Smoking Gun: New Evidence Proves Biden White House Coerced Facebook’s Rampant Censorship. Plus: Lee Fang on DHS, New Epstein Connections, & Anheuser-Busch Lobbyists | SYSTEM UPDATE #119
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to 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, newly released evidence regarding the U.S.
government's program to censor dissent from the Internet demonstrates how aggressively, consistently, and explicitly Top Biden officials demanded that Facebook censor both dissent over its COVID policies and censor dissidents to their narratives.
A mountain of new emails obtained and then released by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan earlier today shows a continuous stream of explicit demands by top Biden White House officials to senior Facebook officials that those who even questioned or mocked their COVID decrees be silenced and censored off the platform.
Now, we have known for years that Facebook has been under steady pressure and coercion from Democratic Party officials and lawmakers to censor content disliked by that party, all under threat of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event of their failure to comply.
Facebook has often complied with these censorship demands, either due to ideological agreement with the censorship request, or because of fear of the consequences to their business for failure to comply.
Indeed, a federal court just this month found that the record of the state's censorship toward Big Tech is so compelling and disturbing that it constitutes what the court called one of the gravest violations of the First Amendment's free speech guarantee in years.
But this new evidence released today, the key excerpts of which we will review for you, provides some of the most disturbing looks yet into just how aggressive and coercive these censorship demands are.
As we noted in last night's episode, thus far, the Democratic Party has yet to produce even a single member of Congress willing to express even light concern, let alone indignation, over the official censorship regime that the U.S.
government has imposed on the Internet.
Indeed, many of them have gone from denying its existence and mocking those of us who express concerns about it as, quote, conspiracy theorists To now explicitly defending the censorship regime as necessary for national health.
That's always the cycle.
They first deny it and mock those who claim it exists and then once the proof is produced that it does exist they say, they go from it doesn't exist to yes it does exist and it's necessary and we should be happy and grateful that it does.
Now, it remains to be seen what changes, if any, these new revelations today will provoke, but our job is to try and break down and deconstruct and analyze and explain them in the best way that we can, so that's what we're going to do.
Then, Lee Fong is one of the nation's most intrepid and independent investigative journalists.
One of the worst things I ever did to anyone that I like was that I persuaded him back in 2015 to leave his job and join The Intercept.
Fortunately for him and for us, he is now liberated from that DNC Talking Points platform masquerading on his news site and has been doing some of the most important investigative journalism on his sub stack, which I hope you will read and, if in kind, support.
Lee, along with Ken Klippenstein, unearthed and published a once-secret Homeland Security document that outlined that agency's plans for an online censorship regime.
You'll recall that we reviewed the House hearing yesterday where the Secretary of Homeland Security repeatedly denied his agency's intent to impose a censorship regime when Lee and his colleague produced the document describing Explicitly what that plan was.
Lee also recently revealed some embarrassing connections between one of the most embarrassing members of Congress, the non-voting delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, and Jeffrey Epstein.
As well as a whole range of new connections between Epstein money and highly powerful people.
We'll talk to Lee about all of that, about a vast lobbyist scheme on Capitol Hill run by Anheuser-Busch, and New reportedly is now doing about a controversy involving a new police program in Atlanta.
As we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, as soon as we're done with our one-hour live show here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our live interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback.
To obtain access to our aftershow, which is for our subscribers only, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community.
The red Join button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page, and that will give you access to that aftershow, to original content we produce, and will also help support the independent journalism that we do here.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, the episodes post on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform.
12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, you can follow our show on those platforms and 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.
There's been a lot of focus, justifiably so, on the way in which the pre-Elon Musk regime at Twitter engaged in all kinds of political censorship.
And that focus on Twitter was due in part to the fact that Elon Musk caused the release of the Twitter files that enabled journalists like Matt Taibbi and Lee Fong and others to reveal and document exactly how much the FBI and other agencies inside the federal government pressured Twitter To remove political content that the government disliked.
Another major reason there has been a focus on Twitter is because Twitter was the one platform that most flamboyantly censored the New York Post and its reporting leading up to the 2020 election based on the CIA's lie spread by Politico and other outlets.
That the reporting based on Hunter Biden's laptop was not genuine or authentic, but was Russian disinformation.
For several days, Twitter simply refused to allow any links to that reporting to be posted.
And then it locked the New York Post out of its account all the way, practically right up until the election.
Because they refused to remove the links to that story.
We covered that extensively, how that happened, the fact that Twitter fabricated reasons for the censorship, namely claiming that they had a ban in place on linking to hacked materials.
And there was no evidence, of course, that the Hunter Biden laptop materials on which the New York Post reporting was based was hacked.
It was just a made up justification under a lot of pressure from the FBI and other agencies inside the federal government.
But sometimes that pressure, that focus on how Twitter has censored political content has obscured what in reality is the much more important censorship regime that has often targeted voluntarily, sometimes with resistance, the much larger platform of Facebook.
And in particular, you should recall that it wasn't just Twitter, but Facebook that censored the reporting based on Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 election.
And the censorship that Facebook did was in a lot of ways much more nefarious than what Twitter did.
Twitter ultimately apologized through its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, who said that it was a mistake for them to have done that.
Facebook has never apologized for its censorship.
The censorship of Twitter was much more transparent.
It was just a ban on any attempt to link to the story, whereas Facebook's censorship was achieved algorithmically.
They simply suppressed the story, prevented it from spreading.
And the way in which Facebook engaged in that censorship is very important to remember.
The way it was announced was through a tweet by someone named Andy Stone, who is a top official at Facebook.
But prior to joining Facebook, he had literally spent his entire adult career working for the Democratic Party.
He worked for Nancy Pelosi.
He worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the entity that tries to ensure that Democrats always constitute a majority party in the Congress.
He worked for other Democratic lawmakers.
He was just a lifelong Democratic Party operative.
And now at Facebook, for some reason, they chose him To go forward and announce to the world the way in which Facebook would algorithmically suppress any reporting based on the Hunter Biden laptop.
And here on October 14, 2020 is what Andy Stone said in making that announcement.
Quote, while I will intentionally not link to the New York Post.
Talking about that reporting as though it was such a distasteful garbage that he wouldn't even deign to mention what he meant.
I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners.
In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
They tinkered with their own algorithms in ways they never bothered to explain to prevent a spread of that story.
So if you were someone on Facebook who posted that story, something in the algorithms would ensure that as few people as possible would see it.
Now you saw there the justification Facebook offered, through this lifelong Democratic Party operative, for censoring that story in the days leading up to the 2020 vote.
Namely that it was eligible for fact-checking by their third-party fact-checkers.
So the question I have always had, and still have, is what did that fact-check reveal?
Any actual fact-check would have revealed That the basis for Facebook's decision, namely that this was Russian disinformation, was a lie and that the reporting was based on genuine and authentic documents.
So if Facebook really conducted the fact check it claimed that it was going to conduct when it decided to censor this material leading up to the outcome, where is that fact check?
What did the fact check reveal?
For how long did Facebook algorithmically suppress?
The spread of that story about Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine leading up before the election, how many people would have seen it, who didn't see it, if Facebook hadn't engaged in this censorship?
These are answers that Facebook simply refuses to provide no matter how many times they're asked.
I'm someone who has asked them multiple times here as just one example.
You see a DM message that I sent to Andy Stone.
It was on, I believe the date was April of 2021, we'll get the exact date, but it was after the election, months after the election, and there you see my message.
I wrote, quote, Andy, I'm writing about Facebook's pre-election moderation decisions, and I have two questions.
One, did Facebook in fact conduct the fact check On the reporting about the Biden family that you referenced in your October 14 tweet announcing its suppression, and if so, what was the outcome of that fact check?
If such a fact check was performed, does Facebook intend to make its finding public at some point?
And number two, what is your reporting relationship to Anna Mankandjou?
If any, and did she play any role in Facebook's decision to suppress this reporting?
Thanks, Glenn Greenwald.
I asked about her because she was central to Facebook's political censorship decisions, even though she had all kinds of ties to the Democratic Party and to the Biden campaign.
I asked this question in many ways, publicly, in writing, to Facebook.
They refused to answer my inquiries or anybody else's.
Telling me here about a platform that is so large that it's the official position of the Democratic Party.
That they constitute a monopoly because of how dominant they are in the field of social media.
And whether you think they're really a monopoly or not, there's no denying the fact that they exert enormous influence over our political discourse.
So when they censor reporting that is incriminating of one of the leading presidential candidates in the days before the election, they at least owe the public an explanation, one to this day they refuse to provide.
So we know that Facebook has engaged in political censorship because Facebook itself has talked about it.
In fact, just recently, in June of this year, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about the fact And I believe that the reason he talked about this was because he anticipated the release today of these emails that proved that what he was saying here was true.
He talked about the fact that Facebook was under a barrage of censorship demands from the U.S.
government concerning COVID, especially or including many demands of censorship of material and viewpoints that actually turned out to be true.
It is disturbing enough and dangerous enough if the US government is trying to get material censored that deviates from their narratives or from their orthodoxies.
But the fact that they were trying to get censored off the internet, viewpoints and arguments that turned out to be true, because what the government was saying was false,
Should make, honestly, I know this is a cliche, but any American extremely disturbed, if you're not disturbed by the highest levels of the executive branch pressuring big tech companies to censor the internet by removing dissent that is actually proven to be true, what is it that would disturb you if that does not?
Here's Mark Zuckerberg in a podcast discussion explaining exactly what I just previewed.
So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are kind of obviously false, that are maybe factual, but may not be harmful.
So it's like, all right, are you going to censor someone for just being wrong?
If there's no kind of harm implication of what they're doing, I think that there's a bunch of real kind of issues and challenges there.
But then I think that there are other places where it is, you know, just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn't been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions.
You know, unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that, you know, kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and, you know, asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being, you know, more debatable or true.
And that stuff is really tough, right?
And really undermines trust in that.
And, you know, I think it's incredibly interesting that on several occasions, Both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, obviously Elon Musk as well, have made statements like this, given interviews like this, where they talk about the really serious dangers of the pressures applied by the U.S.
government to these big tech platforms trying to force them to censor in ways that is classic censorship, political censorship, state censorship of the kind the Constitution prohibits.
Now I know there's a lot of cynicism around those kind of statements when done by leaders of companies that have ended up censoring people in clearly political ways, and I understand that cynicism.
But I, and maybe I'm being naive, and maybe it doesn't even matter.
But I believe that in the case of both Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, both of them genuinely do believe that this pressure that is constantly applied, and we've seen now the streamed emails, we're about to look at them, the ones released today.
We've seen before the ones that were given to Twitter.
There's this constant barrage of demands for censorship from agencies and parts of the U.S.
government that can destroy your business if they want to.
When the FBI and the CIA and the White House or the CDC come knocking on your door and say, we want you to take down this material.
And if you don't, we're going to consider you to have blood on your hands.
And it's in the context of explicit threats from the party in power.
The Democratic Party, which has shown you many times, openly in hearings, where they summon these people and say, you need to start censoring even more.
And if you don't, you're going to face regulatory and legal reprisals.
Any CEO of any company that's a publicly traded company that has the obligation to maximize value to their shareholders is going to take those demands and threats very seriously.
And I, on some level, guess they have to.
But the reality is, regardless of whether they're being cynical and pretending to find this disturbing, but in reality are fine with it, the fact of the matter is that they're the ones who are kind of trying to sound the alarm that this is happening.
That there's this endless stream of censorship demands coming from the highest levels of the U.S.
government to the top levels of these corporations, demanding classic censorship of dissent.
Which is why the Democrats have switched from, this isn't really happening, people who think that's happening are conspiracy theorists, to yes it's happening and we should be grateful it's happening because the brave men and women of the CIA and Homeland Security and the FBI are just trying to protect us from disinformation and we should want them to do that.
As though that's the proper role of the federal government and as though they're reliable arbiters of truth and falsity.
So there's no doubt that it's happening.
And it's not happening in an isolated case or an ad hoc case.
It's happening systemically.
Continuously.
And it's highly aggressive and highly explicit.
And we've seen that over and over and over again.
And now today, and again, I said last night that there's a lot of criticisms that are valid about the House Republican majority, including the fact that they often discover and reveal wrongdoing, but don't seem to have the courage to do much about it.
But whatever else is true, part of their function is oversight and bringing transparency to these agencies.
And on that score, I do think they're doing a very good job.
I think these agencies The CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security are getting more transparency and more oversight and more scrutiny from Congress than at any point since the Church Commission of the 1970s.
I know as a journalist who focuses a lot on these agencies, the information that has been emerging from these hearings and the use of these subpoenas have provided some of the most important insights yet into exactly what's happening here, into exactly what is taking place.
And don't underestimate the importance of that.
I knew for many years that the NSA was spying on Americans in ways far more indiscriminate and suspicionless and illegal than anyone knew.
But I couldn't prove it.
I couldn't prove exactly how it was being done.
We got little bits and pieces that enabled me to know it was happening, but it wasn't until Edward Snowden came forward and handed me an archive that enabled me and my colleagues to spend the time showing exactly how it worked and exactly how it functioned and eliminate any doubt about the fact that it was.
Only then did the repercussions really start.
So it always begins with transparency and the light that gets shined on what these companies and what these agencies are doing.
And we have a lot of that and we have more of it today as a result of Congressman Jordan's release of these emails.
So let's take a look.
at the key parts of what he's calling the Facebook files, obviously intending to draw a parallel between what he was able to discover and the Twitter files.
And there you see his first tweet, part one, smoking gun documents prove Facebook censored Americans because of Biden White House pressure.
That is pretty straightforward and pretty direct.
And I'm going to go ahead and And as you're about to see, by looking at these emails, the only honest conclusion that a person looking at them in good faith could reach about exactly what happened.
It is exactly what he just described there.
Facebook is censoring Americans because of the pressure being applied from the Biden administration.
So here's his next tweet.
Where he says, never before released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee prove that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.
And let's remember that this word unconstitutional is not just Congressman Jordan's view.
It is the finding of the federal court Which very carefully examined this mountain of evidence and reached a factual finding that there was a systemic government campaign in place, that there is a systemic government campaign in place emanating from the FBI, from Homeland Security, from the CIA, from the CDC, from the NIH to force these companies to censor dissent off of the internet and
That their efforts to do so are unconstitutional because they're in violation of the First Amendment, based on longstanding case law that we've showed you before, that government cannot directly censor, nor can they pressure private actors to censor for them, which is exactly what this is.
And that's why communications of this type are now enjoined by this federal court.
Because of the preliminary finding that it's unconstitutional.
So here's the first document that Congressman Jordan released.
There you see the tweet, his explanation of it.
In April 2021, a Facebook employee circulated an email for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, writing, quote, we are facing continued pressure from external shareholders, including the Biden White House, to remove posts.
And there you see the document on the screen.
And again, this is an internal Facebook communication written to the two top executives of the company by a Facebook official.
It wasn't intended for public consumption.
There's no motive to lie.
He's trying to describe to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg exactly what is happening.
And what he says is, We are seeking your guidance on whether to take more aggressive action against certain vaccine discouraging content.
We are facing continued pressure from external shareholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discourse content.
For example, we recently shared with the White House a list of the top 100 vaccine-related posts on Facebook in the U.S.
for the week of April 5th to April 11th.
While authoritative information dominated the list, the White House was concerned that the number three post was a vaccine-discouraging humorous meme, and they called on us to delete the meme.
So it wasn't just that the government was trying to prevent citizens from raising questions and doubts about the vaccine, which they had every right to do.
Obviously, that is an absolute First Amendment right to question the vaccine, to raise doubts about the vaccine.
But in this case, it was just a mocking meme, clearly humorous, although with a point of view.
And it was the number three most influential tweet.
And therefore, Facebook sharing this data with the White House, which already seems inappropriate to me.
sharing internal data about which posts are making the biggest impact, the White House in response said, we want this one gone.
And you can see there that they took that pressure very seriously.
It wasn't just a polite request.
He was describing it as continued pressure from the White House and the press.
That's the other thing.
I constantly say that the most surreal aspect of American political life is that the leading activists and agitators for censorship in the United States are the media.
that.
And they get very angry when I say that, they deny that it's true, but this is exactly how they accomplish it.
The tech unit at the New York Times, people at the Washington Post like Taylor Enns, BuzzFeed, All those scummy Brooklyn digital outlets do the same thing.
They see a post that they want censored, they pick up the phone, they call Facebook or Twitter or Google and they say, we're writing a story on the fact that you're permitting material of this kind to remain on the site and the damage that is caused by it.
Do you have any comment?
Obviously, that isn't a real journalistic inquiry.
It's actually a form of activism.
It's trying to pressure these big tech companies to remove that content by saying, we'll write a story that you're allowing this if you don't remove it.
And that's exactly how Facebook perceives it.
They're saying we're getting pressure not only from the Biden administration and the government, but from the press as well.
And that's the form in which that pressure is manifest.
Here is the next week where Jim Jordan says, public pressure mounted as well.
In July 2021, President Biden publicly denounced Facebook and other social media platforms, claiming they were, quote, killing people by not censoring alleged, quote, misinformation.
So when the President of the United States stands up from the podium and says, we demand, as he did, that social, I remember that day very well, that social media companies censor More dissent about COVID because by not suing doing so they are quote killing people.
That is deliberately creating a climate in which these companies are basically forced to censor because the government is formally accusing them of having bought on their hands that they don't.
This is how the government always used to try and pressure the newspapers with which I was working during the Snowden reporting and many other national security journalists to not report.
They will always accuse you of having blood on your hands if you reveal their secret wrongdoing.
And they're just commandeering this language to insist that these big tech companies censor on their demand Otherwise they will accuse him of having blood on their hands, of quote, killing people, in the words of President Biden.
The next tweet says, but it wasn't just the White House.
Facebook also changed its policies in direct response to pressure from Biden's Surgeon General, censoring members of the quote, disinformation dozen.
And there you see the document on the screen in which This is again an internal Facebook email that says, this email provides a follow-up to our August 6th discussion regarding our response to the Surgeon General on COVID-19 misinformation.
During that discussion, we agreed to further explore our discrete policy options for reducing the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on our platform.
So the government is requesting meetings with Facebook Demanding changes to their moderation policies to expand the scope of what is prohibited when it comes to dissent about COVID.
The memo goes on.
Since the teams have scoped the requirements for executing these options, as discussed further below, we plan to roll out the first three options over the next coming weeks, and we'll roll out the fourth option as an escalation-only policy.
And there you see the options that emerge from these meetings with the federal government specifically talking about things like And they will remove any, they will designate any assets linked in group pages, profiles, or accounts, which we have removed.
And here you can see this information here, what I'm talking about.
So it says, option number one, designate any assets linked to groups, pages, profiles, accounts, which have been removed for COVID misinformation violations as non-recommendable to users.
So they would block These accounts from spreading, even though they wouldn't officially ban them, they would essentially make them impossible to be heard.
And the impact is that any asset linked to the prohibited or the bad groups that have been removed for COVID misinformation would not be recommended to users.
One example, RFK Jr.' 's Instagram account is removed.
So is Facebook will therefore not be Recommendable.
So he was already banned from Facebook, RFK Jr., a lifelong corporate lawyer, environmental lawyer suing large corporations for harming the public health, specializing in this information.
And the federal government was very concerned about RFK Jr.' 's influence.
He had written a book about Tony Fauci and they wanted his influence, his commentary on COVID Not to be heard, and so they pressured Facebook to change its policies to make it impossible to recommend RFK Jr.' 's post or RFK Jr.
himself on Facebook.
And over and over, that's exactly what the government continuously tried to get Facebook to do, to dig into the granular details of their quote-unquote content moderation or censorship policies and insist that they expand the ways in which they were silencing dissenters.
Here's the final part.
Option three, demote COVID or vaccine information rated partly falsely, more strongly, just to try and censor more.
Option four, court COVID or vaccine related URLs that are rated partly false or missing context and penalize them further.
And it describes in detail what the US government wanted them to do.
So you see how involved the federal government was in trying to ensure that dissent was blocked and dissent was impeded.
Now, one of these tweets, I'm not sure if we have it, talked about things like trying to ensure that Tucker Carlson's commentary from his old Fox News show was limited in terms of its reach.
So they're identifying specific journalists whose impact they want to diminish on these big tech platforms.
And I think so much of All of what's happening here in terms of the censorship regime and the role of the U.S.
security state in it can be seen by many of the people who are most responsible for doing this.
I've used the figures before from an excellent and highly reliable Twitter account called Names Redacted 24-7, who analyzes how many people who are in the highest and most influential positions when it comes to censorship and content moderation at Facebook, Google, and Twitter Previously worked for the US security state.
The numbers are enormous.
Just like the numbers of prior CIA agents, FBI operatives, NSA and DHS agents are enormous in terms of how many are employed by media outlets.
They're also embedded deep into the parts of big tech responsible for censoring political content on the internet.
Here is just one example.
And I posted on Twitter today, this is one example, which I described as a perfect illustration of the Axis of Powers collaborating to get censored on the internet, all compiled in one social media bio.
Here you see the profile is Aaron B. is his name.
He uses the he, him.
Here's the he, him pronouns.
You don't want to misgender him.
You want to make sure that you use the pronouns he specifies.
He currently is the misinformation.
He works in misinformation policy at Meta.
So the part of Facebook that is designed to identify what they regard as misinformation and therefore get centered.
And he previously came from the CIA.
There you see it, formerly of the CIA.
He talks about, quote, hashtag democracy, social media, misinformation, national security, and content moderation.
These are the people who are embedded in big tech's censorship offices, the people who used to work inside the US security state.
So they have the pressure coming directly from These US security state agencies to center, but they also have planted operatives in the offices that make those decisions to have that influence on the other side as well.
Remember that as part of the Twitter files, the deputy general counsel who is deeply involved in all of the censorship decisions named James Baker.
Had previously to that position in Twitter, he was the general counsel, the top lawyer at the FBI.
That's what this coalition is.
It is the US security state in particular setting the limits of our political discourse by controlling how censorship functions on the internet.
Now here is a, here's his, from his LinkedIn page you see his own description there.
He's the Senior Product Policy Manager in Misinformation.
He leads the misinformation team's U.S.
workforce and regularly performs duties for the team's global director in their absence.
Oversees a high volume of strategic policy work to ensure policies appropriately balance countering harm with fostering free expression.
Is this something you're comfortable with, having people go from the CIA to Facebook, the largest and most influential social media platform in the world that controls the information flow to billions of people on the planet, and making decisions about how to balance what he considers to be appropriate balancing of harm with free expression?
Is that something you're comfortable with the CIA determining?
I'm not.
He also coordinates extensively with cross-functional partners across the company and regularly advises senior executives and engages with high-profile external shareholders.
He was featured in a nationwide advertising campaign.
And then here's the part of his LinkedIn page where he talks about the work he did at the CIA.
He was at the CIA for 17 years and 5 months.
So he wasn't just there passing through for a few months.
He's a career CIA agent.
He was there from March of 2002, right at the start of the war on terror, to July of 2019.
So he went directly from the CIA to making censorship decisions on Facebook.
And here you see his own description.
He was a senior analytical manager at the CIA.
He oversaw large teams of intelligence analysts to enable senior U.S.
officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues, served in multiple positions.
I'm sure he did.
He wrote for and edited the President's daily briefing.
He led briefings for cabinet members, senior National Security Council officials, and members of Congress.
He was known as a leader who deepened strategic work, drove innovation, increased team output, fostered morale during reorganizations, and championed diversity and inclusion.
So, he likely was part of the team that produced things like the CIA video celebrating their autistic and non-binary workers and their devotion to diversity and inclusion.
So, there you see the career path of so many of these people.
This is where they come from.
It's not a coincidence.
It's the same reason why so many times that you turn on CNN and MSNBC, if you do, I do occasionally for my work, it's part of the responsibility I undertake in order to better inform you the hazard work I do.
Almost always, the minute you turn it on, you will hear a panel composed of people who used to work at the FBI, CIA, DOJ.
NSA, Homeland Security, the people who they employ all used to work there and those are the people who shape and deliver the news to their mindless, partisan, liberal audience.
But they also have this career path where they go into the censorship positions of big tech as well.
Here we have a video of Andy, Aaron B, being interviewed about the work that he has done.
Let's pull that video up.
He's very playful, by the way, in addition to being a serious censor for Facebook and the CIA.
Let's watch him.
Aaron, I've been with Facebook for two years now.
I'm a product policy manager.
What does your job entail?
We're part of the team that writes the rules for Facebook.
If something violates our standards for safety and security, what Facebook could, should, can do.
You and your team are faced with very important decisions, especially when it comes to content.
There's very little agreement whether we should be Leaving more content up, taking more content down.
With any particular rule or issue that we're looking at, where something has come up where the rules are not 100% clear, we're not going to make everybody happy.
How does your team work on that?
Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do.
How do we think about the balance between harmful content and protecting?
Transparency is very important to the work that he does, he says.
And yet, to this day, they refuse to explain what they did in one of the most important censorship decisions since the advent of the Internet, namely algorithmically suppressing the spread of the Hunter Biden story.
Whether there was in fact a third party fact check of those documents as they promised, what that fact check revealed, the extent to which they suppressed that story, how many people ended up not seeing it.
So with that delightful little smirk, he says transparency is really crucial to the work that we do, and yet they refuse to provide even the most basic transparency about the way in which they manipulated the influence of the 2020 election at the urging of the federal government.
Does it ever make you feel uncomfortable to be put in a position where you're having to draw the lines?
Yes, and I think it should make me uncomfortable, and all of us who do this work.
If 99% of the people are expressing themselves, sharing their family photos, Exchanging ideas at 0.001% are encouraging violence or spreading harmful content that can ruin the thing for everybody.
These decisions can have real effects on people.
We are developing rules and policies without regulation.
We're really navigating that space as best we can.
Why would updating regulations help you?
Regulation can help us better define what is acceptable and what's not.
I think a standardized approach would help platforms all across the board.
Actually give us guidelines where right now there's very few.
So that's Aaron.
Aaron.
He him.
We need the legislative and regulatory space to catch up.
Regulation can help us better define what the bounds of those rules should be.
So that's Aaron.
Aaron.
He, him.
Delightful video with very charming music for a very charming person.
And you see there him explaining the struggles he has, the difficulties, the pressures as he sits there and balances what speech is harmful and what speech should be permitted.
Obviously based on the only other thing that he's done in life, which is spend two decades at the CIA.
And that is an illustration of how the censorship regime functions.
As I said before, we have had other indications of these formal plans.
I think this email release obviously adds a great deal of insight into how this functions.
One of the most important stories that had been published on this topic, namely the way in which the U.S. security state overtly and explicitly plots to control the The Internet was reported on by my next guest, the outstanding independent investigative journalist, Lee Fong, whose work can now be read and I hope will be read by as many people as possible at Substack League.
Good evening.
Thanks so much for joining us.
It's great to see you as always.
Good to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So let's start by talking about this reporting because sometimes I think it gets a little bit obscured.
I think sometimes on purpose, where Democrats try and pretend that the only reporting that had ever been done on this issue were the Twitter files because they got their media allies to work so hard to try and discredit the Twitter files and the reporters who did it.
Before the Twitter file started, you had this article at the Intercept before you left with Ken Klippenstein that was entitled, Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation.
You were talking about disinformation.
On the Internet, the title of the article was Truth Cops.
I don't know if we can put that on the screen, the headline of the article.
But there you see it.
This was reported before the Twitter files on October 31, 2020.
So just remind everybody, Lee, of what this document was that you got your hands on and what these materials showed about how Homeland Security planned to police disinformation online.
Well, this piece that we reported last October used a variety of sources.
Ken and I talked to a whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security.
I took a look at documents that were being produced through Discovery and other court documents that came out of the Missouri v. Biden case.
And some other Freedom of Information Act requests.
These are, you know, transparency disclosures from the government that release internal documents.
We compiled these documents and basically painted a picture of how the government had created this massive infrastructure to pressure and censor social media and the plans to really build upon Uh, those efforts and extend them to other forms of media.
And this kind of infrastructure really revolved around the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, this is an agency that was created in the wake of September 11th to kind of integrate the government's emergency response, its homeland security response, its terror response to respond to threats of violent terrorism.
Well, as the War on Terror wound down and this government's budget continued increasing.
They looked for new targets.
There was this kind of threat level from ISIS recruiting online, then the concern around Russia allegedly meddling in the 2016 election.
In the aftermath of these concerns, there was a new sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security, CISA, the Cyber Security Infrastructure Act agency, that was taken and it was passed by Congress to respond to hacking threats on utilities, on pipelines, on other kind of more traditional infrastructure.
But the bureaucrats in control of this agency pivoted it, and without really much debate, devoted a huge team to policing social media, looking at various threats, as they defined it, at COVID.
At the 2020 election, there were plans to expand the kind of pressure campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, including Reddit and others, to look at the war in Ukraine, to look at racial justice, to look at a whole number of issues, and having the government basically decide what's truthful, what's not truthful.
They invented new terms for this censorship.
They said, you know, it's not just misinformation or disinformation, you know, intentional or unintentional lies, but malinformation.
That's truthful information that serves the wrong narrative.
So there was this kind of elaborate structure created within the DHS in partnership with this new expanded team from the FBI to place daily pressure on the social media platforms to flag various forms of media content, of social media content to be taken down or shadow banned or censored or flagged in other ways.
And the biggest kind of test case was on this was the 2020 election.
There were ad hoc efforts around COVID.
And, you know, that's what that really brings us to today.
Because as, you know, after our reporting and other reports and the Twitter files have now provided more kind of grist and evidence about this elaborate censorship infrastructure, we see policymakers now pushing back and discussing it a little bit more.
The future is very uncertain.
There's been one kind of blanket injunction now overturned by an appellate court stopping the government from this type of censorship.
There's now this ongoing effort by congressional Republicans to subpoena the Biden administration and some of the social media companies.
That's how Jim Jordan produced these emails that were released today that you just discussed on your program.
I'm still reporting on the story.
I have other sources of information, including records requests to some of the partners.
The DHS partnered with a number of NGOs and think tanks and universities to flag social media content to be taken down.
I've received hundreds of other documents that I've published on my Substack, adding more details about the process of how the censorship apparatus worked.
But that's how we're at where we are today.
There was a hearing yesterday in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
There were the primary witness.
In fact, the only witness was the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
I don't know if you had a chance to see it, but it was clear that several of the members who were questioning him about the Homeland Security censorship efforts were using this document in this reporting you just described that appeared on The Intercept.
And he just All day, under oath, vehemently denied that there's any effort at all on the part of Homeland Security to censor or otherwise suppress the political speech of American citizens.
He was claiming that the only thing that Homeland Security really does is monitor how adversarial state actors Weaponize disinformation and to the extent that they monitor or care about American citizens' use of the internet at all, it's only to the extent where there's proven connectivity between the speech and violence, namely that people are explicitly urging violence and that others who hear it are then engaging in violence.
I don't know if you had a chance to watch any of that testimony.
We devoted most of our show last night to reporting on it.
Are those denials, as I described them, remotely true?
I mean, is there any way some even playing semantic games to justify the Secretary's insistence that Homeland Security does not in any way engage in the attempt to monitor or control the political speech of American citizens?
I think there's a little bit of a semantic game being played.
If you look at the emails being sent from DHS and the FBI to Twitter around censorship actions, there's a boilerplate kind of blurb that they attach to every single one of those emails saying that this is not a demand to remove any content.
That blurb is attached to emails that are direct requests to say, hey, this tweet doesn't seem to be true.
This tweet seems to violate your terms of service.
Hey, this tweet is part of an influence operation that's spreading misinformation.
If you look at the way that Twitter responded from emails that I've released on my sub stack, It's clear the intention of those communications.
After receiving those emails from the government of flag tweets of dangerous misinformation, tweets were taken down.
And as Twitter responded internally, you know, they had their own workers on this.
They said, well, you know, after a tweet would have been deleted, you know, we've resolved this case as DHS has saw it.
So, you know, just because there's this boilerplate language That they were not engaging in censorship does not change the fact that the government had created this apparatus, had pressured on a daily basis to take down content, and that was not effectively a censorship regime.
And, you know, a claim that these demands were only around violence or foreign actors is just blatantly not true.
We have dozens and dozens of emails showing domestic Twitter accounts and other social media accounts that were pressured to be taken down by this government apparatus.
Some of them, like the messages on Facebook that were released by Jim Jordan today, were incredibly benign.
As Ken and I reported last year, some of the Tweets that were flagged by the FBI and DHS as some kind of national security concern were joke parody accounts, you know, accounts in Colorado that were making weed jokes.
You know, certainly not something that rises to the level of foreign influence or, you know, violence.
Some of the chatter that was flagged as dangerous misinformation that needed to be taken down were, you know, kind of benign claims around fears around absentee or, you know, mail-in voting, you'd see a lot of tweets taken down or flagged that simply expressed concern around the security of mail-in ballots, which, you know, I should add, you know,
you look at the Twitter decisions around this, they were looking at conservatives you look at the Twitter decisions around this, they were looking at conservatives concerned with the security of mail-in ballots, and they were, you know, blanket censoring or shadow When Democrats were expressing similar concerns around the security of mail-in ballots, Twitter made decisions not to ban or shadow ban these accounts.
So this was a partisan effort.
This was an effort directed towards ordinary Americans, and In many cases, Twitter executives even discussed among themselves some of these accusations of foreign influence have no merit.
There's no influence.
There's no evidence of any foreign connection.
Still, they took a lot of these tweets down.
And, you know, I should I should note that, you know, Jim Jordan released a report that confirmed some of my reporting from earlier this summer.
When you talk about foreign influence, I interviewed a Ukrainian intelligence official who visited San Francisco, where I'm based, earlier this summer, and I talked to him about his partnership with the FBI.
Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian intelligence apparatus has worked with the FBI team assigned to the social media companies to flag accounts and take down accounts at Facebook and Twitter that run counter to the Ukrainian narrative, that the Ukrainian intelligence apparatus has worked with the FBI team assigned to the social media companies to flag Or, you know, really, the criteria is not clear.
He listed a number of reasons simply disagreeing with the war effort could get you flagged as an account that needs to be taken down.
So if anything, we see that this FBI DHS apparatus was facilitating foreign influence.
It's just a type of foreign influence that the government seems to favor.
Yeah, you know, there's I mean, there's so many censorship revelations that come so fast these days that even ones I myself talk about and report on are ones I end up forgetting.
And that was the case for this revelation that There's a partnership between Ukrainian intelligence and the FBI where Ukrainian intelligence would send to the FBI tweets or Facebook posts or things on YouTube from Google that bothered them or that they disliked about the war effort or the narrative about the Russians and the FBI would then on their behalf submit those requests to Big Tech for those posts to be removed.
So our political discourse is being censored not only by the U.S.
security state but also by Ukrainian intelligence as well, so our taxpayer dollars are being used to fund Ukraine's war effort and then their government, sometimes they create blacklists of our journalists and our citizens, I've been on some of those, of people supposedly spreading Russian disinformation by which they mean opposing the U.S.
effort in that war, but other times it's just to censor ordinary Americans from expressing their views about a war that they're being asked to fund Endlessly.
And of course, some of this stuff wasn't just benign that got taken down, but as Mark Zuckerberg himself said, was stuff that ended up being proven true about the vaccine, about the spread of COVID, about vaccine mandates and the like.
So it's incredibly insidious and it's important to just, because there's a tsunami of evidence now on this, to kind of keep it all, keep track of it all, is a difficult thing to do.
Let me move on and ask you about Uh, a previously hidden connection between the non-voting delegate Stacey Plaskett, who represents the Virgin Islands ostensibly.
She doesn't talk much about the Virgin Islands or the people who reside there.
She talks instead about things that will get her on MSNBC, but technically she represents the people of the Virgin Islands and this non-voting So Stacey Plaskett on the one hand and Jeffrey Epstein on the other.
You had a June 27th article on your substack entitled, House Democrat Worked for Epstein's Tax and Political Fixer.
Court filings revealed that the delegate Stacey Plaskett misled the public about her deep ties to the powerful pedophile.
What deep ties did Stacey Plaskett have to the powerful pedophile that she misled the public from knowing about?
Well, this revelation came from an ongoing litigation between JP Morgan and the Virgin Islands government.
Both parties accused one another of facilitating and enabling Jeffrey Epstein's criminal enterprise of human trafficking, of abusing young women.
In some of these latest filings from JPMorgan, actually, they show that Jeffrey Epstein controlled a fairly powerful political machine within the Virgin Islands.
He donated to and gave various enticements to local officials in the Virgin Islands so that he would basically accomplish a few things.
One, he would have to do a lot of things.
One, to silence critics.
Two, he also wanted a special carve out from the sex offender law.
So he could travel in and out of the Virgin Islands without any disclosure requirements.
And three, he was looking for massive tax subsidies.
He received basically $300 million in special tax exemptions for his business, for which he seemed to lie about.
He claimed that he had a biotech startup, but there's no evidence of that.
Now, those documents show that one of his biggest allies in the Virgin Islands was actually Stacey Plaskett.
Plaskett, when she was running for office in 2014, was running in the Democratic primary against a major Epstein critic.
So Epstein's closest advisers told him, hey, you know, we've got to intervene in this primary.
We've got to silence this person who's been publicly criticizing you.
We've got to get Stacey Plaskett in.
She's an ally.
I should note, Stacey Plaskett has basically defended government censorship and discussed the supposed evils of misinformation and disinformation.
She's gotten some critical facts wrong here.
When she was asked by the Virgin Islands affiliate of NPR If she was aware of any of these connections to Jeffrey Epstein, you know, her many donations that she received from Epstein, she said no.
She didn't know about them.
She learned about them in the media.
Well, these documents from the litigation tell a very different story.
She actually met Epstein early when she was running for office.
She solicited him many times directly for his campaign.
Epstein donated not just directly to her, but to a Democratic Party affiliate of her campaign.
And then later, late in Epstein's life, just not long before he was arrested for the second time and brought to New York, Stacey Plaskett went to Epstein's house in New York, met with him, and asked for a $30,000 donation to the Democratic Central Committee for House Democrats.
That's a very large donation that's a special contribution to a party committee.
So she was meeting with him in the Virgin Islands, meeting with him in person, constantly soliciting him.
And maybe one of the biggest revelations from these documents is that how did she get connected to the Epstein kind of political machinery.
Well, before she ran for Congress, something that she scrubbed from her LinkedIn, she worked for Jeffrey Epstein's closest tax accountant and political fixer, someone named Erica Keller Halls, who's still the attorney for Epstein's estate.
That was her job, working for Jeffrey Epstein's personal lobbyist and tax accountant, That's who Stacey Plaskett worked for before she ran.
So she has deep and intimate ties, not just to Jeffrey Epstein, but his small and kind of insular team of lawyers and tax accountants.
So as somebody who has worked with Lee as a colleague for many years and who has been familiar with the journalism for many years before that, I want to hasten to add that there's nothing Lee ever says that isn't substantiated by all sorts of documentation, which you can go and read because he furnishes that documentation.
That's what his reporting always is, is based on documents he on Earth, and then it's just very kind of straightforward descriptions of what it is that we can reveal.
So that article is up on his sub stack.
It's from June 27th, I think I said.
And so, yeah, June 27th.
And so everything that he just described about these connections between Stacey Plaskett, on the one hand, Jeffrey Epstein on the other, the interventions she did in order to help him be able to travel more easily, despite his sex crime history and the like.
The financial ties are all visible through the documents that Lee obtained and then published.
Lee, let me ask you about another part of this reporting you've been doing about Jeffrey Epstein from some of these emails that emerged from the litigation central to Jeffrey Epstein's financing was, was JPMorgan Chase.
They have, I think, had been sued many times by his victims.
There have been internal reports about some of the reckless things they did in providing financing to him or staying connected to him.
And one of the obvious questions that people have always wondered about and I don't think we've ever really gotten an answer to is it's very easy in the United States, not necessarily easy, but not that hard, to get very rich.
But the level of wealth that Jeffrey Epstein had wasn't just rich.
I mean, the fact that he was able to do things like travel on private planes and buy immense private islands and build everything he built there and own multi-story townhouses and the most expensive real estate in Manhattan and in West Palm Beach as well, was a level of wealth that never really has been explained.
I mean, he did have connections to a couple of billionaires who really seemed to value whatever he was providing them, and certainly a lot of it came from there.
But there's always been the question of whether he had connections to any particular nation states.
Of course, there's been suspicions about his connection to the US security state, about to Israeli intelligence, whether his involvement in a lot of powerful people enabled him a kind of blackmail that was valuable to these governments.
None of that has ever been proven, but you did unearth an email that suggests that he had specific ties between one of the most important people at JPMorgan Chase and also a former Israeli Prime Minister.
What did that email demonstrate?
Darry, put it on the screen, but go ahead and describe it.
Well, in a new batch of emails that were released this week in this ongoing litigation, it really shows greater detail about why JP Morgan had this close relationship with Epstein.
It seems very clear from these emails that Epstein was a fixer.
He generated income for his associates and potentially for himself by connecting high-level people.
In this particular email that you're highlighting, he's connecting JP Morgan executives, potentially even Jamie Dimon, although we don't know if the meeting took place, with Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel.
There are other emails showing attempted connections to Bibi Netanyahu, the former and now current Prime Minister of Israel.
Really, it's fascinating because you look at this balance sheet that was actually disclosed this week.
It shows that the private banker assigned to Epstein was the most profitable private banker in their kind of upper echelons of private bankers at JP Morgan.
Because in part, Epstein was a connector.
He connected these private high net worth value bankers to people like Bill Gates, to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google.
He facilitated high-level meetings with famous journalists like David Gergen, with other celebrities and other political VIPs.
By connecting people, he appeared to be generating revenue for financial institutions like J.P. Morgan, who wanted the business of these billionaires and very wealthy individuals.
So we still don't have the full picture of how Epstein generated his wealth.
There are, I think, very kind of serious allegations that he used blackmail and other forms of pressure to extract donations or, you know, revenue from certain wealthy individuals.
We still don't know that full picture of that.
But what these documents do show from J.P. Morgan is that he was he was basically an incredible source of referring business to the bank.
They could, bankers like James Stanley, who eventually became CEO of Barclays Bank, but when he was at J.P.
Morgan, he was, this banker, Mr. Stanley, was assigned directly to Epstein and he used Epstein to bring in these billionaires and high net worth value clients into J.P.
Morgan.
Let me ask you, Lee, and again, I really encourage people to go to look at some of these connections between Jeffrey Epstein and a lot of powerful people.
I sometimes dislike the reactionary attempt to immediately assume that anybody connected to Jeffrey Epstein is participating in his pedophile ring.
There's a lot of other reasons to be connected to Jeffrey Epstein besides that.
He, as Lee said, had a ton of money, was able to facilitate connections.
At the very least, though, everybody knew about this conviction for cavorting with underage girls, and it didn't really seem to bother really anybody in the highest levels of power as he continued to be able to move in these circles with incredible ease.
And I still think there's a lot we haven't learned on purpose about exactly who it was that Epstein influenced, who helped him, who financed him, who received favors from him, because it's in so many people's interests and so many institutions' interests to keep those connections hidden.
So Lee's reporting on that is really worth taking a look at.
Another article I wanted to ask you about, Lee, from just a few days ago, the company Anheuser-Busch has been in a public controversy for a couple of months now, initiated by this advertising campaign that it did with, I don't know if Dylan Mulvaney considers I don't know if Dylan Mulvaney considers themselves trans at this point or identifies as a woman, I don't think they do.
I think it's, I don't know, but it's with Dylan Mulvaney did a very controversial marketing campaign that actually caused a hit To Anheuser-Busch's stock because it was a advertising campaign with its most popular product which is Bud Light.
You have been doing reporting on this kind of fascinating lobbyist operation that Anheuser-Busch runs right out of the Capitol with all kinds of ability to sell access to Democratic congressional staff.
Talk about what it is that you discovered in this Anheuser-Busch operation.
Many powerful private industries provide special perks to members of Congress, their staff, and other VIP political operatives in DC.
The airlines have a special hotline so that members of Congress get expedited service.
The banks used to give out low-interest home loans.
The movie industry provides special early screenings to big blockbuster releases and invite only the members of Congress and their staff.
You know, there's a number of perks And Anheuser-Busch is no different.
They actually own a private...
Pub a private bar that's inside an otherwise nondescript office tower.
It's incredibly hidden.
You have to take two different elevators to get to it.
There's multiple layers of security.
But you know if you look at how these things work they bring the lobbyists bring in staffers and they use it to peddle influence because I mean this is a nice bar has sweeping views of D.C.
and as a company under pressure they're trying to rebuild bonds with powerful political officials.
In this particular case, there's an added layer of potential illegal influence peddling.
Officially, government employees can't be used in campaign fundraising.
They can't use their official titles.
But here was a Democratic pact partnering with Anheuser-Busch and essentially selling access to the staff of congressional members of Congress.
So, you know, a couple of layers here.
One, the beer industry just providing just another big perk as they seek influence with Congress.
And two, big money Democratic officials who are raising money and really breaking potentially some campaign finance rules here.
Lee, let me just to conclude, ask you about some reporting that you haven't yet produced but are continuously continuing to work on.
And it involves this controversy, which to be perfectly honest, I have never understood around this police center in Atlanta.
It's It has become a big issue for a lot of left-wing activists who are You've been doing some of this reporting that you're going to publish when it's ready, so I don't want to kind of force you to talk about reporting before it's ready, but for the things you have discovered that you are comfortable talking about, talk about what exactly this controversy is, why people are so kind of bothered by this police center in Atlanta and what it is that you've thus far discovered.
Look, there's a crisis in America that's been identified by Many different experts.
When President Obama reacted to the riots in Ferguson after the death of Michael Brown, he impaneled this Blue Ribbon Commission to look into policing and police reform.
They looked at this issue of training.
American police are not well trained.
The average cop in America receives about three months of training.
In much of Northern Europe, in Germany and Finland and Denmark, they receive, cops receive about three years of training.
There's been this demand and push to better train cops on de-escalation, on not using force when it's not necessary, how to deal with people experiencing a mental health crisis.
This type of training is critical when we see so many studies showing that they can We've seen it applied in cities across the country.
Newark, New Jersey, used to be one of the most violent police forces.
that kind of training helps both civilians and police officers.
We've seen it applied in cities across the country.
Newark, New Jersey, used to be one of the most violent police forces.
After a court ordered it forced the police officers to engage in yearly updated training, including de-escalating training, their police shooting rate plummeted.
Even violent crime plummeted as bonds between the police and the community improved over the years.
Now, the reason I point this out is because we had the same crises in Atlanta.
Former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottom looking at the Richard Brooks shooting in 2020 and looking at the low officer morale after those protests and riots.
And rising crime at the same time said, you know, look, Georgia has some of the least trained police in the country.
We need a state of the art police academy.
For decades, police in Atlanta have used kind of like a decrepit old elementary school.
We need better training for firefighters and EMT.
So she proposed this new police academy and brought in civil rights experts, sociologists, people who would help train the police officers in state-of-the-art de-escalation training.
This sounds like a great win for criminal justice reform.
But for many people involved in this movement, this police training center in Atlanta became the new enemy.
Almost immediately, there were local anarchists and left-wing groups, Antifa groups, who stormed the hearing, who followed the city council members back home at night and intimidated them at their house.
It's become escalating and escalating violence on people from all over the world, from France, from England.
There are claims that this is militarization training.
That's not true.
That it's partnered with Israeli special forces.
the police academy claiming that it's an example of white supremacy, of genocide, of fascism, of capitalism.
It's kind of a smorgasbord of left-wing causes.
But just as I found, completely untethered from the truth.
There are claims that this is militarization training.
That's not true.
That it's partnered with Israeli special forces.
That's not true.
You know, you go down the laundry list of claims that these far left groups are making.
It's, you know, I hate the term, but it's a form of misinformation, but it's a type of misinformation that the liberal universities and nonprofit groups that are supposedly devoted to misinformation never correct, and in fact, in some cases, advance.
And it's led to at least one protester who was armed and had a confrontation with police getting killed.
And it could lead to more kind of instability as we see these confrontations.
People have been bringing Molotov cocktails and weapons to some of these city council meetings and these confrontations at the encampment at the proposed site.
It's kind of incredible.
It's become sort of an activist Lollapalooza.
People are coming in from all over the country.
There's a liberal, a billionaire, and also one local heir to a media fortune who's helping bankroll this.
But it's just, when you zoom out and look at what's actually proposed for this police academy, how it could actually improve It's kind of shocking, but it speaks to, I think, the divergence within the Black Lives Matter movement.
There are a number of people who are concerned with public safety, concerned with crime, focused on tangible improvements on police oversight, on body cameras, on better training, on how to build better community policing.
And there's another faction of Black Lives Matter that's just kind of this catch-all liberal bandwagon that's angry at, you know, 40 different issues that just wants to abolish policing altogether but has no solutions for how to keep a community safe.
You know, Lee, it's really interesting, and as you're describing this story, it really resonates for me because I've been doing a lot of work in the last several weeks because we're preparing to launch the Dave Miranda Institute, which is designed to memorialize the legacy of my recently deceased husband, who was a member of Congress in Brazil, and his politics over the last couple of years.
And I've been talking about this a lot in connection with Producing videos and explaining the kind of rationale for the Institute was shaped by this growing frustration with the political left, which he originally joined and of which he was a member, over exactly this division that you're describing, namely the people who kind of actually came from poverty, who understand the urgency of addressing the difficulties of people who live in impoverished communities and of
Actually improving policing because they know that eliminating policing is not a realistic alternative plus the people in these communities don't want Police gone they want better policing and then on the other hand political leftists who seem to have been born into this privilege bubble and to just see all this is a game.
It's just kind of like a way of expelling their own personal and psychological deficiencies and problems and just spewing hatred at whatever institutions they can find only to kind of elevate their own image without any concern with results because they don't actually care because none of these problems affect them.
And one of the very last law that David got enacted, I know I've talked to you about this before, was a law that provided substantially increased funding for mental health programs and suicide prevention for police officers and for other workers, state workers in public was a law that provided substantially increased funding for mental health
And at first the left, you know, was enraged that David would try and get more resources for the police, for services for the police, for mental health or suicide prevention for the police.
And And he was able to kind of bring people together based on this understanding of leaders of the favelas and people really who care about police brutality as an urgent matter in their lives, not some abstract thing they get to post about on Twitter.
That one of the main reasons that there's so much police brutality is because of police officers who are unhinged or are unwell.
A lot of them see a lot of violence and suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, have no access to mental health counseling.
A lot of them commit suicide at very high rates.
And he was able to convince the right, that's pro-police, that this is good for police officers, but also convince enough people on the left That this would actually be a tangible way to reduce police brutality and the indiscriminate use of violence because the healthier police officers are in terms of their mental health, the less likely they are to engage in improper and violent conduct.
I don't see, and that was really the kind of politics David was so interested in doing, like the kind of politics that would just kind of finally transcend these polarized, entrenched slogans where people can't come together because they're trained to hate each other so much.
I just, I'm wondering if you see any possibility for more of that in the United States.
As you say, if you look at polls of actual community leaders, of people who live in these communities and the citizens there, they don't want less police.
They either want the police to be maintained or they want more police, but then you have this kind of elite class that purports to speak on behalf of them.
Kind of like African-American or Latino activist groups or, you know, the op-ed writers at various newspapers who don't live in these communities, who don't face these problems, for whom this is all abstract, and who endorse these kind of abstract theories.
It doesn't surprise me that there's some rich leftist heir to some fortune financing all this because obviously he's never had to confront issues involving policing.
I'm just wondering if you see any Growing opportunities, the kind I described, David, kind of being able to accomplish in Brazil here in the United States around these issues.
I think there are incredible opportunities for that type of reform that David championed in Brazil because there's a huge demand for it.
Working class people, middle class people want safety and security.
They don't want to live in high crime neighborhoods.
They don't want to live in places where the police have unfettered authority to hurt people.
They want police reform.
They want sensible solutions and civilian oversight of police departments and proper training of proper equipment, proper mental health programs to make sure that cops are also treated well, so they don't have PTSD and take it out on a civilian.
The problem here is, I think, an issue around media coverage.
The media has, in a completely sympathetic way, without any kind of criticism, championed the very privileged, upper-class anarchists and far-left people who see this as an abstraction, as almost a game that they're playing.
They get very favorable treatment in the media.
And there's also just simply money.
You know, you look at the protests.
There was a violent group in Atlanta last year that was arrested, that were throwing Molotov cocktails at cops.
Not a single one was from Georgia.
There's another group of violent protesters, I think, in March or another time in the spring.
Only, I think, about 20 of them or 25 were arrested.
Only two were from Georgia.
These are people who have the time and the resources to travel around the country going from one cause to the next, not local community members who are affected by crime, who are actually affected by the policing issues.
We don't see big foundations on the left.
Or even on the center, really championing the cause of both public safety and police reform.
The big foundations, there's a foundation funded by Mark Zuckerberg, by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Solidair, that's gone in and given resources to the protesters here.
Many of the other big foundations, Ford Foundation, Open Society, which is linked to George Soros, Carnegie and others, they're Lee, whenever I talk to people about journalism, especially people who are very critical of our media outlets, the thing is very similar to policing, actually.
They don't want journalism gone.
They understand the value of journalism.
What they want is for there to be journalism with integrity that's not just subservient to some hidden ideological or partisan agenda.
I really think that you are one of the people who embody that kind of journalism, and so I want to encourage people as much as possible, not only to read the investigative journalism you produce that's very much aligned with that vision, but also to support it, because you're obviously working independently now and need that support in order to do this kind of work.
So tell people where they can find you at Substack and how it is that they can support the journalism you're doing.
Thanks, Glenn.
I really appreciate those kind words.
You can find me on Twitter at LHFANG and my substack is at www.liefong.com.
That's F-A-N-G spelled like FANG.
Alright, we will put those links up in the space where that goes in our video.
Lee, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.
It's always a pleasure to see you and always good for audience to hear from you as well and keep up the great work.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
Take care.
Alright, have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for tonight.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform.
If you can follow us and rate and review each episode, it helps spread the visibility of the program.
Each episode posts 12 hours after their first broadcast live.
Here on Rumble, because this is Thursday night, every Tuesday and Thursday night, we, after our live show here, move to Locals for our interactive after show with our audience to hear your feedback and comment on your suggestions, hear criticisms, ideas for things we should cover and people we should interview.
That show is for subscribers only.
If you want to be a subscriber to our Locals community, which also helps support the independent journalism we do here, simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and that will take you to our Locals
