Democrats Use RFK Censorship Hearing to Again Strengthen Their Censorship Regime. Plus: Cornel West on His Insurgent Campaign | SYSTEM UPDATE #116
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We're going to be talking about the news and news and news news.
We're going to be talking about the news and news and news news.
Good evening.
It's Monday, July 24th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As most of you know, we were off last week for a vacation, during which my children and I traveled through the U.S.
for a much-needed rest, and we are excited to be back for the nightly resumption of System Update at its regular time of 7 p.m.
Eastern tonight.
House Republicans last week, as part of their ongoing investigation of the weaponization of the FBI and other federal agencies, held a hearing on the U.S.
security state attempts to influence the flow of information on the internet to ensure that dissent to their agenda and to their narrative is banned under the guise of combating, quote, disinformation.
Among the witnesses were Democratic presidential challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose interviews and videos have been repeatedly censored by Big Tech, as well as Emma Jo Morris, the reporter who broke the stories for the New York Post about Joe Biden's involvement in his son Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine and China, only to be falsely smeared by the CIA and the media of promoting, quote, Russian disinformation, and then watching her reporting be censored by Big Tech in the days before the 2020 election.
Much of the focus ended up being on RFK, who has become public enemy number one for the Democratic Party, at least for the moment.
There's a good chance our guest tonight will quickly replace him in that position.
But we were off for a vacation during that hearing, and thus won't break it down in detail tonight as we would ordinarily do.
But we do want to highlight how constantly and almost reflexively the Democratic Party at this point does not deny that it is devoted to using state power, especially the power of the US security state, To foster online censorship but instead affirmatively justify such censorship as necessary for the public health.
And now routinely uses that censorship power, a combination of state and corporate power, against anyone the party deems to be its enemy.
And this hearing, designed to show the American people the dangers of censorship as engineered by the FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA, was instead used by Democrats as yet another opportunity to justify it.
And we'll show you the key exchanges from that hearing.
Cornel West has long been one of America's foremost public intellectuals, often associated with the American left, and frequently an endorser of Democratic Party presidential candidates, even while offering scathing critiques of the party.
Professor West is now causing a great deal of concern, angst, and even anger among Democrats as a result of his announcement that this year he will run for president on the Green Party ticket.
He's a graduate of Harvard College with a Ph.D.
in philosophy from Princeton, and during his academic career, he has held teaching positions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth.
He's the author of more than a dozen books, including the highly acclaimed 1983 work Race Matters and his 2004 treatise entitled Democracy Matters.
In both the 2016 and 2020 election, Dr. West supported the Democratic primary challenger Bernie Sanders.
When Sanders dropped out in 2016 amidst allegations of cheating, well-documented allegations of cheating by the DNC, on behalf of Hillary Clinton, West endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Though in 2020, he endorsed, after senators dropped out, Joe Biden in the general election.
Dr. West has for decades been one of this country's most independent-minded and interesting thinkers, and as part of our quest to interview as many presidential candidates as we can on this program, we are delighted to welcome him to his debut appearance on System Up tonight for our interview segment.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form as well.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms, where you can follow the episodes 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble, and you can 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.
Last week, House Republicans used their majority for what Congress is not only supposed to do, but legally required to do, namely, exert oversight and supervision over the powers exert oversight and supervision over the powers of the U.S. states.
security state, something that both parties have been Hopefully lacking in their efforts to do over the last several decades since at least the Church Commission in the mid 1970s.
And as part of that ongoing investigation, House Republicans summoned several witnesses who have been victimized by the kinds of censorship that has now become routine, namely where agencies inside the federal government, such as the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, and during COVID various health agencies would
Direct communications to Big Tech, to Facebook, Google, Twitter with suggestions and even strongly worded directives that certain political viewpoints ought to be banned, certain people ought to be prohibited, and certain content ought to be taken down, specifically content that constitutes dissent To the prevailing narratives and agenda of those agencies.
One of the witnesses, as we noted, was the Democratic presidential challenger, RFK Jr., and another was the New York Post reporter who broke the story right before the 2020 election in the New York Post based on the archive that came from the Hunter Biden laptop.
That Joe Biden was heavily involved in attempts by his son Hunter to exploit his power as vice president, the connections of that family, for very lucrative business deals in Ukraine and China, only for those stories to first be falsely labeled Russian disinformation by the CIA, and then on that basis censored by both Facebook and Twitter in the days leading up to the election.
So that was what the hearing was supposed to be about.
It wasn't about RFK as a candidate.
It wasn't about the validity or importance of the New York Post stories.
It was instead about the abuse of power by the U.S.
security state increasingly to control the flow of information on the internet under the guise of combating disinformation.
And yet what happened during that hearing instead was that the Democratic Party once again demonstrated its core conviction.
It has really become a core conviction of the Democratic Party that it is not only acceptable or tolerable for the powers of the US security state and federal agencies to be used to influence the censorship decisions of big tech, it is an imperative, it is necessary for the societal health and for the public safety
For those agencies to play a major role in determining what can and cannot be expressed, which viewpoints are and are not permitted over the internet.
Here was a particularly telling tweet from the reporter who wrote an article on this hearing, Cheryl J. Stolberg, in the New York Times.
And the way in which she described and summarized this hearing was, quote, there you see it on the screen, despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society.
And here were the two questions she thought were most important to be addressed.
One, is misinformation protected by the First Amendment?
Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment?
And number two, when is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?
Both of those questions are shocking.
When one sees that a New York Times reporter is endorsing or validating them.
Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment?
This is coming from a newspaper that whatever else you think of it, has a long and I think noble history of fighting the US government.
In arguing all the way to the Supreme Court when necessary, that censorship is always unconstitutional when attempted by the federal government, particularly when it comes to media or political figures.
Some of the most important landmark First Amendment decisions of the 20th century came from this newspaper that is now suggesting that misinformation may not be protected by the First Amendment.
This is the same newspaper that spent 18 months telling Americans That Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in order to sell the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq to invade Iraq.
Classic misinformation, if ever such a term was applicable.
It's the same newspaper that told Americans that the documents on the Hunter Biden laptop should be disregarded because they were Russian disinformation.
Only for that same paper, months later, to verify that in fact those documents were not Russian disinformation, but were all along authentic and genuine.
It's a newspaper that has constantly spouted misinformation of all kinds.
So if misinformation is not protected by the First Amendment, as this reporter suggested, in order to service the Democratic Party's broader view that the federal government can legitimately censor the internet in the name of combating misinformation, that would mean that there would have been no legal barriers to either prosecuting the New York Times for spreading that misinformation about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, or suing the New York Times
When they falsely accused a government scientist who was of Chinese descent of committing all kinds of espionage and crimes and ruined his life only for the story not to be true or to tell Americans right before the 2020 election that the 100 Biden laptops should be safely ignored because of Russian disinformation, when in fact all along those documents were authentic and genuine.
But the idea that a reporter would stand up in public and insinuate, let alone propose, That misinformation lies outside the protections of the First Amendment, even a decade ago, would have been so shocking, no reporter would have done it.
They would have been embarrassed.
And yet now, this idea that the government can legitimately censor information from the internet has become such a critical tool, such a central tactic of the liberal establishment, of which, of course, the New York Times is a central part.
That this reporter now has no compunction about suggesting that misinformation can be legitimately censored by the federal government because somehow it lies outside of the scope of the First Amendment.
I think even more amazing is that second question that she rhetorically asked, namely, quote, when is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?
Since when do journalists suggest that the federal government has a valid role in seeking to tamp down the spread of falsehoods when it comes to censoring the internet or censoring the views of American citizens?
That's not the role of the federal government, to tamp down the spread of falsehoods.
That's why the First Amendment exists, because the federal government is not the entity that determines truth or falsity, nor should we want it to be.
But even beyond that, it would be an amazing suggestion to hear from a New York Times reporter that the federal government had a role, a valid role, in censoring the spread of what she calls falsehoods if it were the case that the United States government were this pristine entity with a long and noble history of combating disinformation instead of the reality, which is that there's no entity on Earth
More devoted to the spread of falsehoods than the U.S.
security state.
The CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security are now going to protect us from falsehoods when they have a long and destructive history of spreading it?
Going back to early 1960s when they invented a story about North Vietnamese aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin, an absolute lie that justified the start of the Vietnam War that led to the Senate almost unanimously approving the use of force and the deployment of combat troops based on what turned out to be a total falsehood.
Or the lies that have been repeatedly documented, told by the FBI, the CIA, and then in 2002, the creation of Homeland Security.
Since then, about virtually every matter of national security from Syria and Libya to Afghanistan and Iraq.
These are the agencies that are going to now protect us from the spread of falsehoods in the eyes of the New York Times.
But this has become the ethos of the Democratic Party and the part of the corporate media that most identifies with it, including the New York Times, the liberal establishment, the idea that the internet is too scary and too dangerous of a platform for citizens to communicate free of the centralized control of large corporations like the New York Times and the federal government.
That's why a New York Times reporter can stand up and say this.
Something that, again, even a decade ago would have been unthinkable for a reporter to say without being vilified by their colleagues.
Because this is now what's in the air.
Now, what is amazing about the censorship hearing is that Democrats led by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, remember her?
She is still a member of Congress, even though she was forced to resign in 2016 as the chair of the Democratic National Committee because she got caught.
As WikiLeaks documents demonstrated, cheating on behalf of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment, tilting the election in favor of Hillary, very likely costing Bernie Sanders that election.
And it wasn't just WikiLeaks documents that showed it, but even party loyalists like Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile, who said that the voting was rigged on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
She led the way to essentially saying that RFK Jr., who Democrats are free to attack.
He has a lot of views that one can attack.
Our next guest, Cornel West, has attacked RFK Jr.
and some of the views that he holds.
But he's a lifelong Democratic Party supporter.
And a very successful environmental lawyer.
He spent his adult life suing large corporate polluters, some of the most morally atrocious corporations like Smithfield Factory Farms for the public health menace that they are.
And yet, Debbie Wasserman Stoltz's position was, RFK Jr., now that he's running against Joe Biden, is so far out of the realm of what should be heard in decent society that he ought to be banned from speaking At this congressional hearing, this has become the Democrat solution to everything.
We don't engage with our critics.
We don't disprove them.
We do everything we can to silence them, to argue that they shouldn't be heard from.
And I guarantee you when polls start showing Cornel West at 1% and then 2% and then at 3%, which is going to happen, They're going to start doing the same thing to him, insisting that media outlets deplatform him and ignore him.
And to accomplish this, I just want to show you the way in which they so grotesquely lied about and distorted RFK's view, because the view that he was expressing, namely about the way in which the US government is becoming increasingly totalitarian, Because of the power of the internet, first to spy on all Americans, as we proved during this noted reporting, and then increasingly to censor Americans, to make their propaganda less susceptible to dissent, was actually an important point.
And yet they wildly distorted it, lied about it, made it seem like it was a completely different point.
In order to justify not allowing him to be heard.
So let me show you this video of first what they claimed he said, what Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed RFK said at this hearing, and then what he in fact said.
In discussing COVID public health measures, you made light of the genocide against Jewish people by saying, and I quote, even Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland.
You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.
Well, we're saying that... Okay, so that's the allegation.
She was claiming That RFK Jr.
should not be allowed to speak at a congressional hearing, should not be heard from, because he said, according to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, that the quarantines and lockdowns of COVID were even worse than what Jews experienced under Nazi rule during World War II, because at least there you could escape to the Alps, or you could escape to an attic like Anne Frank did.
That was the way they claimed RFK had talked about COVID as being worse than Nazism.
Now just listen for yourself, with your own ears, with your own open mind, what he actually said, because the point he made was an important one, and it had nothing to do with what they accused him of saying.
It is what I call turnkey totalitarianism. - They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control we've never seen before.
It's been the ambition of every totalitarian state from the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought, and to obliterate dissent.
None of them have been able to do it.
They didn't have the technological capacity.
Even in Hitler Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland.
You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.
I visited in 1962 East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped.
So it was possible.
Many died truly, but it was possible.
Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.
Now, that is a vital point.
The title of my 2014 book Which I wrote about my experience with Edward Snowden and about the reporting we were able to do because of the documents he courageously provided was called No Place to Hide.
And it was called No Place to Hide based on the warning of the senator that led the Church Commission in the mid-1970s, when Democrats still cared a lot about the abuses of the U.S.
security state.
His name was Frank Church.
He was a pretty conventional but liberal Democrat from Idaho.
And after discovering for the very first time with this commission the extent of the spying mechanisms that had been built in secret by the NSA and by the CIA, He called it turnkey tyranny, meaning that the system has been put into place where at any time the key could be turned and you would have totalitarianism.
And he specifically warned that if this mechanism, this machine that they had built, with no transparency, was ever turned inward on the American people, you would have no place to hide.
Such would be the technological capability to track people.
And the reason Edward Snowden came forward and risked his liberty, and he's, remember, now in exile going on almost a decade in Russia for the brave act he undertook, was because he had the documents proving that the NSA had done exactly that which Frank Church warned would lead to turnkey tyranny if the NSA and the US security state ever did, namely focus its powers not on foreign adversaries but on the American people.
That is why other NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Thomas Binney came forward, William Binney came forward, risking their liberties by saying what was drummed into our head from the start was that this could never be used against the American people.
And yet in the wake of the war on terror, it is now a major part of the U.S.
security state to monitor American citizens to make sure there is no place to hide using this technology.
When we did the Snowden reporting and it was revealed that the United States government was spying not only on Al Qaeda but on allied governments and the UN and World Health Organization and World Trade Organizations, Angela Merkel, whose phone herself was tapped, called
President Obama outraged, explaining that she grew up in East Germany, under the Stasi, and that this is exactly what the Stasi wanted to do, was to impose a kind of umbrella of monitoring and surveillance over the population to ensure that everything anyone did was tracked by the U.S.
government.
And in fact, when we began doing the reporting and explaining the details of what this spying system that was built in the dark by the NSA was capable of, former agents of the Stasi said, This goes beyond what we could even dream of.
We were able to read 25% of the mail of East Germans, and there were always holes in our monitoring system, and yet this electronic system of surveillance leaves none.
That's what R.F.K.
Jr.
was saying.
Not that the COVID regime is worse than Nazi Germany, as W. Walter Schultz tried to claim to get him banned from the hearing.
So ironic that at a hearing on censorship, their first instinct is to try and get people silenced.
But instead his point was the surveillance technology that has now been developed in the hands of the U.S.
government combined now with the ability to simultaneously use the internet to pump propaganda through the minds of American citizens while censoring and banning dissent by labeling it disinformation has given powers to the U.S.
government unlike any previously seen before.
And the response of the Democratic Party is first to try and silence those people and then the New York Times article reveals to defend it.
Stacy Plaskett, the non-voting delegate from the Virgin Islands who has actually never lived in the Virgin Islands, doesn't really have any connection there.
She was in Washington and got a lot of money from donors and then got elected to that position, who essentially said, there you see the New York Times article, the report on it.
And it says, quote, A conspiracy-filled rant by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
that the COVID-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people has stirred accusations of anti-Semitism and racism in the Democratic candidate's longshot run for president.
And then it quotes Stacey Plaskett as saying, free speech is not absolute.
That's what the Supreme Court has ruled.
That has become essentially in every instance the way in which they try to justify the censorship that they are now defending.
Censorship that again is coming from The people should be least trustworthy to determine truth and disinformation.
The CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, working in conjunction with Big Tech to ensure increasingly that dissenters to the Democratic Party are being suppressed and silenced in deep platforming.
Including from the internet, that technology that was supposed to be the technology that would liberate us once and for all.
From the need to have large corporations and large government power mediate the things that we are saying.
Now, we're going to probably do some more reporting on this hearing, the one that we missed from traveling last week, later on in this week, because it was filled with highly revealing exchanges of that kind, but we just wanted to highlight the kind of overarching theme that emerged from this hearing, which again is that, and it has become something the Democratic Party now routinely says, That not only shouldn't we be angry or concerned about censorship programs from the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security, we ought to be grateful for them.
Because these are patriotic men and women doing nothing more than working to keep us safe from disinformation that's all censorship of the Internet actually is.
We are excited to welcome to the program one of America's foremost public intellectuals, somebody who I have been learning from for a long time, I'm somebody who every time you speak, you will leave with no doubt that everything he's saying is the byproduct of his genuine convictions and his very well thought through perspectives of the world.
Whether you agree with him or not, he is making a lot of waves right now because he is running as...
As a third party candidate for president on the Green Party ticket, we are delighted to welcome Dr. Cornel West.
Hello?
Dr. West, good evening.
It's great to see you.
How are you?
My brother, it's a blessing to see you, and I just want to begin by saluting you being the force for good for so long, from reading you in The Guardian and bringing the critique to bear on the neoliberalism that was just beginning to really consolidate under Obama.
You were consistent then and then on to Brazil, and of course, our dear brother David, my My thoughts and my prayers are with him and your precious kids, but I just say it's a joy to be in direct conversation with you.
After all of these years, we've never really had a chance to just talk, and so this is beautiful for me.
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more.
We did do that event, I don't know if you recall, about 18 months ago with Professor Butler on issues of identity politics and the like, but not a one-on-one conversation, and it's been too long.
You would zoom them from Brazil.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We'll have to do it in person soon enough.
So I want to begin.
I have a lot of questions.
I'm very excited by your presence here with your candidacy itself.
It's not a lot of things that I say this about when it comes to the Democratic Party.
They are very good at certain things, one of which is smearing third-party candidates.
They blame, as you know, Ralph Nader for the election of George Bush in 2000.
They blame Jill Stein for the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton.
They're very good at blaming everybody but themselves when they lose elections, and third-party candidates in particular are people they love to villainize.
They recently sent out the Clinton-era consultant James Carville.
to preview how they're going to attack you on CNN, namely by saying essentially that the only purpose of your candidacy is to elect Donald Trump.
So let me just show you a little bit of that and I'm going to ask you to respond to Mr. Carville.
Let's go ahead and show that clip.
Joe Stein, who's his campaign manager, is almost certainly an agent of the Russian government.
If you don't believe me, somebody at home Google photo General Flynn Vladimir Putin Jill Stein.
She was hosted by the Russians prior to her running in 2016.
So, you know, people are going to have to decide that we want to continue under our Constitution because Donald Trump is telling us that Very clearly is bragging about the fact that he doesn't want to live under the Constitution anymore.
And it's very clear that the only thing that Dr. West's candidacy can do is help elect Donald Trump.
I don't think any of that's inarguable, nor is it arguable that Jill Stein had deep relationships with the Russian government.
Alright, so it's kind of amazing to me at least, though maybe I'm just naive at this point, that Anderson Cooper just sat there and let James Carville accuse Joel Stein of being a Russian agent with no evidence whatsoever.
But let's leave that to the side for a second because of course that's what Democrats do is they call people Russian agents, whoever they dislike.
Let me ask you about the, I guess what you can call the substantive critique, that the only possible effect of your candidacy is that you're going to help elect Donald Trump.
What's your answer to that?
Yeah, well, I'm not convinced of that at all, but I do want to say that I just don't like the vicious attack on anybody, including my dear sister Jill Stein.
It's an example of Brother Carville being a spokesman of a party That is so radically undemocratic and unsocratic.
It seems that the Democratic Party has lost the capacity to critically examine itself, to be critical of itself, and wonder why it is that it continually reproduces Such milquetoast candidates that don't speak not just to poor and working people, but what you were talking about earlier in your show, my brother, which is protection of personal liberty.
The authoritarian impulse of the Democratic Party tied to their links to big money and big military has led them to give up on both democratic processes within their own party, in terms of no debates in the primary, but also the degree to which it's become authoritarian with the undercutting of the personal liberties of journalists, citizens.
And I come from a black freedom tradition, brother, where there's been COINTELPRO, pre-COINTELPRO surveillance, doing COINTELPRO, post-COINTELPRO surveillance against those who are doing what?
Simply lifting our voices and trying to tell the truth about the suffering of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and Jane Crow and predatory capitalist processes, let alone the drones dropped on innocent people in the name of the American empire, but killing very, very precious human beings.
So it's a very sad sight to hear my dear brother Carville saying that.
And think about it, though, man.
I haven't had one public event.
The first one's going to be in Mississippi on August 25th with the Emmett Till family.
I haven't had one fundraising event.
And yet I become this menace to society, to the...
Wow!
continuation of the constitutional order.
Wow.
Boy, that's a sign of panic.
That really goes far beyond the imagination, doesn't it?
Well, yeah, and I think a lot, like I said, I think a lot more is coming your way when it comes to that.
So I, you know, you have had a life where you are respected by a lot of people across the political spectrum.
You still are.
You, of course, know, you've been around long enough to know that you're going to get a lot of attacks.
There are going to be a lot worse ones than that.
That's just kind of the toe in the water.
And so I guess what I wanted to get a sense of is, and I ask anyone running for president this, because it is a lot of work.
It's something that you have to put yourself out there and get a lot of attacks.
And I really believe that anyone who does it has to have a couple of really strong animating principles that they want to at least bring light to, if not change.
What are those for you?
What are the kind of, without being reductive, sort of two or three real issues that you think made it so that during these attacks was worth it for you?
Well, keep in mind, I mean, I've been a tech for the last 35, 40 years, major I've had controversies with Harvard President Larry Summers and then Larry Bacow as well, so it's never for me been a question of popularity and reputation.
It's really about integrity and vocation.
I want to be true to my own calling, and that calling has so much to do with all of the love and integrity and courage that was poured into me.
By Irene B. West and Clifton West, my family memory to me is inseparable from any sense of calling.
It tied to Shiloh Baptist Church, Willie P. Cook and Deacon Hinton and the others, and the Black Panther Party right down the street, and that fusion of the spirituality of the prophetic black church of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer, And then the Black Panther Party focused not just on the poor, but on predatory capitalist processes, ways in which empires around the world colonize, subjugate others, but always keeping moral and spiritual dimensions alive.
So it's just the following through of my calling, my brother.
It really isn't spilling over into electoral politics, but it's been the same in the classroom.
It's been the same in the jail cell.
It's been the same on the streets.
And for me, it's been the same in the nightclub.
You see this John Coltrane record?
You know, brother, Love Supreme.
That's my tradition, man.
That black musical tradition is all about catastrophe.
It's all about swing, different conceptions of time that authorize better futures.
And it's all about improvisation, being flexible and fluid rather than dogmatic and doctrinaire.
And that's precisely why I stand with you in your strong and rich libertarian sensibilities.
If we cannot protect voices to be raised in the face of forms of censorship, then we cannot have decent societies, let alone democratic ones.
The very anthem of black people is what?
Lift every voice.
That's the Johnson Brothers.
Lift every voice, not lift every echo.
The echo is just an extension of a silo.
A voice is critical, Socratic.
A voice is prophetic, full of compassion for the least of these.
And that sits at the very center of the Black musical tradition, the Black freedom tradition.
And I would go as far as to say when you bring together Socratic legacies of Athens and prophetic legacies of Jerusalem, some of the best legacies of the species, my brother.
You alluded earlier to the fact that, you know, I've been a critic of the neoliberalism of the Democratic Party for a long time.
You've been a critic of that neoliberalism even longer.
And I want to propose to you that I do think the Democratic Party has changed for the worse, even given those kind of harsh critiques that you were voicing, that I was voicing during the Obama administration, especially when it comes to things like imperialism and war and foreign policy.
This war in Ukraine is the number one goal of the CIA, of NATO, of the EU, of the war-making machine.
And it just is a fact that the only opposition is coming from the populist right wing of the Republican Party.
Every single last Democrat voted yes unanimously from AOC and Cori Bush to Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin for $40 billion authorization the last time they had to vote.
They just had some more votes.
Democrats were again united.
It seems to me like what were once significant issues, at least for a lot of people on the left who nonetheless supported the Democratic Party, things like foreign policy, imperialism, war, the abuses of the U.S.
security state, have fallen way down on the list of priorities, if they even make the list at all.
Do you share that impression?
Oh, absolutely.
There's no doubt about it.
We know since the 1970s, three or four, with the challenge of the production of oil shifting from Texas to the Middle East, at that time it was a challenge of Japanese and West German marketeers and capitalists putting pressure on the United States.
So the United States came up with a new class project, and it was actually a class war against poor and working people called neoliberalism, the unleashing of markets, the deregulating of markets, and trying to ensure the various sites, lands, territories for those U.S. markets to penetrate and to gain territories for those U.S. markets to penetrate and to gain access to the cheap labor that was there.
So as the American empire began to engage in external decline and internal decay, The Democratic Party itself became more and more the bedrock of marketeering with window dressing with various black faces and brown faces and women's faces.
I think it's crucial to defend the rights of our precious trans, some of the most viciously attacked in our society, our precious gays, our precious lesbians and so forth.
And I'm glad Democratic Party is ready to make that move in that direction.
But alongside of that, Was the consolidation of the American Imperial Project with the turn of the party toward corporate power.
That's what the Democratic Leadership Council was all about with Clinton.
And from Clinton through Obama, all the way up to Biden, you have a Democratic Party so locked into corporate elites, locked into military elites and the marketeers, making money with the arm manufacturing taking place, that it becomes very difficult for the Democratic Party To not be viewed as a party that's beyond redemption.
It is so captured by big money, so captured by big military, that it makes Martin Luther King turn over in the grave.
He had to engage in this critique of LBJ.
He didn't know that the LBJ trajectory in Vietnam would become the dominant one for the Democratic Party and the acknowledgment, and this is last but not least, of the de-centering of the American empire, which is taking place with the emergence of bricks, not the emergence, but the power of bricks, the power of the organized global South, and the ways in which the United States begins to hold on for dear life.
And the result is what?
Donald Trump, gangster to the core, neo-fascist leading the country toward a second civil war, and then Biden milquetoast, hypocritical, mendacious, leading toward a third world war.
And so the choice in 2024 is, do you want a second civil war?
with Brother Trump?
Do you want a third world war with the proxy war against Russia of the American empire with our precious Ukrainian brothers and sisters caught in the middle?
What a choice.
We're between a rock and a hard place.
Well, one of the reasons why I raised my voice, and thank God, I have a certain visibility, is say, hey, I've got to try to tell the truth about this, and I have to try to bear justice to it.
And I also have to try to keep the joy in it though, man, because we live in some very bleak and grim times and we can't keep our spirits up.
With our love and family and music and community as we intervene into life and death issues, saving the planet, dismantling the American empire, and at the same time trying to unleash democratic possibilities all around the world for the wretched of the earth, in the language of the great Frantz Fanon.
You mentioned Dr. King and almost every year on his birthday, that's now a national holiday, maybe not every year, every other year or so, I write about his speech that for me was one of the most consequential, if not to me the most consequential, which is the one he gave in Riverside Church in April of 1967, exactly one year to the day that he was assassinated.
And it was entitled Beyond Silence and Betrayal.
It was about the Vietnam War and he kind of meant his own silence and betrayal.
That he had kind of let himself be convinced that he should stay away from foreign policy and imperialism issues and only focus on domestic progress and finally realized There's actually no such thing as separating domestic progress and war making.
That if we're going to be this imperial power, there's never going to be domestic progress.
And he kind of apologized for being late to the Vietnam War.
He got attacked by the New York Times and the Washington Post kind of telling him, look, you stick to your racial justice issues and leave foreign policy alone.
You're going to alienate a lot of people, including us.
One of the arguments I've seen a lot of people making, including people who like you and admire your work, is that It's absolutely clear that the lesser of two evils, if it's Trump versus Biden, Trump versus DeSantis, is the lesser of two evils is clearly Joe Biden.
And that therefore, maybe if you live in a state that's a safe state, one way or the other, either automatically red or blue, go ahead and vote for you as kind of sending a message to the Democratic Party.
But if you live in one of those 10 or 12 swing states, The obligation is vote for Joe Biden because he's clearly the lesser of two evils.
No attempt made to analyze what that means.
As you were saying, it kind of seems to ignore foreign policy and war and World War III and the like.
Do you accept that premise about the lesser of two evils?
And is that the time to be guided in terms of how we vote?
Yeah, I think that that framework is just too narrow.
You see, if you accept that framework, then you accept the only possibilities we'll ever have would be these fascist catastrophes on the one hand, and the authoritarian neoliberal Catastrophes on the other.
There's got to be something more than that.
There's got to be something more than that.
And I'm glad you mentioned Brother Martin's great speech given exactly a year before he was murdered and assassinated and partly tied, of course, to the The U.S.
nation state in some form, as Mrs. King believed.
And the reason why I say that is, one, is that speech was written for the most part by the great Vincent Harding, who was one of the towering figures, and highly encouraged by the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who introduced Martin at that Riverside event.
And his speech actually is worth looking at as it moves into Martin's speech.
And what both of them were suggesting was, if we don't come up with a movement—and my campaign is just a moment in a movement, though, brother.
Well, we don't have a stronger mass people's movement than any candidate.
It's just a kind of sounding brass, tinkling cymbal coming and going.
It's a matter of trying to get people awakening, a more awakening and a spiritual reckoning.
But It also has to shatter our perspective, and this goes back to Brother Carville again, same would be true with Brother Axelrod.
So the only perspective available is the establishmentarian lens.
The New York Times, given all of its lies and misinformation about black people and working people, poor people over its tenure, or the Washington Post.
That mainstream lens, that's the Only lens to view the world, and hence you end up a lesser evil.
No, I look at the world first as a Christian.
You know, the 25th chapter of Matthew, brother, the least of these.
I've taught in prison for 41 years.
Mass incarceration, untouched, reinforced by both parties.
Excuse me.
Do you have some water there or something?
Or do you want to take a second?
I think I can bounce back.
Can you hear me all right?
Yeah, we can hear you fine.
I just want to make sure everything's fine and don't put pressure on yourself if you're still coughing.
I probably should have had a little water.
But let me move into my very white mode here a little bit deeper.
If you look at the world through the lens of those precious Palestinians on the West Bank, it doesn't make any difference if they're Democrats or Republicans.
If you look at the world through the vantage point of the landless workers in Brazil, it doesn't make any difference.
If you look at the world through the vantage points of those on reservations and hoods and barrios, both parties, symbolic gestures toward their ugly plight.
And so part of our ripening, remember Shakespeare says ripening is all, part of the ripening is how do we look at the world not in terms of just short-term caretaking governments against fascism, as opposed to long-term uprooting of fascism.
Neoliberalism will never uproot fascism.
You have to have a broader vision, a deeper calling, intense passion to fight.
And people would say, well, we don't have that.
There'll never be a mass movement.
West is naive.
You better come back in this establishmentarian perspective and make a choice between the lesser evil.
I said, no, not at all.
That's not my tradition.
Not at all.
Thanks so much.
My blessed wife just brought me some things here, bro.
All right, great.
Thank you for your patience.
Ooh, I'm feeling better already.
I'm about to sing a song.
We want a little musical interlude now that you're all hydrated.
I think we're almost ready for one.
Feeling, feeling good, brother.
So let me ask you, because there was something you said there that I really want to zero in on.
Because as I was listening to these people, I was referring to just asserting like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
It doesn't require any debate whatsoever that Biden is the lesser of two evils and that's the only way that we have to look at the world.
Being in Brazil has enabled me to interview a lot of Latin American leaders.
Over the last decade or so, including Ivo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and obviously Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
And if you ask them that question, they will tell you it doesn't matter at all whether it's Obama or Trump or Clinton or Bush.
It looks exactly the same to them from their perspective, exactly as you just said.
One of the distinguishing features of Latin American politics, and left-wing Latin American politics in particular, is that it has always been imbued with this sort of religious tradition that's true in Central America, it's true in South America, that Christianity, Catholicism, has always played an important part.
In shaping left-wing politics in Latin America, whereas in the U.S., especially now, if you're on the left, you talk about religion.
It's just very anathema to how left-wing politics is understood.
Religion is obviously a crucial part of your worldview.
Can you talk a little bit about how it shapes your vision and how you want to use the religious matrix or vision to talk more about politics in a way that connects to people who otherwise might not be reachable?
Well, I think there's two levels there.
One has to do with just very personal existential level in regard to what one's own commitments and convictions are shaped in light of the world view that one has.
And then the second is the role of religion within the shaping of the consciousness of a larger community.
I'm a product of the black freedom movement, right?
I'm a product of a tradition of black people who have been hated chronically for 400 years, dishing out war, love warriors every generation.
And so many of those love warriors, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, Martin King, Marcus Garber, Fannie Lou Hamer, they're all deeply religious folk.
The case that I've talked about were Christian and Muslim.
Bell Hooks, one of my dear sisters, Buddhist, that the black freedom struggle has always had a significant, if not near majority of who were profoundly religious, but in the prophetic sense.
You know what I mean?
Not dogma and doctrine, not abstract talk about values.
No, no, no, no.
This is not a fight against science.
It's a fight against despair.
It's a fight against nihilism.
And so I am very much a product of that black freedom struggle where you're going to run into so many deeply religious folk You're going to run into religious folk when you're in demonstrations, when you're in left-wing formations.
Now, we have some rich secular minds, from Richard Wright to a host of others.
There's no doubt about that, the Martin Kilsons and others.
But there's no contradiction.
Race Matters was first translated in Portuguese in Brazil.
I went down there.
And that's the first time I heard of Lula, got a chance to meet him very briefly.
That was 1987.
He was working the Workers' Party, I recall.
That must have been almost 40 years ago.
And he was not that well known in terms of having the potential of becoming a politician and a president, I can say that.
He was out there in the favelas, and I had a great time.
I learned a lot, and of course, the liberation theology movement there with the Christian-based communities, I was blessed to speak almost 22 times when I was down there in Brazil.
I learned so much.
Sorry I didn't pick up too much Portuguese, my brother, but But I learned so many other sides.
It's hard.
It's not easy.
So we'll forgive you for that.
But there is definitely a huge tradition.
One of the things that is so interesting is, you know, there's been a lot of pressure on President Lula to support the war in Ukraine, to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine, to send ammunition that fits with the German tanks that were sent.
And he has repeatedly refused.
He said at least 50% of the blame for that war lies with NATO and Zelensky for getting him revved up into believing he can win the war.
Whenever he's kind of pressured by the international community, as they call themselves, meaning Western Europe and the U.S. and whoever agrees with them at the moment, he says my war is with poverty and the Brazilian people's suffering and not with Russia or with Ukraine.
What do you think explains this kind of obsession that the establishment class in the United States has with this war in Ukraine And why have so many people on the left tolerated the Democratic Party prosecuting this with very little dissent?
What's going on there?
Well, I mean, one, as we said before, the Democratic Party has been a party, not just of Wall Street, but of war.
And Brother Biden, of course, has never really seen a war that he didn't support.
Now, unlike my dear brother Lula, though, I would say that I am deeply concerned about poverty in the United States and in Brazil, but I'm also concerned about the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
And I'm thoroughly convinced that a ceasefire is the best thing that would terminate the suffering, even given the criminal invasion of Putin and the Russian Federation.
Meaning what?
Meaning that it's not just steps toward World War II, it's steps toward escalating the war.
We know what Clausewitz has taught us, that war has its life and logic of its own, that we lose control of it immediately.
But also the fact that we've got You know, the great W.E.B.
Du Bois wrote an essay in June 26, 1945.
He was leaving San Francisco after the founding of the United Nations.
He wrote it in the Chicago Defender, which is a black newspaper.
Boise wrote an essay in June 26, 1945.
He was leaving San Francisco after the founding of the United Nations.
He wrote it in the Chicago Defender, which is a black newspaper.
It's called the Winds of Time.
He said, "I see a third world war that has to do with the suppression of Asia and the strangling of Russia." And he was talking about the American empire emerging after the end of the age of Europe and the decentering of European empires after that.
Indescribably evil Holocaust of our Jewish brothers and sisters after the end of the millions dead in World War II.
Now, Du Bois saw then the American empire obsessed with suppression of Asia, strangling of Russia.
What's going on right now?
Now, of course, he's not infallible, but what a prediction!
And so, so much of what's going on in Ukraine right now is an attempt to use NATO as an arm of American imperial power as it tilts toward Asia and tries to suppress China and we could have a possible war with China over Taiwan.
Just as the war escalates in the Ukraine, and then of course with Trump, the civil war escalating in the United States.
What do we do?
We can't remain silent.
What do we do?
We got to keep telling the truth.
What do we do?
We got to keep fighting for justice.
What do we do?
We got to keep loving folk and especially loving the deeply unloved and subjugated and hated and terrorized and traumatized poor people of whatever color, gender or sexual orientation around the world.
What else can we do?
And that's very much what this campaign is all about.
We refuse to be silent in the face of the ugly militarism of the Democratic Party and its ties to corporate elites and the neo-fascism escalating the Republican Party.
Absolutely.
So let me ask you about that.
And just to be clear, when Lewis says, my war is with poverty in Brazil, he doesn't mean I'm indifferent to Ukraine.
What he means is, I don't think fueling the war would help the Ukrainian people given they're the ones suffering the most.
He and I don't say a lot.
I just wanted to add that.
I just want to know.
We agree wholeheartedly.
Absolutely.
He's been flying around the world trying to kind of forge a peace deal and kind of angry and shocked that not only is there no attempt in the West by Biden and NATO to forge a peace deal, but they seem eager to block anyone who's actually forging that effort.
I'm glad my African elected officials are doing similar things, even though I'm critical Well, Matthew, you heard me talking earlier about the history of the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, which, honestly, it really shocks me.
a very important role here in terms of trying to find some just peace for our precious Ukrainian brothers and sisters.
Well, Matthew, you heard me talking earlier about the history of the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, which honestly, it really shocks me.
I think for a lot of people on the American left, broadly speaking, that sense of history has kind of been gone for a lot of people.
Maybe it's just being younger.
They focus on one issue and one issue only, which is the advent of Donald Trump.
And that's all they know is history from 2015 onward.
A lot of them see the CIA, the FBI.
And the U.S.
security state almost says like they're allies because clearly there was a lot of attempt on the part of those agencies to subvert and undermine the Trump presidency for various reasons.
Can you talk a little bit, there was this recent case that I thought was so helpful where it wasn't just conservatives but several black leftist radicals were indicted, alleged to be agents of the Russian government on the Most trivial charges.
The media didn't care.
Very few people on the left objected.
Talk a little bit about kind of the history of the FBI and the CIA and the U.S.
security state when it comes to radical anti-establishment politics, because I don't think there's a lot of sense of that history any longer, certainly among Democratic Party supporters and even, unfortunately, among a lot of people who identify as the left.
No, you're so right, though.
And we can begin again with Martin Luther King Jr.
and the fact that he was under such vicious surveillance.
And, you know, I do have a deep love and respect for Brother RFKJR.
I may not agree with him on a number of issues of Israel and free market capitalism or what have you, but I think he's a very, very decent brother in his own way.
But it was his father, of course, along with his uncle, who put Brother Martin under surveillance.
of when they were in power.
And I think that because I come out of a tradition where I know, you know, to love black people, to love poor and working people means you will be under surveillance, means you have to deal with character assassination, means that you will.
You have a chance of being literally assassinated.
Black love is a crime and a white supremacist society, my brother.
And we all have to be able to pay that price if we're serious about it.
So what that means is for the younger generation, you know, they need to know that this surveillance state that you're talking about is not abstract.
It is concrete.
It is operating on the ground in a number of different ways.
And a lot of people don't wake up until it comes to their house.
You know what I mean?
A lot of people don't wake up until their own friends are affected by it.
The African People's Socialist Party, Brother Amali, it came to their house.
I think it's wrong.
I think it's unwarranted.
I stand with them.
But I know Brother Mumaibul Jamal, who's been on death row, still in prison.
I know H. Rhett Brown in Arizona, in prison.
Leonard Beltier in prison.
Brother Snowden in exile, can't come back.
Julian Assange.
Oh, my dear brother Julian.
My God, what they've tried to do to him, to crush him.
And he's still going for what?
Exposing the ugly war crimes of the American empire.
And yet those who committed the crimes are free.
Those are the kind of realities that we cannot deny or overlook, and yet it will never ever dampen our spirit.
We'll never have the last word in terms of our willingness to fight, tell the truth, love, laugh, and continue to keep swinging.
All right, well, I refuse to not let that be the last note that we end on because of how powerful it was, how much I think people need to hear it.
I very much hope that this will not be our last conversation.
It took so long, way too long for us to have our first one, person to person at least.
I'd love for you to keep coming back on, talk about the campaign as it's unfolding, issues as they emerge.
Like I said, I always find you to be an extremely valuable voice.
I'm thrilled that you're making use of your platform in the way that you are, and I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight.
Thank you, my brother.
Salute you now, man.
Stay strong.
All right, you too.
Have a great evening.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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