Ukraine’s Vaunted “Spring Offensive” Stalls as Iraq War History Repeats, Russian Civilians Viewed as Legitimate Targets, & Brazil’s Censorship Regime Escalates | SYSTEM UPDATE #100
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to episode 100 of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The war in Ukraine drones on and continues to escalate with seemingly no end in sight.
Almost a year and a half into this grinding horrific war, an end to the war seems further away than ever.
In fact, there is no evidence that American or Western officials are even trying to bring about a diplomatic resolution and much evidence that they are affirmatively blocking the possibility of one wherever it emerges.
For months we have heard that the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive is coming.
It was never clear what this was supposed to achieve or even what this counter-offensive would consist of, other than giving Americans a reason to stay patient and continue to pour enormous amounts of their tax dollars into the coffers of Vladimir Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials.
Now that the counter-offensive, whatever that means, is underway, we are already hearing the kind of leak propaganda designed to lower our expectations and even prepare ourselves for its failure.
Of the many things to say about war, and there are many things to say about it, one is that history always seems to repeat itself.
And we've seen this game before, both in the Vietnam War, when Pentagon leaders constantly assured the public that victory was just right around the corner, just needing a little more money and weapons and conscripts and people dying.
And also in the Iraq War, when proclamations that, quote, the next six months is crucial, became such a repeated drag that it became the source of a kind of black humor.
We'll examine the latest developments in this painfully pointless and yet indescribably dangerous war, and we'll also look at a deeply alarming trend.
that Western officials are increasingly insisting, both implicitly and now even explicitly, that not only Russian leaders, military officers, and soldiers, but also Russian civilians are fair game to be targeted with violence, with legal recriminations, and all sorts with legal recriminations, and all sorts of other vindictive measures, or that they should at least be regarded as morally responsible for the war.
Whenever our moral compass starts degenerating to that extent, only bad outcomes should be expected.
And we'll examine this as well.
And then finally, we've been reporting on the tightening censorship regime in Brazil for months now, both because it matters unto itself and because it's being used as a test case for how to implement similar models first in the EU and then in North America.
There are already censorship regimes throughout Western Europe, in Canada, and obviously included in the United States as well, but this is intended to be the most aggressive model yet, that once implemented in Brazil successfully, can then be pointed to by European and North American leaders as a sign that they need it as well.
This censorship regime in Brazil continues to worsen, and we'll report on the latest.
As we do every Tuesday and Thursday, as soon as we're done here with our one-hour live show on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our live interactive After Show to take your questions and comment on your feedback.
That program, that After Show, is available for subscribers only.
To obtain access to our After Show, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community, the red button, It's right below the video player here on the Rumble screen.
It helps support our independent journalism that we do here as well.
Also, as a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform where you can follow the program there, rate, and review the episode.
Each episode posts 12 hours after it first appears here on Rumble Live in the evening, and rating and reviewing the show helps spread the visibility of the program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There are a lot of things that need to be said about war that one can say and should say about war.
And one of them, which we want to focus on tonight, is that each war tends to follow very similar patterns, even when the wars seem very different in terms of their geography, their geostrategic outcome, the participants.
They seem to follow a very consistent trajectory, especially when it comes to American wars.
In fact, when it comes to almost every American war of the last 60 years, we find a similar public opinion trajectory.
A large percentage of Americans in both political parties are convinced at the start of the war that they have to support it on the ground that it is both necessary and moral, only to then regret that decision and come to see the war as a mistake.
A pattern that repeats itself over and over and over and yet somehow does not prevent history from repeating itself each time a new war is presented and the U.S.
government and its media succeeds once again in generating large majorities in support of the war.
As the Pew Research Center recalled in March of this year, quote, in the months leading up to the Iraq War, majorities of between 55% and 68% said they favored taking military action to end Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, no more than about a third of Americans ever opposed military action.
A sizable majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 83%, favor the use of military force to end Saddam Hussein's rule.
Democrats and Democratic leaders were, leaders were less supportive, but still Democrats favored 52% more so than opposed 40% military action in Iraq.
And yet now, quote, as Americans look back on the war four years ago, this was from 2019, 62%, 62% said it was not worth fighting.
Majorities of military veterans, including those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, came to the same conclusion.
A 1970 article for the New York Times tells a similar story about the war in Vietnam.
The first sentence of that Times article reads, quote, 6 out of 10 Americans now think it was a mistake for the United States to become involved in the Vietnam War, the Gallup poll reported today.
And there you see, actually, the headline on the screen, which is 61% in poll assert entry into the war in Vietnam was a U.S., quote, mistake.
Note how the polling only offers Americans the opportunity to say that it was a mistake.
Kind of like if you spell a word wrong or if you make the wrong turn when driving somewhere.
It's never a question of whether U.S.
leaders acted immorally or criminally in starting a war based on false pretenses as happened in Vietnam and Iraq.
The question that's all offered, the most you're allowed to say about it, is that it was a mistake.
Wrong judgment made by very well-intentioned people, but you see the reversal in both, in the two biggest wars that the United States has fought in the last generation and in this one, the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq, and you see it similarly in all kinds of other public opinions about wars.
One cannot yet say that the same thing is happening when it comes to the war in Ukraine, but the trends are most definitely in the same direction, as even some of the most fervent institutional supporters of the U.S.
role in the war in Ukraine are starting to acknowledge.
Here, for example, is the Brookings Institution in a report published on April 28, 2023, entitled Americans Show Signs of Impatience with the Ukraine War.
And their report reads, quote, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we began tracking American public attitudes toward the war.
In four polls conducted between March of 2022 and October 2022, our University of Maryland critical issues poll found consistent, robust public backing for US support for Ukraine.
Since March of 2022, the start of the war, just the month after the Russians invaded, we fielded four other polls tracking the public's willingness to pay a price in rising energy costs, higher inflation, and loss of American troops.
Public support had been relatively robust, with very little change over the months ending in October 2022.
But the current poll shows a marked drop on all three measures, ranging from 9 to 15 points.
Now, this softening of support among Americans and their growing resistance to continue to endure all kinds of cost in order to fuel this proxy war in Ukraine that really does seem to be a war, yet another one, that is endless in nature, just no end in sight.
There's no promises on the part of the American government about when we can stop funding this war.
There's no descriptions of how this war will likely end.
There's no realistic scenario under which this war could be resolved diplomatically, let alone militarily, because it seems very clear That the desire of the U.S.
government is to continue this war as long as possible.
And there were a lot of reports at the beginning of the war that demonstrated exactly why that is.
Namely that U.S.
officials, British officials, other NATO officials were making clear that the real goal of the war was to trap Russia inside a war that they could never win, to bleed them financially and militarily, to weaken Russia.
But note that this all comes at the expense Of Americans and British and European citizens who have to pay higher taxes and higher gas prices and to replenish the stockpiles.
But the ones paying the biggest price of all for this geo-strategic game are the Ukrainians.
Ukrainians are dying in enormous numbers.
And while Ukrainian leaders and Ukrainian officials like President Zelensky, who stay far away from the front line, who aren't the ones being used as cannon fodder, put on a very defiant, resolute face when facing the media, we want to fight till the end, we want to defend our homeland.
Zelensky is not using a volunteer army.
There are not millions of Ukrainian men lined up eager to fight the Russian army.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Like the U.S.
and Vietnam, the Ukrainians are using a conscript army.
They're requiring Ukrainian men to go and join the military.
They're blocking their borders.
They're making it illegal to leave the country as a means of escaping.
They enforce that blockade very aggressively.
And twice in the last six months President Zelensky has had to increase severely the punishments for desertion or rebellion or any attempts to evade fighting in that war on the part of Ukrainian men because apparently And actions speak louder than words.
There is a perception that they are not willing to die in this war because they apparently don't see it the way we're told to see the war, namely as this existential threat that Ukraine is facing.
It seems that they see the war the way it actually is, which is essentially a fight over who will govern not all of Ukraine, whether Ukraine will be annexed into Russia, whether it will be destroyed.
But instead as a war over who will govern specific provinces in eastern Ukraine where civil war has been raging not since 2022 but since 2014 when the United States government under President Obama and the leadership of Victoria Nuland helped engineer a coup that removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine who had become too
Pro-Moscow in his leanings to anti-EU and replaced him with a more pro-EU, pro-Western, pro-NATO, pro-US leader.
We all heard the tape of Victoria Nuland choosing the Ukrainian leader, not the Ukrainian people at the polls.
And a lot of people in the Donbass region and in other provinces in eastern Ukraine, just like this is true of Crimea, are Russian-speaking ethnic Russians who identify far more with Russia and Moscow than they do with Ukraine and Kiev.
And just as was true for the 2008 More in Georgia, which Russia ended up fighting because two provinces in Georgia also were filled with Russian-speaking ethnic Russians who wanted to be part of Russia and not the neocon favorite leader in Tbilisi in Georgia.
There are people in these regions and these provinces who want their autonomy, who want to be independent of Kiev.
They're fighting a war of independence to be able to secede from Ukraine the way the people of Kosovo fought a war to secede from rule by Belgrade under Serbia.
And NATO and the US supported that independence movement on the grounds that that was what the people of Kosovo wanted.
and this is the same way out of this war, to use the Kosovo example as a model for giving the people of eastern Ukraine a way to, in a referenda supervised by the UN or whatever other way, to express what their true intentions are, what their true desires are for their to express what their true intentions are, what their true desires are for their autonomy and whether they want to be continued, be a part of Ukraine or whether they want to succeed or even
And yet there's no interest in having that happen because the last thing the United States in the West want is to give the people of Ukraine, including eastern Ukraine, the right to decide their future and their citizenship for themselves.
So while the work has been presented from the start as a war to save Ukraine, to defend Ukrainians, there's nobody paying a bigger price for this war than Ukrainians themselves.
This war is not saving Ukraine, it's destroying Ukraine.
And the more the US fuels this war, and obviously Russia, the country that invaded, also bears responsibility, but the more the US fuels this war, It is absolutely the case that the more Ukraine will be destroyed.
We've seen this game before.
The CIA under President Obama was authorized to, with one hand behind their back, attempt to remove from power the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Russia was in Syria fighting to help their allied government in Damascus stay in power.
And the U.S.
claimed to be defending the Syrian people, fighting for freedom and democracy in Syria, and yet Syria ended up completely obliterated as a result of the US fueling through the CIA of that war.
We ended up fighting on the same side as ISIS and Al Qaeda in an attempt to remove Bashar al-Assad.
Somehow the countries we always say we're trying to save, Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, instead end up being destroyed.
If I were a citizen of another country the last thing I would want to hear is U.S.
leaders saying we're coming to protect you and save you with the war.
Since all you have to do is look at what ends up happening to the countries who get helped and saved by the U.S.
government through war and military force and the very opposite ends up happening.
Now the question becomes why is it that That Americans go through this repetitive pattern of lending huge amounts of bipartisan consensus support for the war at the start only to come to conclude that they were deceived or misled and that the war itself was a mistake.
Why do they continue to fall into that same pattern?
Why don't they regard those past errors and mistakes as a reason they ought to be a lot more skeptical each time a new war is presented to them?
I think there are some obvious answers.
One is that war propaganda, especially at the start of the war, is deliberately designed to provoke our core tribal sentiments.
All wars necessarily rely on an us versus them framework.
The idea is there's some foreign evil that is singular in its amorality.
We get all worked up about the unique evil of the foreign leader we're supposed to hate.
We always hear that they're the new Hitler.
At least seven or eight leaders in the past two decades have been called the new Hitler.
You may remember that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader, who wasn't even the supreme leader, that was the Ayatollah, he was the Iranian president, elected Iranian president, was constantly called the new Hitler.
Even though under his rule, Iran never invaded another country, and then he left office after two terms, which is the amount provided for by the Constitution, and he faded into the woodwork and was never heard from again.
He's just living a kind of quiet life as an Iranian citizen.
Assad has been called the new Hitler.
Saddam Hussein was repeatedly called the new Hitler, both in the early 90s during the Gulf War, and then again in 2002 and 2003.
We heard that about Muammar Gaddafi.
Now we're hearing it about, of course, Vladimir Putin.
And it's easy to mock that, the fact that Hitler was supposed to be a singular evil.
That's what makes him Hitler.
And yet everybody now becomes Hitler.
Donald Trump, of course, is Hitler as well in a lot of U.S.
discourse.
But while it's easy to mock, it's also incredibly potent because we are tribal beings.
And even those of us who are highly critical of the United States government and the security state and its posture in the world, we identify as Americans instinctively.
It's part of our identity from birth.
We're inculcated with those kinds of tribal values and that tribal identity.
And so when we're told that we all need to unite in opposition to a foreign enemy, it's something that triggers our deepest Most embedded instincts as tribal beings.
And so in the beginning of the war, before there's dead bodies, before the lies are revealed, before we start incurring any costs, it's very easy to just get riled up by that, to get aroused by promises of glorious success, to feel good about ourselves, to be told that we're fighting an evil, we're saving people.
These are all very potent appeals propagandistically.
And it's really not that hard to understand why at the start of each war we continue to fall prey to that.
Another reason why this continually happens is because the costs of the war are not visible for a long time, many, many months.
That Brookings Institution survey said that for the first six months of the war from February or March until October of 2022, there was a consistent willingness in polling data among Americans to incur all kinds of costs because the costs weren't yet being incurred.
It takes months for
The budgetary authorizations to start having an impact, for people to start seeing dead bodies, and most of all, for people to realize that all the promises of quick victory, all the stories about the feisty Ukrainian resistance warding off the Russian army, we constantly heard Russia was days away from collapsing militarily, that the Ruble was going to be destroyed, that they were running out of ammunition, they were stranded, they had no supply lines.
All of that led us many people to believe that, oh, we're actually going to win this war.
And then over time, month after month after month, as the war grinds on, as more dead bodies pile up, as the costs get higher and higher, people start to wonder, wait a minute, we're in the middle of another war?
What about all those promises we were led to believe at the start about how quickly this was going to be over?
Exactly what happened in the war in Vietnam, exactly what happened in the war in Iraq.
And then finally, I would say another major factor, and this is something I've only been realizing over the last couple of years, is that it is just the case that for a lot of people, the Iraq War is a very vibrant memory because we lived through it.
But for a lot of other people, and each year the number gets higher and higher, The Iraq War is lost to history.
There are many, many adults, millions of American adults, who either did not live through the Iraq War or were far too young to remember it.
And each year that number increases.
And that's why the people who were the chief liars and the chief propagandists of the war can now have their reputation rehabilitated just by feeding people the current Sentiment they want to hear about Trump being a fascist and a white supremacist and trans people being persecuted.
If a neocon like Bill Kristol or David Frum or Anne Applebaum or Max Boot or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham stands up and says that, Everything is forgotten.
No one remembers what they did, or many people don't remember what they did from the Iraq War, and so that historical ignorance is a crucial factor in being able to kind of foster this new support for any new war that you offer.
But one of the main commonalities among war that I think is really worth noting, and there's a lot of reasons to avoid war, beginning with the fact that large numbers of people die, societies are destroyed, enormous amounts of money is wasted, our civil liberties are generally rolled back, the arms industry and the intelligence community grows in power and force, all many, many reasons.
To want to avoid war.
But I actually think the most compelling reason is that war always degrades us as a society and as a culture.
It fosters the barbarism in us.
It fosters our worst instincts.
People who are trained to go kill in the military need to be trained not to see the humanity in their enemy.
Otherwise they wouldn't be able to kill.
But that contaminates the rest of the society as well.
We're constantly feeding on hatred and the idea that we need to destroy and kill and murder and eliminate.
And these kind of sentiments shape what a society is.
They make it very crude and decadent and just morally regressive.
And every war starts to lead to some very ugly outcomes because of that.
And one of the factors that has for sure enabled the US government to galvanize the majority of Americans supporting this war is the fact that Americans have been feeding on anti-Russian hatred and anti-Russian propaganda and anti-Russian rhetoric Certainly for decades, going back to the Cold War, a lot of older Americans instinctively hear Moscow or the Kremlin and react with antipathy because they were trained to do so during the Cold War when the Russians were communists, when there was the Soviet Union.
But even Americans who didn't live through the Cold War have also been feeding on anti-Russian hatred as a result of Russiagate, as a result of being told over and over That the reason this event happened, that many Americans consider to be the most cataclysmic and apocalyptic event in recent memory, which is the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton that elected Donald Trump as President of the United States, that the primary culprit in that election, in that outcome, was Russia.
And so you have this kind of horrifically perfect union of lots of establishment Republicans who are cold warriors, who have long come to view Russia or any country that doesn't obey U.S.
dictates as an enemy that needs to be destroyed.
They're ready to go to war with Iran.
They're ready to go to war with Cuba.
They're ready to go to war with the Palestinians.
They're ready to go to war with China.
It's just an endless list.
You just point them to a country that doesn't obey the United States, North Korea, and they just want to go to war with those countries.
They see them as enemies.
And then you marry that with a lot of bellicose sentiment in the Democratic Party as well.
Democrats were just as much Cold Warriors as the Republicans, but also now the hatred that exists for Russia and Russians within the Democratic Party, largely as a result of Russiagate.
And so we are now at the point in this war Even though no American soldiers are dying, when we are constantly hearing one of the worst things that we can possibly be told, which is that it is not just Russian soldiers and Russian leaders who are responsible for this war, but Russian civilians as well.
We've been seeing this in the culture and in seemingly trivial examples like sports, where there's constantly a move to ban Russian athletes.
The British last year, for example, at the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world, banned Russian tennis players and Belarusian tennis players from competing in Wimbledon.
The World Cup and FIFA have banned Russia from competing in international soccer competitions.
The same is true for other sports as well.
So that's already a way of punishing athletes and civilians who have no responsibility for that war, especially because we're told that Russia is not a democracy.
Which means that you can't even invoke the theory that Osama Bin Laden invoked for 9-11 that American civilians are fair game because they elect their leaders and thus are responsible for their actions.
And Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden would argue after 2004 that obviously the United States and most Americans favor things like the Iraq War by virtue of the fact that George Bush did it, that he set up torture chambers around the world, That he kidnapped Americans off the street and Americans re-elected him and his argument was that makes Americans fair game, American civilians fair game for being targeted anywhere in the world.
That is a very dangerous and a morally repugnant theory and yet that is the one we are increasingly hearing because this anti-Russian hatred which needs to be disseminated for this war to continue is leading to that.
So let's just look at a couple of examples.
Last month, Reuters reported, and there you see the headline on the screen, quote, Russian citizens take language test to avoid expulsion from Latvia.
Now, a lot of this is happening in Eastern Europe, and you can say Eastern Europe has good reason.
Eastern Europeans have good reason to fear domination by Moscow because, of course, they were placed behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, although certainly a lot of Eastern Europeans were themselves communist and also supported that.
But there was a closed-off propaganda wall, and so they have good reasons, you might argue, to fear domination by Moscow and to turn to the West to seek support.
But that nonetheless does not justify any more than it did for Osama bin Laden the attempt to target Russian civilians, Russian citizens in other countries with reprisals as punishment for this war.
And yet that's exactly what is happening.
So here in Latvia, according to Reuters, quote, in a Stalinist skyscraper, which dominates the skyline of Latvia's capital, dozens of elderly Russians wait to take a basic Latvian language test as proof of loyalty to a country where they have lived for decades.
Clutching red Russian passports, the participants, mostly women, old women, Read their notes for last-minute revision, fearing they may be expelled from the Baltic country if they fail.
Speaking Russian instead of Latvian has never been a problem until now, but the war in Ukraine changed the picture.
Last year's election campaign was dominated by questions of national identity and security concerns.
The government now demands a language test from the 20,000 people who live in the country but took Russian passports after giving up Latvian-based issue documents as the loyalty of Russian citizens is a worry, said Dmitri Trofimov, State Secretary at the Interior Ministry.
Quote, if I am deported, I would have nowhere to go.
I have lived here for 40 years, said Valentina Savitsnikova, 70, a former English teacher and Riga guide, after a final Latvian lesson at a private school in central Riga, ready for when she takes her own exam.
Before Moscow invaded Ukraine last February, tens of thousands of Russian speakers in Latvia used to gather every May 9th around a monument in Riga to commemorate the Soviet victory in World War II.
Remember, that was a victory over Nazi Germany.
Their gatherings were banned after the invasion of Ukraine and the 84-meter structure was crushed on the orders of the government, which is dominated by ethnic Latvians and which would now prefer to bury the memory of being part of the former Soviet Union.
TV broadcasts from Russia, formerly watched by many, have been banned.
The State Language Board has proposed renaming Auriga Street commemorating Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and the government has put forward plans to switch all education to Latvian to swiftly phase out instruction in Russian.
This has left many of Latvia's ethnic Russians, who make up about a quarter of the population of 1.9 million, feeling they may be losing their place in society, where speaking solely Russian has been acceptable for decades.
Russian citizens under 75 who do not pass the test by the end of the year will be given reasonable time to leave Trofimov said if they do not leave they could face a quote forced expulsion He said the test was needed because Russian authorities justified their invasion of Ukraine by the need to protect Russian nationals abroad Now that is the irony
Is one of the reasons Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine was because Russian-speaking ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine were starting to be discriminated against very aggressively and sometimes violently.
In part by those neo-Nazi militias that the US and NATO are now funding and arming, including the Azov Battalion, but also by the central government in Kiev, which has been whittling away the rights of Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, something that the government of Moscow considers deeply threatening to people to whom they feel a long-standing historical tie and obligation.
And traditionally, when ethnic minorities in a country are being persecuted, we regard that, the United States does, as a moral evil.
And yet, all of these countries, or many of them, in Eastern Europe and now in Western Europe, that are claiming to fight for democracy and freedom and democratic values are aggressively starting to persecute People who speak Russian and have for generations, or people who are ethnic Russians, because the sentiment is that they are to blame for the war in Ukraine.
The reprisals against them are now justified.
Here from earlier this month.
In Politico, you see a similar headline about Poland, quote, Polish government bets big on anti-Russian law.
Jaroslaw Kozlowski, the longtime leader of Poland's Law and Justice Party, is doubling down on his all-or-nothing position that a win for the opposition in the upcoming election would be Finns Polonaise, the end of Poland.
And in a nod to the stark position, the Sejum Parliament passed a new law on May 26 establishing a commission to investigate, quote, those serving Moscow's interests.
Under this new law, if the commission finds individuals guilty, it can dole out penalties, including a ban from public office for a decade.
Thus, President Andres Duda's quick ratification just days later has sparked fears that the ruling PIS may use the law to move against key opposition leaders in the run-up to October's election.
Now I want to show you a video.
That is from the Czech President Peter Pavel from June 15th.
So what is it?
That is I believe yesterday or I don't know the date right now.
I'm sure someone will tell me in a second, but it's this it's today actually.
So it's a June 15th is today.
This is an interview with the Czech President Peter Pavel in which he's talking about Russian civilians.
I think it's important that you hear this tweet so you can get a sense for what the sentiments are that are growing and that are very alarming.
I believe that as in the case of a number of war conflicts in the past, when there is an ongoing war, the security measures related to Russian nationals should be stricter the security measures related to Russian nationals should be stricter than in normal times.
So Okay, so I hope you heard what he said and processed this and concentrated on this because it is deeply disturbing.
He's saying that all people who are Russian living in the West or in other countries need to be inherently regarded as a security threat And be aggressively monitored far more than they were before.
So the West, what we're talking about here, NATO leaders, people part of the EU, are explicitly advocating that people who are Russian, in terms of their descent, people who were born in Russia, who are ethnic Russians, should be regarded as presumptively disloyal, ought to be monitored by Western security agencies.
Even more so than they were before.
That, of course, is the mindset that led to the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II, one of the most shameful and disgraceful acts of the 20th century by the United States.
The idea that just because American citizens were residents, permanent residents of the United States, happened to be of Japanese descent, it meant that they were presumptively disloyal or favorable to or approving of or supportive of United States enemy in Tokyo.
This is exactly the same mentality exactly the same framework that Western leaders are increasingly endorsing and it's again aimed not at Russian.
Soldiers are Russian military officials, but Russian people, ethnic Russians, Russian civilians.
Let's listen to that last part again and then hear the rest.
Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war.
I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time, when we look back, when the Second World War started, all Japanese population living in the United States were under strict monitoring regime as well.
That's simply cost of war.
When you say monitoring, what exactly do you mean by that?
I mean, being under the scrutiny of security services.
So he's citing there the example of Franklin Roosevelt's internment of all Japanese Americans during World War II as a positive example, as something we ought to aspire to and replicate.
He's using that as a justification for what he wants to do.
That at the minimum, Russians ought to be Subjected to aggressive scrutiny by Western security state agencies simply because of the fact that they are ethnic Russians, even though they've lived in these countries for years or decades or generations without the slightest problem.
This is the kind of barbaric mindset that gets very dangerous.
He's wearing a suit.
He's a NATO and EU leader.
He speaks very calmly and very delicately, very elegantly, like a nice European does.
So it can obscure how demented that message is.
But this is something that, as we just demonstrated, is commonly expressed now.
The idea that Russians, as people, are the enemies.
People who need to be attacked and punished.
Now, there are a couple of people on Twitter who have kind of become celebrities on social media in general as a result of their fanatical support for the war in Afghanistan.
Ukraine, one of them is Paul Massaro, who I really encourage you to take a look at his Twitter feed and just watch a video or two of him on YouTube because the derangement is palpable, it's visceral.
But he has become, he's constantly in Ukraine, he is part of a Western think tank, he glorifies the Azov battalion, he's in Ukraine demanding Every time the Biden administration has reversed itself, originally saying they wouldn't send a particular weapon system, only to reverse itself and then send it, he has been one step ahead of demanding it.
Three months ago, he started demanding F-16s, and that was how I knew they were coming.
And he has built up a clear network of connections with Ukrainian officials and inside the US government.
And recently there was just some report of a random Russian citizen swimming in the ocean on vacation who was killed by a shark.
Just like a tragic story of a random Russian civilian getting killed by a shark.
And a lot of these people, these fanatical Bloodthirsty warmongers who have led the way in public opinion in the United States and the West in making Ukraine the central cause of the U.S.
foreign policy establishment just started celebrating this on the grounds that Russians deserve to die.
Russian people who have no connection to the military.
So here he is with a meme of a shark Shaking hands and menacing a Russian.
He says, this is the best thing I've seen all day.
And then here is Dmitry Zlutenko.
Who also has become one of those thought leaders.
He's with a, we'll get his, let's get his affiliation.
I thought we had that, but he's with some kind of Western institution.
You see the Ukrainian flag in his bio, of course, and here's what he said.
First of all, it is important to acknowledge that Russians have been shown to be pure evil when raping and looting in Bukha, when setting up torture chambers in literally every city they captured, when dumping bodies into mass graves, and when leveling cities.
Full of civilians.
As Ukrainian or anyone feeling empathy to Ukrainians, I don't think it's inhumane to approve and make fun of Russians dying.
This shark case means only one thing to me.
There would be one less invader trying to kill Ukrainians to destroy my home.
From that point of view, it's great.
This kind of went viral.
Lots of people applauded him because the West and the United States have been feeding on this kind of demented anti-Russian hatred.
If you are celebrating random deaths of innocent civilians simply by virtue of their citizenry, you have absolutely become everything that you purport to be fighting.
You have become the worst of humanity to celebrate someone's death who has done nothing wrong You know nothing about them other than their citizenry.
It would be as if...
Someone in some part of the world during the Iraq War read an article about an American man who never served in the military, who was the father of three dropping dead of a heart attack and then making heart attack jokes and celebrating his death on the grounds that he's an American and America is currently involved in an aggressive war in Iraq.
Everybody would think that that was deranged.
And yet this has become the kind of sentiment that is now celebrated and pervasive.
Now, In terms of what is actually happening in this war, as I mentioned at the top, the thing we have been repeatedly promised as public opinion starts softening in support of this war is don't worry, it seems like it's a stalemate, this kind of war where people just kill each other pointlessly and nothing really ever changes, but the Ukrainians have a counter-offensive coming.
And this is going to change the war dramatically.
All we need to do is just hold on, keep sending our money, keep cheering Joe Biden and NATO leaders, and very shortly, everything's going to change.
The Russians are going to be humiliated.
They're going to be vanquished because of this Ukrainian counteroffensive.
And it's extremely notable that the exact same people, and I mean the exact same people, who led the way in making the same claims about the Iraq War, I know you're getting tired of the Iraq War.
I know you were lied to at the beginning.
I know you were told that this war was going to be over in a matter of weeks, and now we're in our fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh year with an insurgency that is clearly getting stronger and not going away.
And there's no chance we're going to win this war anytime soon.
And the argument was, oh, don't worry.
We've created a theory, a tactic, that we call the surge.
And all it really is is we're going to send in a bunch of new soldiers and we're going to train them in counterinsurgency fighting.
And somehow that is going to finally deliver the promise of victory.
So you just need to hold on.
The next six months are important.
Then the next six months after that also are crucial and nothing happens.
And the surge is coming and that's going to change everything.
And the leader of that And his main partners in selling this claim that extended and prolonged the Iraq War for years were neocons and media outlets like Bill Kristol and Max Boot.
and then President Obama to lead this effort.
And his main partners in selling this claim that extended and prolonged the Iraq war for years were neocons and media outlets like Bill Kristol and Max Boot.
And so now you have, amazingly enough, here's an article from last week in the Washington Post by Max Boot and David Petraeus getting everybody excited about this Ukrainian counter And the headline is, the Ukrainian offensive is beginning, David Petraeus is optimistic.
And here's what the article says, quote, David Petraeus has had his share of setbacks as well as successes.
Now let me just stop there.
One of the amazing things, and we talked about this in the context of the Trump indictment, is that one of David Petraeus' setbacks was that he got caught leaking the most sensitive secrets that the United States government has in its possession.
The Crown Jewel documents, the documents that even include the names of covert agents in the field, people who are undercover in countries pretending to be private citizens but who in fact work for the CIA.
Every time there's a leak that's noble in nature, by WikiLeaks or by Edward Snowden or Daniel Ellsberg, there's always the attempt to claim that those documents contain the name of covert agents in the field, that it's putting people in harm's way, and each and every time it's a lie.
I went through all the Snowden documents.
We never published a single one that had the name of foreign agents or covert agents and there were no documents that he furnished us that would have allowed us to do that and yet constantly the claim was Edward Snowden has blood on his hands or WikiLeaks has blood on its hands even though there's never any example of people being in danger.
But David Petraeus is the one person in all these leaks of history, all those history of leaks who actually did leak.
Documents that sensitive with the names of covert agents and he linked it to his mistress The woman with whom he was having an affair Paula Broadwell Not for any noble reason but so that she could write a more revering book about him a more revering biography about him To glorify the imagery of David Petraeus when he got caught unlike President Trump He wasn't
Accused of or indicted for multiple felony charges under the Espionage Act, he was given a slap on the wrist, pled guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a fine, never spent a day in prison, and then immediately went on to run an investment bank where he made many millions of dollars, and now he's continuously held out by the Washington Post as some wise man who we ought to trust when it comes to the war in Ukraine, because according to this article by the neocon Max Boot,
one of the most ardent supporters of the war in Iraq and the surge that prolonged it.
He, quote, has had his share of success backs as well as successes, but he remains one of the most respected generals of modern times.
Leaking those documents didn't apparently erode how respected he was.
The article goes on, quote, he is also no Pollyanna.
Even while the 101st Airborne Division was rapidly advancing on Baghdad under his command in 2003, he wondered, quote, tell me how this ends.
He does not predict a rapid end to the war in Ukraine either.
Even so, the retired general returned from a visit last week to Kiev, where he met with Ukrainian military and civilian leaders with a positive assessment of the prospect for the Ukrainian counteroffensive that is now beginning.
He told me that, quote, told me that while they are likely to take tough casualties in the early going, he expects, quote, the Ukrainians to achieve significant breakthroughs and accomplish much more than most analysts are predicting.
The tip of the Ukrainian spear will be the roughly 8 new armored brigades, perhaps 40,000 troops in all, trained by NATO and armed with German Leopard 2 tanks and German Martyr 1 infantry fighting vehicles, British Challenger 2 tanks, U.S.
Bradley fighting vehicles, and more specialized vehicles akin to armored bulldozers designed to breach Russian trenches and plow through Russian minefields.
U.S.
intelligence analysts have been gloomy about the prospect of Ukrainian forces staging a breakthrough, but Petraeus emailed me on Thursday, quote, I believe the Ukrainian commanders will eventually orchestrate very impressive combined arms operations.
He also cautioned, however, that, as with the 2007 surge in Iraq, the fighting in the early period of the Ukrainian offensive is, quote, going to get much harder before it gets easier.
Petraeus told me, quote, it is entirely possible that Russian units, now composed increasingly of poorly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly led individual replacements, who have been in tough combat for many months, will prove to be quite brittle and collapse over broad areas.
The Russians, he noted, will have trouble responding to Ukrainian breakthroughs because they don't have sufficient reserves to cover a 600-mile front.
And if the Russians do try to plug one hole in the line, they might be creating other vulnerabilities elsewhere.
All sunny, optimistic promises that mean that you just gotta keep your head down and keep supporting this war because victory is coming.
Max Boot, the supreme neocon commander who never gets near a front line, goes on, quote, if Petraeus is right and the Ukrainians can cut the land bridge between Donbass and Crimea, they can strike a mighty blow against the invaders.
The United States can and should help the Ukrainians by providing them, as advocated by Petraeus and many other military experts, with army tactical missile systems to supplement the British-provided Storm Shadow cruise missiles to enable longer-range strikes against Crimea.
Of course, warfare is the most complex and unpredictable of human activities and failure is always an option, but the odds in this case favor David over Goliath because of the changes that have transformed the Ukrainian military in recent years.
I love how Ukraine, the country that is being financed and armed by the most powerful military in the planet, the United States, and by dozens of the richest countries on the planet in Europe and NATO, is the David.
Against the Russian Goliath, even though the US spends 15 times more on its military than the Russians spend.
Quote, but the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are spinoffs from the Red Army.
Yet since the Ukrainians started receiving Western training in 2014, they have been encouraging the kind of small unit initiative that characterizes NATO armed forces.
And that, Petraeus said, quote, will enable the Ukrainians to make the most of every success they achieve.
The Russians, by contrast, remain mired in the top-down Soviet central planning mindset, where junior officers remain dependent on officers from higher up, who are often far from the front and cannot respond to rapidly changing conditions.
There is also the all-important matter of differing motivations between the two sides, and, as Napoleon reportedly said, quote, in more moral powers to physical as three parts out of four.
Petraeus noted that, quote, the Ukrainians are fully mobilized, see this word, the word of independence, and have high morale.
By contrast, he pointed out, many Russian soldiers presumably do not feel the same commitment to their cause and likely have quite poor morale after months in trenches and areas where local citizens hate them.
Wow, this is really pouring this on thick, this war propaganda.
One of Petraeus' heroes, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, told the troops it will begin in the liberation of Europe on D-Day.
It's always Hitler in World War II.
Quote, the hope and prayer of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
Today, the hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with Ukrainian troops.
We can only hope their counteroffensive will be as successful as Petraeus anticipates.
So that was really quite something that neocon arousal, whenever war is mentioned, it really gets them excited and riled up.
They never get near the war, but they really, they get pulsating with excitement and a sense of strength and purpose that they otherwise lack by writing these Churchillian paragraphs about how glorious victory is coming.
Here is, speaking of pathetically cowardly but warmongering neocons, a tweet from Bill Kristol, who unsurprisingly echoes what Max Boot, his fellow neocon, has to say.
He's citing an article from The Bulwark, which is a website created by Republicans who hate Donald Trump and now have become Democrats, mostly neocons who are Far more comfortable in the Democratic Party because they know that's their best vehicle for their warmongering agenda.
And he's quoting an article, it's funded by Pierre Omidyar by the way, the billionaire who funds most of the disinformation groups that are designed to censor the internet, who also funded the intercept back when it was intended to be an adversarial force for the U.S. security state before it became a DNC propaganda arm.
And here's Bill Kristol, funded by Pierre Omidyar, who writes, quote, Ukraine's counteroffensive may set the conditions for a war-winning victory.
Where would that leave the Biden administration and Kiev supporters in the West?
The West needs at last to let confidence rather than caution be its guide.
He goes on.
Boldness is required.
First the administration should request and Congress should provide enough funding for the next three years and a single multi-year appropriation.
Imagine the morale boost in the trenches of Ukrainian positions as well as the demoralization in Russia.
Again, these are the same people who have been spewing this Propagandistic framework about the glories of war for decades.
They did it about Iraq, and Syria, and Libya, and before that, Vietnam.
And every time they're proven to be liars, every time the public comes to regret listening to them, and every time they come forward with the same exact promises framed with the same exact emotionally manipulative phrases.
And yet, no matter how many times they lie, their careers continue to thrive precisely because lying on behalf of the establishment is the way that you advance in establishment circles.
Now, let's just take a look for a second at the realities of this counteroffensive, this glorious counteroffensive that's going to change everything and lead to glorious Ukrainian victory.
Even from the Western press that operates as the PR service for the Ukrainian government, we're starting to see some glimpses that this counter offensive is, at least at the moment, a terrible failure.
And it is obliterating.
Ukrainian forces.
Here from Reuters on June 11th, just a few days ago, Russia said it hits Leopard tanks, U.S.
Bradley vehicles in Ukraine.
Quote, Russia on Sunday said it had destroyed at least seven German-made Leopard tanks and five U.S.-made Bradley vehicles over 48 hours while repelling Ukrainian attacks.
The Russian bloggers reported Ukraine had briefly pierced part of the Russian line.
By the way, it must be very strange to be Russian, to have twice had to fend off the German military right on the other side of your border in Ukraine, and now again to be faced with a fanatical, warmongering German government led by the Green Party, and these officials who are largely women who ran on a policy of a feminist foreign policy,
One of whom is the foreign minister of Germany who came recently to Brazil and mocked Brazilians for not caring enough about the war in Ukraine, for caring too much about the price of meat and beans, and thinking Ukraine has nothing to do with them, which of course it doesn't.
You have a fanatical German government once again sending German tanks headed toward the Russian border through Ukraine.
The two most traumatic events for Russia in the 20th century.
The Reuters article goes on, quote, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky acknowledged on Saturday that his military was engaged in, quote, counter-offensive and defensive operations a day after President Vladimir Putin said Russia had repelled the first attacks of the offensive.
Here from Forbes on the same day, June 11th, quote, the Ukraine army has already lost half of its Leopard 2 tanks.
Those are the tanks provided by Germany.
According to Forbes, they already lost half of those tanks.
Here from today, the New York Times has a little explainer, the Ukrainian counter offensive, what to know.
And the article reads, quote, even President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine now says so.
The country's long-awaited counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied territory has begun.
After months of defending against a barrage of airstrikes, Ukraine is on the offense, looking for vulnerabilities along the 600-mile front line and even launching strikes on Russian soil.
But after days of sometimes intense battle, it has been difficult to figure out the state of play in Ukraine.
U.S.
officials have confirmed that Ukrainian troops have suffered casualties and equipment losses in the early fighting.
Little information is available on Russian losses, but the officials pointed out that attackers typically suffer heavier initial casualties than dug-in defenders.
Satellite imagery showed this year that Russian forces had erected dragon's teeth barricades between anti-tank ditches and trenches through eastern Ukraine and toward Crimea.
Videos and photographs posted last week by pro-war Russian bloggers, which were verified by the New York Times, show that at least three of the Ukrainian German-made Leopard 2 tanks and eight of their American-made Bradley fighting vehicles had been recently abandoned or destroyed.
Just keep pouring money.
Just buy more tanks to send more missiles.
And maybe at some point, All of this will start to change beyond just draining the weapons stockpiles of the American military and enriching arms dealers, the CIA, and President Zelensky in that extremely corrupt country that he leads.
Here from yesterday in The Guardian, a similarly pessimistic report entitled, Russian-Ukraine War, Ukraine Taking Significant Casualties and Making Slow Progress Toward Russian Defense, says Western officials, as it happened.
Quote, Ukraine is taking significant casualties and making slow progress toward the Russian main line of defense.
Western officials have admitted in one of the West's first assessments of the Ukrainian counteroffensive launched on June 4th.
One official said, quote, the Russian maneuver and defense approach is proving challenging for the Ukraine and costly to attacking forces.
Hence, the advance at the moment is slow.
The official suggested that there is likely to be, quote, grinding costly warfare likely for many months to come.
This is incredibly difficult.
They are going against a well-prepared line that the Russians have had months to prepare.
Russia has generally put up a good defense from their well-prepared positions and falling back to tactical lines.
Whilst they are inflicting casualties on the Russians, they are not significant because the Russians are choosing the time to withdraw in a manner similar to the way the Ukrainians defended themselves against Russian vehicles.
Quote, the idea that the Russians were just going to melt away and the Ukrainians were going to drive straight through their defensive line was in people's wildest dreams.
So you see Western media outlets preparing people that there are months and months and months that they need to be prepared Not just to endure more war, but to fund it and arm it and fuel it.
You don't see any success from it.
Even if nothing changes, you need to just keep it up.
Your duty is to keep financing and funding this war for as long as it goes on.
That is the official position of the Biden administration.
And in that, he has the support of the vast majority of the establishment wing of the Republican Party.
Now, as I said before, just to give you a little sense that it's the same bullshit artists who have been doing the same kind of deceitful propaganda for the same exact motives.
Forever.
Here is a CBS News report on March 19th of 2007 that is entitled, quote, Surge of Success Going Unnoticed.
And it reads, quote, in order to preserve the cosmic harmony, it seems the gods insist that good news in one place be offset by misfortune elsewhere.
It may well be that General David Petraeus is going to lead us to victory in Iraq.
He's certainly off to a good start.
If the karmic price of success in Iraq is utter embarrassment for senior Bush officials in Washington, DC, well, in our judgment, the trade-off is worth it, the world will surely note our success or failure in Iraq.
It will not remember the gang that couldn't shoot straight at the Justice Department, or for that matter, the antics of congressional Democrats, unless either so weakens the administration as to undercut our mission in Iraq.
Obviously, it's too early to say anything more definitive than that there are real signs of progress in Baghdad.
By the way, is this written by Bill Kristol?
So this is a column by Bill Kristol, the same Bill Kristol that is now telling you that success is around the corner in Ukraine.
He was telling you the same thing in 2007 about the war in Iraq.
That, quote, there are real signs of progress in Baghdad, he said.
The cocksure defeatism of war critics of two months ago when the surge was announced does seem to have been misplaced.
The latest Iraq update by Kimberly Kagan She was the theorist of the surge, and she is married to Frederick Hagen, whose brother is Robert Hagen, who is the husband of Victoria Nuland.
So you see these same scumbags have been the same people at the heart of these wars Forever!
They never send their families, they let other people's families fight and die in them, and they just turn out this propaganda, this same propaganda, this surge of Iraq is the counter-offensive of Ukraine.
Bill Kristol writes, quote, the latest Iraq update by Kimberly Kagan.
The sister-in-law of Victoria Nuland summarizes the early effects of the new strategy backed up by, as yet, just one additional U.S.
Brigade deployed in theater, with more to be added in the coming weeks.
This, quote, rolling surge focuses forces on a handful of neighborhoods in Baghdad and attempts to expand security out from those neighborhoods.
A big advantage of a, quote, rolling surge is that the population and the enemy sense the continuous pressure of ever-increasing forces.
This is four years Into the Iraq War.
Bill Kristol was one of the leading liars that ushered in that war.
We're preparing a show on how Bill Kristol is a singular evil, a singularly deceitful disinformation agent, despite the fact that he is more influential now than ever.
And this is the role that he was playing four years after the Iraq War started that he helped lie the country into.
Quote, Iraqis have not seen such a prolonged and continuous planned increase of U.S.
forces before.
The continued increasing presence of U.S.
forces appears to be having an important psychological as well as practical effect on the enemy and the people of Iraq.
Meanwhile, in Ramadi, in the belt south of Baghdad, stretching from Yusufist to Salman Pak, and northeast in the Diliya province, U.S.
and Iraqi forces have deprived Al Qaeda of the initiative.
The sense of momentum is confirmed by many other reports in the media and from Americans and Iraqis on the ground.
They can win this fight.
And if they do, combined with progress in Iraq, the lasting news from March 2007 will not be Bush administration haplessness.
It will be that we are on the way to success in Iraq.
Didn't that sound exactly like the Max Boot article I read to you about Ukraine?
The same tone, the same words from the same liars who led us into all of these wars in the first place?
Now, this surge that was the propagandistic innovation when Americans were ready to leave Iraq to promise them that they were about to transform the war came from something called the Institute for the Study of War.
That's where Kimberly Kagan worked.
And here you see the Report the Real Surge Preparing Operation Phantom Thunder.
That was the name of the operation.
And here is from that same institute is an article in the Weekly Standard, which at the time Bill Kristol had founded and was the editor of.
So it's an article from the Weekly Standard entitled The New Strategy in Iraq General Petraeus Learns from Past US Mistakes.
And it says, the new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase.
Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, General David Petraeus and Ray Orderno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt Al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear and hold operations that will follow.
The deployment of forces in preparation for this operation have gone better than expected.
And then here is the Institute for War.
You see who we are.
And then here is the Institute for War.
You see who we are.
It includes Bill Kristol, Kimberly Kagan, David Petraeus, the same exact national security experts who now get quoted on Iran on end, becoming success of the counteroffensive.
It's just the same people doing the same things all the time.
Now, in case you were one of the people who was all excited about the surge, you probably are not surprised to have learned that here in the Boston Globe in 2014, we have an article, quote, why the 2007 surge in Iraq failed.
It failed.
And this article reads, quote, the goals of the Iraq surge were spelled out explicitly by the White House in January 2007.
Stop the raging sectarian bloodletting and reconcile Sunni Shiites and Kurds in the government.
Quote, a successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations, then President George W. Bush said.
In light of all that has happened since that announcement, it is jaw-dropping to still hear the surge described as a success.
Yet the myth of its success is as alive as it is dangerous.
It's a myth that prevents us from grappling with the realities of the last effort in Iraq, even as we embark on another.
A former junior officer who served in Baghdad during the surge and now attends one of the city's fine graduate schools recently told me that the gains he saw were akin to Potemkin villages.
This summer, the Iraqi army collapsed as the Islamic State insurgency swept across the Sunni heartland.
Despite years of training and billions of dollars worth of U.S.
weapons and material, Iraqi army soldiers abandoned their uniforms, guns, and Humvees as they fled.
The United States has sent war troops to Iraq and launched airstrikes.
For Americans, the myth of the victorious surge is so seductive because it perpetuates an illusion of control.
It frames the Iraq War as something other than a geostrategic blunder and remembers our effort as something more than a stalemate.
What's more, it reinforces the notion that it's possible to influence events around the world if only military forces deployed properly.
It's a myth that makes victory in the current Iraq mission appear achievable.
Now, the same exact thing was done with Afghanistan.
I can show you countless articles year after year after year of American officials and neocon scumbags, including David Petraeus and Bill Kristol and Max Boot, insisting we were on the verge of victory in Afghanistan.
And of course, when we finally left in 2021, the Taliban just marched right back into power as though nothing had happened.
So at some point, one would hope that Americans start learning these lessons, that they start tuning out the people who have constantly lied to them, and yet it doesn't happen.
The exact people who are most responsible for the deceit and lies and propaganda that have led us into war after war after war after war are the same people responsible for justifying This US proxy war in Ukraine, and who know that public opinion is softening in support of this war, just like it did before in the wars before it in Afghanistan and Vietnam and Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.
And so they invented just a new propagandistic framework, the counter offensive, designed to make Americans continue to support this war, even though there is no explanation for how it's in the interest of the American people to do so.
And it's just crucial sometimes to take these steps back into history.
Not even long ago history, recent history.
The 1990s, the 2000s, the decade of Obama, in order to see that the people Americans are being persuaded to listen to, who are being presented to them as the credible military experts, are the same people whose history of lying and bloodthirsty warmongering cannot possibly be exceeded.
We're going to have this show on Bill Kristol, not to focus on him personally, but just to illustrate that even the worst of the worst continue to be presented as credible experts in American media outlets when it comes time to convince Americans to continue this war.
So I indicated at the start of the show that in addition to covering the latest developments in the war in Ukraine, we also wanted to continue our reporting on the censorship regime that continues we also wanted to continue our reporting on the censorship regime that continues to grow in Brazil, both because it's important unto itself, but also because it really is being used as the laboratory, the model, by the EU and by North America leaders, including in America and Canada, as the model
including in America and Canada, as the model they hope to implement here to take the censorship regime even further.
We actually broke a big story in Brazil and reported it here on the Rumble show back in January We obtained a copy of a Supreme Court order in Brazil that ordered multiple internet platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and Rumble, to immediately ban the platforms of elected officials in Brazil, including the most voted for member of Congress in Brazil, as well as various media commentators.
And in the order, it gave them two hours to comply and a fine of 100,000 reais for every day that they failed to do so with no due process, completely in secret.
In fact, the order required these platforms to maintain that order in secrecy.
We were able to obtain one, and that's how we were able to report on it.
And we do want to keep reporting on the escalating censorship regime in Brazil because that is what's coming to the United States.
We're out of time today to do more.
We're going to continue the reporting on our Live After Show.
Our Live After Show is something we do every Tuesday and Thursday night.
We do it on our Locals platform, which is part of Rumble.
It is for subscribers only.
If you want to have access to that after show where we take your questions and respond to your feedback and also continue the reporting from this show that we're not able to have time for on the live broadcast itself, you can simply join our community.
Join the Locals community where you have access to those exclusive shows.
We have the transcripts for every program that we post every night, as well as written journalism that I write, that other people write, including outside contributors.
It is a growing community of people who take this written journalism, debate it, discuss it, and including on our after show.
It also really does help our show.
Remember, we're an independent journalistic outlet.
We don't have the superstructure of a large corporation that controls our show, that produces it, that edits it, that tells us what we can say and doesn't say.
But we also don't have a corporation that funds our staff either.
And so this is really something on which we rely to continue to grow the show and the kind of journalism that we do here.
to join, simply click the join button and that will give you access.
Remember, System Update is also available on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform.
You can listen to the show in each episode in podcast form 12 hours after it appears first live here on Rumble.
For those of you who've been continuing to watch and make the show a success, this is our 100th episode.
The audience size, the growth of the show really does radically exceed all the models and expectations we have at the start.
We're very grateful for those of you who have made it a success, a growing success, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
