Dems—And Bernie Sanders—Nuke Oversight Measure for Billions to Ukraine, Biden Admin Appeals Anti-Censorship Ruling, & CNN Mocks “Facebook Files” Revelations | SYSTEM UPDATE #120
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, as the war in Ukraine drags on with no one in sight, the spigot of cash that goes directly from the U.S.
Treasury into the coffers of the Ukrainian government and the U.S.
arms industry continues to flow as lavishly as ever.
Given that this money is sloshing around some of the most corrupt and unaccountable institutions on the planet, the Pentagon, Western arms manufacturers, the Ukrainian government, it is no surprise that very few people, if any, have any idea where these billions of dollars in weapons systems are actually going.
For that reason, last year Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky attempted to impose some basic oversight and auditing provisions on where this money was going and how it was being used.
Not only was that effort overwhelmingly defeated, but he was accused by Senate leaders in both parties, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, as well as by the Ukrainian government, of being a Kremlin asset.
Obviously, there's no reason why you'd want to have oversight on the whereabouts of American money unless you're working for Russia.
A year later, Senator Paul this time has allies in his attempt to impose some basic safeguards on the flow of this money, namely most of the Republican Senate caucus, many of whom are emphatic supporters of Biden's proxy war in Ukraine, but believe that some oversight is now necessary on this money, as well as two Democratic senators, John Ossoff of Georgia and John Tester of Montana.
Nonetheless, a proposal to establish an inspector general's office to monitor the flow of money from Washington to Ukraine was just rejected by the Senate.
51 senators voted yes in favor of this oversight, while 48 voted no.
Because Democrats invoked what they often referred to as the quote, Jim Crow filibuster, at least that's what it's called when Republicans use it, 60 votes rather than 50 were required for passage, leaving the amendment nine votes short of passage.
Not only did all but two Senate Democrats vote to sink this oversight provision, but the radical, anti-establishment, working class hero, independent from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, joined the Democrats in doing so.
Failure of this amendment, which in this case is sponsored by Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, along with three other Senate Republicans and Arizona Independent Kirsten Sinema, Means not only that the U.S.
role in the proxy war in Ukraine will continue at that end, but so too will the oversight-free flow of billions of dollars.
We'll examine the key aspects of how Senate Democrats, along with Bernie Sanders, ensure that there will be no real oversight on the billions they continue to send to Ukraine.
Then the Biden Justice Department filed a brief this week with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals urging it to reverse a decision from a federal district court judge that banned the Biden administration from continuing to pressure Big Tech to censor dissent off of the internet.
That was a decision we reported on at length.
On the one hand, this move is unsurprising.
Of course, the Justice Department is going to appeal when a lower court rules that the administration is guilty of one of the gravest assaults on First Amendment free speech rights in years.
But on the other, this appeal highlights a core truth of U.S.
politics.
Censoring the Internet of all dissent is a core weapon of the D.C.
establishment and the Democratic Party.
By appealing, the Biden administration is willing to incur the risk of an even worse precedent.
One that could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
But they are willing to do so because this court ruling endangers one of the most cherished weapons of the U.S.
security state and the liberal establishment in Washington, namely the ability to coerce big tech into silencing their critics.
Lastly, we devoted last night's episode to the release of new emails from the House Judiciary Committee proving how aggressively and continuously the Biden administration and the White House pressured Facebook to censor any and all dissent from its COVID policies and narratives.
Still more emails were released today by Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and we'll review the most important of those.
But the reaction of the corporate media to all of this was as predictable as it was repellent.
Most of them simply ignored these revelations, as they often do when things are incriminating to the Democratic Party.
While the few who deigned to discuss them did so by mindlessly adopting the White House talking points that absolutely nothing inappropriate was done and all of this is just a right-wing conspiracy, there's no real censorship being exerted by the administration.
We'll look specifically at the so-called news analysis from one of the most dishonest partisan operatives in all of corporate media, CNN's Oliver Darcy, to highlight one of the most surreal facts of American political life, namely the leading activists and most vocal agitators for the U.S.
censorship regime Are the liberal employees of the nation's largest media corporations who still use the title journalist in their corporate HR departments, even as they agitate ever more explicitly for more and more censorship of all political dissent.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all major podcasting platforms where you can rate and review each episode that helps spread the visibility of this program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
If we were to report on each time the Biden administration and the Biden Pentagon announce a new large package of money to send to Kiev, we would do little else on this program except report on that.
That's how often it happens.
We try to report on it when it's a particularly large package or when there's something connected to it that is particularly notable.
But you should just assume, because it's true, that there is a spigot of money that has been turned on since February of 2022 that goes from the U.S.
Treasury Department into the coffers of Raytheon, the U.S.
arms industry, the CIA, And Ukrainian government agencies in Kiev.
Very few people even know where this money is going.
Just this week, the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who you should recall, prior to becoming the Biden Pentagon chief, was on the board of directors of Raytheon, one of the primary beneficiaries of this war, announced a What he called an additional security assistance to meet Ukraine's critical security and defense needs.
He added, we are prepared to stand with Ukraine, oh there you see the official flag of the United States, which is the Ukrainian flag, for as long as it takes.
Here is the official press release that he issued.
There you see it on the screen.
The Biden administration announces additional security assistance for Ukraine.
And the Pentagon press release reads, quote, today, the Department of Defense announced additional security assistance to meet Ukraine's critical security and defense needs.
This authorization is the Biden administration's 43rd drawdown of equipment from DOD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021, as the U.S. government, this is his words, has continuously provided Ukraine with the weapons and equipment it needs for the battlefield.
He goes on.
This authorization, he goes on.
Today's commitment in security assistance, valued at up to $400 million, includes additional air defense munitions, artillery and other ammunitions, armored vehicles, anti-armor weapons and other equipment to help Ukraine counter Russia's ongoing war of aggression.
The capabilities in this package include, and then he lists 15 or so different kinds of munitions, including munitions for Patriot air defense systems, Stinger anti-aircraft systems, ammunition for high-mobility artillery rocket systems, EMARs, and a whole variety of other munitions, many of which are manufactured and sold
By Raytheon, the corporation on whose board of directors Lloyd Austin served before needing a waiver and getting a waiver to become Biden's Pentagon chief.
A waiver was needed because there is a law in place that says that if you are an active military, you have to wait a certain number of years before becoming Defense Secretary.
They gave a waiver to Donald Trump's choice, which was General Mattis, to lead the Defense Department, and at the time warned they would never give another waiver because of how dangerous it is to have military control over the Pentagon.
We're supposed to have civilian control, in part to avoid revolving doors like the one through which General Austin so rapidly transgressed and yet a mere two years later after vowing never to give another one, Senate Democrats lined up with many Republicans and gave this waiver to General Austin allowing him to leave Raytheon, go to the Defense Department where as a matter of pure coincidence
He now oversees the expenditure of massive amounts of sums that continue to produce record profits and high stock prices for the corporation from which he came, the arm industry, the primary beneficiary of this spending.
Now, it should go without saying that there has been virtually no oversight or serious monitoring of where these weapons systems are going or where this money is going.
Ukraine, of course, has long been described as the most corrupt country in Europe, so you can only imagine in the middle of a war with billions of dollars flying around how little tracing there is or monitoring is of where that money is actually going.
There was an inspector general finally appointed for the war in Afghanistan who discovered billions and billions of dollars in unaccounted for money and was scathing in his reports about the need for greater safeguards, which ultimately were finally applied because Congress realized how much of this money was disappearing.
in unaccounted for ways.
And of course, the same thing is happening in Ukraine because there has been no oversight and no safeguards from the beginning.
So here is an article from CNN in April of last year, the title of which is, "What happens to weapons sent to Ukraine?
The US doesn't really know." And the first paragraph reads, quote, "The US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry that is sent across the border into Ukraine, sources tell CNN, a blind spot that's due in large part to the lack of U.S.
boots on the ground in the country and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems now pouring across the border.
It's a conscious risk the Biden administration is willing to take.
In the short term, the US sees the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment to be vital to the Ukrainians' ability to hold off Moscow's invasion.
A senior defense official said Tuesday that it is, quote, certainly the largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict.
But the risk, both current U.S.
officials say and defense analysts say, is that in the long term, some of these weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the U.S.
did not intend to arm.
Oh, you don't say.
That's what happens in every war.
And I'm sure it is only a matter of time before we hear that we have to go to some war, new war in some new place because the weapons we poured into the Ukrainian battlefield ended up in the hands of neo-Nazi militias like the Azov Battalion who sold it to black markets all over Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East.
And so there's no safeguards, there's no provisions on the flow of this money.
Even if you're somebody who supports the ongoing expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars for a war that the Biden administration itself says has brought us closer to nuclear armageddon than at any point in 1962, if you're one of the people who believes that's worth it over who rules eastern Ukraine, at least you should want, in fact, if you're somebody who wants that money going for that, you should, all people should want Safeguards and monitoring and oversight on where this money is going.
And yet the people in Washington, who at least until this week, who have been the most vocal about sending this money over to Kiev, have continuously blocked attempts at oversight.
So last year, As you might recall, Rand Paul, the Republican Senator from Kentucky, introduced a bill, an amendment, that he tried to latch onto the expenditure of $40 billion that was to go to Ukraine.
You might remember that the Biden administration requested $33 billion be expended by the Congress, authorized by the Congress.
And they arbitrarily raised it by $7 billion to $40 billion.
Every single Democratic member of Congress in both the Senate and the House voted yes to send $40 billion to Ukraine.
And most of the Republican caucus did as well.
There were five dozen or so House Republicans who voted no, and 11 Republican senators who voted no.
But the bulk of the Republican Party joined with the unanimous Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders to vote yes.
And the Senate was so desperate to get this money approved that they tried to fast track it, which required unanimous consent, and Rand Paul refused to give it.
Because he wanted to impose the condition that there be a new Inspector General office, or rather, to require the existing Inspector General, the one that did such a good job in the war in Afghanistan, to now start monitoring, like they did for the war in Afghanistan, where this money is going in Ukraine.
And he was laughed out of the Senate.
By virtually every member of both parties.
Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell both implied that he was doing Putin's bidding.
And so now he's back.
Rand Paul is a year later.
Many billions of dollars more to try once again to introduce a bill that would provide for the same exact oversight.
So here you see the press release from Rand Paul's office this week, the headline of which is Dr. Paul introduces bill to provide much needed oversight for Ukraine spending.
And it reads, quote, Today, U.S.
Senator Rand Paul, ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee and Governmental Affairs Committee, introduced the Ukraine Aid Oversight Act, which would expand or extend the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Segar, oversight authority to supervise American spending to Ukraine Segar, oversight authority to supervise American spending to Ukraine in order to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
Quote, a little over a year ago, I proposed an amendment to the massive $40 billion Ukraine spending package that would have entrusted a proven and effective Inspector General to oversee and track how funds are spent in Ukraine.
My amendment was rejected and today over $113 billion in taxpayer dollars have been sent to Ukraine without proper oversight, said Dr. Paul.
My Ukraine Aid Oversight Act would extend SIGAR's oversight authority to include aid to Ukraine and provide taxpayers with an accurate accounting of how their money is spent, as well as to detect and prevent waste and fraud.
Last year, Dr. Paul offered a similar proposal as an amendment to the first Ukraine spending package.
Since then, the US has spent over $113 billion to Ukraine.
Given the fast-evolving situation on the ground in Ukraine and the significant sums already committed, The American taxpayers deserve the oversight experience of tried-and-true investigatory personnel to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
Now, that to me seems just intuitively reasonable.
The idea that if we're going to send over a hundred billion dollars and counting to a war zone to the most corrupt country in Europe, we should at least have robust oversight provisions to ensure that the money is going for the intended purpose.
And yet amazingly, there is contempt heaped on Senator Paul for trying to do that.
He was cast as a Russian propagandist.
Here is a video from a report on what happened back in May of last year with regard to this oversight.
...to the U.S.
Constitution, not to any foreign nation, and no matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America.
We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S.
economy.
This bill under consideration would spend $40 billion.
This is the second spending bill for Ukraine in two months, and this bill is three times larger than the first.
Our military aid to Ukraine is nothing new, though.
Since 2014, the United States has provided more than $6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, in addition to the $14 billion Congress authorized just a month ago.
If this bill passes, the U.S.
will have authorized roughly $60 billion in total spending for Ukraine.
So that bill did pass, as I said, with unanimous Democratic support and overwhelming Republican majority support.
But Rand Paul's amendment to provide oversight did not succeed.
As a result, a month or so later, the Ukrainian government issued a blacklist of American citizens that it claims were Russian propagandists.
And on that list appeared Congressman Paul, Senator Paul, as well as former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, along with myself, And Professor Mearsheimer, so this is the effort to suggest that any Americans who exercise our constitutional right to oppose the U.S.
government's role in Ukraine or even to question where this money is going are to be deemed Russian propagandists on an official blacklist issued by the Ukrainian government that on the one hand demands that U.S.
citizens give our taxpayer money, our hard-earned money, to their government and on the other Issues these blacklists about our journalists and our politicians who question the US government's role in Ukraine.
That's what the Ukrainian government is.
That's what this whole dynamic has become.
Now, in addition to Senator Paul's bill that he's renewing this year, there is a separate amendment that a Republican congressman who is a vigorous supporter of President Biden's proxy war spending in Ukraine, which is Roger Wicker of Mississippi.
And he introduced an amendment which had the co-sponsorship of three Republican senators, including Senator Kennedy of Louisiana, who is also a stalwart supporter of the war in Ukraine.
So these are not people trying to impede the war in Ukraine.
It was also supported by Utah's Mike Lee and Kyrsten Sinema.
And the idea, as you can see on the screen, was to create a separate inspector general modeled after the one that was used for the war in Afghanistan so successfully to require them to engage in oversight about where this money is going.
Here you see Senator Wicker introducing his amendment.
It was a very narrow amendment that would do nothing other than attach to the military spending bill.
An amendment that would simply create an office of an inspector general to trace where this money in Ukraine is going because nobody knows where it is.
Here you see the key provision of the bill.
It says the establishment, there is established the office of the lead inspector general for Ukraine assistance to provide for the oversight of independent and objective conduct and supervision of audits.
and investigations relating to the programs and operations funded with amounts appropriated for the United States, by the United States for Ukraine, appointment of lead inspector general, and it provides for how they're to be appointed.
And then it goes on to say that the key roles, the duties of this inspector general are as One, to appoint from among the offices of the inspector general an assistant inspector general for Ukraine assistance who shall supervise auditing and investigative activities and assist the lead inspector general in the discharge of responsibilities under the subsection.
To develop and carry out in coordination with the Offices of the Inspector General a joint strategic plan to conduct comprehensive oversight of all amounts appropriated by the United States for Ukraine, to apply key lessons from prior oversight work in coordination with the Offices of the Inspector General to Ukraine response programs and operations to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse.
So it is exactly what it sounds like, a very narrow amendment that would do nothing other than create an Inspector General model after the one that saved so much money and detected so much fraud and corruption in the war in Afghanistan.
It would genuinely seem impossible that anyone would oppose this.
And yet, it failed.
It did not get implemented.
The Senate blocked its enactment.
Here you see the roll call vote.
There were 51 yes votes and 48 no votes.
And because the Democrats invoked the Jim Crow racist filibuster, as they call it, 60 votes were needed for passage.
They only got 51 votes, which is the majority of the senators, but that was 9 votes short needed for passage.
So the Democrats not only voted no, but they invoked a filibuster to ensure there was no actual vote on this amendment.
That's how badly they wanted to ensure that there was no oversight on the hundreds of billions of dollars they're going to end up spending in Ukraine.
They've already spent $113 billion.
So let's take a look at the vote, which I put here on the screen.
It was essentially a party-line vote with a couple of exceptions.
So every Democratic senator voted no against this amendment to create an inspector general, with the exception of two Democratic senators who voted yes, one of whom was John Ossoff.
Let me get a different pen, one that you can actually see.
There's Jon Othoff.
He voted yes.
And the other Democratic senator who voted yes was Jon Tester of Montana.
That's how the 51 majority vote total was received.
Every Republican voted yes in favor of these oversight provisions, with one exception, and that was Senator Paul.
He was the only Republican who voted no.
Now we reached out to his office to ask why he voted no, but I can almost guarantee what the reason is, knowing Senator Paul and his work and his vote history, which is that on principle he opposes the creation of a new office A new Inspector General, when he believes the current one that is already in place, that was already spent and created, the one that worked on Afghanistan, can simply be transferred to this work in Ukraine.
In fact, in his statement, he essentially says, my bill's better because it doesn't require the creation of a new agency.
But on principle, Ron Paul, or Rand Paul rather, wants the same amount of oversight as every other Senate Republican who voted yes.
He just, on principle, didn't want to create a new agency.
In addition to the no votes from every single Democratic Senator, you also had the ostensible independents, including August King of Maine, who voted no, and Bernie Sanders, who voted no.
There you see Sinema's vote.
She voted yes as an independent.
She was one of the co-sponsors of the bill.
That means that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Both voted no.
There you see Elizabeth Warren's vote on oversight for hundreds of billions of dollars sent to Ukraine.
And what makes this so amazing is that Bernie Sanders was one of the leading advocates for exactly this kind of oversight when it came to the war in Afghanistan.
And he preys on the work of the Inspector General in detecting huge amounts of corruption in the billions of dollars that went to Afghanistan.
And Elizabeth Warren has been urging These kinds of audits and this kind of oversight for banking expenditures and all kinds of other expenditures because of how much corruption and fraud takes place when everybody gets to have a party with U.S.
taxpayer-funded money when no one is watching as a watchdog.
And yet, for some reason, and we also reached out to Senator Sanders' office to try and find out why he voted no, not just Senate Democrats who support the war, but also supposedly they're left-wing senators who hate Large amounts of waste in the military-industrial complex like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders also don't want oversight or audits on this massive amounts of money being poured into Kiev.
Just ask yourself, why would that be?
We see the record of even CNN acknowledging that nobody has any idea where this money is going, where these weapons systems are ending up.
Why would you possibly oppose Oversight on where this money is going, unless you don't want the public to know how it's actually being used.
That's the only conceivable reason to vote no.
Now, one of the arguments of the Defense Department is, oh, you don't have to worry.
We audit our own money.
We audit where this money is going.
Just leave it to us.
And I don't even think anyone would be willing to go on camera and say that with a straight face, given the fact that the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, Has failed every audit to which has been subjected ever since auditing requirements were put into place a decade ago.
Here you see from The Hill in November of 2022, the headline, Defense Department Fails Another Audit But Makes Progress.
Quote, the Defense Department has failed its fifth ever audit, unable to account for more than half of its assets.
But the effort is being viewed as a teachable moment, according to its chief financial officer.
Yeah, they failed for the fifth time in a row, but we're learning now.
After 1,600 auditors combed through DOD's $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liability, officials found that the department couldn't account for about 61% of its assets, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters on Tuesday.
Federal law since the early 1990s requires mandatory audits for all government agencies, and since fiscal year 2013, all but the DOD have been able to satisfy that requirement.
The sheer size and scope of the department Which makes up for more than half of the U.S.
discretionary spending and has assets that range from the personnel and supplies to bases and weapons makes it difficult to audit.
Obviously, there's no oversight from the department that can't even pass an audit for its basic budget.
In fact, here from May of this year was a Time Magazine report that's almost laughable And it's absurdity.
Quote, Pentagon says multi-billion dollar accounting mistake means more arms funding for Ukraine.
They started looking around at how much they had sent Ukraine, and they realized they had undercounted or used the wrong valuation system.
And therefore, that meant they get to dump $3 billion more into Ukraine due to an accounting error.
So anybody who would try and claim that there's already enough supervision or audit over how much Money is being poured into Kiev is not treating you with even minimal amounts of respect.
Nobody could possibly believe that.
Given the joke that is the Pentagon when it comes to figuring out how that money is being used.
It just flies around everywhere.
And it's being run by someone who genuinely came right from the Board of Directors of Raytheon to run that gigantic, monstrous, massive agency.
So, whatever the reason is for why Senate Democrats decided to block this oversight, it has nothing to do with the fact that there already is oversight because there so plainly is none.
The reasons are elsewhere.
And in general, oversight, if you look at how it happened in the war in Afghanistan, ensures that the public knows where this money is going and understands when people are stealing it.
And so the only effect of blocking oversight, as Senate Democrats and Bernie Sanders just did, is to ensure that the public has no idea, nor will anybody else, exactly who is profiting off of this war in Ukraine.
So we are going to So we're going to turn to our second story of the evening, which is the fact that the Biden administration this week appealed a very important district court ruling that we reported on at length that essentially found that the
First Amendment's free speech guarantee is under one of the most sustained and profound assaults in the history of the country as a result of the Biden administration's constant aggressive attempts to coerce big tech to censor dissent off of the internet.
Now, last night's show that we reported on there, you can see it on the screen, was one, this is actually our show when this court decision was issued in early July, early this month, on July 4th, actually, a major defeat for the censorship regime.
And we described what this court found, which is it looked at the mountain of evidence that was flowing from the Biden administration, the FBI, Homeland Security, the CDC, the NIH, to the top levels of Twitter and Facebook and Google, and found that there was an unprecedented censorship and found that there was an unprecedented censorship campaign on the part of the top levels of the executive branch that not only was happening, but that was a profound assault on the First Amendment.
That's what I'm saying.
The First Amendment bans not only direct censorship where the government says no citizen shall be allowed to dissent from our policy, but also coercion on private actors to censor for them.
And we had Lee Fong on our show last evening as well talking about what the Twitter files revealed about this as well as what the court had found and even what Lee was able to report prior to the Twitter files about Homeland Security's systemic effort to try and control the internet through censorship.
Part of that program was the appointment of that disinformation star, Nina Yankiewicz, that caused too much controversy because of how preposterous she was.
But the program to censor the internet has only strengthened since then.
And that's why it was so remarkable that this court issued this ruling banning the Biden White House from doing this.
Now, on last night's show, we reported on the release of a mountain of new evidence from the House Judiciary Committee, led by Jim Jordan, that showed a...
A huge pile of emails from the Biden White House to the senior leadership of Facebook demanding that Facebook censor all kinds of content regarding COVID policy and all kinds of dissent from the government's narratives about COVID.
And there were some more emails released from Congressman Jordan today that fortify the fact that the White House is engaged in a systemic censorship campaign to ensure that Big Tech complies with its orders about what can and cannot be said.
And so that district court said this has done the gravest insults on First Amendment press freedoms and enjoined the Biden White House and the FBI and Homeland Security and every other agency named from continuing to engage in these coercive censorship campaigns.
The Justice Department this week appealed that ruling.
They already succeeded in getting an appellate court to stay the injunction, meaning that the injunction will not be in effect until the appeals court can hear the ruling.
And today the Justice Department filed what is really a revealing appeal where they're essentially urging an appellate court to say, we need to continue to tell Big Tech What they can and cannot permit.
Here is the Reuters article from earlier today that shows the headline there.
There you see it.
U.S.
urges appeals court to lift curbs on social media contacts.
So they are now officially appealing this ruling, trying to get this ruling reversed.
And if you look at the Court ruling, the brief that the Justice Department filed, it's extremely revealing because they're essentially justifying why they believe they are entitled to badger and hector and coerce big tech.
to remove content that they regard as damaging or in some ways untrue.
There you see the caption on the screen.
It's before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
It's a brief for the appellants.
The appellants are Joe Biden and various cabinet secretaries and various agencies, including Dr. Fauci and the FBI and Homeland Security.
And they're appealing it from the ruling by the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana that ruled that this is all in violation of the First Amendment.
We're going to show you the key passage from this brief where the Biden Justice Department explains to the court why they believe this is justified.
Here's what they say.
Quote, One of the central obligations of government leaders at any level is to protect the public.
Against innumerable threats, natural disasters, outbreak of disease, crime, economic turmoil, and much more.
Governments have concrete tools to address some of these challenges, but often one of the government's key roles is simply to provide the public with accurate and timely information to dispel false rumors and to explain what actions citizens and businesses can and should take to advance the public good.
It is critical in crises and also in ordinary circumstances that government leaders be able to disseminate accurate information and encourage actions that support the public good.
The government cannot punish people for expressing different views, nor can it achieve the same objective indirectly by threatening the media with punishment if it disseminates those views.
But there is a categorical, well-subtle distinction between persuasion and coercion.
The government must be allowed to seek to persuade people of its views, even where those views are the subject of controversy.
Now, that is the appropriate distinction.
The government is entitled to suggest that certain information that the media is about to disseminate should not be published because it's inaccurate or harmful.
That has nothing to do with what they're doing here.
The Democratic Party has spent two or more years explicitly threatening Big Tech that if they don't begin to censor more content off the internet in accordance with the Democratic Party's wishes, the Democratic Party will impose on them regulatory and legal reprisals.
It's not some option or request.
When the CIA or the FBI or the Biden White House come knocking on the doors of Big Tech, And say we want this content removed.
It's not just a suggestion.
The context is a continuous stream of threats and punishments that could cripple these companies and not destroy them in the event that these companies fail to comply.
And the emails that we walked you through last night and that were revealed by the Twitter files and that were revealed by other reporting makes clear that The Biden White House is not even pretending that any of this is optional.
There you see our show from last night, that Biden unconstitutionally censored Facebook.
That was the program that we did last night that walked you through all of these emails in which Facebook officials were saying, we are under constant and extreme pressure from the US government to censor these materials and get all of this information that they dislike about COVID off of the internet.
You can see in the tenor and the tone of these emails, these communications from the government, that it is anything but a request.
It is an order accompanied by explicit threats to these companies, and that's exactly how these companies understand them.
So I think it's an important moment where the government is admitting that the First Amendment is violated in the event that they're coercing big tech to censor for them.
And of course, their claim is, well, we're not doing that.
We're just making a polite request.
We're just persuading them that they should remove content.
But the evidence, the record that the judge reviewed is so overwhelming.
And we've reported on it and walked you through it so many times.
That demonstrates just how aggressive and threatening and menacing the behavior is from the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security and the CDC and the Biden White House.
When telling these companies that there's material that they need to be removed.
It is coercive on its face.
Now the federal judiciary typically does defer to the executive branch and tends to have a very permissive view of what the government can do.
And I spoke last night on our after show on Locals when I was asked whether I thought the Supreme Court would ultimately rule in favor Of the Biden White House or whether it would affirm the lower court's ruling and I talked about how even though the court has a majority of conservatives on it who tend to be very pro-free speech, they also are judges who have a history of believing that the U.S.
security state and the U.S.
government should have very broad powers when it comes to legitimate policy objectives like protecting national security and these other things that the government, the Biden administration is invoking to justify their censorship.
But it's unclear how this will play out.
But what's not unclear is that the Democratic Party and the Biden administration very explicitly intend for these requests to be understood as demands.
And that's how they have been understood.
And that's the reason big tech companies have so continuously obeyed them with very little pushback or resistance, because they know that these are orders designed to use the coercive power of both the Congress and the executive branch To hang threats over their head that they had better censor as the government demands unless they want to suffer punishment, which is according to even the government, is exactly the kind of behavior that the First Amendment is designed to prevent.
Now, one of the most interesting aspects of this censorship regime, as we've noted many times, is that The censorship regime has as its primary advocates and activists the people who are listed as journalists in the nation's largest media corporations.
It is the liberal journalists at the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and Vice and BuzzFeed and the rest who have been largely responsible for demanding that big tech companies censor in accordance with the Democratic Party's wishes.
And the way the media does that is that they call up Facebook or Google or Twitter and they say, we've noticed that you're allowing this kind of dissent on Ukraine or this disinformation about COVID to remain on your site.
Shouldn't you be removing it?
Doesn't your rule, don't your rules require its removal?
If you don't remove it, we're going to write an article, as they've done many times, accusing these big tech companies of having blood on their hands or being reckless for allowing too much free speech.
And these big tech companies know and often note that the pressure to censor is coming not only from the Democratic-controlled Biden administration but also from their Democratic allies in the corporate media.
Here is one of the emails that we showed you last night that is part of what was released by The Judiciary Committee that is an internal memo written by a top level Facebook official to the two top executives at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
And he wrote, quote, we are seeking your guidance on whether to take down, take more aggressive action against certain vaccine discouraging content.
And then here's what he just told them is the reason they're feeling so much pressure.
Quote, we are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content.
Now, we're so accustomed to this that I think sometimes we overlook just how twisted and surreal and bizarre it is that the media has taken the leading role In demanding greater censorship of the Internet.
Because a traditional value of journalists is supposed to be a defense of free inquiry and free speech and a free press.
Basic First Amendment rights.
As I've noted many times, having journalists urge censorship is like seeing a cardiologist urge more cigarette smoking.
It's completely anathema to what they claim their function is.
And yet, It's so easy to demonstrate and obviously Facebook perceives that so much of the pressure to censor more is coming not just from the Democratic Party and the White House and the CIA but also as they say from the press itself.
Now it seems clear that Oliver Darcy, who is one of the most dishonest partisan operatives in the entire corporate media, seemed eager to step forward today and prove just how corrupted the corporate media has become because the article or so-called news analysis that he wrote
was essentially a manifesto in favor of censorship and a defense of the Democratic Party in the White House when it comes to the censorship.
It's filled with lies.
But that's not notable.
The CNN often lies.
But what's really notable here is just how willing he was to drop the mask on any pretense of objectivity or neutrality.
And he just wrote a DNC talking point screen in defense of the censorship regime, half denying it and half defending it.
Amen.
Now, I don't know if we have the video, but a couple of nights ago, a Republican congressman went on to CNN and the host told him That, look, I don't have any political opinions.
And he laughed in her face.
And I just want to show you this video because it demonstrates that the gig is up in terms of the ability of the corporate media to pretend any longer that they don't have sides, that they're not allies with a certain political party, that they don't have allegiance, supreme allegiance to a particular political ideology, that they're just neutral arbiters calling balls and strikes.
Let's look at this video before we show you Oliver Darcy's defense of the Biden administration at CNN because it's so revealing of what the real role of the corporate media is.
I just want to be really clear, Congressman.
Yeah, Congressman, look, nothing has been made public yet that shows us all of this.
When and if it is, we will get back to you.
We'd love to talk to you if you have the evidence to show.
But at this point, we haven't seen, the public hasn't seen any of this hard evidence that has been brought up by members of Congress.
I don't know, we have $10 million coming from Burisma, a company, you know, they're accusing Biden, they accused Trump of doing what Biden actually did, $10 million of bribery, and they fired a guy.
I mean, you can follow the money, ma'am, and these are FBI informants.
These are FBI... Right, but it has to be proven.
There has to be some proof.
You can't just say it happened.
There has to be some proof, right?
Well, what was the dossier on Trump?
I don't have a base.
I'm a journalist.
all hearsay.
And now here you've got an FBI document, an official document showing that.
So, you know, we can sit here and argue about it.
And I get it.
You know, you've got your base.
I've got mine.
But I've seen the documents.
I don't have a base.
I'm a journalist.
I don't have a base, Democrat or Republican.
You work for CNN, but let's be honest.
If you worked for Fox, you'd be the right wing, and you all are the left wing.
And I get it.
It's politics as usual, ma'am.
You don't know my politics, sir.
You really don't know my politics.
Nobody believes that, ma'am.
You can say that, and you can have your fingers crossed.
But again, there has to be proof, sir.
There has to be proof, both with my politics and with whether or not Joe Biden is involved in this.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate you talking about UAPs and the issue with Hunter Biden.
I appreciate you coming on, sir.
So there she was just aggressively defending the Biden administration, saying that you have no proof for your allegations of corruption against Joe Biden.
There's no proof at all.
And he laughed in her face and basically said, look, I know you have your base and I have mine.
And she said, sir, I don't have a base.
I'm a journalist.
And he told her exactly what was appropriate, which is he laughed at that and said, nobody believes that anymore, ma'am.
It's absolutely true.
Nobody believes that CNN is a journalistic outlet.
And if you do, with apologies, you've been incredibly propagandized or misled.
Because everything CNN does reeks of partisan allegiance.
And I can't think of a better example than this news article that Oliver Darcy, one of the worst partisan liars in all of corporate media, wrote today about The extremely compelling evidence that the House Judiciary Committee released yesterday that we walked you through last night showing how aggressive the White House is when demanding censorship from Facebook.
Here is what he wrote.
I think it's really worth watching.
There's the headline on the CNN site, the real reason Republicans are forcing Mark Zuckerberg to turn over thousands of pages of Facebook documents.
It's not because they have the responsibility of exercising oversight over the White House and the intelligence community to prove how aggressively they're demanding censorship from big tech.
No, there's the real reason.
That Oliver Darcy, the Democratic activist and pro-censorship agitator dressed up as a journalist, is about to reveal to you.
you.
This is what he writes, quote, the hyper-partisan Ohio Republican, I mean, the irony of Oliver Darcy calling anybody else hyper-partisan is off the charts.
The hyper-partisan Ohio Republican still on an unsuccessful years-long journey to dishonestly portray Silicon Valley as unfairly censoring American conservatives.
This is a news article.
And look at how many adjectives, partisan adjectives he used just in the first introductory clause of the first paragraph.
The hyper-partisan Ohio Republican, that's Jim Jordan, still on an unsuccessfully year-long journey to dishonestly portray Silicon Valley as unfairly censoring American conservatives, is now wielding the power of the federal government in his quest to besmirch META.
That's all one sentence.
Every phrase designed to say that the Republicans are liars, the Democrats are truthful, there's no censorship regime, and this is all about unfairly smirching meta by trying unsuccessfully to prove that there's a censorship regime in place.
He goes on.
Who sits atop the powerful House Judiciary Committee has embarked on a phishing expedition at Facebook, demanding Zuckerberg turn over reams of internal documents that pertain to Meta's content moderation decisions.
Jordan will then selectively post portions of those very documents on Elon Musk's rival platform X to advance the narrative that Facebook is a supposed anti-free speech social media network working in collusion with the Democrats and media elite to tilt the scales against the GOP.
In effect, Jordan is coercing Zuckerberg into turning over documents that will then be used to mendaciously smear the Metachief's company.
And if Zuckerberg fails to comply, Jordan has threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress, an action that would carry with it serious legal consequences.
Yes, that's what Congress is supposed to do.
They're supposed to subpoena documents relevant to the public interest.
Such as how much the US government has been pressuring Big Tech to censor, and then they're supposed to release those documents, and if the companies don't comply with the subpoena, they're supposed to suffer legal consequences.
That's exactly how things are supposed to work.
He goes on, quote, The documents that Jordan ultimately obtained and posted on Thursday were far from surprising.
They showed that the White House in 2021 had applied pressure on MEDA to keep its platforms clean of COVID vaccine disinformation, something that was already well known given that the White House had staked a public position on such measures during the pandemic.
In fact, President Joe Biden even went as far as to accuse Facebook of, quote, killing people.
In his efforts to press the social media company to do more to tackle dangerous vaccine information and conspiracy theories on its platform.
So he begins by saying there is no censorship regime.
There's an unsuccessful effort by Jim Jordan to prove that there is one.
It's all based on lies.
And then he goes on to say of course there's a censorship regime.
We already knew that.
And it's totally justified, and we should be grateful for it because President Biden is simply trying, through this censorship, to keep us free of disinformation.
He goes on, quote, Jordan, however, predictably hyped the documents in a much different light, dubbing them the Facebook files, a ripoff of the Musk-orchestrated Twitter files, which also failed to provide any smoking gun evidence proving government collusion in the Hunter Biden case.
I mean, every report that is in any way incriminating to the Democratic Party or the U.S.
security state, Oliver Darcy is there to malign.
Quote, Jordan tweeted X in all caps that he had, quote, smoking gun evidence proving Facebook censored Americans because of Biden White House pressure.
Here's a really revealing paragraph.
Quote, most news organizations gave Jordan's Facebook file entry little attention on Thursday.
Exactly.
They essentially ignored it.
As they do every time there's a story incriminating of Joe Biden or the U.S.
security state.
But, as you might expect, right-wing media outlets hype the stunt.
Fox News, for instance, featured a story on the document's release as a top story on its website, and Jordan was welcomed on the network's air to further promote his narrative without scrutiny.
It was a helpful distraction on a day in which new charges against Donald Trump commanded the attention of the nation's biggest newsrooms.
We are about to live through the Twitter Files era all over again, except this time around, Facebook and Instagram will be on center stage.
Notably, the documents are not being made available to the public because of an erratic billionaire owner who purchased the company and legally acquired the material.
In this case, the awesome powers of the federal government are being weaponized to threaten Zuckerberg into handing the information over.
Now, the lies and the partisanship ooze off of every word of that article.
I don't feel it necessary to dignify it by dissecting every paragraph.
But I want to show you one video That by itself completely destroys the veracity of everything that Democratic Party pro-censorship activist claims.
He cast Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook as victims of the House Judiciary investigation and cast the censorship claims that the U.S.
government is applying censorship pressure to Facebook as totally false.
And yet, as we showed you last night, and as we're gonna show you again, it was the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself, who publicly complained about the endless censorship pressures applied by the Biden administration to include not only disinformation, as Oliver Darcy claimed, falsely, but also content that Facebook itself knew was either debatable or claims that turned out to be true.
So you have Facebook saying the Biden administration tried to force us to censor content and viewpoints that were actually true.
And then Oliver Darcy claims on CNN that Mark Zuckerberg is a victim because none of this ever happened.
And this is just the Biden White House trying to protect us from disinformation.
Let's look at what Mark Zuckerberg himself said in June.
So misinformation, I think is, um, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are, Kind of obviously false, right?
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?
It's, you know, if there's no kind of harm implication of what they're doing, I think that that's, 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 You know, real health implications, but there hadn't been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions.
And, 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.
So Oliver Darcy purported to be defending Mark Zuckerberg from unfair attacks.
The problem is that Mark Zuckerberg himself sees himself as a victim of the Biden White House and the Biden administration's attempt to censor, not disinformation, but valid debates and even true dissent off of Facebook.
And we see from these internal Facebook documents how angry and concerned Facebook was internally About this endless censorship pressure that they believed was inappropriate.
Earlier today, Congressman Jordan issued some additional emails similar to the ones he released yesterday, but we want to show you just a couple of them.
That add yet new light on this censorship regime and how much Oliver Darcy is lying in his defense of it.
Here's the tweet from Congressman Jordan.
To appease the Biden White House, talking points were drafted for Nick Clegg.
Nick Clegg is the former Labour Democrat leader from the UK who is now a...
What's that?
Liberal Democrat.
Sorry, Liberal Democrat party in the UK.
He's now a top official for Facebook.
There were talking points that were drafted for him.
Facebook was ready to tell the White House that it had demoted a video posted by Tucker Carlson by 50% in response to the White House's demands, even though the post didn't violate any policies.
So they were trying to appease the Biden White House.
They were going to say, look, we suppressed a Tucker Carlson video for you.
So this is a case of the White House pointing to a specific journalist saying we want his content suppressed.
And Facebook was under so much pressure from the U.S.
government.
I'm not defending them here.
They should have defied these orders and that some of these documents they even acknowledged they made a mistake.
But when the FBI and the CIA and the Biden White House come knocking in the context of threats against your company, demanding that you censor, and accusing you of killing people if you don't, any company is going to take that seriously.
So here is the document released by Congressman Jordan that was talking points for a senior Facebook official, Nick Clegg.
Thanks, Nick.
Here are some talking points that you can use if Andy, that's Andy from the Biden administration, raises Rob's questions.
How is this Tucker Carlson post not violative?
And then he was supposed to say, while we remove content that explicitly directs people not to get the vaccine, as well as content that contains explicit misrepresentations about vaccines, we reviewed this content in detail and it does not violate these policies.
And then the White House would say, moreover, you say reduced and demoted.
What does that mean?
There's 40,000 shares on the video.
Who is seeing it now?
How many?
How effective is that?
Is this a...
Valid role for the U.S.
government to be demanding of Facebook.
Prove to us how many people are seeing it and how many people you're censoring.
And then Nick Clegg was supposed to say in response, the Tucker Carlson video is receiving 50% demotion for seven days as it is in the queue to fact check.
So you see the constant pressure that Facebook was under.
Like Twitter.
That's what led the district court To conclude that this is the gravest assault on the First Amendment in decades, here is Congressman Jordan releasing another email that proves that the Biden administration wanted Facebook to remove true information, as Mark Zuckerberg said that it was doing, and it was from the Surgeon General, from an internal Facebook memo that says, there you see it on the screen, it's right here.
It says, the Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about side effects of the vaccines if the user does not provide complete information about whether the side effect is rare and treatable.
We do not recommend pursuing this practice.
So this is the Biden administration saying, this information is not disinformation.
This is true information.
The vaccine can have side effects and we don't want you to let the public see that.
They were trying to constantly frame what the public could say and what the public couldn't say.
And CNN is willing to come out and tell you, on the one hand, this wasn't happening, this is all a right-wing fantasy, and then turn around and say, yes, actually, it was happening, the Biden administration did it publicly, and we should be grateful that they did because they're protecting us from things we shouldn't be hearing.
The corporate media in this country is the leading activist and advocate for censorship.
Which is why I say no matter how much you hate people like Oliver Darcy and the employees of CNN, it is nowhere near enough.
The level of harm that they are responsible for is incomparable to what anyone else does.
You expect the government to abuse its power.
That's why there's a free press clause.
To have an adversarial press that is a check on what the government is doing.
That's not what our corporate media is.
They lie for the U.S.
security state.
They conceal what they're doing.
And when it gets out that they're actually doing the things the corporate media deny that they do, they start defending it.
They're spokespeople for the U.S.
government.
And it is a major malfeasance in how our system is supposed to work to have the U.S.
government be the leading advocate, or the corporate media be the leading advocate, for the abuses of power on the part of The US government, the Biden White House and the US security state.
So we absolutely are going to continue to follow this story.
I hope the House Judiciary Committee and the Republicans in Congress in general continue with the good job that they're doing enforcing this information to come.
into public view since that is the role of journalists that they're not doing and so it's left for Congress to do it.
We will certainly do our job and continue to report on it because I agree with the district court judge that this is the gravest installed on First Amendment press freedoms in many, many years.
That concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
We will be back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
