Media Gloats Over Trump Indictment—Ignoring Dangers, Blinken Rejects Australia Demands to #FreeAssange, & Worst Pro-Iraq War Journalist Promoted (Again), w/ Michael Tracey | SYSTEM UPDATE #123
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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.
Before getting into the topics of tonight's show, we have a couple of programming notes.
First of all, we are really starting to encourage our audience here on Rumble, here on System Update, to download the Rumble app, which is of great quality.
That will enable you to follow our program there and to turn on notifications.
And that will, in turn, let the show directly notify you or email you exactly when our live broadcast is beginning so you don't have to wait.
You will always be reminded.
We are really thrilled by the way in which this program has grown in a very short nine months.
Our audience is really growing rapidly.
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We are climbing the podcasting charts as well, but we do want to do more to promote the show, to spread the show.
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Secondly, We are going to start introducing new features where we will begin much more frequently interacting with the commenters and the live chat feature that is here on Rumble.
Interacting with our audience and my readership has always been a very important part of how I've done journalism.
We do have the live interactive after show every Tuesday and Thursday night that is devoted Exclusively to interacting with comments, taking feedback and suggestions.
But we're going to start incorporating a lot more of that into the live program here on Rumble as well very shortly.
But for now, we just wanted to make a note that sometimes people go into the live chat and impersonate me by using various formulations of my name.
And you should know that if it seems like I'm participating in the chat at the same time that I am speaking and reporting live here on the program, You should assume what probably is the obvious conclusion that that person is not me and is an impersonator.
We've seen a few people falling for that.
Don't fall for that.
That is not me.
But when we start increasing the interactive features of the chat, we will have a way for me to participate directly there, to interact on screen.
We're really looking forward to that.
And then finally, as a programming note, although I'm not yet authorized to talk about the details, you may notice, That I have here this secret new device.
This device bequeathed me great, great power.
And you'll see it on my desk.
You'll see me using it.
As I said, I'm not authorized to speak about it.
I don't want to have an indictment of the kind that Donald Trump got from Mar-a-Lago, but it is here and I'm very ready to use it.
Now, for tonight's show.
A follow-up from Donald Trump's latest criminal indictment, his third so far, his third indictment, continues to unfold.
Having had far more opportunity today than yesterday to delve into the substance of each aspect of the indictment, the frivolousness of these charges, as well as their dangers, have become much more manifest to me.
But over the past 36 hours since the indictment was unveiled, most of the corporate media unsurprisingly devoted very little to no time to examining or even allowing their audience to hear or read any of the criticisms of the indictment.
Instead, they were in full-on gloating mode, barely trying to hide their utter glee and ecstasy over the fact that Joe Biden's principal political opponent, And the man they long ago decided was the gravest threat to American democracies in decades, if not ever, was once again charged with crimes, this time in connection with an event they now regard as sacred, as having quasi-religious overtones, the insurrection of January 6th.
Some of their reactions were corrupt, but some of them were downright embarrassing when it came to the melodramatic pronouncements they were issuing about the sacredness and importance of this event.
We'll highlight both of the key dangers of this latest indictment as well as the corporate media and the party they threw for itself in lieu of doing any actual Colonel Corr reporting on it, and for that part of the show we will talk to the supremely independent reporter Michael Tracy about this newest Trump indictment, about the political pressures that led to it, and other topics as well, including the latest in the war in Ukraine.
And then, Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has spent the year publicly denouncing the Biden administration for what it appears to be the United States' real determination to proceed with the extradition and prosecution of Australian citizen Julian Assange.
In a series of comments that have become increasingly more strident over the year, Prime Minister Albanese, reflecting growing resentment among Australians over what even many Assange critics there perceive to be the now abusive and excessive persecution of him by the United States, has urged the U.S.
government and the Biden administration specifically to withdraw the prosecution.
Quote, enough is enough, he proclaimed in May.
The Biden administration's refusal to heed this request from an ally government and a friendly government at that, a center-left government, is beginning to generate real tensions with this vital American ally.
In a visit to the country over the weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pointedly refused to consider dropping the charges, telling reporters in Australia that Assange stands accused of, quote, very serious criminal conduct, mainly journalism.
In response, the Australian prime minister again told reporters, quote, this has gone on for too long, far too long, enough is enough.
He accused the U.S. of using double standards in its treatment of Assange and prompted some rare but rather intense negative media coverage in Australia towards the United States.
We'll report on these latest developments.
Then, America's corporate media loves to depict itself as the bulwark against disinformation, the heroic vanguards that keep you from being exposed to things that might deceive you.
And yet, those who thrive and are most rewarded within these same media corporations are the people who lie most aggressively and casually, as long as they're lying on behalf of the U.S.
security state and its agenda.
The journalist who did more than any single American to convince Americans of the vital lie that Saddam Hussein personally participated in the planning of 9-11.
That lie was crucial to get Americans to support the invasion of Iraq, which ended up killing around a million people.
That person is Jeffrey Goldberg, and for those lies that he told, He was promoted from the liberal journal, The New Yorker, where he won journalism prizes for those articles in 2002, linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, and then became the editor-in-chief of the liberal journal, The Atlantic.
He should have been scorned out of decent society forever, and yet he became the editor of one of America's most influential liberal magazines, funded by Steve Jobs' widow.
And again, today, he's been promoted.
Along with the remaining editor of The Atlantic, he'll now be the new host of PBS's Washington Week.
It cannot be emphasized enough, while the corporate media endlessly warns of the dangers of disinformation, to the point of demanding the power to censor the internet to protect you from it, nobody spreads and rewards serial destructive lying more than these media corporations do.
Finally, we have spent months telling you and reporting on the growing censorship regime in Brazil, both because it matters unto itself given how huge Brazil is and how influential it is in our hemisphere, but also because Brazil is plainly being used as a laboratory by the EU, Canada, and the US to see how far internet censorship can go.
Today, Brazil's Supreme Court judge, who is the person largely responsible for the entire censorship regime, took another truly disturbing step.
In destroying the life and work of the podcaster who, until two years ago, just two years ago, was Brazil's most popular and influential podcast host, regularly called, quote, the Joe Rogan of Brazil.
His name is Monarch.
We had him on the show in January to report on a censorship order that targeted him and other big tech platforms, including senators and Congress members who supported President Bolsonaro.
And the court today opened a criminal investigation into Monarch, barred him entirely from using the internet, and fined him 300,000 reais, the equivalent of $75,000 or so, entirely based on the claim that has never been tested in court, that has never been the subject of a trial.
That he was spreading disinformation.
That's the only allegation against him.
They've now turned him into a criminal and completely wrecked his life.
It is disturbing and alarming in the extreme.
And we'll show you where the censorship regime in the West is headed by looking at how despotic Brazil has become.
And we are not that far away from it in the United States and certainly not in the EU where there's no First Amendment protections.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form as well.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all major podcasting platforms where you can listen to the show in podcast form 12 hours after they first are broadcast here on Rumble.
And you can also rate and review the program, which helps spread the visibility of the show.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Last night we reported on the newest indictment brought against President Donald Trump in It's its third overall.
His third, his second federal indictment, and it pertains to the events of January 6th and his conduct in contesting the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 election.
As many of you know, liberals were really hoping that Donald Trump would be charged basically with treason, with inciting what the U.S.
government with a straight face still refers to as an insurrection, that three-hour riot at the Capitol that day.
They were hoping that he would be charged with having his speech that he gave to that crowd, quote, incite the violence that ended up taking place at the Capitol, and hoping that he would essentially be labeled an insurrectionist, somebody who is a traitor to the United States.
None of that ended up happening in this indictment.
Almost certainly because the free speech barriers to trying to allege that his speech that day incited the crowd were far too great.
It was likely that such charges would be dismissed.
We devoted an entire show around four weeks ago to explaining to you, breaking down the seminal cases in the 20th century that define the parameters of free speech in the United States, to demonstrate why it would be almost impossible to charge Trump with Responsibility for the actions of that crowd that day by referring to the speech that he delivered.
It's almost clearly or certainly within the central balance of what's protected by the First Amendment.
And if they were to indict Trump on those charges, it would be a grave frontal assault on the seminal cases of the 20th century, namely Claiborne and Brandenburg.
We devoted the show to explaining that.
The prosecutor, the special prosecutor in this case, Jack Smith, Who is also the prosecutor who indicted Trump for taking documents that he had every power to arbitrarily and unilaterally declassify had he wanted to Mar-a-Lago.
He's responsible for that indictment, the first federal indictment, and I was responsible for this one as well.
And what he charged Trump with is not inciting any violence on that day, but instead, essentially, Arguing that the outcome of the 2020 election was the byproduct of election fraud, even though, according to the indictment, Trump knew that that claim was false.
In other words, they're charging him with lying, with making false statements about the 2020 election and trying to criminalize the spread of disinformation.
They charged him with four felony counts, four federal counts, including obstructing an official proceeding, which was the January 6th hearing, as well as a conspiracy to deny people the vote, and very similar to the two other counts.
And it's essentially based on Trump's efforts both in the federal courts, where he challenged the results in places like Wisconsin and Arizona and Georgia, As well as his efforts to talk to officials in those states to encourage them to find evidence of fraud and his efforts to persuade the Vice President Mike Pence to reject the set of electors presented and to reject the certified results of the election on the grounds that Trump argued that they were the byproduct of fraud.
That's it.
It's entirely based on Trump's argument That the 2020 election was fraudulent, the results were, and his attempt to invalidate those results in court or through Vice President Trump or by finding fraud in the states by turning those statements and those efforts into crimes.
Now the reason it's so dangerous is as we showed you last night, there's a long history in this country of contesting the legitimacy of presidential elections.
It was widely claimed.
After John F. Kennedy's victory in 1960 against Richard Nixon, secured by winning the state of Illinois, which was the most contested and important of the states that put John Kennedy over the top, that the election outcome was secured by voting fraud through the mayor of Chicago, the longtime machine politician Richard Daley, and the mafia connections he was said to have.
And in the 21st century alone, every time, literally, that Democrats have lost a presidential election, Democrats have stood up and accused the government of defrauding the voters of the United States and trying to obstruct the process of certifying the results.
In 2000, of course, Democrats in a consensus argued the Supreme Court stole that election from Al Gore, the rightful winner, and awarded it to George Bush and Dick Cheney.
In 2004, there were widespread claims that Karl Rove cheated the country by manipulating the Diebold voting machines in Ohio to steal Ohio from the rightful winner, John Kerry, and give it to George Bush in order for him to be reelected.
And there were members of the Democratic Party, including Senator Barbara Boxer and members of the House, who stood up on the equivalent of January 6th and objected to certifying the Ohio result.
And then, of course, in 2016, There was a campaign by leading Democratic activists, including Neera Tanden, who's now a White House official, to try and convince electors, duly elected and chosen by their states, to violate the decision of the voters of that state by refusing to vote for Donald Trump in the Electoral College and instead either voting for Hillary Clinton or voting for some third party.
And several of them did that and it was found to have broken the law.
So this indictment essentially would say that it is a crime now to argue against the legitimacy of the certified outcome of presidential elections in the United States and or to take steps including suing in courts or invoking other legal procedure or legal rights that your lawyers tell you that you have in order to contest these charges.
That really is the full scope of what this indictment alleges.
So you think about crimes It's like murder and rape and kidnapping and bribery and extortion.
And if you look at the things that Donald Trump is alleged to have done in the aggregate of these three indictments, it is beyond batty, beyond trivial.
You have to really stretch to turn these into crimes.
Remember the Manhattan investigate, the Manhattan indictment brought by the liberal prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
alleges that Trump and the Trump Organization did nothing more than mischaracterize the payments made to Stormy Daniels as legal fees rather than as hush money payments and somehow is using a legal theory that has never previously been tested to turn that into a felony.
There has never been a case in the history of New York Where that kind of behavior has been ruled to be a felony rather than a misdemeanor.
So that is relying on a brand new legal theory to try and turn Trump into a felon.
And of course the idea is we're gonna get to try him before a set of Manhattan jurors who are almost certainly likely to be very hostile to Trump politically and hope that they will convict him.
And then you have this case in Florida.
Which I know a lot of people think is the strongest of the three, and I guess if it got into my head I had to pick, I guess I would say that one is.
But ultimately, it's not about anything other than a claim that Trump took classified documents that he had the power to classify or declassify at will when president and took them to Mar-a-Lago and stored them there without authorization and refused to give them back.
Now, every day in the United States and Washington, people play games with classified information.
They declassify information.
Everyone knows it.
The journalists at these media corporations who everyday get people inside the CIA and Homeland Security and the NSA and the FBI calling them or the White House and leaking classified information for their own ends, go on the air with a straight face and act so indignant that Trump would mistreat sacred classified information, knowing that Hillary Clinton had a private server in her house and lied about the fact that it had classified information on it and never got indicted, to justify this indictment?
I mean, that's the strongest one!
And now you have this indictment which essentially alleges that Trump, as everybody knows, argued the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and tried to get the election results invalidated on that ground based on theories his lawyers were telling him were valid.
That's it.
That's the sum total of three indictments.
And this is why I really question whether this is not only going to not have the political effects Democrats want, but might actually politically backfire the way that, for example, the leading proceedings, the legal proceedings, including the impeachment, did against Bill Clinton at a time when Americans thought that that was just a private matter that did not warrant that level of prosecution.
And punish the Republicans in the 1998 Midterm election at a time when Republicans really thought they were going to punish the Clinton administration and Democrats instead.
So we're going to talk a lot more about the indictment itself, about the media reaction to it, which has been, even for those of us who harbor contempt for the media, pretty shocking in terms of just how pathetic it is, as well as a couple of related issues, including the latest in Ukraine with friend of the show, not friend of me, but friend of the show and the very independent journalist, Michael Tracy.
Michael, good evening.
It's great to see you as always.
Howdy, Glenn.
Howdy, Michael.
So let's just dive right into this.
We have a lot of topics that we want to cover, including once we boot you off, which I'm hoping is pretty soon.
So let me just show you a couple of things.
And before we get to the indictment, I just want to show you how the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, is being turned yet again into this kind of secular hero, this secular deity, the way that Robert Mueller was.
People might remember that Saturday Night Live sung songs to Robert Mueller.
There were articles about how sexy he was.
They had liberal shops selling votive candles with his face on it, and yet he didn't deliver the goods.
He closed his investigation without indicting a single American for criminally conspiring with Russia, which was the thing that launched that investigation.
He concluded in his report there was no evidence to establish the core conspiracy theory.
And they immediately turned around and started saying that Robert Mueller is actually a coward and he's senile.
But they have their new secular hero, another prosecutor.
This time, at least, it's not the Bush-Cheney FBI director, but it's a former prosecutor with a pretty sketchy record, Jack Smith.
And I just want to show you a couple of articles and then ask you to comment on the media's reaction.
Here's one from the Washington Post.
And they ask, who is Jack Smith?
What to know about the special counsel who charged Trump?
And this is what they said, quote, Smith started as a prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office where he earned a reputation as a hard worker.
That's the first sentence.
He earned his reputation as a hard worker.
It reads like a ninth grader's book report.
He spent nearly a decade in the U.S.
Attorney's Office.
Michael, he has a reputation as a hard worker.
He also eats his vegetables.
He prays every night before bed.
No, it's almost as bad.
Listen to this.
He spent nearly a decade in the U.S.
Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.
And remember, this is the Washington Post, where he served for a time as the head of criminal litigation.
In that position, Smith oversaw about 100 prosecutors working on cases in areas such as terrorism, violent crime, and gangs, along with white collar crimes.
Smith is known to enjoy biking and has completed, Michael, more than a hundred triathlons and at least nine Ironman competitions around the world, including in, I know you want to know the countries where he did that, Germany, Brazil, and Canada.
Despite saying in a 2018 interview that he, quote, could not swim a length of pool until my mid-30s.
He's very humble.
He is married to an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Katie Cheveny, and they have a daughter, Josie.
He has described, quote, enthusiasm and high energy as key ingredients to a happy life.
Quote, like most people, I think I want to devote my energies to making the world and my community a better place for my daughter to grow up in.
I mean, it really is like a junior high.
schooler's description of what a nice person is.
It doesn't mention things like his prosecution of the former Virginia governor that was ruled extremely abusive and excessive and invalidated by the Supreme Court or any of the other problems in his past.
So just before we get into the other aspects of the media reaction indictment itself, what do you make of this kind of attempt to convert him into this cultural folk hero?
Yeah, I wonder what his favorite shows are on Netflix and what his favorite ice cream flavor is.
You know, how does he spend his Saturdays?
I really want to get to know him on a personal level so I can almost feel like I'm there with him as he's inventing cockamamie new legal theories to bring yet another indictment against the former and potentially future president.
I mean, it is, of course, just amazing, but not surprising at all.
That they kind of create this almost mythological visage of him as this unblemished, unimpeachable savior figure who, let's remember, has been endowed with this solemn responsibility to defend democracy.
He's carrying out all this sort of melodramatic imperative that has been articulated over and over again ad nauseam by Biden, by Democrats, etc., who recite all the standard lines about what January 6th was, what kind of threat Trump was to our democracy and norms and institutions and blah, blah, blah.
Exactly.
Smith is the one who's taking on that duty to see to it that Trump is, quote, held to account for his democracy infringing activity.
Of course, they're going to valorize him and sanctify him.
What are they going to do?
Actually do adversarial coverage of him?
No, they won't do that at all.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it was exactly the way they did it with Robert Mueller.
You know, sometimes it does surprise me that they don't even bother hiding how openly partisan their agenda is.
There was the judge in the Mar-a-Lago case, in the documents case, who was our Trump-appointed federal judge.
Yeah, she was biased, right?
She was biased.
She was suspicious.
Because she ruled in favor of one Trump request early on in the case.
She's multiple times since then ruled against Trump in vital ways, but they turned her into this biased, incompetent, Trump-appointed judge.
When they say Trump-appointed, of course they mean that Trump selected her, but she only got onto the bench because the Senate approved her for that position.
They did the same to this judge in the Hunter Biden case where she really did a good job of doing what she was supposed to do, which is apply judicial scrutiny to the fairness of this plea bargain because you have two sides that are in total agreement, Hunter Biden's lawyers and the Biden Justice Department.
There's the obvious potential and problem that the Biden Justice Department could be giving favorable treatment to Joe Biden's son.
And she subjected this plea agreement to the most minimal scrutiny, immediately exposed that they couldn't even agree on the terms and it all fell apart.
And they did the same to her.
So if these judges or prosecutors do anything against Trump, they're valorized and turned into heroes.
And if they do anything in favor of Trump or even rule on emotion positively, they're immediately mauled and vilified.
I mean, it does surprise me the extent to which they're so open about that.
Now, speaking of that— One more thing on Jack Smith, Glenn.
Go ahead.
Yeah, very quickly on Jack Smith, and I think this has been very conspicuously underreported on.
Where did Merrick Garland poach Jack Smith from immediately prior to him naming him as special counsel for these Trump investigations?
That is the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the January 6th case.
Well, Jack Smith was actually on loan to the International Criminal Court for a number of years.
He had been in the Justice Department prior to that, of course, but he was at The Hague where he was in this special tribunal over dealing with Kosovo.
And that was one of the areas where the US authorizes US government personnel to actually be party to the International Criminal Court, at least had been before they made different legislative changes this past year.
But anyway, the point is, where was he marinating for the past several years?
In this venue of international law where there really is no binding president.
It's not like they have a constitution where the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment constrains prosecutors' ability to bring certain charges against certain targets.
No, international law is basically just make it up as you go along and set precedents at your own whim.
And I think that kind of shed some light on the creativity with which Jack Smith, and I use the word creativity a bit sarcastically and a bit faux charitably.
Jack Smith has used a lot of creativity that he probably got very good experience from during his time over there in The Hague with regard to Trump.
As you mentioned in your opening comments, all these indictments that have brought so far against Trump, whether it's both Smith charges and then also Alvin Bragg, they've been wholly novel legal theories that have been constructed solely for the purpose of tailoring criminal exposure they've been wholly novel legal theories that have been constructed solely for the purpose of tailoring It's not like they just took a statute off the shelf and applied to Trump just like they would apply to every other person.
No, they had to kind of manufacture or confabulate these brand new legal theories out of whole cloth, and I think Smith, They really expected a lot from him.
He delivered nothing.
where that's just par for the course, maybe has something to do with it, although that's just a theory on my part.
Yeah, I think they clearly felt they had gone very awry with Robert Mueller.
They really expected a lot from him.
He delivered nothing.
They immediately turned on him, and I think they were determined not to make the same mistake this time by choosing a special counsel that they knew would be very devoted to ensuring President Trump's indictment, even if it meant relying on very sketchy and novel legal theories, which this new indictment does to turn non-criminal behavior into criminal which this new indictment does to turn non-criminal behavior into criminal
Now let me show you part of the media reaction, and it was hard to pick which clip we wanted to use, so we used the one from MSNBC, where you can imagine they were basically having a pornography level party over the fact that Trump was not just indicted, but indicted on January 6th.
The comments that I'm about to show you come principally from the 8pm anchor Chris Hayes, who I actually find to be an interesting figure.
I was on Chris' show a lot prior to becoming a heretic on Russiagate when I stopped being invited on at the end of 2016 because of my view that we should actually not rely on the CIA for allegations about Trump's collusion with Russia, but should wait for actual evidence to come, which turned me into an enemy of the left.
I knew him back when he was the Washington editor of The Nation, before he made the MSNBC career transition.
Well, Chris was a longtime critic of the Democratic Party from the left before he got that MSNBC job.
And even when he got that first job as a weekend host, he continued to kind of maintain that facade.
But what's so interesting is Chris wrote a book in 2011 That's a genuinely good book.
I'm not saying that to... I read it!
He praised on him.
Yeah, called Twilight of the Elites.
I reviewed it at Salon.com.
I interviewed Chris about it, and one of the primary arguments was that if you are somebody who enters a large corporation and stays there for a good amount of time and thrives within it, inevitably, not probably, but inevitably, in all cases, you will start to relinquish your own independent you will start to relinquish your own independent autonomy and adopt the worldview and values of that corporation because it's so structured to co-opt you.
No matter how well-intentioned you are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how much you think you're going there to subvert it And in that interview that I conducted with Chris, I said to him, you're about to get your own MSNBC show.
How have you, have you taken any steps to immunize yourself against this happening, given that you say it's inevitable?
And he said, I haven't really thought about it.
And he was obviously telling the truth because in a very short period of time, he has morphed Into one of the most blind, kind of loyal, blindly script reading partisans on all of television.
So let's look at his reaction and the reaction of his MSNBC colleagues, including Rachel Maddow, to this indictment last night.
Okay, Michael, so I'm going to just...
Well, the interesting thing about...
Go ahead.
Talk about what I said, and then we'll watch the audio once they figure out the sound issues.
Yeah, and the interesting thing about Chris Hayes is that you say he made this very fast transformation into sort of more skeptical, anti-establishmentarian, or at least detached journalist and commentator.
And then became the sort of just a quintessential MSNBC institutionalist.
But I think it was a bit more of a protracted process than that.
Remember, he got his show, I think it was 2010 or 11, on MSNBC on the weekend.
And that was the, you know, the Obama years.
But only really during the Trump years did the incentive structure that is attendant to being a member of that particular corporate media institution, MSNBC, become totally impossible to forestall, causing you to shift into this new creature.
Like in the Obama years when the ratings were low and it wasn't really that, it wasn't like a frenzied period and it wasn't as though everybody was always at the center of attention or it wasn't like politics had morphed into entertainment yet.
You could maybe get away with it if you were Chris Hayes being a little bit more circumspect about the party line of the Democrats.
But once Trump became the center of gravity, Then everybody reordered themselves in relation to Trump and Chris Hayes just became a standard fare every night.
It was Russiagate.
It was impeachment.
It was Trump is corrupt with, you know, Kushner and Don Jr.
and blah, blah, blah, blah, indistinguishable from the rest of the anti-Trump media class.
I think that's a crucial point.
I do think Donald Trump changed everything for these people.
You know, when he would have me on, it was always to criticize the Democratic Party about Obama's drone program, about his extension of the war on terror abuses, of Bush and Cheney from the war on terror that he had promised to uproot but instead extended and even strengthened.
So there was a lot of space before Trump for even MSNBC to criticize the Democratic Party and the Democratic President.
It was when Trump was elected, I think not only was there kind of an economic motive because they were profiting so much.
I mean, Chris Hayes, you go back and look at 2015 and 2016, there were reports in every journal that he was on the verge of being fired because nobody was watching the show.
Trump saved him.
It saved the careers of all of these people.
It made them rich.
But I actually think that Chris became a true believer for exactly the reasons that he wrote about in his book, that if you go from being a left-wing writer at The Nation to being somebody who's inside this corporation, interacting all the time with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and interviewing every night these Democratic senators and talking to their staffers and going to parties with Democratic elite, you do start to become integrated into that culture and do start adopting
Their worldview.
Humans are social animals.
We do crave social acceptance, and that was part of why he said it was inevitably the case.
He called it cognitive capture, that if you entered corporations, you would automatically at some point fully end up adopting their worldview.
And I think some of it is cynical, but I really think they became convinced because they talked to each other all day that Trump is this never-before-seen threat that everything and anything is justified to stop him.
All right, let's watch this video, Michael, because I know you have stuff to say about it and I do too.
Well, my first reaction, which is just a personal one, and having covered this, I think, you know, like all of us have, and many of the viewers are in the weeds of it too, is like, right, yes, I'm not crazy.
Yeah.
Like, if this wasn't a crime, nothing is a crime.
We watched him do it on television.
We sat at this desk a year ago at the January 6th committee.
We knew what he was doing.
If that is not a crime... First of all, look at how proud Rachel Maddow is of him, the way she kind of gazes at him like her little boy has grown up and he's become like...
Yeah, like it's her son who just graduated fifth grade or something.
Exactly.
She's like, oh look, I only come on Monday now and he's really grown into the job.
I'm so proud of him.
And got an A plus on his book report.
Totally.
And she's just like gazing at him like, you know, with such like maternal pride.
The thing is though, what he just said there is so insane if you think about it.
If this isn't a crime, nothing is?
That's what I'm saying.
I can imagine this not being a crime and still having things that are pretty clearly crimes like murder and rape and, you know, bribes and embezzlement and extortion, things like that.
Like those still seem to me to be much clearer crimes than arguing that the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and taking steps to overturn it.
But in this world, because, as you said, these people do nothing every day but talk about this every night for five, six straight years about how Trump is Nazi, Trump is Hitler and his movement is Nazis, this is the kind of worldview that they have genuinely adopted.
That makes sense to them to say, but if you take just a step back, it's really insane.
All right, let's listen to this next part, which takes it to an entirely different new level.
You were the one who drew my attention to this segment, so I just want to play it and then ask you to comment on that.
Nothing is a crime.
So that part of it is just, like, I find really important and gratifying.
There's a kind of ballast to it.
This, yes, yes, of course this was corrupt.
Of course this was fraud.
Of course it was a conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
We all saw him engage in the conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
The second thought I had, it's just about the magnitude of this moment, which I think it's just worth taking a second on.
I mean, With Donald Trump, lots of things are unprecedented.
The first time he was indicted, it was unprecedented.
And the second time he was indicted, it was unprecedented because a federal indictment had never come down.
This is in the canon of American events, January 6th and its aftermath.
And the reason is that for 159 years after the cannons fire on Fort Sumter, there is an unbroken chain of peaceful transfer of power.
And not only that, The core story of the American experiment is a fight within itself to be true to the radical promise of democracy.
That is why Lincoln says at the battlefield at Gettysburg that the question before the nation is whether a nation of, by, and for the people can long endure.
It is a test whether the thing can last.
And that's in a category of itself in American history, the Civil War and the death and misery.
But this is the gravest political crime since secession.
And the gravest test that Lincoln called on the battlefield of Gettysburg of whether a nation of, by, and for the people, that we are our own masters, whether that can long endure.
So I feel profoundly gratified by reading this document because it calls the question in a way that it has not quite been called yet.
Like, if the law is not for this, then what is it for?
All right, Michael.
I mean, I think he was about to cry.
He didn't.
He made that through without shedding tears.
I'm about to choke up.
I'm about to choke up.
I'm glad I wasn't on the screen because I was also struggling to hold back my emotions.
That was a very moving statement.
It was deeply profound about who we are as a nation.
But Michael, he said that this is the greatest political crime since the Civil War and the single greatest task for American democracy since Fort Sumter.
How do you see that comparison?
Well, first of all, that was just bizarre performance-wise, because it sounded like it was a pre-prepared oration that he made sure to find the proper Lincoln quote for, and the rhythms were very well-structured, and it sounded like Barack Obama's speechwriters, you know, prepped him before
last night's show and maybe he, you know, practiced in front of the mirror a couple of times because it was just that profound of an event that he felt he had to mark with, you know, almost a formal address, like the Gettysburg Address.
Maybe he does fancy himself the MSNBC incarnation of Lincoln.
I think on some level, though, he has to be sincere.
And when he expresses this profound, almost emotional gratification as to finally having it be made plain to him that he isn't crazy after all, because the audience incentives of MSNBC have required a relentless focus on not just January 6th, which, you because the audience incentives of MSNBC have required a relentless focus on not just January 6th, which, you know, lots of people have been focused on at least for various time periods, but on Arcane minutia like Cassidy Hutchinson.
Does that name ring a bell?
You might vaguely remember that popping up about a year ago when she was hauled before the Liz Cheney Yeah, and she talked about the Secret Service.
She talked about the Secret Service.
And they denied it, but yeah, it was supposed to be like, it was like when Rachel Maddow interviewed Lev Parland, or whatever his name was, Lev Parnas.
And for four days, all I saw on my Twitter feed were liberals saying, this was the most important interview in American history, and I bet you not want, also the same thing when Jeff Flake The Republican Senator from Arizona stood up and denounced Donald Trump in a Senate speech.
They were like, this book is going to go down in history.
And I remember thinking, nobody's going to remember Jeff Flake's speech by next Tuesday.
And they are so, they're such drama queens.
They're so melodramatic about January 6th, about the Trump presidency in general.
And I think you're right that that was a genuine expression of emotion.
Like, thank God someone vindicated us.
It also channels the neuroses that have almost certainly, I would say certainly, I'm going to assert with certainty that the same sort of neuroses that Chris Hayes exhibited in that clip are very much overrepresented in the audience.
So he's channeling the audience there, which is probably a savvy thing to do in terms of Yeah, being a television performer, because you want to have that connection with your audience.
I mean, they see you struggling in the same way that they do, where they're kind of toiling away in angst over, won't somebody finally hold this Trump menace responsible?
Remember, they went through a lot of pain and suffering when the Mueller investigation didn't pan out, and then the first impeachment, yeah, they did impeach him in the House, but he wasn't acquitted.
And Trump always seemed like he was getting away with stuff in a way that they couldn't really psychologically reconcile themselves with.
So to have this whole emotional release after seven years of pent up rage, I mean, I almost envy them because it probably feels euphoric.
But the other thing to note is the historical comparison that he's actually making there on the substance because it's worth dwelling on for a minute.
He's saying there was this unbroken chain of the peaceful transfer of power between Fort Sumter, when the cannons rang out at Fort Sumter, and then January 6th.
So what is he talking about with Fort Sumter?
That was the opening salvo of the Civil War.
Hundreds of thousands dead in the killing fields of the American continent in a civil conflict.
And he's likening that in magnitude to January 6th, which is kind of best personified by a shirtless QAnon shaman yodeling and hoping that he can be like levitate the Pentagon or something.
So but but the people in the audience.
And Michael, one of the things you pointed out earlier today was that there was a peaceful transfer of power.
Trump utilized the legal recourses he had.
He lost at the end of the day.
The courts ruled against him.
He left the White House on exactly the day and it was exactly the time that presidents are supposed to leave the White House that they traditionally left to make way for Joe Biden.
Not supposed to when the Constitution mandates it.
It's not optional.
Exactly.
And he left peacefully.
He wasn't dragged out by the police or by the military or anything else.
There weren't armed Trump supporters trying to prevent anybody from taking him out of power.
And Joe Biden went and was inaugurated, duly inaugurated.
The most that happened, the absolute worst that came from any of this, was that there was about a two hour delay or a three hour delay in the January 6th hearing.
They actually certified the election results on the very day the Constitution indicates.
So there wasn't even a delay, not even a one day delay.
With any of this, and he's comparing this to the Civil War, and I think, you know, I think that you put your finger on something that is important about left liberal politics and one of the things that I found most disturbing about it is it has really become way more than politics.
It's become a psychodrama to these people.
There were all those reports when Trump first got elected about how therapists were saying that so many of their clients in big cities were having serious psychological pathologies as a result of Trump's election.
There were these people in the media who you can see them breaking down.
Oh yeah, I mean, Rachel Maddow, you know, clearly was, like, deeply personally pained she would go on the air and she would, you know, talk about how Russia was going to cut off the heat in the winter.
I mean, these people became, like, so invested psychologically and emotionally and personally, way beyond what politics typically requires or suggests that it should.
And I think that this catharsis they're confessing to feeling, which is deeply unhealthy is very genuine.
And I do remember someone at MSNBC telling me early on in the Trump presidency when I was talking to them about the insanity of this liberal resistance that had emerged saying, well, you know, the Republicans got kind of insane under the Obama administration with the Tea Party and the birth certificate stuff and it actually helped the Republicans.
And I think the insanity that liberals are going through over Trump could actually be a positive force that could help the Democratic Party.
When elections on some level, I think that turned out to be pressure.
And I think this psychosis that liberals have been culted, that have been cultivating liberals to believe that Donald Trump presents a danger to their lives, that he's planning death camps and he's a new Hitler.
Civilization itself. - Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Civilization itself, I think, that is the thing that they have really cultivated in roughly half the country, and that's going to have some very deleterious long-term effects, I think, to the point where they now believe that any kind of authoritarianism is justified in the name of stopping it.
All right, let me show you one last point that you also made today.
You were really on quite a roll.
You pointed out that one of the major... Don't flatter me, Glenn.
One of the major themes of the Trump administration was that Donald Trump had completely politicized the Justice Department, he had turned the Attorney General into his personal attorney, all of those themes, and in fact, as usual, the Biden Justice Department has turned into exactly what they claimed the Trump Justice Department was, and in particular, It was very clear that for at least a year Merrick Garland did not want to bring sedition charges or insurrection charges against any of these January 6th defendants.
It was making liberals insane with rage.
They were applying overt pressure to him publicly and private pressure to him as well to indict more aggressively, to indict Donald Trump as well, and there's a whole bunch of corporate media outlets, which talk openly about that.
Here from the New York Times, for example, in April of 2022, the headline was, Garland faces growing pressure as January 6th investigation widens.
And then we have here, I just pressed the wrong button on my powerful machine and caused all kinds of chaos to break out, but I fixed it here.
Here from NPR in July of 2022, the headline is, the January 6th committee rests its case for now and eyes turn to Merrick Garland.
And they reported, quote, as the hearings continue, the Department of Justice is conducting its own investigation and Attorney General Merrick Garland is under pressure from the left to bring criminal charges against Trump.
And then PBS in June of this year, the headline was, report says DOJ resisted investigating Trump's role in January 6th for over a year.
So they really had taken this position that the idea of charging January 6th defendants with insurrection or the idea of charging President Trump with January 6th was legally invalid, and yet there was all kinds of political pressure brought to bear on the Biden Attorney General, Merrick and yet there was all kinds of political pressure brought to bear on the Biden Attorney General, Merrick Garland, and he finally delivered the good and satiated is.
Well, I don't think it's quite correct to say that the Biden Justice Department is doing the same thing as what they were accusing the Trump Justice Department of doing.
In fact, it seems that the manner in which political influence is exerted on the Biden Justice Department is much more effective than the way that Trump sought to influence his own Justice Department when he was in power, because he did it, of course, very brashly, ostentatiously, with tweets.
He would, you know, call his Attorney General or acting Attorney General directly and sort of, you know, berate them and hector them.
Whereas Biden, you know, he has, he professed to be returning to our cherished norms and therefore he was going to at least put on the appearance of not having anything to do at all with the workings of the Justice Department.
Meanwhile, the New York Times, I'm not sure if you put up this particular excerpt, but the New York Times in March of this year and then also the previous year, 2022 in April, had reported that, you know, By strange coincidence, the private musings that Biden had told to his inner circle that he really wanted Trump charged for January 6 and he was getting super frustrated that
Merrick Garland was not acting decisively enough for Biden's liking.
Those, quote, private comments ended up making their way into the New York Times and fueled this kind of drumbeat of pressure on Garland to adhere to this political prerogative.
And now that way of doing it is probably more effective because it's slightly more subtle.
It's not going to provoke a lot of consternation because the media, you know, kind of see that excerpt.
I mean, I don't remember that excerpt or that report from The New York Times causing much of a stir, whereas if Trump had kind of blinked in the wrong direction of the main justice in D.C., you know, it would have been, you know, that day's five alarm fire.
So and look, the proof is in the pudding.
Look at the results.
There's double indictments now of Donald Trump.
They've given the hard core, emotionally sort of blinkered Democratic Party base exactly what they want, that emotional gratification release of finally, you know, going after Trump in this decisive way.
And the it's worked out very much in their favor.
So but it's just funny because you have to, like, dig into the archives and unearth this stuff, because, you know, if you don't just see it at the moment, I mean, nobody even bats an eye and thinks that, oh, maybe this could constitute undue influence.
And maybe we should, you know, do some journalistic inquiry into this, given that there's now these unprecedented criminal prosecutions by a president against his predecessor and potentially successor.
Like that doesn't really give them pause.
Right.
That's why I think it was, yeah, I mean, to be clear, I wasn't saying the Trump and the Biden Justice Departments were the same.
I was saying, I think the Biden, I think the Biden Justice Department is doing exactly that, which they claim the Trump Justice Department.
Was guilty of.
So you spent the last few minutes contesting a point that I didn't even get close to making, but I thought those points were nonetheless important on their own.
I know you didn't fully make that point.
I was kind of using that as a launch pad to make a separate point.
That's fine.
Feel free to exploit me to make your points.
Now, let me ask you about this last issue, Michael, before I finally, thankfully let you go, which is the question of the political ramifications of I'm about to kill myself.
Donald Trump into a criminal.
Now, there was right before, I think the morning of, yesterday, there was a new New York Times Sienna report that showed that Trump's lead had ballooned to the highest margin yet over the closest competitor Ron DeSantis.
It's only 37 points, but if you dig into the poll, It's even more disturbing for everyone else who's not named Donald Trump because even people who like DeSantis and who like a lot of the other candidates nonetheless are proclaiming their loyalty to Trump.
It takes place through every demographic group, through every region of the country, even in South Carolina where they have two very popular South Carolina politicians, former Governor Nikki Haley, current Senator Tim Scott, running.
Trump has a gigantic lead over both them and DeSantis.
So the question is... Are they very popular?
I didn't know that.
Well, Tim Scott's pretty popular.
Nikki Haley was elected governor, I think, twice, so she's reasonably popular in South Carolina.
But, you know, even this kind of favorite son theory doesn't really stop Trump.
Nothing seems to be stopping him, despite, or maybe because of, and I think because of, two indictments.
So law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University has had an article on June 13th wondering, the headline was, DOJ fatigue, is special counsel Jack Smith singing to an empty room?
Meaning, yes, if he indicts Trump the way he just did, it's going to make Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough melt with orgasmic glee.
But obviously they're voting for Joe Biden anyway.
So the question is, how is the rest of the country going to react politically to these indictments?
Obviously, the hope is, and this would always have been true for a long time, that if a presidential candidate were indicted even once, let alone three times, on felony charges, that would probably sink their candidacy.
Donald Trump has proven repeatedly he doesn't follow standard political rules.
I remember in 2015, the senior political reporter for the Washington Post, Dan Balz, In response to Trump mocking John McCain for being somebody who got shot down, said, oh, this is clearly over the line.
This is going to end Trump's prospects with Republican voters.
His lead is now going to collapse.
We're going to see him collapsing because you don't get to insult John McCain and get away with that, especially among Republicans.
And obviously none of that got close to happening.
The Access Hollywood tape was the final straw.
Exactly.
Even that, people hearing him say those things didn't even have a dent and he ended up winning.
They found it funny probably.
What I think is kind of at the root of all of this, and this is I think, even though I think it's well deserved, I do think it's kind of disturbing if you're looking for the United States as a country of stability, a huge portion of the country, at least 50%, Simply do not trust America's leading institutions of authority.
They do not think their authority is valid.
They don't think they conduct themselves legitimately.
They believe they're completely politicized and are abusing their power.
That's true for the media.
That's true for large corporations.
Obviously, it's true for the US security state and the FBI and the Justice Department.
And so you can indict Trump all you want and it seems like that's just gonna feed into this perception that The power of the federal government is being abused more and more for political ends.
I think it won't change the polls and could even backfire.
I know it's hard to predict politically what is going to happen.
I think it's interesting because of the way it reflects this distrust about institutions.
But what do you make of this question?
Well, it's interesting because, at least in a vacuum, what is the main takeaway from the Republican primary race thus far?
It's that if you really want to Prosper in a Republican primary race the thing that you really want to do is get indicted a bunch of times so it is it's very strange incentive now that's been introduced into US politics and It kind of gets to why I?
Was most disturbed on some level by the indictment yesterday in the sense that Jack Smith has introduced this novel theory whereby a whole vast slew of new political conduct has been criminalized and that would not have been previously thought of as even cognizable as a criminal violation, right?
Jack Smith is the one who's now pioneering this.
And when you criminalize political conflict or political debate in a way that kind of crosses a threshold into the domain of criminal law, then I think it potentially opens the floodgates to make this potentially a more long-term then I think it potentially opens the floodgates to make this potentially a more long-term pattern of kind of back and forth tit for tat, or
Or in other words, to use a favorite word of the resistance liberals from the Trump years, it normalizes the idea of this constant kind of Issuance of really heavy-handed indictments.
It's not just kind of piddling stuff here.
They used the Espionage Act.
They're now using a statute that originates from the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a post-Civil War law to indict Trump for the second time.
And so, it's kind of a startling omen as to what the incentive structure might be going forward for U.S.
politicians, because look at the polls.
The DeSantis campaign likes to often bring up this idea that, oh, well, in 2008, Barack Obama was also lagging well behind the polls behind Hillary Clinton, but he won, so don't worry, it's very early and we can follow the same sort of trajectory.
Well, no, I mean, if you look into it and refresh your memory, DeSantis has now been on a downward trend since about February or March, whereas Obama was already tied or in the lead against Hillary at this point, August 2007 in, let's say, Iowa.
So DeSantis' hurdle is far more insurmountable than Obama's was at this point in 2008.
There's really no precedent for how dominant of a position that Trump is in.
I mean, at the early phase of the primaries, people kind of seemingly, I don't know, maybe there's like a pundit parlor game going on because it's more exciting to like maybe have an insurgent or unexpected victor in the primary.
You want to kind of puff up DeSantis because it's sort of like, you know, an interesting, just political intrigue type story.
But Trump, I mean, There was no recent precedent in U.S.
history for a quasi-incumbent to enter a primary like this with the kind of grip that Trump had on the party in the first place.
And then for that grip to be such further solidified beyond what he could have ever done himself by way of his being targeted in this genuinely, you know, a shocking manner by the incumbent Democratic administration.
It's like a perfect storm that is, I think, basically leaving the rest of the candidates in the dust.
And, you know, but it's shaking up the kind of the basic assumptions of U.S. politics as like what is seen as politically advantageous and what isn't.
I mean, even a year ago, I don't know about you, but I would have told me I would have said if you had asked me, like, is it good or bad for a presidential candidate to be indicted with felonies?
Like, probably not the greatest.
Yeah, it seems bad.
You'd think.
But now it seems like it's, you know, it's a boon.
Yeah.
You know, just a couple of comments.
I think there is a kind of unprecedented aspect when you're talking about a president, a person who was president for four years just, you know, two years ago.
I think it's much less likely that there's going to be massive changes in public opinion about that person, given how, you know, kind of solidified people's views are of that person, especially within the Republican field, which is not the case for Hillary and Obama.
As I said, if you dig deeper into the polling data beyond the top line, Numbers, which are bad enough for everybody else besides Trump, it seems even more unlikely that people's views are going to change based on the loyalty they proclaim to Trump.
But the point I think is worth making, Michael, is, and I talked a little bit about this last night, but this idea that basically the law is being completely dismantled and distorted to prosecute political enemies I did a long article or a couple of long articles about the prosecution of Michael Flynn and then a 90-minute kind of mini-documentary about it because people forget how disturbing that prosecution was.
I mean, that was somebody who was the incoming National Security Advisor who did exactly what you would want a person in that position to do, which is pick up the phone and start making, in the transition, relationships with their counterparts in foreign countries and essentially to say, look, We know these sanctions are in place, but we want to work positively with you.
They turned him into a felon for that.
They threatened to prosecute his son.
They lured him into an FBI interview where they claimed he didn't remember the details and accused him of lying to the FBI, something that liberals like Ruth Bader Ginsburg have long argued should not be a crime in the first place.
And then for the January 6th defendants as well, there's been 1,000 Americans charged with crimes for the January 6th riot.
90% or 80% or some overwhelming percentage are not accused of using violence.
They're non-violent political protesters.
I saw a Justice Department estimate that there may be another 1,000 who end up being prosecuted when all is said and done.
They're still prosecuting people over that.
And these people are being charged with felonies.
And the question always has been, how do you take a person who participates in a political protest Nonviolently, which is your right to do as an American and turn that into a felony.
And there too, they're taking this law, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was enacted after the Enron fraud, that made it a felony to obstruct an investigation or some kind of a hearing, and they're claiming that by obstructing the January 6th certification, that somehow falls under the scope of that law, even though the law was never meant for anything like that.
It's this constant- And they've even tried to claim that the obstruction of the official proceeding can be used in the sentencing phase as an enhancement for a terrorism charge.
I know.
Everything that liberals have long claimed to find so disturbing about the criminal law and prosecutions are being employed, and then some, to turn Trump supporters into felons and criminals.
And if you look at it from the objective eyes of trying to imagine how we would understand this if this were happening in Russia or Iran or Venezuela or whatever the bad countries are that we're supposed to hate.
And we saw the person who was the only leading opposition politician against the current incumbent being piled on with one indictment after the next, brought by that government under various dubious circumstances, his political movement itself being slowly criminalized, slowly but surely criminalized with all kinds of exotic and dubious interpretations of the law, obviously you would say that That movement is being persecuted.
Nalvany, the film won an Oscar for turning into a martyr and hero.
President Putin's leading opposition politician based on the criminal prosecutions that he faced and was convicted of for corruption and the like.
And that's exactly how we would see it.
But here, People are just so drowning in this idea that Trump is such a criminal, it's what that Sam Harris video said, that anything that you have to do to get rid of Trump and defeat his movement is justified because whatever bad things you're doing, whatever games you're playing with censorship or the truth or with the law, Trump is a zillion times worse and there's just no comparison and that's what I think is so disturbing.
Yeah, it's the same moral flattening effect.
I don't know if this has occurred to you, but it occurred to me recently.
of this sort of black and white morality that you can appeal to that then makes every other consideration just totally unambiguous like of course you're going to do this because it's hitler and likewise of course you're going to do this because it's trump that's the same mentality that's been imported on the mike flynn thing though here's something interesting i don't know if you this has occurred to you but it occurred to me recently it probably occurred to me the fbi okay I know.
We have a mind meld.
Sorry.
Sorry, audience.
You're not allowed in our little private bond here.
The FBI went, if I'm not mistaken, the FBI agents actually went to the White House in the first week or two of the Trump administration in January of 2017 to interview or, you know, to approach or interact with Flynn.
And they presented this just kind of this casual meeting that ended up, of course, being the basis for their charging him with making false statements to the FBI.
But what would clearly happen was that Flynn is with somebody who is going to just presumptively view FBI agents as patriots, you know, fellow pro-American lovers of freedom.
And of course, he's just going to help them if that's what they're characterizing their inquiry as wanting him to do.
And of course, it blew up in his face.
But they kind of use that kind of casual entry to bring your guard down.
And look what they just did recently in this superseding indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
They nail the mar-a-lago maintenance guy like who you know does the pool and the tennis courts or whatever and you know has uh the lawns mode they nail him with the same kind of charge that was acquired under the like very similar circumstances as with mike flynn
where you know this guy who knows how politically aware he is or how politically kind of conscientious he is and you know the average person if they're approached by the fbi and their help is ostensibly sought they're probably going to oblige because they feel they have to and they might even view the fbi agents as you know friendly or they might actually have a sort of a sincere almost uh patriotic desire to want to help them and then it also blows up on in his face too
and now he's charged as a co-conspirator for like moving a box or something in mar-a-lago full of yeah the idea of course is to like scare him with prison to say whatever they want him to say against trump Michael, thanks so much.
We covered a lot of ground.
I'm sure you're very tired.
I have a lot of energy left.
I have a lot of things to cover with my audience, and so we're going to have to let you go.
But I want to thank you so much, as always, for joining us, and we hope to have you back on, not that quickly, but soon enough.
Well, I could just stay for, like, another manic hour or so, if you want.
Please cut him off.
Thank you, Michael.
I'm available.
Great to see you.
It's nice to be with you.
All right, bye-bye.
All right, bye-bye.
Thank God.
All right, so our next story is about rising tensions between the United States and one of its most important allies, especially when it comes to the United States reorienting itself to the Pacific Ocean and to China, which is Australia.
These countries have a long history of working very closely together.
And yet, as a result of the growing resentment in Australia over the United States' persecution of the Australian citizen Julian Assange, there is starting to appear in public some visible tension, which is very rare, and so you can only imagine how extreme it must be in order for it to emerge in public.
The context, as you probably know, is that Julian Assange is currently in his fifth year of being held in a prison in the UK, a very high security prison that the BBC has called the British Guantanamo, where he is not convicted of any crime.
He is being held pending his extradition request to the United States, which has accused him of multiple felonies, including under the Espionage Act of 1917, the same law they're using to prosecute Trump in the Mar-a-Lago document case, for the reporting that WikiLeaks did in 2010 Proving that the United States and its allies committed multiple war crimes around the world.
That is the criminal charge that they are extraditing him to the United States to stand trial for in a Northern Virginia courthouse, just like they want to put Trump in Manhattan and D.C.
They want to put Julian Assange in Northern Virginia, the home to Raytheon and the U.S.
security state and the arms industry, under a law where there's basically no defense.
And so the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has been saying all year long, for the first time Australia is standing up for its citizens, saying, Enough is enough.
This has gone on for way too long.
We want you to release our citizen and let him come back home.
Anthony Blinken made a trip this weekend to Australia, and I have to say, I've been wondering whether the Australian position openly Disputing what the United States is doing was essentially a way out for the United States, which I don't think wants to bring Julian Assange to American soil.
Imagine the press brouhaha that is going to be generated around him standing trial, the things he can say if he takes the stand, the fact that Joe Biden will have on his record the first ever prosecution of a publisher, not a leaker.
Under the Espionage Act, the fact that foreign leaders in foreign countries will use this against the United States forever.
The fact that we're putting on trial somebody for the crime of journalism.
And Anthony Blinken went to Australia, and I thought that might be a chance to announce an agreement.
Instead, Blinken very publicly said, we understand your position, but we don't accept it.
We're not releasing Assange.
We're going to prosecute him.
Hear from the Associated Press today.
The headline there, you see it on the screen, Australia's Prime Minister stands firm against the U.S.
on WikiLeaks founder's prosecution.
The article reads, quote, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday his government stands firm against the United States over the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Australian citizen fighting extradition from Britain on U.S.
espionage charges.
Albanese center-left Labour Party government has been arguing since winning the 2022 elections that the United States should end its pursuit of the 52-year-old who has spent four years in a London prison fighting extradition.
U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed back against the Australian position during a visit Saturday saying Assange was accused of quote very serious criminal conduct in publishing a trove of classified U.S.
documents more than a decade ago On Tuesday, the Australian Prime Minister said, quote, this has gone on long enough.
This has gone on for too long, rather.
Enough is enough.
He told reporters that Blinken's public comments echoed points made by President Joe Biden's administration during private discussions with Australian government officials, quote, remain very firm in our view and our representations to the American government and will continue to do so, Albanese added.
Assange's freedom is widely seen as a test of Australia's leverage with the Biden administration.
Was discussed in annual bilateral meetings in Brisbane, Australia last week between Blinken and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
So there's a lot going on in terms of the Australian relationship with the U.S.
The U.S.
is increasingly reliant on an alliance between the UK, Australia, and the U.S.
to pressure and encircle China in the Pacific Sea, along with the Philippines and South Korea and Japan.
And the United States wants a big commitment from Australia, which is obviously in much greater proximity to China and those countries in the Pacific of the United States, and Australia is essentially saying, one of the things we want from you is to release our citizen.
I think it's starting to embarrass the government that they appear very impotent in standing up to the United States.
They can't even get their own citizen released.
While the United States is demanding all sorts of concessions that Australia accept to serve the U.S.
agenda of increasing the pressure on China and the Pacific.
Now, I don't know if we have the video, do we have this video of the news report?
So we don't have a video, but there was a news report in Australia, and the tenor of it, the tone of it, was actually quite hostile, where the news anchor was speaking about the United States as this kind of hostile nation in a way that's very rare for Australia, that tends to have a very pro-US mentality.
I've been hoping for a long time that this pressure being applied by a U.S.
ally, a Prime Minister of Australia, would help Assange finally find a way out.
It doesn't seem, though, like the U.S.
government is even close to willing to consider that.
They hate Assange.
They want to destroy him.
I think they want to kill him.
They want him to die in U.S.
custody, even though they come very close to breaking him already because they're so vindictive and they want to set an example To other people who might oppose the US government and the security state and spread its secrets, that maybe we let Edward Snowden get away.
And maybe President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, although after eight years of a hardcore prison, I visited her in that military break in Kansas.
That was no joke.
But Assange, we're going to make sure he's destroyed because he's been thumbing his nose at us for too long.
And they seem very determined to do that.
So we're certainly going to continue to follow the events and report on them as we've been doing for quite some time.
But I think this Australia aspect is a very interesting component because it shows you how willing the U.S.
is even to alienate their own critical ally in order to make sure that Assange never walks free.
A different story that we wanted to tell you about, obviously a theme of this show, is that the corporate media is rotted and full of liars, that they are essentially have a job of spreading disinformation for the U.S.
security state and the government officials they serve, and that however much contempt you have for them is not enough.
They really are the most despicable and destructive force in the United States by far.
I really believe that.
And one of the Episodes on which we focus to demonstrate that is the rise of Jeffrey Goldberg to the very top of the media food chain, despite the fact that he did stuff in 2002 and 2003 that ought to have ended his career forever.
Jeffrey Goldberg is a long-term, time, hardcore neoconservative.
He loves for the U.S. to go to the war in the Middle East.
He has a lot of allegiance to Israel.
He actually served as a prison guard for the IDF in prisons that hold Palestinians.
And in 2002, he was one of the most vocal advocates for the war in Iraq while working at The New Yorker, that august liberal publication.
Obviously the entire Republican Party and American Right, with some exceptions like Pat Buchanan and paleo-conservatives, but certainly the mainstream Republican Party was entirely behind George Bush and Dick Cheney and their neocons and wanting to go to war.
Neocons were at the time aligned with the Republican Party.
But that wasn't enough.
What they needed was not 50% of the country in support of this war, but 70%.
They needed at least half of American liberals to support this war.
And so they needed liberal outlets to get behind the war.
And they got them.
The New York Times was fully behind this war.
They were the ones who sold the idea of weapons of mass destruction.
But remember, this was 2002, was just a few months after the 9-11 attack.
All people cared about in the United States was 9-11.
They didn't care about Saddam's treatment of the Kurds.
And they really didn't even, they weren't that bothered by much, bothered that much by the possibility that Saddam Hussein would get nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.
Unless...
They got convinced that Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Al-Qaeda, which means he would give those weapons to Al-Qaeda to carry out an even worse attack than September 11.
The problem is that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda have always had this incredible tension for religious reasons, and for factional reasons, and for all kinds of other reasons.
Saddam Hussein was no religious figure, unlike Al-Qaeda, whose allegiance was to Saudi Arabia, primarily.
And yet, there is a perception that the United States, that Americans would not support their war in Iraq without large numbers unless they were convinced, even subliminally, that Saddam Hussein had participated in 9-11 or that he had an alliance with Al-Qaeda that would allow him to give those weapons that, by the way, he didn't have to Al-Qaeda.
And no journalist, not one journalist in America, did more to deceive Americans into believing that lie than Jeffrey Goldberg from his perch at The New Yorker.
As just two examples, here in March of 2002, just five months after the 9-11 attack, Goldberg wrote an article entitled, The Great Terror in Northern Iraq.
And here you see the key phrase, in Northern Iraq there is new evidence of Hussein's genocidal war on Kurds and See if I can make my pens work and of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.
So that sub headline, that framing was critical.
He went on every show on NPR and NBC to talk about the evidence that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda.
And then in February of 2003, so a month before this war began, he went back in his, in the New York article entitled The Unknown.
Let's put that back, let's put that on the screen, there we are.
And here you see the even blunter headline, the CIA and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq by Jeffrey Goldberg.
Crucial lies.
That were way more destructive than any lie you can identify Donald Trump or anyone on Fox News outside of this or anyone else from telling.
And it should have destroyed Jeffrey Goldberg's career.
It should have rendered him radioactive.
What is worse than participating in a concerted disinformation campaign to lie your country into war that kills a million people, thousands of American lives in the military.
Obviously nobody in the Goldberg family was killed.
Because you have some geostrategic or geopolitical allegiances that led you to want this war to take place, fought by other people's families, and so you use your journalistic perch to lie.
These articles got journalism awards, some of the most prestigious magazine awards at the time.
Now, just to show you how central this lie was, we have this Guardian article here from September of 2003, so six months or so after the war began, that reported so six months or so after the war began, that reported on a poll that found that, quote, the U.S. public thinks Saddam Hussein had a role in And listen to how propagandized Americans have become.
Quote, seven in ten Americans continue to believe, seven in ten, that Iraq Saddam Hussein had a role in the September 11th attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.
69% of Americans said they thought it was at least likely that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to a Washington Post poll published yesterday.
That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for Al Qaeda, So, job well done, Jeffrey Goldberg.
He convinced Americans of this crucial lie.
And yet, rather than be laughed out of journalism or shamed out of journalism, as you should be for spreading such a destructive and blatant lie for such a long time, he has been nothing but rewarded In corporate media, it is a prerequisite to getting promoted to be willing to lie for the U.S.
security state.
In fact, the more you lie for them, the faster you will get promoted, the more lavishly you will be rewarded.
The single worst liar of the last six years during the Trump era and Russiagate was Natasha Bertrand, and she flew up that ladder.
She started at this thing called Business Insider in 2016.
Where she was reporting on every deranged component of Russiagate.
She was quickly promoted to MSNBC and then to The Atlantic where she was hired by Jeffrey Goldberg.
And then she went to Politico where she lied on behalf of the CIA by being the first to report that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation and now she's at CNN.
Her career trajectory was incredibly rapid and powerful because she kept lying for the CIA, and that's the fuel that brings these people up that ladder.
So Jeffrey Goldberg was, after telling those lies, was named the editor-in-chief of one of America's most influential magazines.
Here you see, in September 2016, the Atlantic's new editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the magazine, succeeds James Bennett as its 14th editor.
And there was all sorts of reporting at the time about how the then owner of the Atlantic, James Bradley, it's now Warren Powell Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire heir of Steve Jobs.
But at the time it was actually I think his name was David Bradley.
He so desperately wanted Jeffrey Goldberg to leave the New Yorker and come to the Atlantic.
I would say despite all those lies he told, but really because of them, that proves his worth in corporate media.
The willingness to lie is the key prerequisite.
He sent Arabian horses to Jeffrey Goldberg's house to allow his kids to play with them in order to ingratiate himself with Jeffrey Goldberg and convince him to leave the New Yorker and come to the Atlantic, where he now sits atop that magazine.
And if that weren't enough, just today it was announced, a PBS press release, that Jeffrey Goldberg is named the new moderator of PBS's Washington Week.
And they're going to change the name of the show to something like Washington Week with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.
Here you see the New York Times article on the same promotion.
From today, top editor at The Atlantic will moderate Washington Week.
The Atlantic will co-produce the show, which will be renamed Washington Week with The Atlantic.
The publication will cover some of the cost and help sell sponsorships.
Mr. Goldberg, who has been at The Atlantic for more than a decade, its former owner David Bradley recruited him in 2007 with a team of ponies.
Said he believed that there were still enough viewers who cared about in-depth analysis of consequential issues to make the show a success.
Quote, the good thing is there's an awful lot of Americans and I don't need all of them to come here, Mr. Goldberg said.
We just need five or ten million.
Not only was Jeffrey Goldberg a proven liar during the war on terror and the Iraq war, but he was also, he turned the Atlantic into ground zero for Russiagate insanity every Russiagate, deranged Russiagate debunked story made its way through the Atlantic.
Every person, like Franklin Foer, who was reporting on that debunked Trump Alpha Bank story from Slate, Jeffrey Goldberg recruited him to come to work for the Atlantic where he did more of it.
He stole Natasha Bertrand away from MSNBC because he wanted her to produce one story after the next about how Trump was controlled by the Kremlin and she did that.
And then got further promoted.
Do you see how these people want you to believe they incessantly tell you?
That they're worried about disinformation, by which they mean the things that ordinary Americans say, or that journalists like me say, if we're not controlled by corporations, independent media, people on sites like Rumble that don't censor, that aren't within their control.
These are the dangers to the American citizenry and American democracy.
You need corporate media because they're the ones who fact check.
They hate disinformation.
They want to censor the internet because only they can be trusted.
And yet, they employ the most brazen liars.
Remember, Joy Reid, who's an employee of NBC News, has the 7 o'clock show on MSNBC.
When someone uncovered a decade's worth of deeply homophobic and anti-trans blog posts, which of course is a crime in left liberal culture, And had she just said, look, I wrote these, I believe that then, I've grown, nobody would have cared.
I even defended Joy Reid at the time by saying, so what if she said these things 10 years ago?
People are entitled to change their mind and not be held captive to those bad things that they've said and written forever.
But then, instead of doing that, instead of taking responsibility, she did for some, she ended up inventing a very sick and deranged tale about how a hacker had broken into her blog and posted these bigoted posts in order to discredit her even though at the time she wasn't even on MSNBC.
Nobody knew who she was.
And there were, in the archives of the internet, proof that those posts were up on her blog back in 2004 and 5 and 6 when no one knew who she was.
So it would have meant the blogger had to have, the hacker had to have time-traveling powers to go back into time and post these retroactively on her blog to discredit her once she got to MSNBC.
She even claimed the FBI was investigating to try and find this hacker, this hacker that she invented in her head.
To deny responsibility for these bigoted posts, she got promoted by MSNBC, even though her lies were so extreme that even CNN said her story doesn't add up.
Do you see how valued lying is in corporate media?
They're all full of liars, these newsrooms.
And if you're not willing to lie on behalf of the U.S.
security state, you will not have access to corporate media.
Along with myself and Matt Taibbi and several others, we used to go on MSNBC and CNN all the time until Russiagate happened.
And then we started saying, you know what?
These claims are coming from the CIA and the FBI and are accompanied by no evidence.
We shouldn't believe assertions from the U.S. security state and the trained liars who work there about Trump and Russia colluding on the election without evidence for it.
And that got us expelled from corporate media venues of that kind because lying is a requirement to have access to them.
And it should be surprising that one of the worst, most discredited liars in all of American journalism, with blood of huge numbers of people on his hands indelibly, Yet again got hired and promoted and rewarded by being given the host and show on PBS.
That's sort of a long-standing convention, albeit one that nobody watches besides people in Washington.
But it's a form of credibility that he's being bestowed.
Despite this very long record of lying about the most critical issues that we face, because again, that is considered not just an asset, but a prerequisite in corporate journalism.
And that is why I say that disinformation is something that primarily comes from them.
And that no matter how much you hate of the corporate media and the people who work there, it is not enough.
Increase that hatred.
Feed on it.
It's deserved and it's necessary because nobody does as much damage to the United States as they do.
For our last story, we wanted to tell you what is going on, very disturbing events in the nation of Brazil, which as a reminder, is the sixth largest country in the world in terms of population and the second largest in the American hemisphere.
It has a lot of influence on South America.
It's worth paying attention to just because of that alone, but also because when it comes to the censorship regime that it has been aggressively implementing for several years, It is really the key test case for what the EU wants to do, followed by Canada and then the United States.
We have been reporting for quite a while now on the censorship regime imposed by a single judge of the Supreme Court, Alexander Demirais.
There you see him on the screen.
He has become such a fanatic that even the New York Times before the 2022 election, obviously hoping that Lula would win and Bolsonaro would lose, Published two separate articles featuring him with heavy amounts of criticism, saying that he's become this very aggressive censor and seems to be perhaps destroying Brazilian democracy in the name of protecting it.
He was given the unilateral power to order posts taken off the air, to ban people from the internet with no trial.
And it was supposed to be only until the election was over, and he used that power aggressively.
Take this down.
I order you to take this post down.
This person is not allowed to be heard.
They were all opponents of then-candidate Lula da Silva.
With a couple of exceptions on the left, people who criticized him and his censorship powers, and they got banned too.
He just became a despot, a fanatic, and there's nobody to challenge him.
And the law that enabled him to do that, they said would end on the day after the Brazilian election, namely October 31st, 2022.
And yet he continues to use this law to censor.
And the report that we did on January of 2023, we obtained a secret order that he had issued and sent to six different social media platforms, Facebook and Google and Twitter and Rumble and I believe TikTok and Telegram ordering removal of multiple political media figures, including people elected to the Senate.
The top vote getter in all of Brazil who got elected to the Congress is a young supporter of President Bolsonaro.
And also the person who was the most influential podcaster in Brazil, the Joe Rogan in Brazil, whose name is Monarch.
Two years ago, he had the top show on YouTube, millions and millions of views to every program.
Everyone in Brazil who was of any influence was desperate to get on his show.
The biggest politicians on left and right all went on because he had this gigantic audience like Rogan.
And then one day, about a year and a half ago, he was arguing with a member of Congress about censorship in Brazil.
And he said he believes the government has no role to play in prohibiting ideas or criminalizing any particular political parties.
And she asked him, does that include the Nazi Party?
And he said, yes, the Nazi Party or any other party should be allowed legally to exist.
The government should not be able to ban ideas or political ideologies or parties.
And as a result of his saying that, the Brazilian media united to lie about him and claim that he had endorsed Nazism.
All over the world there were international headlines following the Brazilian press saying Brazil's top podcaster defends Nazism and came out as a Nazi.
When in fact all he had done was oppose censorship of any party including when asked the Nazi Party.
If he's a Nazi for doing that so is Noam Chomsky, so is the ACLU and the Jewish lawyers who work there, so is essentially everybody in the United States.
Which, for the most part, at least until a few years ago, also believed that the government had no role to play in banning ideologies or political opinions or criminalizing political parties.
But because of that, he was destroyed.
He was kicked off YouTube, just banned from YouTube despite being one of their highest profile hosts.
Nobody would go on his show any longer.
His career and life were destroyed.
He couldn't be anywhere.
And so Rumble came in and offered him a contract, and he was allowed to be on Rumble.
He had a show there, but it was much reduced because Brazilians aren't really on Rumble.
Rumble doesn't have a very big presence in Brazil.
They don't know what Rumble is.
And yet, destroying him that way wasn't enough for the Supreme Court justice because monarchy began really opposing censorship, questioning whether or not there was fraud in the 2022 election.
And this judge is part of the secret order that we reported on.
On January 2023, the order says, this order shall be kept secret.
We got a hold of it.
We published it because it was so shocking.
It said to all these social media outlets, you are required to remove Monarch from the air.
He's now been kicked off Twitter, which complied with the order, and Facebook and every other outlet.
And Rumble, for some technical reason that the order didn't cover his page, he continued to broadcast on Rumble.
And that night we interviewed him.
We just want to show you a little bit about what it is that he said because today something even more extreme happened in terms of the judge and his attempt, this relentless attempt, to completely destroy Monarch and turn him into a criminal simply because, literally for no other reason other than the fact that he has an ideology and a set of political viewpoints that Brazil has decided is criminal.
Let's listen to what he said.
But you are on Rumble.
You're also on other platforms like Telegram.
You're on, I believe, Instagram.
And so earlier today, one member of the Brazilian Supreme Court, Alessandro de Moraes, ordered those companies to ban you.
Not specific posts of yours, but to prevent you from speaking on those platforms at all.
To ban them and to turn over to him any registration data that you provided.
When did you learn about this order and what is it that you know about what the order is?
I just learned about this.
You actually was the guy that broke the news for me.
So I don't have any access on the legal process included.
My channel was censored a time ago, months ago, and in that process I don't have access to any information.
So I believe that in this new process I will not have any information from the government and not an ability to defend myself.
My lawyers cannot find any information that could help me to defend my case.
I don't even know what I'm being accused of.
This is very unusual.
It's not the correct legal process.
Yeah, I mean that's what I wanted to ask you.
So presumably, If you were being accused of breaking the rules of the platform, it would be the platform that would notify you, as has happened to many of us.
You know, Twitter says, this post is in violation of our rules, so we're going to suspend you for 12 hours or we need you to take from this post before you get back on.
But I would assume But you are in Rumble.
The press cannot find a process.
It's happened to many of us.
You know, Twitter says, "This post is in violation of our rules, so we're going to suspend you for 12 hours, or we need you to take from this post before you get back on." But I would assume, given that this is a judge who is ordering you banned, that he believes that it's because you've broken some kind of a law through things that you're saying on your shows.
Do you have any idea what laws you've been broken?
Have you ever been Are you told by Brazilian judges or the Brazilian police or any other Brazilian authorities in the last couple months, I'm not talking about during that episode we just discussed, I'm talking about in the last couple months, that you are breaking laws or in violation of laws or in jeopardy of being prosecuted?
No, actually, I don't know about any law that can punish me for what I have said in the past months.
I never said anything that incites violence.
I never did support any type of coup or any type of military intervention.
Actually, I was always vocal against it.
I believe that we can fix this situation in the law with political activism, and I do not believe in violence in any form.
So, there you have it.
I mean, his life has been completely destroyed within less than two years.
He has been entirely removed from the internet.
He can't earn a living anymore.
He has a contract with Rumble, I believe, that obviously they can't continue to fulfill if he's not allowed to produce his show on Rumble.
So they've denied him a livelihood.
They have denied him the ability to speak.
And yet he's never been charged with anything.
These issues, these orders are issued with no due process.
The judge just types out, he is hereby banned from speaking, and that's it.
He has no idea what he's being accused of.
It's Kafkaesque at best.
And this judge just goes around routinely doing this, banning people from the internet, saying you cannot speak.
Even though he's reduced to almost nothing.
He has a very small audience, Rumble, for the reasons I said.
He's not, it's actually some people have followed him, but it's been severely reduced.
He can't speak on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or any other platform, even though he's never been charged with a crime.
Just by decree, he's silenced.
Today, the court announced that they are formally opening a criminal investigation into him.
Either because of things he said or because of suspicions that he didn't obey the first order to stay silent.
He apparently has been fined 300,000 reais, which is the equivalent of roughly 75,000 American dollars.
Again, all based on no process.
He has had no opportunity to go in with lawyers and be advised of the charges or contest them or do anything else.
His life has been dismantled and he's been silenced and now he's fined with no due process.
Just an order of a decree by a judge.
And he is banned permanently, or at least indefinitely rather, from speaking on any platform.
He can't defend himself.
He can't speak.
He can't have a show.
He can't speak about politics.
He's just, he has a tape over his mouth.
He's silent.
It's shocking.
Brazil is a country in which I've lived for 18 years.
It has a lot of flaws, politically and socially and lots of other ways, like every country.
But it has always been basically a democracy.
And it is such a vivid reminder of how easily despotism can emerge.
Now, I know most people are trained to believe that despotism is not something that happens in their country.
And especially when it's being done in the name of a cause that they really believe is righteous, like stopping Trump or stopping Bolsonaro and his movement.
They're convinced they're fighting Nazis.
There's a leading congressman who's a social media influencer, who is one of Lula's most vocal supporters, who is advocating that Bolsonaroismo, the movement behind Jair Bolsonaro, be treated like Nazism and be criminalized and outlawed.
Meaning half the country, half the country of Brazil, would either be forced to remain silent about their political views, Or be turned into felons by expressing their support for Bolsonarismo, which will now be a crime.
That is totalitarianism of fascism and despotism of the worst kind.
And again, to watch how it can happen, just materialize so quickly and with so little opposition.
And I say this because this is what's coming.
That is what these indictments are about.
It's an attempt to criminalize disinformation.
They're formalizing this notion that the state has the ability to determine truth and falsity and to make it a crime to say things the state regards as false.
That is what this entire industry is for and what this entire movement is about.
And you routinely have Brazilian judges and politicians and academics, all of whom of course support this, Who go to conferences in Paris and Berlin and London and Amsterdam.
They get these nice trips because Europe is very interested in what's happening in Brazil when it comes to how they're censoring the internet because they want to see how far they can go without public pushback.
And the reason they're getting away with it is because this judge is such a fanatic that people fear him.
I think I've said before in my 20 years or so working as a journalist, I've never once had the thought in my head, not when I was publishing the Snowden reporting, not when I was doing the reporting in Brazil.
I obviously knew the risk and fears, but I never had this idea that maybe I shouldn't do this.
Criticizing this judge, every time I go to do it, there's that thought in the back of my head that, you know what, maybe this is not worth it.
Obviously, at the end of the day, I disregard it because you have to.
Not going to live that way.
And I wouldn't be a journalist if I caved in or succumbed to those concerns.
But it's very real.
You watch people getting arrested or having their homes searched and their things seized or their careers wrecked or them being silenced over their political views by the singular act of a judge who provides no trial for any of this.
And you realize that it's very possible.
Julian Assange is in prison.
For four and a half years, and was in an embassy, in a tiny little embassy for nine years before that, because of his journalism.
And the United States is getting away with that.
So you might think, oh, well, they can't do that to me, or that's a breach too far.
There's no such thing once they start convincing themselves that they are truly fighting the righteous cause.
That is the most dangerous mentality in politics.
It is absolutely the dominant mentality in the United States.
It's the one Sam Harris so candidly and clearly expressed and defended.
And it's what's happening here in this incredibly awful case that is extreme only for the moment.
The idea is to gradually normalize it.
And that is what's happening.
And it's nowhere near confined to Brazil.
It's coming to every other country in the West.
It already has in a lot of ways.
It's one of the things we cover most on this show.
And I think these indictments of Trump, And the ongoing prosecution of the defendants in January 6, including ones who got nowhere near violence.
And the insistence that it's an insurrection and the use of the U.S.
security state for domestic ends is all about criminalizing dissent.
It's all part of the same mentality.
And it's worth watching other countries to see what's coming to your country very soon.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
I'm sorry you concluded on not a very light note, but sometimes that is our job.
As a reminder, System Update is also available on podcast form.
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We are soon going to, very soon in fact, going to integrate more interactive features into our show where we can respond to audience feedback and the chat as it develops.
I'm probably not going to be like a standard streamer where I'm constantly talking to the chat and staring at the screen.
We'll probably do reporting segments and then at the end, curate some of the comments to which I can respond.
We'll do it in some way.
As a reminder though, there are people impersonating me occasionally in the chats using my name.
Some people are falling for it.
Don't do that.
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