it is an incredibly influential country, one of the largest in the world, one of the largest online countries in the world, and is being used as a laboratory by the EU to see how far their censorship regime can go so that the EU can watch what Brazil can get away with and that they will then be able to copy it.
	And one of the things that Brazil has been doing is exactly what Turkey just did.
	Before the last presidential election in Brazil in 2022, officials in the Brazilian government, including a minister of the Supreme Court, has repeatedly ordered every major big tech platform, Facebook, Google through Instagram and YouTube and WhatsApp and Twitter and TikTok and Telegram, to ban conservative politicians.
	On a couple of occasions, some anti-establishment left-wing parties were also banned by this judge for the crime of objecting to censorship.
	We do actually in Brazil have a couple of left-wing parties, unlike in the US, that stand up for free speech.
	And they got banned as a result.
	But the orders that we've been trying to Bring people's attention to, were exactly this, saying, you will either censor these conservative politicians who support Bolsonaro, you will ban them from your platform, you will delete their tweets, or if you don't, you will be banned entirely from having access to the entire country of Brazil.
	And every big tech platform has obeyed those orders, from Twitter and Facebook, to Google and TikTok.
	Here, for example, is on January 13th, a program we did after we obtained a secret order from this judge, where with no due process and in total secrecy, he sent censorship orders to six different social media companies, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google, with a list of conservative politicians, including some of the most popular
	Brazilian politicians, ones that ended up getting the biggest vote totals in their election to Congress, banning them from every single platform upon threat of having Twitter completely banned entirely from the country, or having those platforms banned from Brazil.
	And they obeyed in every case.
	Here, for example, is one of the Journalist, one of the commentators, who this Brazilian judge ordered Twitter to ban, Monarch, who is kind of a free speech absolutist.
	I wouldn't really call him a right-wing activist.
	He was never really a supporter of Bolsonaro, though he's probably more to the right than the left.
	But if you try and go in Brazil to his Twitter account, you will find this.
	Account withheld.
	Monarch's account has been withheld in Brazil.
	In response to a legal demand.
	This is the calculation Big Tech has been making forever in multiple different countries.
	And not only that, but the United States government does the same thing with TikTok.
	Tells them you cannot allow this political material on your platform, or if you do, you will risk being banned entirely from the United States.
	And there is never any outcry.
	Why?
	Because the targets of these orders have usually been conservatives.
	And liberal elites and liberal journalists and liberal media outlets are thrilled when conservative voices are censored using this formula.
	Either censor these voices or risk getting banned from our country.
	Now, the reason they cared in this case Was in part because they want to undermine and discredit Elon Musk because of his banner of free speech that he waves, not one that he always fulfills, but one that he waves.
	But also because Erdogan is somebody that often disobeys the orders of the United States and the EU.
	And the US security state and NATO and the EU were eager for Erdogan to lose and so liberal elites in the United States who are huge fans of NATO and the EU and the US security state therefore also wanted Erdogan to lose and were therefore angry that in this case the censorship orders with which Twitter complied were aimed at people they wanted to empower rather than silence.
	That's the only reason they care.
	In all of these other instances, when all these other countries, including Brazil, most aggressively are giving the same choice to these big tech companies and they always comply, there's very little outcry.
	That shows you the grotesque lack of principle in the reaction to what Twitter did, which does not mean I support and approve of what Elon Musk did here in obeying the Turkish government.
	I do think he should have made the decision that if I can't be in Turkey with offering free speech, I won't be in Turkey at all.
	I think it's important that at some point these platforms unite and tell these governments, okay, If censoring upon your command is the only way that I can stay in your country, let's see what happens if YouTube and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook all disappear from Brazil.
	Let's see how Brazilians will like it.
	Try and explain to Brazilians why all of the key social media platforms that they use every day, on which they depend, that the entire rest of the world has access to, is suddenly no longer in Brazil.
	But so far, they haven't found that courage.
	I think they need to, to see how far these governments are willing to go.
	But there is an example, actually, when a social media company, a platform, did exactly that, stood up and had the courage to do it.
	In 2022, at the start of the war with Russia and Ukraine, The EU enacted a law, an incredibly tyrannical law, that made it illegal for any social media company in Europe To platform, to give air time to, to allow to be heard RT or Sputnik or any other outlet of Russian state media.
	In other words, they wanted to prevent Europeans from hearing the other side of the story.
	From hearing from the country that the Europeans want to go to war with, Russia.
	They only want their citizens to hear their version of events and not have access to RT, even if they want to.
	When RT was kicked off of YouTube, and Google obeyed that order, and every other major platform did, Rumble said, we're not going to remove RT from our platform.
	If people don't want to watch RT, that's their choice.
	But if they do want to watch RT, they should be able.
	They're adults, and they should be able to access whatever news or propaganda channels that they want.
	And as a result, France, in late 2022, sent correspondence to Rumble saying to Rumble, If you continue to platform RT, if you allow adult citizens to hear RT if they choose to, you will no longer be in France.
	We will block you at the IP level, which these governments absolutely have the power to do.
	So Rumble was presented with the same choice that Turkey presented Twitter with, and that Brazil has continuously presented Google and Facebook and Twitter and others with.
	Namely, either you take off the voices we want gone, or we will ban you from our country.
	And as a result, Rumble stood up and they said, we are not going to Comply with your unjust censorship orders as a condition to being in France.
	We would rather lose access to the French market than comply with your censorship orders.
	We will not be a company that submits to France and what the French government tells us we can and cannot allow to be heard.
	We're not even a French company.
	We're not even a European Union company.
	We're not subject to the laws, the censorship laws you passed.
	And here was Rumble in 2022.
	Explaining that the French government demanded they remove Russian news sources from Rumble and they refused and as a result, they decided they were going to be unavailable in France.
	If you're in France and you try and access Rumble without a VPN, you will be told the platform is not available in France.
	Rumble is contesting the legality of this order in the French courts, but until then, Rumble decided they would rather lose France, a pretty big and important country, to its economic self-interest rather than comply with the censorship order.
	Now, the CEO of Rumble, Chris Pawlowski, went on Tucker Carlson's show before Tucker Carlson was fired on his streaming show and he explained why Rumble decided to do what it did.
	It's the exact opposite of the decision Elon Musk made.
	Listen to what Chris Pawlowski, the CEO of Rumble, said in explaining why they would never censor upon the orders of a foreign government.
	Um, and, uh, the French government said, we're going to turn you off at the telco level.
	This means, uh, you know, imagine AT&T and Verizon turning off Rumble at the telco level if you don't remove RT, uh, because you're violating sanctions.
	First, Rumble has no operations in France.
	We're not a French company.
	We're an American company.
	To an extent, Canadian as well.
	But American.
	We're headquartered in the United States now.
	We have no employees in France, no operations, they have no jurisdictional reason to even come to us.
	But they said they're going to turn us off at the telco level.
	Obviously, you know, we're hosting True Social, we're hosting Tim Pool's website on our cloud.
	If they were to turn us off at the telco level, there'd be a lot of collateral damage by turning those guys off too.
	Yeah.
	So this is why when people say to me, shouldn't you be more skeptical of Rumble's commitment to free speech?
	At the end of the day, if they're faced with a choice, aren't they going to capitulate like everyone else has?
	This is why I'm confident that they will not.
	I believe that Rumble, in their DNA, ...sees this crusade for free speech on the internet as a cause.
	And a cause so important to them that they're not willing to sacrifice it, even if it means sustaining harm to their economic self-interest.
	Now, is there a guarantee that will always happen?
	I have no idea.
	But I know what they've done so far.
	It's easy to waive the banner of free speech.
	It's a lot harder to follow through on it.
	when you actually are faced with that choice.
	Now, as I mentioned, Tucker Carlson has decided that he's going to bring his show to Twitter.
	I don't think anyone really has an understanding fully of what that means.
	And one of the things that Tucker said when he decided to do that was that he thought it was so important because Rumble, or rather Twitter, is one of the few or the only important platform on the internet that still is devoted to free speech.
	And while I hope Twitter follows through on Elon Musk's pledge I know that so far, they've often not done so.
	They've failed to do so.
	I'm rooting for Elon Musk to succeed.
	But I know that Rumble has actually put its money where its mouth is.
	And Rumble is growing very aggressively.
	They just hired or signed two of, or the two biggest streamers, Gen Z streamers.
	They've recently hired hip hop commentators who have millions and millions of people.
	If you're over the age of 30, you probably have no idea who they are, even though they're extremely famous.
	They're bringing a huge audience to Rumble that makes me very excited for the future of this show and independent journalism.
	They just bought Collin, which is the podcast app that was founded by David Sachs, who was one of the original founders of PayPal and has had a lot of very successful ventures.
	And David Sachs is now on the board of Rumble.
	I think Rumble's future is extremely exciting.
	But more importantly is the fact that they have this extraordinary commitment to free speech.
	Now, the other thing that happened at Twitter that I think is worth commenting on is Elon Musk, several months ago, had said that if the public wants him to resign as CEO of Twitter, he will do so.
	There's a lot of pressure on him from his other companies, including SpaceX and Tesla, to do so because they're concerned, the stockholders are, that his attention is being consumed by Twitter.
	They want him to hire a CEO to run Twitter.
	And he announced recently that he has found his CEO, a person who seems, at first glance, and at second glance, and at third glance, to be a not very encouraging and quite unlikely choice to run Twitter, in part because she is currently employed by NBCUniversal as an advertising executive, so she's the one who sells
	Advertising for Rachel Maddow Show and Morning Joe and for other NBC properties.
	But I think the way this happened was that she sat down, her name is Lisa Iaccarino, Linda Iaccarino rather, and interviewed Elon Musk just a couple weeks ago.
	And she was interviewing him in front of corporate advertisers, many of whom have abandoned Twitter since Elon Musk took over.
	And obviously, regaining these advertisers back is something he really wants to do.
	I presume that was the primary motive for him hiring her away.
	is that she has a very good relationship with corporate advertisers.
	But listen to what she said to him in front of all these corporate advertisers as what she believes Twitter and he need to do to win back these advertisers.
	Now, he pushed back a lot on this, but this is clearly her view of what Twitter ought to do and what they need to do.
	There is an opportunity for them to influence what you're building, that vision.
	What we're doing here, whether it's me trying to push and prod you on your tweets, For example, you've said you probably shouldn't tweet after 3am.
	Well, I've got myself into trouble a few times.
	I'm very aware of those.
	So after 3 a.m., you travel all over the world.
	Lord knows how you handle time zones in space.
	Will you commit to be a little more specific and not tweet after 3 a.m.?
	People in this room would like to see that.
	It will make them feel more confident.
	I will aspire to tweet less after 3 a.m.
	But, I mean, it is important that, you know, if I were to say, yes, you can influence me, That would be wrong.
	That would be very wrong.
	Because that would be a diminishment of freedom of speech.
	But I want to be specific about influencing.
	It's more of an open feedback loop for the advertising experts in this room to help develop Twitter into a place where they will be excited about investing more money.
	Product development, ad safety, content moderation.
	So there you see her list of things she wants Twitter to do in order to win back these advertisers.
	Content moderation, which is, as we know, the euphemism for political censorship, is one of the things on her list.
	Let's hear the rest.
	That's what the influence is.
	Yeah, I think.
	It's totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places.
	But it is not cool to try to say what Twitter will do.
	And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it.
	But freedom of speech is paramount.
	So, Twitter 1.0 had a very well-populated, much-loved influence council.
	A much-loved influence council Twitter 1.0 had.
	By whom were they much-loved?
	By corporations that want an extremely safe and Controversy free environment in which to sell their products and promote their brand.
	But this influence council was one of the first developments that turned Twitter into a site with heavy political censorship.
	And this is something she regards as some innovation that was much beloved.
	And we all lament its loss.
	I think we need to change the name.
	Elon does not want to be influenced.
	But it was really a recurring feedback loop from your key stakeholders, your advertisers, where they had recurring access or would have recurring access to you.
	Would you commit from this stage today to reinstate that council to be named later?
	Well, I don't think it should be Influence Council.
	I would be wary of that creating a backlash among the public, because if the public thinks that their views are being determined by a small number of CMOs in America, they will be, I think, upset about that.
	But feedback, I think, is appropriate.
	At the end of the day, if somebody's spending money for their ad campaign, it needs to yield results for their organization, or it doesn't make sense.
	So in fairness to Elon Musk, he definitely pushed back on some of her more explicit proposals for censorship for content moderation.
	But at the same time, he sat with her as she said all these things and decided she was the choice to lead Twitter, to be the CEO of Twitter.
	How much leeway he's going to give her, how much willing, how willing he will be to actually push back when it means the difference between having corporate advertisers or not, is something that's very much in doubt, I think.
	Because I would not have sat next to this person and heard what she had to say there and decided she should be the CEO of Twitter.
	I would have put her as far down on the list as the list goes.
	It's kind of ironic that Tucker, after announcing his show would be moved to Twitter, under what by all accounts is subject to a non-existent agreement, they don't even have a deal, now finds himself essentially under the supervision of a NBC News executive.
	Now I presume Tucker's mentality, I have no doubt about it, knowing his integrity is, well look, the minute someone tries to limit what I'm going to say is the day that I leave Twitter.
	I'm sure that's his mindset.
	But I find the choice of going to Twitter something that seems unclear in terms of its rationale, especially given these most recent developments.
	Especially when you have this very growing site, Rumble, that has demonstrated its commitment to free speech in a genuine way.
	Now, as I said, I think it's very important Twitter become a free speech platform.
	Even though I am the biggest believer in Rumble's future, Twitter is still at a scale and a size that Rumble has yet to arrive at.
	And I think they will, and I hope they do quickly, but they're not yet there.
	And so having Twitter be a free speech beacon is something I've always regarded as important.
	It's been why I was positive about the news that Elon Musk was buying Twitter and some of the changes he made early on.
	But if this doesn't give you doubts, at least about where Twitter is headed, I think it's very difficult to say that with any amount of honesty.
	And so my hope is that more and more people come to Rumble.
	My hope is that other platforms see the business benefits of free speech, but also adopt it as a cause so that we can regain what was the original promise of the internet, which was that it would empower individuals to speak and disseminate information free of centralized state and corporate control.
	The degradation of the internet into the greatest tool of surveillance and coercion and censorship, surveillance and coercion, and increasingly the greatest tool for censorship, barring any dissent on any major debates from COVID in Ukraine to any kind of speech about culture war issues or foreign policy is very frightening and very alarming.
	And I have no doubt about where Rumble is headed.
	when it comes to those questions.
	But given these recent events, I do have a lot of doubts, I'm sorry to say, about where Twitter's headed.
	So as I said at the beginning of the show, I want to spend a little bit of time sharing some thoughts I have about my husband, David Miranda, who passed I want to spend a little bit of time sharing some thoughts I have about my husband, David Miranda, And this is not an easy thing for me to do, but it's almost impossible for me not to do it.
	Um, in part because it's the thing that's central to my mind but also because David's Life and David's influence on me and David's work as an activist and a journalist and then as a politician is probably, I wouldn't even say probably, I would say without question the single greatest influence on my worldview, on the ethos with which I try and do everything, especially my work,
	And I think there are parts of David's public life that are truly extraordinary and that contain within it a lot of important lessons that I think are very appreciated in a lot of different ways, but I want to kind of put it together in a way that I think does justice to David and to his legacy.
	And I think contained within a lot of these events are some really important lessons.
	Now, obviously, personally, David has been the single most important event in my life.
	When I met David in 2005, I had nothing in my life that I value back then.
	I was working as a lawyer in Manhattan.
	I had never written a single word about politics or journalism.
	I hadn't written any books.
	I had no public platform.
	I had no public voice, something I'd always wanted but couldn't figure out how to get.
	I was unsatisfied with my life.
	I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer any longer.
	It wasn't giving me the opportunity I thought it would when I went to law school.
	To be able to empower the people I wanted to empower, the causes for which I wanted to fight, in large part because our judiciary is so corrupted in so many different ways, in so many different aspects.
	I came to Brazil in 2005 in large part because I knew I was on the wrong path, not the path I wanted to be on, but I had no idea how to get on the path I wanted to be on.
	And I decided I would rent an apartment for seven weeks in In Rio de Janeiro, a city I had visited many times and was in love with from the first time I visited there, basically to just clear my head, spend my days walking on the beach and figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
	And I came to Brazil, I took my dog, we got into Rio de Janeiro late at night.
	I woke up the next morning, the first thing I did was go to the beach.
	On the very first day I was in Brazil, within I would say two hours after waking up and getting to the beach, I was sitting there reading the paper, having a drink, a volleyball came and knocked over my drink and then a Brazilian man came over to me and apologized for having knocked over my drink and we looked at each other and we began talking and I didn't think it was possible but we actually fell in love on first sight and from that moment we were completely inseparable and we ended up
	Marrying and being married for 18 years.
	I, six months after I met David, started a blog, began my journalism career.
	At the time it was impossible for us to live in the United States because the U.S.
	a law in place called the Defense of Marriage Act signed by Bill Clinton with overwhelming bipartisan support that banned the granting of any legal rights by the U.S. government to any same-sex couple, including immigration rights.
	So if David had been a Brazilian woman, I would have been able immediately to get a green card for him and live in the U.S. because he was male.
	That was impossible.
	So our only way to be together was to stay in Brazil.
	Ironically, Brazil, despite being a very socially conservative country, despite its reputation, the largest Catholic country in the world had created the right for its citizens to get immigration rights for their same-sex partners because the alternative,
	having to separate from the person you most want to share your having to separate from the person you most want to share your life with, was viewed by the courts as so inhumane that they created a right, even though same-sex marriage was not legal in Brazil, for Brazilian nationals to obtain permanent immigration rights for their So I was able to obtain a permanent visa to be in Brazil, to work in Brazil.
	But that meant I couldn't work any longer as a lawyer, and that kind of forced me to abandon the work I was eager to leave behind anyway.
	And within six months, I had created a blog.
	Within less than a year, I had a contract to write a book about the war on terror and the civil liberties assaults it was fostering.
	And essentially, David was my biggest fan from the very beginning, always pushing me to do more.
	He designed my journalism career.
	Whenever I got content, he would say, this isn't enough.
	You need to do more.
	He just somebody who was constantly affirming and believing in my full potential and not ever letting me stagnate.
	There would be no show of this kind.
	You would not know my name.
	There'd be none of the work that I did without David.
	He was completely integral and fundamental to everything that I did.
	We ended up adopting children in large part because he was his dream and not mine and it was the greatest choice I ever ended up making.
	The thing I value most in life is our children that I also would not have if not for David.
	But He too transformed as a result of our marriage and he was somebody who hated politics at the start of our relationship when journalists would come to Brazil or we had to travel to the US.
	And we'd have to go out to dinner with people in media or politics.
	He would always say, I'm not going.
	You're just going to talk about politics the whole time.
	I'm completely uninterested.
	That's the most boring world possible.
	He wanted to go to school for marketing.
	He loved video games.
	He wanted to do marketing for Sony or for new technology companies.
	That was really his passion.
	And he did go back to school and get a degree in that.
	And the origins of David's life are just by themselves truly amazing.
	David was born to a single mother and he's talked about this before.
	They were born, he was born to her while she was living in one of the most deprived communities in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, a favela where there was no drinking water, no sewage, no access to any minimum basic service.
	They were beyond poor and his mother worked as a prostitute to Sustained him.
	She had three other children before David.
	He was her fourth.
	And that was his start in life.
	And when he was five years old, his mother died, leaving him an orphan.
	He never met his father.
	And an aunt of his, even though she had five children of her own, was working as a domestic worker, facing extreme poverty of her own, all kinds of difficulties.
	Took him in and saved his life and gave him a chance for life, which he would not have had.
	He would have ended up on the street or in a shelter.
	Completely consumed by a society that has incredible amounts of income inequality.
	Brazil is not a poor country.
	Brazil is a rich country.
	It has immense resources, commodities, oil.
	It's, Sao Paulo is the center of hedge fund capitalism and banking in Latin America.
	It's just the distribution of resources is so unequal that there's no class mobility.
	If you're born poor in Brazil, with very few exceptions, you stay poor.
	And yet David, despite having a relatively short life, he died one day before his 38th birthday, was able to achieve so much in such a short time despite that beginning.
	In fact, I would say because of that beginning, he was able to achieve so much.
	He had to stop working at the age of 13 because he needed to work to support himself and his family.
	So he stopped his formal education at 13.
	And yeah, when I met David, I would say he was probably the single smartest person I've ever met.
	I don't just mean street smarts or intuitive smarts.
	So we add those in abundance.
	I mean, intellectually, he just had read so many books.
	He had mastered a large amount of English by the time we met through films and video games and David was a pioneer in so many ways so I just want to talk a little bit about what that public part of his life entailed because it's just extraordinary and I think it should be told but also there are some Uh, like I said, some really valuable insights that we can take from that.
	So the first time that David ever really emerged in the public spotlight was as a result of his truly crucial role in the Snowden story.
	As some of you might recall, and here's the New York Times article on it.
	The headline there says Brazil detains the partner of a reporter tied to leaks.
	And the article says the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist for The Guardian, who has been publishing information leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, was detained for nine hours by the British authorities under a counterterrorism law.
	A counterterrorism law.
	While on a stop in London's Heathrow Airport during a trip from Germany to Brazil, Mr. Greenwald said Sunday, Mr. Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, 28, is a citizen of Brazil.
	He had spent the previous week in Berlin visiting Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has also been helping to disseminate Mr. Snowden's leaks to assist Mr. Greenwald.
	The Guardian had paid for the trip, Mr. Greenwald said, and Mr. Miranda was on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.
	Now, what actually happened there, the New York Times being the New York Times, minimized everybody's role and everybody's work.
	Is that Laura Poitras and I weren't helping to disseminate Snowden's leaks.
	We were the journalists who were reporting on this archive that he had given us.
	He had chosen us.
	We flew to Hong Kong.
	There was a Washington Post reporter involved and the Washington Post refused to let him fly to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden because of how dangerous and risky that was.
	Laura and I went and met with Snowden.
	That's where we got the full archive that he had given us.
	And when I got back from Hong Kong and began doing the reporting, that was...
	Incredibly destabilizing to the U.S.
	security state.
	It revealed that they had been spying on the U.S.
	population indiscriminately by the billions, even though three months earlier, before we began the reporting, James Clapper, Obama's senior national security official, had gone to the Congress and when asked by Senator Wyden whether the NSA was spying en masse on American citizens, explicitly lied and said they were not.
	And among the documents Snowden gave me was the proof In the form of a secret FISA court warrant that was ordering phone companies to hand over to the NSA everybody's record of phone calls, with whom we were speaking, for how long, where we were when we were speaking, incredibly invasive information, none with search warrants about people based on suspicionless searches.
	And there were diplomatic ruptures as a result of the reporting we were doing, and the US government got very threatening.
	James Clapper and other senior Obama administration officials had explicitly threatened that either Laura Poitras, who was in Berlin at the time doing the reporting, when she got back from Hong Kong she went to Germany, or myself, who was doing the reporting in Brazil, could be arrested if we left Brazil or if she left Germany.
	And there was recent reporting over the last couple of years by Mike Isikoff in the Yahoo News that reported that there was an assassination plot developed by the U.S.
	government against Julian Assange.
	And part of that reporting was they were also attempting to develop theories to prosecute both myself and Laura Poitras for doing the reporting.
	So it was a very dangerous time.
	We had access to the most secretive documents by the most secretive agency in the world's most powerful government.
	And I didn't leave Brazil for 11 months.
	Laura didn't leave Germany for 11 months.
	We stayed there and did the reporting.
	And Laura began working on the film that she had taped while we were in Hong Kong.
	With Snowden's permission, she recorded every single moment that we were with Snowden in Hong Kong.
	What happened was when I got back to Brazil, there were five or six different segments of the archive.
	Each had its own encryption key, each had its own password.
	Snowden was obsessed with protecting this archive with the most sophisticated encryption methods that he had learned at the CIA and the NSA.
	And when I got back to Brazil, I learned, I saw that one of the segments of the archive that I knew contained some of the most important documents had become inaccessible because somehow in the course of these very tense moments in Hong Kong, The password that Snowden, that I ended up having for this part of the archive and that Laura also had for this part of the archive was incorrect.
	It just would not give access to this part of the archive and I was desperate to get into this part of the archive because I knew it had some of the most important stories and it did.
	And so through an amazing stroke of, oh, really a miracle, Laura was able to decipher what that password was after weeks, even months of trying.
	Because she was filming Snowden so continuously when we were in Hong Kong that she discovered and she began editing what became the documentary Citizen Thor.
	About our work with Snowden in Hong Kong that won the Academy Award in 2015 for Best Documentary, she discovered she had the raw footage of Snowden entering the password to that part of the archive before he gave it to us.
	And even though it was from an angle that wasn't directly on the keyboard, she was able through guesswork It took her weeks to figure out what the password was based on how he was typing.
	And so she told me she finally got access to this part of the archive.
	And so the question became, how was I going to get this archive in Rio de Janeiro?
	She obviously couldn't mail it to me.
	We were among the most surveilled people in the world at that point.
	The proof emerged that that was the case.
	That was obviously not paranoia.
	We were being spied on by the US, the UK, and probably every other major government in the world because of the work we were doing.
	And by that point, Laura had decided she no longer trusted the Guardian.
	And so the Guardian offered to send somebody to pick up the archive and take it from Laura and bring it to me.
	But by that point, Laura no longer trusted the Guardian.
	In fact, she was unwilling to give it to anybody.
	And David stepped up and he said let me go to Germany and get this part of the archive from Laura and I'll bring it back here and that way you can work on it.
	Most likely they won't know what I'm doing.
	We knew there was a great risk though because We knew they were watching everything we were doing and spying on our communications.
	We used encryption.
	We tried to be as careful as we could, but David knew it was very dangerous, and he was adamant that he do it, and he was the only person Laura trusted.
	She had visited Rio de Janeiro several times, and she told me, David's the only person besides you to whom I will give this archive.
	I couldn't travel.
	David was the only choice, and David, knowing the risk, decided to go to Germany to get this archive because he was so determined to make sure we could report the entire archive.
	He went to Berlin to meet Laura.
	He got the thumbnails, the thumb drives with those articles, with that part of the archive.
	And as he was coming back through London on his way home to Rio, he was detained by British authorities at the airport.
	He was held under a terrorism law.
	I will never forget the day that the British authorities called me to inform me that they had arrested him and detained him under this terrorism act.
	And one of the things David ended up saying that I didn't realize at first was when you're not American or not British, and it was clearly in part because David was Brazilian that they detained him, there were all kinds of journalists with far more closer proximity to Snowden than David, but they were British and American.
	They had gone in and out of Heathrow many times without getting stopped.
	They stopped David because they knew they could.
	And if you're not an American citizen at this time, 2013, and you get accused of terrorism, crimes involving terrorism, you know the U.S.
	and U.K.
	governments are unlimited in what they do to people, sending you to Guantanamo, torturing you, putting you in prison with barely any due process, and they threaten David all day with Doing exactly that, with prosecuting him, with putting him into prison, and it was only because the Brazilian government so vocally
	Objected and essentially insisted to the UK that they release David, that he was finally released after 12 hours.
	And he came back and he got radicalized.
	That's what politicized David.
	That's what led David to conclude, as he told me, that maybe you want to avoid politics in life, but politics will not avoid you.
	And he was so enraged by what had been done to him that he sued the British government and he won.
	The highest court in the UK, as you can see from this January 2016 article, ruled that, as the headline says, the UK court in David Miranda's case rules that the Terrorism Act, the act that they used to detain him, violates fundamental rights of a free press, quote, in a case involving the seizure of Secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
	A sweeping British counterterrorism law has been ruled incompatible with journalists' rights in a landmark decision.
	Quote, a British appeals court has ruled that the United Kingdom's broad counterterrorism laws breached fundamental rights in a case involving the seizure of encrypted documents from David Miranda, the partner of Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, at a London airport in 2013.
	So he was really able to Change the law to prevent the UK government from ever again using this act against journalists.
	Here you see from The Guardian, a similar article reporting on that case that David brought, quote, terrorism act incompatible with human rights.
	Court rules in David Miranda's case.
	Appeals Court says detention of Miranda was lawful, but the cause under which he was held is incompatible with European Rights Convention.
	And then it goes on to summarize what the court ruled.
	Now, That was an incredible thing David was able to do.
	And he did it knowing that he could provoke the British government further.
	They were threatening criminal prosecution against him.
	He didn't know if he'd be able to ever travel again outside Brazil.
	And yet, he didn't care.
	He was so infuriated by the threat to journalism that his detention posed that he fought the British government all the way to the High Court.
	This is somebody who never wanted to be involved in politics, who told me that he wanted to stay as far away from politics and journalism as he could.
	But realized at that point that that wasn't necessarily a choice that he had.
	Now, when David died last week, it was really extraordinary to watch the reaction.
	The president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, Lamented David's death.
	He said, my condolences to Glenn Greenwald and his family for the loss of David Miranda, a young man with an extraordinary trajectory who left too soon.
	Now, the amazing thing about this tweet from Lula is that David, before the 2022 election that Lula won, was in a left-wing party in Congress.
	He was representing Rio de Janeiro in Congress.
	And this party had always been known as a party that was built to oppose Lula's party.
	From the left.
	It was a party that in 2004 was formed by dissident members of Lula's party who left in objection to what they perceived as the corruption in the Workers' Party under Lula, but also because of neoliberal policies.
	Lula was doing business with large corporations, with the media corporations, with all sorts of corporate power centers that
	Members of Lula's party thought they were there to oppose, and so they created this dissident party, this anti-PT party, and David joined that when he ran for, he became in 2016, he ran for city council, he became the first ever gay man in the history of Rio de Janeiro to be elected to the Rio de Janeiro City Council, an extraordinary thing given David's origins, and then in 2018 became a member of the Federal Congress, and in 2022,
	His party decided for the first time ever that they were going to support Lula in the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election.
	And so desperate was the entire Brazilian establishment to defeat Bolsonaro that even longtime enemies of Lula all united behind him.
	The entire Brazilian left united behind Lula.
	Almost every major institution united behind Lula.
	And David decided that he didn't go to that party to march behind Lula and his party.
	And so David became the first Nationally known left-wing politician to stand up and say, I refuse to support Lula's candidacy.
	He left his party to join a different party to support a different presidential candidate, Ciro Gomez, who was more of a center-left candidate, I suppose you could say.
	And David knew that by doing that, he was risking his political career.
	There was a war waged on him by the left when he decided to do that, because it was important to punish anybody who stepped out of line and refused to support Lula.
	And David He knew that his political career would be much easier if he got in line behind Lula, and yet he didn't, and yet Lula still felt compelled, in what I think is a very heartfelt way, to lament David's loss because of how important he was to the country, what a powerful symbol he is to Brazil.
	Lula's successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, his government was the one that got David out of British custody by so vocally objecting Said similarly, encouraging things about David, quote, David Miranda left too soon.
	I had a lot to live.
	He had a lot to live and build.
	He was a dedicated and respective parliamentarian, respected by all.
	My condolences to your family, Glenn Greenwald, and to your children.
	Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, who was the one who gave asylum to Julian Assange, infuriating the West by doing so, also tweeted about David and lamented his loss.
	The New York Times, the Washington Post, felt compelled to run obituaries about him.
	It is really amazing for somebody to be born as an orphan in one of Rio de Janeiro's most deprived cities and in just 37 years have an impact of this kind on the world.
	But I want to show you a couple videos about David, because though he did become a left-wing politician, he was really very heterodox in a lot of ways, especially as he evolved over the last several years, where he hated above all else.
	Polarization and ideological dogma and the prohibition, especially that comes from the left, on having relationships with or communicating with people who are not on the left.
	He was a very firm advocate in the need to have dialogue with everybody.
	He went on the show that at the time was probably the biggest podcast in Brazil.
	It was kind of the program of Brazil's Joe Rogan, whose name is Monarch.
	I talked earlier that he ended up being cancelled and censored by YouTube and his show was cancelled.
	But this was before that one.
	Everybody was dying to go on that show.
	It was watched by millions of people.
	And David went on before the campaign and he said a lot of things that really angered the left, including the fact that he believed that Uh, whether to get the COVID vaccine should be optional, that it's outrageous to punish people for not getting the COVID vaccine, that it should be done through persuasion and not coercion, which was a heretical view on the left.
	But I just want to show you a couple of clips.
	We put the English subtitles on that really gives you a sense for the kind of spirit in politics that David tried to spread, oftentimes at real risk to his political career.
	Sometimes you want to question something that's happening in society, and you're cancelled because there are certain words that you can't use.
	And if you want to question that, there's a bunch of people who are cancelling you.
	And that's fucked up, because you can't have a dialogue.
	For example, we came here today, on my Twitter, and I've seen a lot of people criticizing me.
	Because I'm coming here on the show to talk to you and with thousands of people who are here, who have an idea of the left and the policies that are made, which is completely different.
	How are we going to have dialogue in a country that is cracked, that has an economy...
	The date is completely over for us to be able to dialogue because these people have a conscious vote next year and that it is a project of reconstruction of our country.
	How are we going to dialogue if we're going to stay in our bubbles?
	So, I think there has to be dialogue, as I do in Parliament.
	I have a lot of dialogue with all the sectors in there, you know?
	Even in Rio de Janeiro, I had to dialogue with Carlos Bolsonaro That was really true.
	the name of transgêneos and travestis, the name of the social name, in Rio de Janeiro, with Crivella as a president, with Carlos Bolsonaro, and with a ultra-conservative bank.
	Why?
	Because I had a conversation with everyone there explaining what the name of the social name meant for those people.
	So I managed to pass it there.
	That was really true.
	David was able to get laws passed because he formed friendships with even the pro-Bolsonaro camp.
	And they would have fights in public all the time, but David was just a person who was impossible to dislike.
	Everybody really liked and respected him, and he was able to use that to get support from conservatives, from the Bolsonaro-each to camp, for laws that he was able to get passed that he believed would benefit the people who had sent him there.
	This is another clip.
	Where he talks about vaccine mandates and the, what was becoming the increasingly repressive, not just the policies around COVID, but the attempt to ban any debate over what our COVID policy should be and the role that Big Pharma was playing in it.
	And this too was absolutely heretical on the left.
	But he never thought that way.
	He never cared.
	He said what he really believed and it came from the spirit of We don't talk about how much the pharmacies are making with this.
	So, we put the vaccination very quickly.
	We have to take it.
	The vaccine works.
	We can see that the number of cases has dropped.
	This is something that we have to put.
	We have to take a vaccine.
	We have to take a vaccine.
	We are seeing the number of cases have fallen.
	This is something we have to put.
	It really works.
	Now comes a third dose, maybe a fourth dose, and so on.
	And how much will these pharmas be earning on top of a speech that, ah, you need to take it because it only works for six months.
	If you have COVID, you don't have enough antibodies.
	When we're going to be a fan of that?
	And then if you talk about that in a debate, philosophically, just to be able to talk about economy, about everything, then you're anti-vaccine, you're already canceled.
	You can't have this debate in society, because you don't have space.
	And this is the point.
	And this is the point, end the debate.
	Because if you end the debate, what do you have to do?
	And who will end the debate?
	Those who are winning, those who are in the structure of the system.
	So, like I said, I mean, you see there, David, believe in the vaccine at the beginning.
	But I think that's what I'm saying.
	But he also knew that there was a lot of profiteering going on with it and a lot of attempt to basically hold us captive to vaccines and to medications by Big Pharma that we were really not even allowed to question.
	And the fact that there was debate closed around all these issues is the thing that offended him most, because the idea that any of us are the owners of truth Is this something that David instinctively rejected?
	I wrote a story after David was hospitalized that I think really, to this very day, has such an impact on me and I think really captures the best of David and what made him so unique.
	There was this figure in Brazil, his name is Cabo da Siola, and he first came to prominence in around 2010 because he was a firefighter, and he was one of the leaders of his union, and the firefighter union decided to go on strike because they had incredibly low wages.
	I mean, barely poverty-sustaining wages.
	It was barely the level of subsistence.
	These people running into fires, rescuing people in dangerous situations, and they barely could even afford a house or food or anything.
	And so he led this strike.
	Unions aren't always very popular in Brazil, but Cabo was so charismatic and so he spoke about We need to treat people like firefighters in a humanistic way from a religious perspective.
	He's a fanatical evangelical.
	He's an evangelical pastor.
	So he's used biblical verses to talk about the way we treat others.
	And he became this political star overnight.
	He's a very good looking guy.
	He's a very charismatic guy.
	And it was finally something that the left has always craved in Brazil and elsewhere, but is very difficult for the left these days to find, which is an actual working class person.
	Who speaks genuinely from religious values and working class values, but also uses it to support the idea of treating workers and people in poverty and people deprived in a better way.
	And Cabo became an overnight star.
	He went to the same party that David ultimately joined, ran for Congress, and after about two years in Congress, he began speaking too religiously.
	And he began advocating things like changing the Brazilian constitution to talk about how rights come from God.
	He was also opposed to same-sex marriage and got a perception that he was homophobic.
	And so this party, this left-wing party that has long been filled and dominated by intellectuals and professors, just like Western leftist parties so often are, finally had a working class person but he was too religious, too homophobic, For them to tolerate and so they expelled him from this party and Cabo got mauled by the Brazilian left as being someone who hates LGBTs and is bigoted and homophobic.
	He ended up going to a different party.
	He ran for president.
	He got way more votes than people expected in 2018.
	He really became a bulldog figure.
	And in 2022, he was planning on running for Senate and David and Cabo found themselves in the same political party.
	And they formed this extremely close friendship, obviously a very improbable friendship, one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, gay politicians in the country, the person who was first elected, the first ever gay man elected to the Rio de Janeiro City Council, someone who's in a same-sex marriage, who advocates same-sex marriage, and on the other hand a politician who is known for being an evangelical, for opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds, and who was perceived as an anti-gay bigot.
	And yet, They didn't care.
	They completely overcame these differences that they were told should divide them, and they just loved each other.
	They were constantly speaking and hanging out at these political events, and David would post photos of him with Cabo online and talk about how much respect he had for Cabo, and Cabo would do the same.
	And Cabo's followers were often angry, but David's supporters were infuriated that David would have this friendship with Cabo.
	And when David was hospitalized and in the first week we were told he probably would not survive that first week, that the chances were overwhelming that he would die, Cabo called me and Share with me biblical verses that came from the heart that I found incredibly comforting.
	He was insistent that he wanted to go visit David.
	He went and visited David multiple times and told me he didn't want any publicity, he didn't want any media there, he didn't want it even to be known that he was visiting David because he didn't want any hint that he was doing it exploitatively.
	He went and prayed with David, prayed over David, and While a lot of politicians did that the first week and then went away, Cabo never stopped.
	He continuously visited David in the hospital.
	He continuously called me.
	He went to David's funeral last week.
	And I find that so inspiring that, you know, if you go online and mention Cabo's name, all you'll hear is that this is a person who hates gay men and lesbians.
	And yet, for the last nine months, Cabo was one of the people who spread the most love and the most comfort when it came to David and me.
	And talked about our marriage and our children and how he wanted to bring his wife to meet our kids.
	It was such a lesson in how you judge another person.
	You know, tons of people online who put rainbow flags in their Twitter bios with the right hashtags attacked David using all kinds of homophobic themes when he left his party because he didn't want to support Lula, when he started engaging in these more heterodox views, and yet the person who Twitter will tell you or the political discourse will tell you hates gay men and lesbians
	Is somebody who through sheer affection and love for David and respect for us as a family and as a married couple lent so much support for no benefit, purely from the heart.
	Let me show you just a couple more things.
	In September of 2017, David and I went back to the UK for the first time since he was detained under that terrorism law.
	And we knew there was an open criminal case.
	And we tried to get our lawyers to get assurances from the British government that we could go back to the UK.
	And not have any problems with the law or with David getting detained again or arrested and they refused to give it to us.
	But David was insistent on going back and we did an event where we talked about this note and reporting in the threats of the Brazilian of the British government.
	You may remember the British government sent agents into the newsroom of the Guardian and demanded That the Guardian physically destroyed the laptops on which they were working with the Snowden files, and the Guardian journalist said, this achieves nothing.
	There's copies all over the world that Glenn Greenwald has, that Laura Poitras has, that you're not going to be able to destroy.
	And the British authorities were so tyrannical that they stood over the journalists at the Guardian, the editors, and forced them to physically destroy the laptops and the computers With tools upon threat of physical prosecution.
	So when we went back to the UK, we were very concerned about what might happen.
	And so we went back anyway, and we did this event, and here was David talking about why he decided to take that risk to go to Germany and pick up that part of the archive, knowing that the dangers were very high.
	I came from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, and I'm LGBT.
	And why did I did what I did to help Snowden, Glenn, and that time, and Laura, what we did?
	We learned very young that that is just a path that you have to take.
	When you are so young in that kind of environment, you have to be strong for the world.
	And that's what we did.
	When I got detained here, everything has, like, completely changed.
	Like, I will tell you, like, it was one of the hardest time, but it was one of the most bravest time because I look up, like, my husband, I look up what Edward Snowden was doing, Laura Poitras did, and that time, and many other journalists around the world, And I could not be just standing there and not fighting alongside of them.
	Four years later, I'm here in front of you.
	I choose to come because we battle.
	And we won.
	We won.
	We won.
	Journalists are not going to be more stopped in this country under that terrible law.
	We won.
	I came with fear that they're going to do something to me.
	But I'm back there.
	With fear, that's how you do it.
	So just one more thing.
	It's just good to be here.
	and say, "Fuck you, GHQ." - So I think you can see there, one of the reasons David touched people all the time is 'cause he was just such a man of passion and emotion and was not afraid to show it.
	You know, he was very imposing physically, very strong physically, but every time he spoke it was from the heart.
	He moved people so much.
	I mean, When he died, Snowden paid this tribute to David, saying that of all the people involved in the Snowden story, I think David was the purest, the one who did it with the purest motives.
	No thought of material gain, no thought of fame, no thought of anything other than this incredibly genuine commitment to this cause and this belief that he learned from when he was young that if you believe in something, you fight for it.
	That's the only way you get things.
	It's the only way you get anywhere.
	The mayor of Rio de Janeiro came to David's funeral and didn't ask to speak but spoke afterwards to reporters and talked about how David was so important to the city because he's an example to so many people in Rio and Brazil generally who are poor and are taught that that's their place and that
	He was an example showing people you don't have to accept that, that with courage and devotion and determination it is possible to break out of that.
	It's not easy and sometimes it takes a lot, but he was an example that inspired people to have belief and faith in their future if they're willing to do the things necessary.
	I think we have one more before I just share a couple thoughts.
	Okay, so yeah, there was one more video, but we don't have that.
	I think it's fine.
	It really shows the way that David entered politics was just so organic.
	It was never something he wanted.
	He never wanted a career in politics.
	But he came back radicalized from that British experience.
	He led the campaign to try and get asylum for Snowden in Brazil.
	That almost worked, but it didn't.
	And then from there on, everything that he did was always showing he was willing to throw his political career away.
	If it, in order to speak the things he really believed in and to set an example for how discourse can be done.
	And for all the, you know, powerful people and famous people who showed up to David's funeral and who manifested in various ways online in the wake of his death.
	The thing that was really the most impressive to me was how many people who have no power and have no position and have no privilege who talked so movingly about the effect David had on them, including the team of nurses who took care of him for the last nine months when he was in an ICU bed, often not able to speak.
	Who came to his funeral and he told me that David was so much more than a patient to them, but was this true friend who had changed their lives.
	Only David, of all people I know, could actually do that.
	Just to kind of share a couple personal insights quickly.
	I read an article, I think about two months ago, at a moment when David was actually getting better.
	And We had been told after that first week three other times, once in November, another time in, or October the first time, another time in December, another time in February, that it was extremely unlikely that David would survive the next 48 hours.
	Three times his doctors called me and told me prepared for what is almost certainly to be David's death in the next 48 hours and I had to tell my kids that and take them to the hospital to what I thought was saying goodbye and yet he didn't die those three times or that first week he fought so hard to survive and to stay alive and as a result he gave us months to be able to be with him and
	reaffirm our love and to say the things to him that you want to say to somebody before they die and that they want to say to you.
	Those were some of the most profound and moving moments we had in our marriage and had in our relationship and it gave the kids so much of an opportunity and his friends and it all came from David's fighting and one of the things I realized from that is there's so many things we take for granted in life.
	That are the things we value most.
	I often thought about what happened on August 5th, which was the day before David went to the ICU for what would be the last day that we had together at home, unbeknownst to us, and how often, probably, we passed each other without saying anything, might have bickered over stupid things.
	And then I got to the point where, when David was actually awake and communicative, I was able to spend the day with him just chatting, just talking.
	Just connecting to him and it just reminds me of how important it is to have gratitude for all the things that we value in life because everything is temporary in this life in its current form, in the form that we experience it.
	It's all going to be taken away from us at some point and then we're going to die.
	And so remembering to always embrace all those things with so much gratitude It's so crucial, and even with David's death, when the sadness comes, when the pain comes, when the loss comes, I try very hard to not think about it as something that was taken from me and focus on the pain and the sadness from the loss, but instead to focus on how grateful I am that I had the opportunity to share my life for 20 years with someone so extraordinary.
	I encourage you to read that article.
	It's one that I wrote when, as I said, I thought David was getting better.
	There were so many times when he fought so hard that we really believed he was on the road to recovery, even though the doctors kept warning us not to believe that, that it was unlikely that he would recover.
	It just, his strength was so immense that he was able to fight through all of that.
	So yeah, I think that's everything I wanted to say.
	Like I said, I would have felt odd, maybe even like a little dishonest, like I was hiding something or concealing something that's obviously very much on my mind had I not used this show to talk about David and the political side of David, the public side of David, but also where that started, which was from this
	Immense strength of character and integrity and passion that touched so many people and it was in the most improbable ways so I hope you got a lot out of that.
	I think it was good for me to talk about that.
	We're very appreciative for the audience we've assembled here.
	I feel like we're gonna be back.
	I'm gonna continue now trying to come back every night.
	We're gonna I think take it a little easy for this week, try and ease back in, but we will be back every night at 7 p.m.
	at our regular scheduled time, live here on Rumble exclusively, so we hope to see you back with us tomorrow night and every night.

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