US Sends Deadly Cluster Bombs to Ukraine After Years of Condemning Their Use. Plus: YouTube's Censorship of Jordan Peterson's Talk with RFK Jr. | SYSTEM UPDATE #112
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the U.S.
proxy war in Ukraine continues to escalate, still with no end in sight.
With Ukraine and the U.S.
now facing a serious shortage in artillery, not just Ukraine, but the U.S., the Biden administration announced that it would furnish Kiev with cluster bombs.
A notorious weapon that kills civilians at a high rate, including children, especially children, for years after their use, for years after the conflict is over, and is thus banned by more than a hundred countries, including almost all of the U.S.' 's Western European NATO allies.
Last year, when reports surfaced that both Russia and Ukraine were using cluster bombs on the battlefield, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused Russia, but not Ukraine of course, of committing what she called, quote, war crime, simply as a result of their use.
The multi-pronged cost to the U.S.
from this war continues to escalate as well.
As we have often reported, much of the world is exploiting the U.S.
fixation in Ukraine to create confederations against American power, often to the benefit principally of China.
While the war in Ukraine is seen in American corporate media and in the establishment wings of both parties, and in Washington generally, as a noble crusade to defend democracy, Because everyone knows the U.S.
government always wages war not for its own interests but for the benevolent and selfless goal of delivering freedom to the peoples of the world.
Much of the world views this war as little more than a naked attempt by the U.S.
and NATO not to save Ukraine but to sacrifice Ukraine at the altar of the U.S.
geopolitical goal of weakening Russia.
The use by the U.S.
of this despised and widely banned weapon will only exacerbate this cost.
All of this has led even steadfast supporters of the Biden administration and its war policy in Ukraine to object to U.S.
actions for the first time.
That includes the New York Times editorial board and numerous Democratic House members.
But that will likely matter little.
Biden is being cheered on in his use of cluster munitions by the standard range of DC warmongers, from John Bolton to Lindsey Graham, who have heaped praise on Biden for his moral courage.
And it is hard to remember the last time this bipartisan class of endless war advocates has lost any debate in Washington.
As a result, this war is likely to grind on even further with the U.S.
continuously doing exactly that which it vowed at the start it would never do because doing so would be too dangerous and escalatory.
That's exactly how mission creep and escalation in wars always happens and we are seeing it repeat itself before our eyes yet again.
Then last week, one of the world's most popular podcasters, Jordan Peterson, interviewed RFK Jr., a Democratic presidential candidate, polling at 20% among Democratic Party voters in the primary.
The interview was published on the YouTube channel of The Daily Liar, one of the most watched right-wing independent media outlets in the world.
But shortly thereafter, Google, the owner of YouTube, casually announced that it was banning the interview.
Not removing parts of it, but banning the entire interview from its platform.
This type of censorship by corporate giants, banning an interview with a leading presidential candidate conducted by one of the world's most popular interviewers, Jordan Peterson, would have once been controversial, if even unthinkable.
It would have provoked outrage and indignation, especially in left-liberal circles.
But these days, barely anyone bats an eye.
It didn't even make the news, really.
That corporate tech giants dictate the limits of our political debates is now expected and normalized.
In fact, it would have been more surprising if Google had permitted this interview to be heard.
Nonetheless, despite how customary this now is, it's worth reflecting on how extreme this censorship has become.
And it's particularly worth taking note of exactly who is and who is not the targets of this corporate censorship because in those decisions lies significant insight about who is genuinely a threat to establishment power and who is perceived as harmless by establishment centers of power.
And then, in breaking news that emerged just shortly before we went on the air tonight, the House Judiciary Committee released an extraordinary new report.
It reveals that the FBI worked in tandem with Ukrainian intelligence agencies to pressure and even order big tech companies to remove content and postings about the war in Ukraine, including content posted by U.S.
citizens and even some American journalists.
The Judiciary Committee acquired these emails to Big Tech from the FBI as part of its ongoing investigation into the weaponization of the FBI and other powers of the U.S.
security state for nakedly political ends.
Think about what this means.
American citizens are funding the war in Ukraine endlessly, tens of billions of dollars, while at the same time, the Ukrainian government demands that our free speech be limited by working with the FBI to have big tech remove and suppress dissent about the war that we as American citizens are funding.
We'll show you the details of this new report.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
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You can also rate and review each episode, which helps spread the visibility of the program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
People often talk in U.S.
wars about escalation and mission creep.
The classic case was the war in Vietnam, which began with President Kennedy sending a few thousand advisors, promising there would never be any combat troops on the ground.
And lo and behold, after President Kennedy was assassinated as early as 1964, the U.S. security state concocted a false story about aggression by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin that resulted in the Senate almost unanimously approving the authorization of military force.
And within a year, the U.S. was in full-fledged war in the jungles of Vietnam for reasons that barely anyone can explain now.
It ended up resulting in the loss of 60,000 American lives and at least 2 million Vietnamese lives in the U.S.
left and barely accomplished anything just as happened in the 20-year war in Afghanistan where the U.S.
occupied that war, occupied that country for 20 years.
And as soon as it left, the Taliban waltzed back into power as though nothing had happened.
Same thing in Libya, where you can find the speeches of President Obama.
We've shown you this before, promising at the beginning that the only point of the NATO air bombing raid in Libya was to protect citizens in Benghazi, to create a no-fly zone, to protect civilians, that it was not a regime change war.
And very quickly, the war was obviously designed with only one purpose, which was to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, resulted in no benefits to American citizens and all kinds of suffering and costs for the Libyan people.
That's how escalation and mission creep take place.
I don't think I can recall an example in our lifetime of mission creep and escalation as vivid as the US proxy war in Ukraine because the war has been driven by one dynamic.
Every month, President Biden and the Obama and the Biden White House promise that there is some line that they will not cross.
The Ukrainians start demanding it.
Neocons and warmongers in Washington echo those demands.
The Biden administration says this is something we will not do because doing that will be too escalatory, too dangerous, will drag us and our country too much in that war.
Sometimes weeks later, sometimes months later, the U.S.
turns around and provides exactly the weapons that it once said it would and could never provide.
That happened with long-range missiles, it happened with tanks, it happened with F-16 fighter jets, and now it's happening again with cluster bombs.
A weapon that, for very good reason, is banned by over a hundred countries.
Not because it's some powerful, scary weapon too potent to use in war, but because it's a weapon uniquely suited to kill civilians in the area in which it's used.
And not just civilians, but principally children.
And not only during the conflict, but for years to come after the conflict, because so often These munitions do not explode, they are duds.
They fall somewhere, some children find them while playing and the bomb detonates and it kills many civilians.
This has happened over and over and over again, which is why around the world these munitions are considered immoral.
In fact, last year when Russia was reportedly using them in Ukraine, Jen Psaki on behalf of the White House said that Russia was committing war crimes simply by using these bombs that we are now providing to Ukraine.
And the reason we're providing them to Ukraine is because both Ukraine and now the United States face a munitions shortage, an artillery shortage.
Ukraine has a shortage of munitions because the United States has a shortage of munitions.
We've depleted our own military supplies.
To fuel this proxy war in Ukraine.
And we don't have any more artillery to give to Ukraine.
And so we're giving them cluster munitions instead.
Not only risking the lives of all kinds of Ukrainian civilians, remember the people we're supposed to be going to war in order to protect, whose lives are now going to be endangered.
Often the people in Ukraine who are not loyal to the government in Kiev but who live in eastern Ukraine, the ethnic Russians, who have been fighting the central government in Ukraine, in Kiev for the last eight years, to have a separatist or semi-autonomous region, those are the people most in danger.
And the U.S.
is yet again risking its own soft power, its own standing in the world, by providing weapons to Ukraine that most of the world considers intrinsically immoral.
First of all, here's the report from the Washington Post on July 6.
Quote, Biden approves cluster munitions supply to Ukraine.
The article reads, there the sub-headline is, transfer will bypass legal limits on dud rate for the controversial weapons.
Quote, President Biden has approved the provision of U.S.
cluster munitions for Ukraine.
Withdraw down of the weapons from Defense Department stocks due to be announced Friday.
The move, which will bypass U.S. law prohibiting the production use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1%, comes amid concerns about Kiev's lagging counteroffensive against entrenched Russian troops and dwindling Western stocks of conventional artillery.
Now, you probably remember this vaunted counteroffensive that people like David Petraeus and Max Boot in the Washington Post were promising you was coming and would change the course of the war.
And for that reason, you should just hold on for a little bit longer.
Ukrainian victory was on the way.
The Washington Post just a couple of weeks ago had a top secret scoop that its national security reporter Shane Harris proudly touted.
That, for one thing, was based entirely on leaks of top-secret information.
Remember, Washington is supposed to pretend to be so concerned about the leak of classified information that President Trump is now indicted on federal charges, not for leaking classified information, but simply for storing it improperly or in a negligent way.
And yet, every day, you can pick up the Washington Post or the New York Times, and there's leaks of top-secret information.
Nobody cares.
Nobody wants to find the person who did it.
Because they weaponize leaks all the time for propaganda.
And the article was essentially nothing other than this proud scoop that CIA officials went to Kiev and got convinced that glorious victory is coming with the counteroffensive.
In reality, as we've showed you, and as they're now acknowledging, the counteroffensive is a joke.
It has almost accomplished nothing.
The Russian forces are deeply entrenched in their defensive positions all through the front line in eastern and southern Ukraine.
It's very difficult for Ukraine to penetrate those front lines.
If they're able to do so, it will be not months, but years.
So this war will just continue to go on and your money will be transferred out of the U.S.
Treasury into the coffers of Ukraine, long regarded as the most corrupt nation in Europe.
As the New York Times editorializes it did last week, as we showed you, that the U.S.
is drowning in debt and therefore Americans need to prepare for what the paper calls costly or painful cuts to Social Security and Medicaid.
But we certainly have enough, as usual, to fund endless war in Ukraine.
That's why these cluster munitions are being provided, because the United States doesn't have the artillery supply necessary to furnish to Ukraine.
So we're depleting our own weaponry, our own self-defense, our own military.
Over who rules Eastern Ukraine?
The Washington Post goes on, quote, The decision follows months of internal administration debate over whether to supply the controversial munitions, which are banned by most countries in the world.
What are cluster emissions, the widely banned weapon Biden is sending to Ukraine?
Cluster weapons explode in the air over a target, releasing dozens to hundreds of smaller submunitions across a wide area.
More than 120 countries have joined a convention banning their use as inhumane and indiscriminate, in large part because of high failure rates that litter the landscape with unexploded submunitions that endanger both friendly troops and civilians, often for decades, decades after the conflict often for decades, decades after the conflict ends.
The United States, Ukraine, and Russia, which is alleged to have used them extensively in Ukraine, are not parties to the convention.
Eight of NATO's 31 members, including the United States, have not ratified the convention.
Which means that 23 NATO members out of 31 have ratified it, have banned these weapons, including every country in Western Europe.
It's the countries in Eastern Europe that have not.
So this is an incredibly controversial decision around the world.
You may not care about that, but what that means is that US standing has eroded even further.
The Chinese will be able to use this decision to rile up anti-American sentiment the way they are very adept at doing these days, increasing Chinese influence all over the world.
While this decision is extremely controversial throughout the world, in Washington, as you would expect, it's being applauded by the most deranged warmongers.
Here, for example, is Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who quite literally has never encountered a proposed American war or an actual American war that he did not cheer.
You show him an American war, an actual one or a proposed one, and he will immediately start beating the war drums.
Here he is heaping praise on Joe Biden for this decision.
Quote in a July 7 tweet, I support and appreciate the Biden administration sending cluster munitions to Ukraine.
We must provide the Ukrainians the tools they need to evict the Russian invaders.
Why not give them nuclear weapons if that's the principle?
What is the limiting principle here?
The idea that the Ukrainians are now going to breach the front lines of Russia with cluster munitions seems extremely improbable.
But if the idea is, and I've heard people say this, look, it's war, we just give whatever weapons we can use.
Why not just bomb Russian apartment buildings?
Why not just deliberately target Russian civilians?
Why not give Ukraine nuclear weapons?
Of course there are limits to what we ought to do in order to help Ukraine win this war.
Cluster munitions are despised around the world.
They've often killed American troops as well, who find them and then they detonate.
Not only Lindsey Graham, but also John Bolton.
He preys on Joe Biden here from the Hill on July 7th.
Quote, John Bolton hails Biden's decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine.
You see there in the headline, he called it, quote, an excellent idea.
So you have Lindsey Graham, John Bolton cheering Biden, also Alexander Vindman, the American-Ukrainian fanatic who was at the center of the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, who became a resistance and MSNBC hero.
As a result, there in the Hill, quote, Vindman on cluster munitions, quote, from a practical standpoint, the president did the right thing.
Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman said on Saturday that President Biden quote did the right thing in agreeing to send cluster munitions to Ukraine quote from practical standpoint the president did the right thing he told CNN adding Ukraine is going to be very mindful.
In a lot of ways it seems counterintuitive but it's frankly one of the most humane things that they could do he continued.
Instead of having this war run indefinitely having a sharp punctuated conclusion to the war is a pretty humane approach.
These are the people who have been saying for a year and a half, just about, that Russia is on the verge of collapse, that Ukraine is about to win, that providing these long-range missiles, providing these tanks, providing these F-16s are going to ensure Ukraine wins the war quickly.
None of that, of course, happens.
They're never discredited.
They come right back.
They make the similar promises, and nobody reminds them that every time they promised them before, It is proven untrue.
Now, let's look at what happens.
And this, to me, is such a perfect illustration of how U.S.
foreign policy functions and the mentality behind U.S.
endless war, which is that we impose rules on the rest of the world that we very flagrantly exempt ourselves from whenever we want.
Here is Deniz Saki.
In February of 2023, so just a few months ago, speaking about reports that Russia used cluster munitions in Ukraine.
Okay, so first of all, listen to that question.
and vacuum bombs being used by the Russians.
If that's true, what is the next step of this administration?
And is there a red line for how much violence will be tolerated against civilians in this manner that's illegal and potentially a war crime?
Okay, so first of all, listen to that question.
That's what these journalists do all the time.
They always question the White House, not from the perspective of, are you involving Americans in a war in which we have no vital interest?
or Or, isn't this becoming dangerous, what we're doing?
Instead, the perspective always is, why aren't we more involved in this war?
The reporter called the use of cluster bombs a war crime.
She said that cluster munitions themselves are illegal.
And basically pressed the White House on whether we would become directly involved in the war, whether we would go to war with Russia if they continued to use cluster munitions.
That's what she meant by a red line.
That was always the phrase they meant when they tried to pressure the Obama administration to go to war with Syria directly instead of just having the CIA do a clandestine war, a dirty war against the Assad regime.
She was doing exactly what the media did constantly throughout the Obama years, saying What's the red line?
And then President Obama finally said the red line is the use of chemical weapons.
There were claims that Assad used chemical weapons.
And the media began openly and flagrantly demanding that the U.S.
intervene directly in that war.
Put boots on the ground combat troops in Syria and remove Assad from power.
Why would the U.S.
do that?
Why is it in the interest of the American people who rule Syria?
So this is what she's doing.
She's demanding that Jen Psaki say, what is the red line for U.S.
involvement in the war, beyond just fueling a proxy war, but directly fighting with combat troops.
And the premise of the question is, the use of cluster bombs is a war crime and cluster bombs themselves are quote, illegal.
The same weapons we're now giving to Ukraine, and this is what Jen Psaki said.
It would be.
I don't have any confirmation of that.
We have seen the reports.
If that were true, it would potentially be a war crime.
Obviously there are a range of international fora that would assess that, so certainly we would look to that to be a part of that conversation.
So it would likely be a war crime simply to use cluster munitions.
No indication of how they're being used, whether they're being used recklessly.
And remember, the Convention on Cluster Munitions and Cluster Bombs that 120 countries have signed does not demand they be used responsibly.
They just ban them on the grounds that they're intrinsically irresponsible because they will inevitably result in the loss of a large amount of civilian life.
And since we're in the war in Ukraine, ostensibly to protect civilian life, it's kind of a strange thing to do to send them weapons that we know will kill civilians in the war zone, meaning Ukrainian civilians, Ukrainian children, who will find these undetonated weapons.
And when they do, they will be killed, as has happened so often.
Here, for example, is a USA Today article from April 4th, a few months ago.
From a soldier who writes, quote, I dropped cluster bombs on Laos in the U.S.
secret war there.
Ukraine shouldn't want this nightmare.
The sub-headline says all that was accomplished by using these inhumane weapons was to leave a trail of destruction that remains to this day.
And a deep sense of regret for U.S.
veterans like myself.
The author wrote, quote, Ukrainian leaders in Kiev and members of the Republican Party who have asked the Biden administration to release cluster munitions for use in Ukraine should be aware of what they asked for.
The results will be deadly and disastrous and will haunt the United States and the people of Ukraine for decades.
I participated in the extensive bombing of Laos during America's secret war.
From December 1966 until December 1968, I was assigned to air bases in Thailand.
The primary mission of the units to which I was assigned was to stop the flow of personnel and materials coming from North Vietnam through the Ho Chi Minh Trail to South Vietnam.
Despite the 2.5 million tons of ordnance that the United States dropped from 1964 to 1973, it did nothing to impede the traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
All that was accomplished by using these inhumane weapons was to leave a trail of destruction that remains to this day in a deep set of regret for U.S.
veterans like myself.
Up to 30% of these, quote, airborne mines did not explode on impact.
But remain buried in the ground for future generations to trip over.
Since 1964, more than 50,000 men, women, and children have been killed or maimed in Laos.
A third of Laos' beautiful land is held hostage by unexploded ordnance, preventing farmers from working the land to feed their families.
Talking about 60 years later, and large parts of Laos are unusable because of cluster bombs.
That's why they're banned by 120 countries.
Not because they're some potent weapon that tough guys use to win war, and if you want to win war, you dig deep and you use whatever you have.
They're not weapons that are uniquely effective.
They're just weapons that kill civilians at an enormous rate, not only during the conflict, but for decades to come.
This country is going to be littered with these weapons.
And they still have, they may have lower dud rates, but they still have dud rates above 1%, well above 1%.
Here from the outstanding independent media outlet Declassified UK on July 6th, so a few days ago, is an anecdote about their use in Kosovo.
Cluster bombs for Ukraine, a warning from Kosovo.
And this article reads, quote, With Washington poised to ship cluster bombs to Kiev, declassified visits Kosovo to review the grim legacy of NATO firing this banned weapon in the Balkans.
Thousands of bomblets failed to detonate on impact, posing a hazard to children who mistook their little yellow parachutes for toys in the decade after the war.
These remnants claimed another 178 casualties in Kosovo.
Unexploded cluster munitions remain a hazard in Kosovo long after NATO's 11-week air war ended in 1999.
Gorin, a Kosovo server, recalls how the weapon almost killed a farmer in a vineyard near Garancia's Orthodox Monastery, a World Heritage Site.
His dates tally with a British demining charity, the Halo Trust, which said it was, quote, Still finding hundreds of cluster bombs in Kosovo that same year.
At one site near Junik in western Kosovo, they cleared 171 cluster bombs dropped by NATO, which stubbornly refuses to provide aid workers with access to its official database of airstrikes, Partly as a result of these difficulties, 44 hazardous sites were yet to be fully demined by the end of 2021.
While the Atlantic Alliance justifies its wartime conduct by saying the targets were Serb soldiers, the people now living in the liberated areas are often ethnic Albanians, the very people NATO set out to save.
Remember, these weapons are going to be used in eastern and southern Ukraine where the Russian forces are dug in.
Not in Russia.
The people who are going to find these bombs and be killed by them for years to come are Ukrainian civilians.
And they're not Ukrainian civilians who live in western Kiev, western Ukraine, who are often loyal to the Ukrainian government.
They're people who have been opposed to even enemies of the Kiev government, which might be one of the reasons why Zelensky doesn't care.
The question is, should the U.S.
have this moral mar on its record, and for what?
Here from the New York Times in 2019, quote, "America's dark history of killing its own troops with cluster munitions." Quote, "The weapons are notorious for their effects on civilians, but five years of reporting and hundreds of interviews have revealed they've also killed and wounded scores of Americans.
The devastating effect that dud bomblets from cluster munitions have inflicted on civilians is well documented.
They have killed or injured an estimated 56,000 to 86,000 civilians since World War II.
The United States alone has spent more than $3.4 billion on demining operations since 1993, including in countries where it released hundreds of millions of bomblets in past wars that continue to kill and maim civilians.
Relatively few Americans loitered in Iraq and Kuwait after the ceasefire, but their military's cluster bombs kept stalking them.
Between the start of the invasion in late February and early April, some two dozen soldiers and Marines were killed by American submunition duds of all kinds.
An additional 18 were killed by explosions that most likely came from submunitions, but records are unclear.
The U.S.
and the British used them in Iraq.
Back in 2003, and it was widely denounced, here from The Guardian, April 4, 2003, just a week or so after the invasion of Iraq began, the British use of cluster bombs has been condemned, and it details how American and British forces were accused of breaking international laws.
After admitting that they used cluster bombs.
So this history is a long and ugly history that has damaged Americans standing in the world and killed a huge number of civilians.
Now here is a interview from the site JustSecurity from May of last year.
They interviewed Steven Pomper, who was a special assistant to President Obama and a senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
And they asked him, What was his experience using cluster bombs during the Obama administration?
This is what he said, quote, they asked him, you served as senior director in the White House office responsible for human rights and multilateral affairs during Obama's second term and in that capacity worked on issues relating to U.S.
cluster munitions policy.
To begin, what are cluster munitions and how are they governed by international law?
And he answered, quote, cluster munitions are conventional explosives that break apart in flight and scatter bomblets called submunitions.
They have a deserved reputation As an especially ugly weapon of war because of the danger they pose to civilians.
Not to Russian soldiers, to civilians.
In densely populated urban areas, they disperse at random, imperiling residents.
In rural regions, their undetonated remnants contaminate the countryside, creating a lingering hazard for farmers, herders, and others.
The ICRC has noted that children in particular are quote, attracted by the shape, size, and color of the munitions.
The way they're built makes them appealing to children.
Children see them and find them and think they're toys and pick them up and play with them and then get killed by them regularly.
As a matter of international law, the primary treaty governing the use of cluster munitions is the Convention on Cluster Munitions, CCM, which was concluded at Oslo in 2008 and came into force in 2010.
The product of years of effort by civil society and supportive states, the CCM prohibits state parties from developing, producing, acquiring, using, transferring, or stockpiling cluster munitions.
While 23 NATO powers, including the UK, France, and Germany, are parties to the CCM, the United States is not, either is Ukraine or Russia.
The CCM was drafted so that NATO members that became parties could continue to cooperate militarily with the U.S.
It expressly permits military cooperation and operations with states not a party to this convention.
Beyond the CCM, the use of cluster munitions is also governed by customary international law.
Some experts in the arms control and human rights communities see clusters as inherently indiscriminate and thus illegal.
International law doesn't apply to the U.S., of course, but in the event that it did, experts believe that without a convention, the precepts of international law that ban the reckless or indiscriminate use of weapons designed to kill civilians include the use of cluster bombs.
Quote, they argue that their wide and imprecise deployment makes it impossible to reliably mitigate the impact on civilians and that unexploded or dudged submunitions can remain on the ground for years, presenting a lethal threat to noncombatants who come into contact with them.
While the United States does not consider uses of cluster munitions to be per se illegal, it does recognize that they are governed by customary international law requirements that use of force must be discriminant and proportionate.
These requirements are also codified in Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions, to which both Russia and Ukraine are parties, but which the United States does not join.
Note that the United States simply doesn't join international efforts to curb the use of indiscriminate weapons because we regard ourselves as exempt.
The whole world sees that, and it absolutely affects how the world perceives us.
Now, when you're a superpower whose power cannot be challenged, it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks.
They can hate you.
They can be angry at you.
They can think you're hypocritical and immoral.
It doesn't matter.
You're too powerful.
They can't do anything about it but submit.
That is not the world in which we live any longer.
As both the interview we conducted with John Mearsheimer, the International Relations Professor at the University of Chicago, and other interviews that we've done have demonstrated the world is much more multipolar now, which is why China is marching into the Middle East and forging a peace deal with two traditional superpowers in the Middle East that the United States has controlled, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Why is it worth all of this?
Over this war?
I do not understand the answer to that question.
I never will.
I've been asking that question for a year and a half.
to the immoral use of American power.
Why is it worth all of this over this war?
I do not understand the answer to that question.
I never will.
I've been asking that question for a year and a half.
If you are an ordinary American citizen, how is your life in any way affected, improved, by having Kiev continue to rule the Donbass instead of the Donbass being a semi-autonomous region separate from Kiev?
What difference does it make to the lives of American citizens?
It plainly does not.
So why is the American government using enormous amounts of American resources and depleting its own stockpile to pursue this goal that doesn't improve or affect the lives of American citizens, which should be, in theory at least, the primary goal of the US government, to pursue policies that improve the lives of its citizens?
This is so basic.
And yet, U.S.
endless war has been such a normalized posture that nobody really bothers to ask that question any longer.
It really doesn't matter.
As long as you convince the population that it's a righteous war, they get excited by it, they get purpose from it, they derive strength from it, especially the pundit class.
And then the question of why we're fighting this war or what purpose it serves to U.S.
citizens no longer matters.
Elites benefit in every way.
Pundits get to write columns about it, that are Churchillian in nature, they puff out their chest, they talk about how strong we are.
Adam Smith warned about this in a passage we've shown you several times in 1776 from The Wealth of Nations, where he describes as human beings will love war as long as they maintain a safe distance from it and get to read about the conquests of their army.
And they get disappointed when the war ends because the entertainment they derive from it, the sense of strength and pulsating purpose comes to an end.
Do not underestimate that effect of war, especially for the professional media class.
To say nothing of the arms industry that profits immensely at the expense of the American people, who have lobbyists in Washington who wield a lot of power, the think tanks that love war, And the U.S.
intelligence community whose budget and power and authority explode whenever wars are discovered.
That's who benefits from these wars.
Now, Ukraine has been using these weapons before.
The New York Times, an ardent backer of Ukraine and the U.S.
war in Ukraine, reported that in April of 2023.
The headline read, quote, To push back Russians, Ukrainians hit a village with cluster munitions.
They hit their own village using cluster bombs.
Quote, The New York Times verified that Ukraine's forces appeared to fire at least two of these internationally banned weapons in a neighborhood, putting Ukrainian civilians at extreme risk.
The New York Times also noted the reports that Russia has used cluster munitions.
That has not been proven.
I think the reports are pretty convincing that they have.
So Ukraine has already been using them on their own people, but they've been using them in Eastern Ukraine, where the population is often against the central government in Ukraine, and therefore they seem to value those lives less.
Now, the reality of why We're giving these munitions, these cluster munitions, is really quite disturbing.
It's because we've depleted our own stockpiles to the point we have nothing else to give.
Here is President Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, explaining the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine.
We base our security assistance decision on Ukraine's needs on the ground.
And Ukraine needs artillery to sustain its offensive and defensive operations.
Artillery is at the core of this conflict.
Ukraine is firing thousands of rounds a day to defend against Russian efforts to advance and also to support its own efforts to retake its sovereign territory.
We have provided Ukraine with a historic amount of unitary artillery rounds, and we are ramping up domestic production of these rounds.
We've already seen substantial increases in production, but this process will continue to take time.
So that's it.
We don't even have the capability, the manufacturing capability, to provide Ukraine with the munitions they need even to be competitive with the Russian Army.
So we're just dumping Cluster munitions there instead.
Now, the US foreign policy class has repeatedly condemned the use of cluster bombs.
Here, for example, is Samantha Power, who probably is more responsible than anyone for convincing President Obama to join the French and British effort to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, and that regime change war would turn out to be a gigantic disaster for Europe and for Libya.
Here she is criticizing President Trump in 2017.
Quote, Trump walks away from Bush administration's 2008 commitment to phase out cluster munitions with unacceptable dud rates.
We have the world's most advanced military and we are better than this.
But now Samantha Power is delighted about the fact that we're sending cluster munitions to Ukraine because now it's President Obama who's doing it and not President Trump.
Here is a tweet, sorry, President Biden rather, and not President Trump.
Do we have the tweet from Ro Khanna who explains why, which explains why the, it's on the screen, there you see the tweet from Ro Khanna.
This is what I find particularly disturbing beyond the moral and ethical aspect.
Quote, the fact that we do not have enough conventional artillery to send Ukraine should be a wake up call.
Most of the top 15 steel producers now are Chinese and we don't have a single one.
The U.S.
urgently needs a strategy to become a manufacturing superpower.
We don't even have enough of our own weapons to defend ourselves, and yet we're pouring weapons into Ukraine.
How is that justified for the U.S.
government to drain its own treasury and to drain its own supply of weapons for Ukraine?
But this is the mentality of endless war.
Once you get into it, once you declare that it's imperative to win, you start doing anything, including things you once vowed you will never do.
Because the reality is the Russians are winning this war.
They have currently occupied 23% of Ukrainian territory.
They are very dug in.
It's going to be extremely difficult for Ukraine to expel them.
The Russians are never going to allow NATO and Ukraine to regain this territory without all kinds of desperate action.
It's extremely dangerous, even if Ukraine could gain in this counter offensive.
And if they're able to, it's going to take Hundreds of billions of dollars more and all kinds of weapons and a lot of time.
Why?
What is the reason?
What is the benefit to the American people for this constant spiraling escalation out of control?
You could see this coming at the beginning of the war just based on the propaganda in which Americans were drowning.
That there were going to be no limits on this war.
And there's at least four or five times the Biden White House has said they wouldn't do a particular thing, it would not take a particular action, because doing so was too dangerous, only for them to get desperate and take it because the Ukrainians are losing the war.
It's been incredibly costly to the Russians, but they so far have gained 23%, a quarter of Ukrainian territory that they now control that is under their governance.
So The only way this war is going to end on any terms favorable to the United States or NATO is by doing a lot more than this.
We're already at the point of providing cluster bombs to Ukraine.
The Treasury is a spigot of money going over to Kiev.
Who knows where that money is ending up?
And the question is, what is the end to this war?
The reality is there is none.
That's why the U.S.
us as a country at endless war and all of the costs that come with it.
Earlier this month, the very popular podcaster, Jordan Peterson, who has his show now on the Daily Wire, which is an independent right-wing platform who has his show now on the Daily Wire, which is an independent right-wing platform There's Whatever you think of the Daily Wire, it is an incredible success story for independent media.
It is spearheaded by Ben Shapiro.
It is a gigantic behemoth worth Tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions of dollars.
And Jordan Peterson is one of their most popular voices.
He has a podcast.
They typically place their content on YouTube.
That has obviously been a source of controversy on the right when Steven Crowder was recruited by the Daily Wire to Join daily wire one of his objections ended up being after their contract negotiations broke down that their model requires that they stay within the parameters set by Big Tech because they don't they're not principally on rumble.
They don't have a free speed platform.
They're critics of Big Tech and yet also dependent on Big Tech.
And Jordan Peterson conducted an interview with RFK Jr., just like we did on this show.
Many other shows did.
RFK Jr.
is relying on independent media for the messaging of his campaign.
They discussed a wide range of issues, including vaccines and COVID policy.
Google decided that some of the things each of them said transgressed the limits imposed by Google on what you're allowed to say about COVID.
And the pandemic and vaccines, there are limits that this corporation sets on what you are allowed to say.
That in and of itself, given Google's power, should be very alarming.
We reported before that we tried to advertise on Google's network on YouTube for this show and were banned from doing so.
Primarily because we're on Rumble and that's a competitor of YouTube.
That at least is a commercial motive.
This is an ideological motive.
This is Google not wanting certain political views to be aired or certain political voices to be heard, including President Biden's principal competitor for the Democratic Party.
Primarily, even if you think he's an unlikely candidate, he's polling at 20% RFK Jr.
is.
That is a mainstream person, a mainstream candidate.
He has been in the political mainstream for his whole life.
And now because he's running against President Biden, Google, the most significant disseminator of information on the internet, the primary place where people get their information in the West, decided that RFK Jr.
is a bridge too far, that he could not be heard from, nor could Jordan Peterson, and they simply removed the entire interview.
That should be something that when you hear about is amazing and shocking and enraging, But I know it isn't.
I know when I heard the news, that part of my brain that reacted to it, reacted in a way that said, yes, this is what big tech does.
This is what Google does.
That's the world in which we live.
We live in a despotic world where corporate giants control the flow of information.
So we're guaranteed the right of free speech in theory on parchment paper in the Constitution.
But the reality is the corporations that control the flow of information over the internet Our enemies of free speech have eliminated it, have set extremely severe limits on what you can and can't say, on the kinds of views that can and cannot be heard.
And they're doing so not autonomously on their own, but at the direction of the U.S.
government.
And there's a new report from the House Judiciary Committee that is yet another bit of revelation about how the FBI is directly pressuring these corporations to censor for them.
And in this case, they're working with Ukrainian intelligence to censor American citizens who are expressing prohibited views.
That's right.
Views that are prohibited about the war in Ukraine.
So first of all, here from NBC News is the report about Google's decision to ban this interview between Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr.
from June 19th of 2023.
Quote, YouTube removes video of RFK Jr.
and Jordan Peterson for vaccine misinformation.
Kennedy, an anti-vaccine crusader, Is seeking support for a Democratic presidential run.
Look at how they just insert that phrase.
Almost as though it's part of his legal name.
RFK Jr.
comma anti-vaccine crusader.
Because they try and prime the public to believe of course this person should not be heard from.
He's against vaccines.
It's a total lie.
He's not against vaccines.
As he's explained many times, he's in favor of better safety protocols for vaccines, of more information about whether vaccines are effective.
But even if he were against vaccines, that is something that you should be allowed to say in the United States.
That is the purpose of free speech.
And yet we know for certain that the U.S.
health industry, led by Dr. Fauci, successfully pressured Facebook and Google from into banning dissent on a wide range of issues when it came to health policy and COVID including views that got censored that according to Mark Zuckerberg ended up being proven true.
That is classic totalitarianism when you're not only censored in your political speech, but you're banned from expressing views that are true because the government dislikes them.
Here's the NBC report, quote, YouTube said Monday that it had removed a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
speaking with podcast host Jordan Peterson for spreading what the company said was vaccine misinformation.
The decision is the latest challenge for Kennedy as he seeks to find support for a Democratic presidential run after years as an anti-vaccine crusader.
A challenge to his candidacy?
Yeah, I think it's a challenge to your candidacy when the world's largest corporations are preventing you from being heard.
It's incredibly anti-democratic and authoritarian beyond being a challenge to his campaign.
The video was removed amid a broader tug-of-war online between vaccine conspiracy theorists and prominent doctors.
YouTube's policies against hosting false information are long-standing.
Quote, we removed the video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube's general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities, YouTube said Monday in a statement.
It was not the first time Kennedy has lost access to social media accounts or spreading health myth information.
Last year, Facebook and Instagram cited the same reason when they suspended the Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group that Kennedy founded.
At least one clip of the interview still appears on TikTok.
A representative for TikTok did not immediately have a comment.
Are you comfortable with that?
Just think about this.
Let's think about this for a minute.
This is a person whose father was a presidential candidate, a senator from New York, and a presidential candidate in 1968, a very successful one until he was assassinated.
His uncle was president of the United States.
He has spent his whole life as a mainstream Democrat and an environmental lawyer suing corporate polluters and factory farms for threats they pose to the public health.
And now suddenly he's somebody whose views are not just stigmatized, which would be fine, they're banned.
He's a presidential candidate who giant corporations are blocking the public from hearing.
Because he descends from the orthodoxy of a health establishment that has proven to be not only wrong but deceitful and dishonest over and over and over again.
Is that the proper role of large corporations, of corporate giants in American society?
To prevent views from being heard on the internet?
Here NBC ends up by saying, at least one clip of the interview still appears on TikTok.
A representative for TikTok did not immediately have a comment.
Do you see what NBC is doing there?
They're calling TikTok and they're saying, why are you allowing this RFK segment that has been banned by Google to appear on your platform?
They're trying to pressure TikTok into censoring.
This is what's so important to understand is that the leading agitators and activists For censorship of the internet are these large media corporations.
They are threatened by independent media.
They hate the idea that there are people who can speak without their control, who can say things that the corporate media has decided is false.
And they use their platform constantly under the guise of reporting.
Every day you can pick up the New York Times.
We called Facebook and asked for comment about why they're allowing this post to remain.
It's a way of telling Facebook, we're going to use our platform as the New York Times to accuse you of having blood on your hands or spreading disinformation or endangering marginalized groups if you continue to allow free speech instead of censoring.
That's the role that corporate media plays.
They have been the leaders in ushering in this corporate censorship regime.
And it would be bad enough if this were the autonomous decisions of corporate executives.
But we know it's not.
We know from the Twitter files, we know from all kinds of reporting that we've reported on endlessly on the show that this is coming from the federal government.
The federal government is pressuring these big tech platforms to censor for them in ways the Constitution would prevent the U.S.
government from doing directly.
And that was why a federal district court judge last week on July 4th
Granted a motion from the plaintiffs in this lawsuit that was brought against the FBI and the NIH and the White House Press Secretary alleging that they've been unconstitutionally pressuring Big Tech to censor for them and the federal court enjoined, prevented, banned, restrained these federal officials and federal agencies from continuing to pressure Big Tech.
Just today, those defendants asked for the court to stay that injunction pending appeal, and the federal district court judge refused to stay his order.
Did Pellet Court probably will?
They might.
They may stay the order pending appeal, but this is the point that we're at.
Whatever you think of Jordan Peterson, whatever you think of RFK Jr., you don't have to like them.
You don't even have to think what they're saying is true.
These are not people who are on the fringes or the margins.
They're not advocating that for genocide.
They're not advocating that huge groups of people be put into death camps.
These are not people who are so far outside of the bounds and traditions of American decency that censoring them should even be debatable.
And I bring this up now in part because I was interviewed by Jordan Peterson today for, I think that interview is going to come out later this week or maybe next week on his show, and I just remembered that Google banned this interview.
Just banned it.
His interview with RFK Jr.
And I realized that I didn't make such a big deal out of it because I'm also somebody at the point where it seems normal to me now.
And it shouldn't.
It shouldn't seem normal to any of us.
This is incredibly menacing.
The idea that these big tech companies, in conjunction with the federal government, impose such severe restrictions on the political views that can be heard, on the ability to dissent from establishment power.
Here's a tweet from Jordan Peterson on July 5th about this incident.
Oh, sorry, it's the image of the ban.
So he posted the image of the ban, and there you see it says, YouTube justifies its utterly inexcusable, pernicious, invisible, self-righteous, and counterproductive censorship.
Hey peasants, your woke corporate overlords think you're too stupid to separate wheat from chop yourselves.
And there you see the YouTube notice to Jordan Peterson saying we remove the following video.
This wasn't even a video.
This wasn't even the RFK video.
This was a separate interview that Jordan Peterson conducted on the new gender ideology with Helen Joyce, who's a dissident from gender ideology.
This video also got Removed.
It says we removed your content carefully, on appeal, and have confirmed that it violates our hate speech policy.
So no dissenting from health officials on COVID protocols, vaccines.
No hearing from RFK Jr.
He's running for president about his critique of the health establishment.
No questioning gender ideology.
One of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world in history, Google, is deciding what it is that you can and can't hear.
And what you can and can't hear completely aligns with establishment orthodoxy and the establishment agenda.
There's no difference.
It's not like Google's over here banning the views that establishment political figures in Washington believe in.
They're enforcing the pieties of the most powerful people in the country, the establishment wings of both political parties and of the most powerful pharmaceutical companies and the people in academia who have decided that everyone must affirm new gender ideology and not just be scorned if you don't but be censored the establishment wings of both political parties and of the most powerful pharmaceutical companies and the people in of the inheritance.
Now this is the question I want to ask.
Oftentimes, it is always the case That censorship is a tool of the powerful, used against dissidents and the marginalized.
That is true by definition.
Whoever has the power to censor in a society, by definition, is the institution of authority, is the center of power.
Censorship is always a tool of the powerful, used against dissidents and the marginalized.
That's why it's so logically absurd For left-wing censorship advocates to claim that censorship is necessary to protect the marginalized.
Why would the people with power, who wield enough power to censor, the U.S.
government, the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, and American tech billionaires, why would they use the censorship power to protect the marginalized?
They're not the marginalized, they're the establishment.
Those are the institutions of American power.
American political and corporate and financial power.
The people who get censored are always dissidents and the marginalized.
And one of the ways that you can distinguish between people who serve establishment power and people who threaten and challenge establishment power are by looking at who is censored and who isn't.
So the mainstream left in the United States, talking about the left wing of the Democratic Party, the people who are very loyal to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, even while pretending they're dissidents to the Democratic Party, the people who urge their followers to vote for the Democratic Party, The people who are led by people like Bernie Sanders and AOC and who like to fancy themselves as radical, those people are never, ever, ever censored.
Can you even imagine Bernie Sanders or AOC being censored by YouTube, by Google, by Facebook, by Twitter?
It's completely inconceivable.
That's because Bernie Sanders and AOC and their followers are completely harmless to establishment power.
They're servants of establishment power.
They're tools of establishment power.
Bernie Sanders and AOC have already endorsed Joe Biden's re-election campaign.
They didn't get anything in return for it.
They didn't demand anything in return for it.
They didn't wait to see who else was running against him.
There's a left-wing challenge to Joe Biden and Marianne Williamson.
There's an actual anti-establishment figure in RFK Jr.
who is very critical of Biden's belligerence toward both Russia and China, who's a vocal critic of the pharmaceutical industry and its ability to capture regulations in the United States and regulatory agencies.
That is the threat to establishment power.
That's why RFK Jr.
is being centered and Bernie and AOC never, ever would be.
Bernie and AOC are major cultural celebrities.
They are on the Sunday shows every single week.
They go on late night network programs all the time.
AOC went to the Met Gala.
Granted, she wore a very radical and threatening dress, designer gown, but she went to the Met Gala.
Because these are the most valuable tools to establishment power that exist.
That's why it is not just the case that AOC and Bernie are never censored by big tech.
You can't even imagine that happening.
It would be completely inconceivable.
That would be shocking.
Because they never say anything that is a threat to establishment power.
Everything they say advances establishment power, and that's why it's unimaginable.
Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr.
are constantly censored by Big Tech.
It is very common for right-wing, anti-establishment, populist figures to be censored by Big Tech.
Let us remember that the sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, was censored by Big Tech in collusion when Facebook, Google, and Twitter all banded together to remove the sitting President of the United States, the elected President, from the Internet by banning his accounts.
Even foreign leaders and countries like Germany and France and Mexico that have no love for Donald Trump were horrified by that and protested how anti-democratic that was to have corporate giants determining who is and is not allowed on the internet.
And it is incredibly menacing because it means that dissidents to establishment power and dissidents to establishment orthodoxy are no longer allowed to be heard.
That's what the censorship regime is for.
And it's extremely telling who is targeted by it and who is not.
That is how you know who is a genuine threat to establishment power and who is not.
Now, the way this was all instituted, I think it is very worth remembering, is the way that censorship regimes are always implemented, which is, in the first instance, what they do is they pick the most hated figure they can possibly conjure, and they censor that person or those people based on the knowledge that because these people are so hated, people will just succumb to their emotional reaction and be glad that these people are censored because they hate them so much.
And it will be very difficult to stand up and defend those people because if you do, you'll be accused of not defending the principle of free speech, but defending these people themselves.
And most people don't want to be attacked that way.
So the way in which this experimentation, this experiment was conducted was in 2019, the first two people depersoned By occlusion of big tech were Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.
In May of 2019, that was when Facebook banned them, and then other big tech companies immediately followed suit.
There you see the article from The Hill, Facebook bans Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, and other quote, dangerous figures.
Facebook announced Thursday that it has permanently banned a host of prominent figures it described as, quote, dangerous from its platform, including right-wing commentator and former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theory Alex Jones, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
The platform said it has determined that those figures are, quote, dangerous and removed them under their policy, barring individuals and groups that promote hateful and violent messages.
The tech giant, which has been engaged in an escalating crackdown on hate speech and fear-mongering on its platform, also removed neo-Nazi Paul Neiland, who previously ran for the House in Wisconsin, far-right activist Laura Loomer, and conservative YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson.
The individuals are all barred from Facebook as well as its image-sharing platform Instagram.
The batch of bans comes as civil rights groups ramp up their calls for Facebook to remove hateful and extremist speech from its platforms.
All people on the right, despite coincidence.
All the people who were perceived as being threats to establishment power.
Now, at the time it was predictable and predicted by some people.
That this ban was going to serve as a precedent would immediately start expanding outward to be used to silence people closer and closer to mainstream thought who were also dissidents.
And of course, that's exactly what happened.
Here from the Hill in 2018, when Alex Jones' ban was being bantied about, one of the very few genuine civil liberties defenders at the ACLU, Ben Wisner, warned that, quote, Alex Jones' ban could set a dangerous social media precedent.
Ben Wisner, the director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Earlier this month, Jones' content was pulled from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Vimeo for violating policies related to hate speech.
Hate speech policies that many social media companies cited when they banned Jones can be, quote, misused and abused.
Earlier this month, Jones' content was pulled from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Vimeo for violating policies related to hate speech.
You see, they all colluded together.
He was later hit with a temporary suspension by Twitter as well.
He was just depersoned from the internet.
That was the framework that they created for Alex Jones and Miley Yiannopoulos, knowing that most people would hate them so much that they would be afraid to object.
Weisner said companies had a constitutional right to regulate speech on their platform, but added that hate speech, quote, turns out to be an extremely subjective term.
In particular, Weisner told Huffington Post that he is worried about massive private companies holding the power to define that ambiguous category.
Quote, I have some of the same concerns about platforms making these decisions.
Governments at least purport to be acting solely in the public interest, but platforms are making these decisions based on what's in their financial interest.
So their interest may be in avoiding controversy.
But do we want the most important speech platforms in the world avoiding controversy?
That is exactly what has happened.
The incentive scheme that has been created is one that fosters a conformist society.
If you know, if you are someone who wants to remain on the internet, as most people do since that's a prerequisite for being heard by a lot of people, and participating in a public discourse, that's where public discourse takes place now is on the internet, The incentive scheme is obvious.
You know that if you affirm establishment pieties, if you're in favor of blockdowns, if you believe everything Tony Fauci says, if you believe in Russiagate, if you are a huge believer that there was no fraud in the 2020 election, if you support the war in Ukraine, you will never be censored.
You look at Bernie and AOC.
And their followers, these edgy, radical threats to capital, so antagonistic to centers of power, and they are never, ever censored because they are supporters of core establishment pieties, the people who get censored are those who are dissent.
And that's what this framework is designed to do, foster compliance, foster conformity.
And it's been incredibly successful at doing that.
The thing that has turned out to be so menacing Is that it is not just these companies making these decisions on their own as an oligarchical despot.
It is they are taking orders from the U.S.
government because the U.S.
government exerts extreme amounts of power over them.
The U.S.
government can punish these big tech companies in all sorts of ways and have threatened to do so repeatedly in the event that they fail to comply.
That's what the Twitter files was.
That's why corporate media instructed everyone to ignore the Twitter files, called it a nothing burger.
Because this is the dirty secret of establishment power, that the Internet is being increasingly controlled and censored.
If you go back and read the literature in the mid-1990s about the reason people were excited about the Internet and its advent, they viewed it as a liberatory technology, as something that would emancipate individuals From the need to rely on centralized corporate and state control to communicate, to organize, but allow individuals freedom to disseminate views without having to rely on corporations or state power to do so.
It had the potential to be the most empowering technological innovation in history.
That's what its proponents were heralding it as being.
And instead, it has been degraded into its exact opposite.
By allowing the U.S.
government to turn it into a tool of mass surveillance, it became the greatest tool of coercion and monitoring in human history, and now it is one of the most closed information systems and one of the most potent propaganda systems in the world, under the control of the U.S.
security state and the U.S.
government, exercising that power through big tech.
That has the ability to ban all dissent and all dissidents to make them disappear.
And that's what happens.
And the more that happens, the more a prison gets created in the mind.
That's how real despotism works.
There's a prelude, an introduction to 1984 that George Orwell wrote.
That ended up being banned.
I believe it was to 1984.
It might have been to his essay about Catalonia.
We'll check on that.
But the essay didn't get published because the point that Orwell made was too threatening to the West right after World War II.
What he was essentially saying was, we're taught that despotism means this blunt use of force.
That if you criticize the government, death squads in black costumes show up at your house, point guns at your head, haul you off to a gulag, put you in prison.
That is a form of despotism.
But the much more effective form of control is to so propagandize the public that dissent disappears in people's minds.
The prison exists in people's minds.
So that you don't need to punish dissent because there is no dissent or there's so little dissent that it's easily marginalized.
And you've just turned the population to such conformists that they believe everything the government says.
That is a much more effective form of despotism.
It doesn't create backlash.
It creates the illusion of freedom.
And that's what the internet is designed to do, to create the illusion that you have freedom and you have choice, when in reality, everybody knows that there's a tiny little range of freedom in which they can function in everything that falls outside the line, no matter who you are.
Even if you're a heir to one of America's most storied and powerful and beloved political families like R.F.K.
Jr., if you step outside that line, set by the U.S.
government in collaboration with big tech, you will be silenced and censored and disappeared.
Just to show you how nefarious this is, there's breaking news from today.
It's a House Judiciary report.
They are investigating the weaponization of the FBI, which is what that Congress is supposed to do.
It's the first real investigation into the U.S.
security state since the Church Committee in the mid-1970s that uncovered all kinds of abuses of the FBI, infiltrating political groups, monitoring political dissidents and the like on both the left and the right.
And here's the new report.
There you see the title on the screen.
Just out today, the FBI's collaboration with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor American speech.
Here's what the report says, quote, on February 15th, 2023, as part of its investigation into the federal government's role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms.
Let's say that again.
What this investigation is, it's an investigation into the federal government's role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms.
The committee on the judiciary issued a subpoena to the META, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, documents obtained in response to those subpoenas revealed that the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence entity, requested and in some cases directed the world's largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online.
The committee's investigation has revealed that the FBI, the federal law enforcement agency responsible for disrupting foreign malign influence, facilitated censorship requests to American social media companies on behalf of the Ukrainian intelligence agency infiltrated by Russian-aligned actors.
Regardless of its intended purpose in endorsing the SBU's request, the FBI had no legal justification For facilitating the censorship of Americans' protected speech on social media, the FBI and SBU, the Ukrainian agency, sent Matt a massive spreadsheet containing thousands of accounts to remove, including authentic American accounts.
On March 1st, 2022, week after the Russian invasion, FBI Special Agent Kovnets sent an email to a Meta employee with the subject, quote, additional disinformation accounts.
Copying agents Kellett and Chan, Agent Kovnets wrote, quote, I have a few more Instagram and Facebook accounts that, according to the SBU, that's the Ukrainian intelligence agency, spread Russian disinformation.
For your review, an action is deemed appropriate.
According to his email signature, Agent Cobnett's was then serving as the quote, assistant leading attache for Ukraine and Belarus.
Agent Cobnett's attached two spreadsheets to his email to Meta.
One spreadsheet contained a catalog with the timestamp, tax, and URL for 15,865 individual items of content on Instagram, including post stories and reels.
The other spreadsheet contained a detailed registry of 5,165 Facebook accounts ostensibly suspected of, quote, spreading Russian disinformation.
Meta suggested establishing a, quote, 24-7 channel to respond to the Ukrainian agency's requests.
Although the SBU's list contained American accounts, neither the FBI nor Meta appeared to raise concerns.
About the providence of the SBU's disinformation registries.
Instead, the FBI demonstrated a willingness to support and implement the Ukrainians' calls to take down certain accounts, even though the requests included US-based accounts.
So let's just look at this graphic here, just to get an idea for what has happened, according to this House Judiciary Information Investigation.
What they're essentially saying is that a lot of these Ukrainian agencies have been infiltrated by Russian agents.
And as a result, some of the requests sent by Ukrainian agencies to the FBI, remember this is the Ukrainian government, telling the FBI, these are posts we want removed from the internet.
Tell Facebook and Google to take this off.
And many of those posts were written and expressed by American citizens expressing their free speech rights, and the Ukrainian government sitting in Kiev is telling the FBI, take that information down offline.
Tell Facebook and Instagram we want that gone.
Facebook and Google.
So here you see the SBU, which is Ukraine, sending a takedown request to the FBI, which in turn sends our takedown request to Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube.
So I just want you to think about this for a second.
You, as an American citizen, are funding the war in Ukraine.
You're sending hundreds of billions of dollars, more than $100 billion now, to the government of Ukraine for all kinds of military aid and other types of assistance.
The Ukrainian government is then turning around and telling the FBI to take down your post because your speech transgresses the limits that the Ukrainian government wants to exist on what you are and are not allowed to say about the war that you're funding through your government.
And the FBI is dutifully complying with the Ukrainian agent's request.
By pressuring Facebook and Google to remove constitutionally protected speech.
According to this committee, sometimes these agencies are infiltrated by Russians, so some of their requests are actually pro-Ukrainian content.
But who cares?
Who cares if they're infiltrated by Russia or not?
The Ukrainians have no business Trying to get censored from the internet the speech of American citizens about a war that American citizens are funding.
And the FBI, independent of everything, has no business pressuring these big tech platforms to take down constitutionally protected speech.
This is what the federal court has enjoined, has prevented, has banned after seeing the evidence that this is what is being done.
Just to give you a sense for how frequently this is happening.
Here from March of 2022, which is the month after the Russian invasion, these little corporate logos reflect how often the FBI sent takedown requests to big tech agencies.
Here on Tuesday, they sent them to Facebook, Google, and Instagram.
On Wednesday, to Instagram.
On Saturday, to Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
On Sunday, to Facebook.
On Monday, to Instagram.
On Tuesday, to Facebook, etc.
Friday, to YouTube.
On and on and on.
This is the censorship regime that the U.S.
government has created.
These are not autonomous decisions of big tech.
These are pressure campaigns by the U.S.
government, in this case, working with Ukrainian intelligence agencies over what speech is allowed on the Internet.
This is a direct assault on the First Amendment, and it's even more offensive here because it's coming not from the American government, which is bad enough and unconstitutional enough, but from some foreign government over which you have no exercise, no control, no democratic accountability, but which you are funding to a great extent.
And while you're transferring your money to them, They're turning around and trying to censor your speech, if that is you are a dissident to American establishment orthodoxy.
If you're a follower of the Democratic Party, if you are a supporter of Bernie Sanders' AOC, if you like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, you don't have to worry, you're fine.
These are censorship campaigns aimed at actual dissidents to institutions of American power.
That's who gets censored.
This is the censorship campaign laid out perfectly.
It was already menacing enough that Big Tech was doing it.
It was more menacing still that the U.S.
government is controlling those decisions and to learn now that the Ukrainian government, which has in the past already issued blacklists of American journalists and American Activists who they accuse of being Kremlin propagandists I've been on those lists before of the Ukrainian government while my tax dollars is being used to fund their them in their war To watch them now.
You can see the emails in this report We're gonna hope to have we have to have on Someone from the Judiciary Committee this week to talk about this investigation, but part of this report contains the emails Sent by the FBI to big tech companies That specifically cite the reports and the demands of the Ukrainian intelligence agencies to watch those emails and that flow of censorship demands and how it function is really remarkable.
And I think again what we have to understand is that this is a war on dissent.
This is a war to cleanse the internet of anyone who questions U.S.
orthodoxy and to ensure that the internet is banned from being what it was supposed to be.
A source of free information and free expression into what really is the most potent and most inescapable propaganda weapon ever to be developed.
It's aimed right at people's brains.
And the idea is to cleanse it of the sense that the only information to which people are exposed is information that American power centers want them to think and want them to have.
And that is why I really do regard As the overarching cause, the preservation of the few remaining places on the internet devoted to free speech.
Remember, Elon Musk turned into public enemy number one.
He was beloved by the global public.
He was the person who was gonna give us electric cars and save the planet from climate catastrophe.
And get us to Mars.
And someone who is And now you have the entire U.S.
security state creating vast tentacles to ensure that this happens.
There are few remaining places on the internet that genuinely allow free speech.
a little bit more free speech to take away that weapon from them.
That's how valuable the censorship regime is to them.
And now you have the entire U.S. security state creating vast tentacles to ensure that this happens.
There are few remaining places on the Internet that genuinely allow free speech.
Obviously, Rumble is one of them.
R.F.K.
Jr.
has put his channel on Rumble because that's one of the few places where he can go where he knows he won't be censored.
These are like outposts of dissent and obviously power centers are waging war on them, the French government, already Rumble is not available in France because France demanded That Rumble removed RT from its platform.
The French government just reached over to this American corporation and said, we demand you obey our censorship order and take off this news agency that we dislike and want silence.
And when Rumble said no, they were forced to remove themselves from France pending a lawsuit.
Those attacks are going to come more and more and more aimed at any platform that is devoted to free speech.
And that's the reason these platforms are so worth fighting for because that is, for now, until we get this kind of decentralized protocol that Jack Dorsey believes is the ultimate solution to decentralize the internet, to put protocols in the hands of every person and not have it be centralized.
Until that happens, the only outpost for free speech will be sites like Rumble.
Or any place devoted to protecting free speech.
And if those are lost, we will live in a world dominated by this censorship industry.
And you don't have to worry if you are a good liberal, which is why good liberals aren't worried.
In fact, they're happy about this because those are never the people targeted with censorship.
It's only real dissidents, people who dislike establishment orthodoxies and who are opposed to establishment power.
Who are threatened by this, who are the targets of it, and that's how you can identify who they are.
Now, we will continue to report on this this week.
As I said, I hope to have somebody who is from the House Judiciary Committee to interview.
There's an account on Twitter called Name Redacted 247 that does an excellent job of tracking How many people who work for these big tech companies who used to work for the CIA and other US security states?
This is a very elaborate industry.
It's a censorship industrial complex.
We've reported a lot on the role that disinformation groups play.
But this is the system that is increasingly dominating American political discourse, propagandizing people by large numbers, and eliminating all dissent, and combating it, to me, is the highest priority.
That concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday after this show, we move to our live after show on Locals that is interactive in nature.
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For now, thank you so much for those of you who continue to listen.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
