Grayzone’s GoFundMe Frozen—Escalating Abuse of Financial System to Crush Dissent, w/ Max Blumenthal. Plus: Sean Penn's New War Film About His Own Courage & Integrity (ft. Sean Hannity) | SYSTEM UPDATE #139
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Good evening, it's Tuesday, August 29th, Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, when the internet first emerged in our lives in the mid-1990s, it was primarily used for discrete tasks, researching obscure topics, sending emails to relatives, buying books.
Very quickly, however, it turned into something vastly greater.
The central means that human beings throughout the West and increasingly throughout the globe use to communicate with one another, to disseminate information, and to organize.
And the original promise of the Internet, What all of the triumphalists championed at the start, above all else, was its liberatory nature, its ability to enable human beings to do all of that, to communicate, disseminate information, and organize freely, meaning without the mediation of centralized state and corporate power.
That's what made it revolutionary.
And that was what the internet was at the beginning.
And centers of power began to become petrified by it.
And they, at first, gradually, and now rapidly, have sought to commandeer it, to limit it, to control it, above all, to destroy the core freedom that once shaped it and made it so promising.
The fears that this innovation would be too emancipating, too liberating, was accelerated by many magnitudes by the events of 2016.
First, when British voters decided they no longer wanted their country to be part of the EU and be governed by distant Eurocrats in Brussels.
And then by the defeat of the ultimate establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, at the hands of the Bulgarian menace known as Donald Trump that shocked And what those power centers and the media corporations they control explicitly blamed for those debacles was the Internet.
And then increasingly blamed the Internet for all social ills.
As they told it, Brexit and Trump happened not because citizens validly claimed or came to hate the establishment that told them what to do.
No, that couldn't possibly be the explanation.
The establishment And senators of power could not possibly acknowledge any blame for what they regarded as those cataclysmic events.
Instead, it was all really blamed on the internet.
The internet was too free.
The internet allowed too much disinformation to circulate.
Russia and other bad actors could divide us with self-serving lies that turned us against our noble leaders by tricking us into distrusting them.
In sum, people were simply too subject to manipulation, and our democracy is too fragile to permit the Internet and Western populations to be free any longer.
We needed their protection, which came in the form of their controls, and ever since then, core freedoms in the West, on the Internet and off, have been rapidly eroding.
The core goal of all of this is simple, to stigmatize, banish, outlaw, and even criminalize dissent from establishment pronouncements.
That is not hyperbole.
That is the goal, and it is easy to demonstrate that they are rapidly moving toward it.
And one of the most insidious forms of this control has been around for at least a decade, only rarely used back then and noticed by very few people, but it has become recently as commonplace as it is genuinely terrifying.
Exclusion from the digital financial services and the financial system for anyone whose dissent becomes too threatening, according to entirely arbitrary rules.
On Monday, the increasingly politicized fundraising site GoFundMe notified the anti-establishment and anti-imperialist news site Greyzone that their account was being closed effective immediately, with its funds that were donated by their readers being frozen.
We will speak to Grayzone's founder and editor Max Blumenthal about all of this in just a bit, but first we want to examine the trajectory of this truly repressive weapon that is now being used against dissidents of all types as part of a broader context to control public opinion, control the flow of information, and outlaw and banish dissent.
Then, the actor Sean Penn was, for some miraculous reason, in Ukraine, in Kiev, on the day that Russia invaded that country with a full film crew that was filming his interactions with that country's president, Vladimir Zelensky.
Sean Penn had spent months working on a propaganda film before Russia invaded to glorify the Ukrainian leader and its fight with Russia.
And he has now released the must-see-to-believe trailer for his soon-to-be-released documentary that is nominally about the war in Ukraine and the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, the profound generational greatness of President Zelensky, but is actually about Sean Penn, Sean Penn's heroic role in this war, and most of all, Sean Penn's courage and integrity.
The trailer is worth marveling at in part because it is the glaring and classic type of war propaganda which Hollywood has been producing in conjunction with the U.S.
security state for years.
You may recall that in June, we interviewed the director of the truly great documentary called Theaters of War, Roger Stahl, who described to us how so many of Hollywood's most mass-marketed films, Not just films about the military and war, but even just standard, seemingly benign superhero films, are and can only be made in partnership with the CIA and Pentagon, which gives them script approval over these films.
Penn's film, and his trailer features this, has a very touching moment where the one-time left-wing firebrand supporter of Hugo Chavez and Fox host Sean Hannity come close to spontaneously hugging on the set of Hannity's show when they realize how fully in agreement they are in support of President Zelensky and the need for the U.S.
to infinitely fund this war until the end.
But the film is worth really examining to see how much propaganda has been drowning the West when it comes to this war from the very beginning and to question how it is that Sean Penn had been working on this documentary well before the part of the war that involved the Russian invasion in February 2022 commenced.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It has been known for a long time that the Internet is being used as a weapon of mass surveillance.
That is something that we know thanks to the heroic NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who has paid for that heroism with now a decade in a country he never chose to be in, where he was purposely and cynically trapped by the Obama administration in Russia to try and imply that he was a Russian agent.
We also know that the Internet has rapidly become a regime of censorship, in part carried out by the largest technology companies in the world, but increasingly done at the behest and the coercive direction of the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the rest of the United States government.
But one of the weapons that has a very similar objective as the surveillance regime and the censorship regime, which is to control dissent and dissidence and to ultimately banish all dissent and to criminalize it and outlaw it, is a weapon that has actually been around for at least a decade but really only began receiving a lot of attention
When last year in Canada there was a peaceful protest by truckers and other Canadian citizens protesting the draconian lockdown measures and mandates of the Canadian government, and in response, Justin Trudeau's government, without any due process, without bringing criminal charges against anyone, froze the bank accounts.
Of anyone the government deemed in their use of funds, denied people access to the financial system on which their substance and ability to support their family depends.
Now this has been an increasingly escalating weapon as part of the censorship regime, as part of the effort to convert the internet into a surveillance regime that has not gotten enough attention.
And one of the reasons is that there is a perception, a very inaccurate perception That all of this censorship and surveillance and exclusion from the financial services system is aimed at one group and one group only, which are political conservatives.
It is true that conservatism, particularly the kind of populist right-wing conservatism that has become much more powerful with Donald Trump and with movements in Western Europe, has become a true threat to establishment power, and therefore they are very often the targets of these kind of weapons.
But it's not only them who are.
There are also anti-establishment dissidents and critics on the left, or who aren't really categorizable By traditional left-right labels who also have been targeted in many ways with those sorts of abuses and yesterday a site that has editors and reporters that has long been associated with the left Which is the gray zone.
They are highly critical of U.S.
foreign policy, of U.S.
imperialism, of neoconservatism, of war, of U.S.
policy in Israel.
I'm sure some of you in this audience disagree vehemently with some of their views.
Doesn't matter at all for what the story is about, any more than it matters whether people who are censored or in prison for their political views have views that you agree with or not.
What matters is that they are dissidents from establishment power, agree with them or not, and they are starting to suffer the kinds of punishments that we have covered frequently on the show, including now the digital financial system to solicit fundraising support.
So what happened, and we will talk to its founder and editor Max Blumenthal in just a bit, is something that was reported by the Grayzone itself on August 28th.
There you see the Headline of the Grayzone article which is GoFundMe freezes Grayzone fundraiser quote due to some external concerns.
There you see the headline and that is the logo of GoFundMe and you see what the Grayzone's message to GoFundMe is after hearing what it is that GoFundMe did.
Now many of you already know that GoFundMe has increasingly become highly politicized to the point where they have already banned ...and frozen the funds of all sorts of politicized projects that they regarded as a threat to establishment power.
But a lot of people used GoFundMe before any of that was true.
I have a nonprofit here in Brazil, for example, that I founded with my husband in 2016 that is a shelter that takes care of abandoned animals, dogs and cats.
And the thing that makes it unique is that we employ people who are homeless on the street with their animals based on this unique connection between homeless people and their animals.
And we wanted to capture that relationship that's so unique by creating a special kind of animal shelter that employs homeless people, that teaches them how to transition off the street to earn income, to open bank accounts and the like.
And that was something that we began fundraising for on GoFundMe at a time when GoFundMe was not controversial.
And it worked for us because it's not a political project.
It's simply a non-governmental organization that people on the left and the right have supported and continue to support.
And the gray zone did the same.
Use GoFundMe before GoFundMe became yet another tool of establishment attacks on dissidents.
So you can blame the victim if you want, saying that, oh, anyone who uses GoFundMe gets what's coming to them.
But a lot of people like the gray zone invested in GoFundMe, used it as their primary source of financing or at least one of them.
And you shouldn't blame the victims.
You should blame the increasingly menacing weapon that is being used, and we want to put this into context for you.
So first, let's look at what happened with Grayzone.
According to the site itself, quote, GoFundMe has indefinitely frozen donations to the Grayzone, quote, due to some external concerns.
The company's actions follow a campaign of repression against our personnel by the British and Ukrainian governments.
The Silicon Valley-based crowdfunding site GoFundMe has informed The Grey Zone that it has frozen all money raised in a recent fundraiser.
They didn't just close the account, they're freezing people's hard-earned dollars that they decided they wanted to give to The Grey Zone to support their independent journalism, which over the past year has largely been devoted to opposing the Biden administration's policies in Ukraine.
Our initiative was devoted to providing independent journalists Wyatt Reed, Kate Clarenberg, and Alex Rubenstein with long-term positions.
On August 19th, when we demanded to know why GoFundMe has refused to authorize the transfer of the funds we raised, a member of the site's trust and safety team, identifying themselves simply as Sabrina, emailed the... Do you see how Kafkask all this is?
Your site gets frozen with no process.
Your funds get frozen.
A fake person communicates it to you using what is probably automated messaging.
They don't have any obligation to tell you the real reason they've done it.
They rarely do that, and you rarely have any appeal.
It's purely arbitrary, invisible, authority, reaching into your funds and seizing them for purely political reasons.
This is what Sabrina told The Gray Zone, quote, our number one goal here in ensuring that the money from GoFundMe fundraisers always gets to the right place.
So we really appreciate you helping us to make sure GoFundMe is a safe place to give.
Due to some external concerns, we need to review your fundraiser to make sure it complies with our Terms of Service.
Please keep in mind that our processes are followed to ensure our own safety.
I'll keep you updated as soon as possible.
By this point, we had raised over $90,000 from 1,100 contributors, and now GoFundMe is holding the donations hostage, refusing to transfer them to us, while failing to inform donors that it has effectively seized their money.
The for-profit site has similarly refused to explain its freezing of their donations, issuing nothing more than a vague allusion, quote, some external concerns to pressure from powerful outside forces.
GoFundMe has also arbitrarily removed the fundraising campaigns of the anti-war alternative media outlet, Mint Press News, and banned the website from its platform, also without explanation.
Now, I have known about what has happened to GoFundMe.
And as a result, a new nonprofit that we are announcing next week that I talked about before, which is the David Miranda Institute, which is an institute designed to memorialize the work and legacy of my recently deceased husband.
And to build on that work, we deliberately decided and realized we can't rely on GoFundMe to raise funds because that does have political overtones in my politics.
Could jeopardize the ability of that institute to safely raise money on that site and the idea that we all have to segregate into financial services based on what our political views are and in many ways risk being excluded entirely.
None of us can live without, for example, access to banks and the ability to receive money from them is something that is extremely alarming.
Now, to prove that Grayzone is considered a true menace to establishment authority is extremely easy to do.
Two weeks ago, we interviewed one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, who warned that Wikipedia has become completely untrustworthy.
We showed you some examples of how the political pages on Wikipedia are almost entirely written, almost in a way that is so extreme that it's parody.
To mimic establishment orthodoxies and to defame and malign anyone who challenges those orthodoxies.
So here is Wikipedia's page, and you can just immediately tell what Wikipedia is about and what The Grey Zone is by reading just the first paragraph.
Quote, The Grey Zone is an American far-left news website and blog founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal.
The website, initially founded as The Grey Zone Project, was affiliated with AlternetNude, Alternet before becoming independent in early 2018.
A fringe website, it is known for misleading reporting and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes.
The Gray Zone has denied human rights abuses against Uyghurs, posted conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria and other regions, and posted pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Grayzone writers such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté acted as briefers on behalf of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Foundation to the United Nations at UN meetings organized by Russia.
The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line centered around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world.
The website has supported the government of... Okay, you get the point.
Every single insult, every single trope, every single attempt to malign someone's character for opposing establishment pieties.
You're immediately declared disloyal if you oppose U.S.
war policies.
You're declared loyal to foreign states.
The United States government partners with the most tyrannical and authoritarian regimes in the world.
If you go to the Wikipedia pages of U.S.
officials, You won't see anything there about how they praise authoritarian regimes like those in Riyadh or Cairo or throughout Latin America or Asia with whom the United States is constantly partnered, not despite the fact that they're authoritarian, but because of it.
Or news sites that spread the lies that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation or Donald Trump urinated on a prostitute while Vladimir Putin taped it and used it as blackmail leverage to control the United States government.
All those insane conspiracy theories that the New York Times and NBC News spread.
You won't see those words on the first paragraph or anywhere else on those Media outlets websites because it is there to prop up establishment propaganda and those who serve it while demeaning and maligning enemies of establishment orthodoxy which clearly includes the gray zone.
Wyatt Reed who was recently hired as a managing editor of the gray zone on Twitter or the site formerly known as Twitter.
reported the following.
First it was PayPal, and now Venmo has permanently deactivated my account, citing an unspecified rules violation.
Their email says, quote, we do not divulge our decision-making criteria, so I won't be getting an explanation.
This was Wyatt Reed reporting this in November 9, 2022.
So they've been targeting this crowd at Grayzone for a long time.
This is him losing access both to PayPal and to Venmo, crucial sites for receiving payments for work or support from donors if you're an independent journalist.
If you're an independent journalist, you cannot function Without a way to collect donations electronically.
And so if these sites simply terminate the accounts of any independent media that questions establishment orthodoxy as they are doing, it will destroy a free press.
Here's the letter from Venmo, the email from Venmo that he received on November 8th, 2022.
There you see it.
From Venmo, you have a new message.
Hello, Wyatt.
My name is Sandilya on behalf of Venmo.
She's probably Sabrina's sister.
Thank you for taking the time to reach out to us.
While we encourage the use of Venmo, we must ensure our users abide by the user agreement.
After reviewing your account, we have found that your actions and activity have been in violation of this agreement.
As a result, your account has been permanently deactivated as of June 28, 2022, and we regret to inform you that you can no longer offer the Venmo service.
We do not make these decisions lightly, and when we do so, it is to help ensure that Venmo continues to be a safe way To make payments, if you have any questions regarding this decision, please note that we do not divulge our decision-making criteria.
In order to protect the systems that monitor activity on Venmo, I apologize that we are unable to assist you further.
So that's it.
Now, Wyatt Reid is not a criminal.
He hasn't been charged with any criminal conduct.
He's a journalist, an independent journalist, who has views that the establishment dislikes.
And this is what considers him unsafe to be able to use the financial system.
Just shortly after he joins Grayzone, they are now kicked off of GoFundMe.
He himself has been kicked off of Venmo and PayPal.
Now, as I said, there are of course many, many examples.
Of more recent uses of this weaponry, I think the Canadian example got the most attention.
But I first became aware of it, the first time I ever saw it, was back in 2010, in December of 2010, specifically when I was at Salon.
And this was the year that WikiLeaks released its Iraq and Afghanistan war files, as well as the diplomatic cables that made WikiLeaks and Julian Assange the number one enemy of the U.S.
security state and the endless war machine that runs Washington.
This is the publication for which Julian Assange is now being prosecuted and extradited to the United States, this exact publication.
So back in 2010, before they found a way to prosecute Julian Assange, what they decided to do instead Was to crush and destroy WikiLeaks through extrajudicial punishments by insisting and coercing financial services companies on which WikiLeaks and everybody else depends.
MasterCard and Visa and the Bank of America and PayPal to just close WikiLeaks accounts without convicting them of any crime, without charging them with any crime, simply because neocon scumbags in Washington, like then-Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Demanded that that be done.
Here's the article I wrote when it happened.
There you see the headline, Joe Lieberman emulates Chinese dictators.
Quote, the Connecticut senator pressures Amazon to block Americans from viewing WikiLeaks documents.
Talking Points memo and an article headline, quote, how Lieberman got Amazon to drop WikiLeaks, detailed that Lieberman's, quote, staffers called Amazon to ask about it and left questions with the press secretary, including, are there any plans to take the site down?
Shortly thereafter, Amazon called back to say that they had kicked Wikileaks off.
Lieberman's spokeswoman said, quote, Senator Lieberman hopes that the Amazon case will send the message to other companies that might host WikiLeaks that it would be irresponsible to host the site.
But Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host.
And more important, what you can and cannot read on the internet is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S.
Senator in quite some time.
Josh Marshall wrote yesterday, quote, when I'd heard that Amazon had agreed to host WikiLeaks, I was frankly surprised given all the fish a big corporation Amazon has to fry with the federal government.
That's true.
Of all large corporations that own media outlets, every one of them And that is one big reason why they're so servile to U.S.
government interests and easily manipulated by those in political power.
That's precisely the dynamic Lieberman was exploiting with his menacing little phone call to Amazon.
In essence, hi, this is the Senate's Homeland Security Committee calling.
You're going to be taking down that WikiLeaks site right away, right?
Amazon, of course, did what they were told.
This was a prelude to what the U.S.
government is now doing with Facebook and Google and Twitter, picking up the phone.
Hi, it's the CIA.
You know that tweet that got posted questioning our policies in Ukraine?
Or, hello, this is the CDC.
You know that tweet questioning the efficacy of vaccine mandates en masse?
You're going to take that down, right?
Because we regard that as dangerous and you wouldn't want to make us determine that you are a danger as well by allowing those tweets and those posts and that speech to remain up.
This was how this was created.
This was how it was pioneered.
Two days later, Reuters on December 4th reported the following, quote, PayPal suspends WikiLeaks donations accounts.
The online payment service PayPal said it has suspended the Wikileaks account that the organization used to collect donations.
US-based PayPal said in a statement that Wikileaks, which this week released thousands of secret U.S.
diplomatic cables, had violated its policy.
A posting on Wikileaks' Twitter page said, quote, PayPal bans Wikileaks after U.S.
government pressure.
A statement on the PayPal site said, quote, PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by Wikileaks due to a violation of the PayPal acceptable use policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate, or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.
We've notified the account holder of this action.
PayPal is one of several ways that WikiLeaks takes in donations to finance its operations.
On Friday, WikiLeaks directed readers to a web address in Switzerland after two U.S.
internet providers dropped it in the space of two days.
Shortly thereafter, Visa, MasterCard, and the Bank of America also all closed WikiLeaks' account, telling the independent media outlet that it would no longer process donations to the site.
Basically, Joe Lieberman and his comrades in the CIA Crushed or tried to crush an independent media outlet by excluding them completely from the financial services system without bothering to convict them of any crime.
It was purely extrajudicial punishment of a press organization in retaliation for the reporting that WikiLeaks was doing.
And whatever theory they wanted to use to justify it, oh, WikiLeaks is encouraging illegal activity by encouraging or showing sources how to communicate with them anonymously.
The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, almost every other media outlet was doing the same.
But of course, those media outlets serve rather than challenge establishment orthodoxy for the most part and didn't present the same kind of threat.
Now, in 2012, There is a group that is now fairly large called the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
It was co-founded by myself and the colleague with whom I worked on the Snowden reporting, Laura Poitras.
This is before the Snowden reporting.
This is 2012.
As well as the recently deceased Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Alsberg, and the actor, John Cusack, and other press freedom activists called the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
And it has now become a kind of generalized press freedom group, but its original purpose, as reflected by the article I wrote in The Guardian announcing it...
Was to try and create a way to circumvent any attempts by the U.S.
government to blockade financial payments or financial services donations to news media outlets it dislikes, including WikiLeaks, by essentially creating a new group, which we call the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where we announce that any groups that suffers extrajudicial blockades from the financial system, we will collect funds for and then give those funds to them.
And that's essentially what we did for years for WikiLeaks until PayPal and others said that they were welcome to go back onto the system.
Now here is the article I wrote from 2012.
New press freedom group is launched to block US government attacks.
And this is what I wrote about the organization we were created.
Just to give you a sense for how long this weapon has been around.
Quote, "Several weeks ago, I wrote about the steps taken by the U.S. government to pressure large corporations to choke off the finances and other means of support for WikiLeaks in retaliation for the group's exposure of substantial government deceit, wrongdoing, and illegality.
Because WikiLeaks has never been charged with, let alone convicted of any crime, I wrote, quote, "That the U.S.
government largely succeeded in using extra legal and extrajudicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode.
By the way, this was written in 2012.
Does it sound like my views have radically changed as a lot of people claim in the last 10 years?
To me, this sounds like pretty much exactly what I started this show saying.
The article that I wrote went on, quote, at the end of that column I disclosed that I had been involved in discussions, quote, regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments.
That group has now been formed and this morning was formally launched.
Its name is Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Its website is here.
Its Twitter account, which will be quite active, is Freedom of the Press.
That's still its Twitter account.
I'm very excited to have participated in the formation and will serve as an unpaid member of the board of directors, along with Daniel Ellsberg, Laura Poitras, the EFF founder, John Perry Barlow, the actor and civil liberty advocate turned fanatical democratic partisan now, John Cusack, the actor and civil liberty advocate turned fanatical democratic partisan now, John Cusack, and So that was the impetus for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
And for years, that's what we did, notwithstanding being told that we had a lot of liability ourselves, legal exposure, by helping what the US government considered to be a terrorist organization to collect funds.
We did it anyway because we could see how dangerous this weapon would become if it expanded beyond WikiLeaks.
And of course, that quickly happened.
And it's now being commonly used against all sorts of independent media outlets exactly as was predictable back in 2012 when it happened.
But few people cared because so many people had decided WikiLeaks was an enemy organization.
In the same way that the censorship regime began when people like Maya Leonopoulos and Alex Jones were depersoned by a collusion of big check and people didn't care because not enough people liked Maya Leonopoulos or Alex Jones enough to stand up and object.
Because people are unwilling to stand on principle, even if it means that principle will start expanding if the people originally targeted are sufficiently disliked.
That's the tactic they've used.
Now, here is just to remind people who don't remember what happened in Canada.
The Guardian in February of 2022 reported in its headline, GoFundMe removes donation page for Canadian trucker protest.
Website says it will refund all donations for a convoy that began as protest against vaccine mandates in Canada.
You might remember Canada, like many other countries, imposed a vaccine mandate.
Not encourage the vaccine, a mandate, a legal mandate.
That would have resulted in the termination and firing of anyone refusing to take the vaccine, the experimental vaccine, because they didn't trust it.
And huge numbers of people lost their jobs, including health care workers and people in the military, for failure to obey orders to take the vaccine.
And there was a protest against it, against the mandate by truck drivers and others.
And before the Canadian government took action, here's what happened.
Quote, fundraising website GoFundMe has taken down a page accepting donations in support of truck drivers, protesting against vaccine mandates in Canada, adding that it would refund all donations.
The quote, Freedom Convoy 2022 began as a movement against the Canadian vaccine requirement for cross-border truckers, but has turned into a rallying point against public health measures in Canada.
It has also gained increasing support among Republicans, including Donald Trump.
GoFundMe took down the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser page on Friday, saying it violated its terms of service.
At the time, it said donors would have two weeks to request a refund with any remaining funds distributed to, quote, credible and established charities.
Protesters have shut down downtown Ottawa, the Canadian capital, for eight days now, with some participants waving Confederate or Nazi flags and some saying they wanted to dissolve Canada's government.
Do you see how this reporting from The Guardian is completely designed to twist your brain to think this incredible assertion of authoritarian power is justified because you're supposed to hate the participants by believing that they're Nazis?
To the increasing fury of residents, Ottawa police have largely stood by and watched as some protesters smashed windows, threatened reporters and healthcare workers, and abused racial minorities.
I remember a protest movement much earlier in the pandemic, in the summer of 2020, that went on for a great amount of time, months in fact, that entailed a lot more destruction and violence than that trucker protest, which was almost entirely peaceful, that these very same news outlets glorified and vilified anybody for questioning or opposing.
Now, it wasn't enough to just get GoFundMe to cancel the account of people who supported the protests the way they did to the Gray Zone this week.
As CBS News reported, supporters of Dixon Rail Blockade questioned cancellation of GoFundMe campaign.
Quote, the organizer of a fundraising effort to build a quote, organizing hub to assist supporters of a northern BC rail blockade is questioning a decision by GoFundMe to cancel the internet, the campaign before it even hit the internet.
So that is what GoFundMe has been doing for quite some time and then of course the Canadian government ended up seizing the bank accounts under Justin Trudeau of people who they suspected in some way of supporting that protest movement.
A protest against a very repressive Policy in the name of COVID, which was absolutely people's right to do.
And the punishment was we're going to freeze your funds and exclude you from participating in the modern financial system.
Now, just to show you how systematized this is becoming, that it is not an isolated case where WikiLeaks here or Canadian protesters here or the gray zone over here are just occasionally being targeted, that this is being systematized.
Is Reuters reported in July of 2021 that PayPal is now partnering with the Anti-Defamation League, which is basically a Democratic Party group that exploits anti-Semitism to pretend it's about something else.
They were demanding Tucker Carlson be fired from Fox News, even though no one serious thinks Tucker Carlson is an anti-Semite.
But what he was was an effective voice against the Democratic and Republican Party against the establishment, and the ADL is there to protect the establishment.
Orthodoxy is exploiting its long history of opposing anti-Semitism to do that, and PayPal is now partnering with them to identify extremist groups to kick them off PayPal.
Here's what the Reuters article explains.
Quote, PayPal Holdings Inc.
is partnering with nonprofit organization the Anti-Defamation League to investigate how extremists and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities.
The initiative will be led through ADL's Center on Extremism and will focus on uncovering and disrupting the financial flows supporting white supremacist and anti-government organizations.
It is not illegal in the United States to espouse whatever the ADL considers to be white supremacy.
They use that term to describe Tucker Carlson, so you can see how indiscriminately they use it.
Nor is it illegal to be opposed to the government.
In fact, it is the most basic right guaranteed.
It's the reason for the American Revolution to give citizens the right to be opposed to their government's policies.
And yet PayPal is now looking, actively searching, using the ADL, this highly ideological Democratic Party group, to identify extremists to remove them from participation in PayPal's system.
Quote, it will also look at networks spreading and profiting from anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Asian bigotry.
Raise your hand if you trust the ADL and PayPal to objectively and fairly identify whose views qualify under any or all of those insults.
The information collected through the initiatives will be shared with other firms in the financial industry, law enforcement and policymakers, PayPal said.
So again, it's not just trying to get these people kicked off PayPal who espouse views that are whatever, anti-etcetera or anti-government.
It is going to be shared with other firms in the financial industry, law enforcement, and policy makers.
This is a systemized attempt based on ideology to identify and punish dissidents.
If you can't see that that's what this is, you will never see it.
You'll never recognize that when it comes.
That is what this is explicitly and in its most vintage and classic form.
The Reuters article goes on, quote, over the years, the San Jose, California based company PayPal has developed sophisticated systems to help prevent illegal activity and flows through its platform.
It hopes to have a positive social impact by sharing some of its capabilities.
Aaron Krasmer, PayPal's chief risk officer and executive vice president, risk and platform said.
So this is beyond menacing.
And it's the aggregate of these weapons.
Censorship, just being banished from the internet, which obviously happens constantly, and has happened to Grayzone and many of its reporters and many of the people on this platform, Rumble, which is why they're on Rumble, because they got removed from Google's YouTube platform.
Or being surveilled upon, remember that Tucker Carlson Was, and the NSA confirms, spied upon when he was making journalistic arrangements to go to Russia, trying to interview Russian leader Vladimir Putin, which is what any journalist would want to do.
And of course, we were able to report the system of mass surveillance.
So you have censorship, you have surveillance, and now you have the exclusion of dissidents from the financial services industry.
Basically, you can't function as a citizen if you express dissent to government policies.
That is the obvious And essentially explicit aim of this system.
So, we are now going to bring in the founding editor and reporter, Max Blumenthal, who has done a lot of great investigative journalism reporting over the years and whose site, Greyzone, is one that I use frequently, even though I don't always agree with it, like I'm sure Max doesn't always agree with my journalism either, but it's one of the most reliable sites, in my view, for getting good, critically-minded, independent reporting about U.S.
foreign policy.
I'm grateful the gray zone exists, and I'm very appreciative, Max, for you taking the time to join us tonight on System Update.
Welcome to our show.
Thanks for having me on, and thanks for supporting us here, and thanks for using our site.
We don't have a warning label yet.
Yeah, well you need one because you are apparently very dangerous.
You are making the world unsafe for all kinds of people in ways that it's even too dangerous for these sites to explain how you're unsafe.
That's how dangerous you are.
So let's first of all talk about how you've been using GoFundMe before you got this shutdown notice.
What is it that you've been using GoFundMe to do?
Well, this is the first time we ever used GoFundMe.
We were advised not to, but I thought maybe I was naive.
We wanted to fundraise to provide basically a stable future for three journalists that I've been working with for a long time, who I think are three of the best young investigative reporters out there and who've been supplying us with so much journalistic content.
Kit Clarenberg, Wyatt Reed, and Alex Rubinstein.
And people were enthusiastic about this fundraiser.
None of it was going to go to me.
This is just a way for our audience to directly support the future of the kind of journalism that they really care about.
And after over 1,100 donations, really showcasing so much grassroots support, hundreds of enthusiastic messages, and raising over $90,000, I received a message from someone named Sabrina, who could have been in a call center who knows where,
From the ironically named trust and safety team of GoFundMe and they told me that due to some external concerns, those are Sabrina's exact words, our funds had been frozen and they would let me know as soon as possible what was going to happen.
We'll keep you updated.
And they didn't keep me updated.
There was no response, no due process.
I had no idea who I was talking to.
Nine days later, eight days later, I just decided to call it quits.
I mean, it wasn't fair to our donors that they didn't even know that their money was not even being transferred to us.
It was being held up.
And the history that you just provided of GoFundMe shows how shady this organization is.
They actually tried to take the money, like to
Right, people donated their money to a specific cause that they supported and GoFundMe was going to take that money and give it to some other charity not requested by those people, steal their money and give it to some other group, whether that group was supported by the people donating or not.
That is theft!
Yep.
Yep.
They were going to steal the money, that $10 million Canadian dollars, steal the money and just give it to some other charities.
I mean, this is unheard of.
And it was only thanks to actually U.S.
lawmakers, Republican governors and Republican senators, threatening GoFundMe, which is a U.S.-based, Silicon Valley-based company, that they relinquished the money and gave it back to its rightful owners.
And so our fear was that that could happen again.
So we said, hell no.
We put out an article and a bulletin, an email blast to everyone telling them demand a refund and go to a new fundraising page that we've set up at a trustworthy site called Spot Fund where we've actually been in touch with the co-founder who said that they are 100% behind us and they're willing to transfer the money.
They seem to be keeping their word and so Yeah, I mean, thanks to everyone at SpotFund for providing a trustworthy alternative to GoFundMe.
And this goes to the question of who is behind this campaign?
Who represents the so-called external concerns?
Well, before we get into that, let me just say a couple of things.
One is, in response to the Canadian Donation freezing and seizing of those funds, there has emerged another site as well called GoSendGo, I believe it's called, that also has become a kind of free speech donation site that a lot of people have trusted, and I think that trust has proven warranted.
But let me just illustrate, I was gonna actually talk about this, but I didn't want to keep you waiting.
Just to show you what, how insincere and inauthentic this kind of safety concern is.
So if I were to think about A safety concern, a legitimate safety concern on the part of a site that facilitates fundraising by the public to people claiming certain things on the Internet about where that money would be used for.
What I would be most concerned about are cheaters and frauds.
People claiming that they were going to use that money and receive that money for one purpose and instead just pocketing it or using it for another.
That's fraud.
Rick Wilson, the longtime Republican consultant turned Lincoln Project scumbag, never Trump, Democrat.
In 2017, open a GoFundMe project Where he urged resistance liberals, which are the only people who now support him, to donate to his page, promising he was going to produce some documentary that was going to explode Donald Trump once and for all, reveal all of his secrets.
He raised $66,000 through GoFundMe and never produced any documentary or film.
Every six months or 12 months, he would go back and update saying, oh, we're in the final editing stages.
He was lying the whole time.
There was never any film.
They pocketed that money.
GoFundMe knows it.
Fox News has reported it.
I've reported it.
We've contacted GoFundMe about it.
They have never once manifested or commented about Rick Wilson's theft of funds through GoFundMe because they don't care, Max, about safety.
Safety is a euphemism for ideological conformity.
So talk about- Yeah, go ahead.
I just had to look this up because I just remembered it.
Investigate Tulsi Gabbard by Caroline Orr Bueno.
Do you remember that one?
Fast!
Go ahead and tell that story.
So this disinformation huckster named Caroline Orr Bueno raised...
A bunch of money on GoFundMe.
I'm going to pull it up right now to see how much she raised.
Thousands of dollars to investigate Tulsi Gabbard's links to Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin at a time when Tulsi was under attack by the Democrats because she was the only anti-war candidate or moderately anti-war candidate.
And what was Caroline Orbueno going to do?
She was going to go to Hawaii to investigate those links.
She never produced anything.
She never turned anything up.
So she basically fundraised for a Hawaiian vacation under the shadiest auspices possible, spreading disinformation in the process.
And her fundraiser is still up at GoFundMe.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
And this was widely discussed.
This was widely reported at the time.
It was widely documented that none of the promises she made to elicit those funds actually were ever realized or fulfilled.
And of course, because she also had the right ideology, namely attacking a dissident to establish an orthodoxy.
GoFundMe did nothing.
GoFundMe does not care.
If you use GoFundMe to steal people's funds, to defraud well-intentioned people, as long as your politics are correct.
And I'm going to state that so explicitly.
I hope they sue me if they think that that's wrong.
GoFundMe is a fraudulent company.
It exists to help people steal money who have the right politics and to punish people who are using the funds for what it's promised, including journalistic outlets, if they have the wrong politics, as the gray zone does in the eyes of virtually every establishment.
Maven.
Now Max, we were going to have Clint Camberg on our show I think six weeks ago and it turned out not to work out.
I ended up having to cancel a couple shows during that week for personal reasons but talk about what happened with that reporter who was going to or will be hired by Grayzone using these funds and the reason that they were going to come on our show.
Yeah, I mean, this financial sabotage by GoFundMe and the elements, the powerful elements behind it follows a campaign of repression, state repression, against our personnel or would-be personnel.
Kit Clarenberg in May was taken off a plane that had landed at Luton International Airport in the UK.
He's a British citizen.
By counterterror police, he was taken into a room and he was interrogated for eight hours about his work for the Gray Zone.
And his work for the Gray Zone, he has revealed many covert intelligence intrigues spun out by the British state to, for example, plan terrorist attacks.
against Russian infrastructure.
He's exposed Paul Mason, the British supposedly left-wing journalist and possible candidate for parliament on the labor slate as a security state collaborator.
And it's this kind of journalism that wound Kit Klarenberg up in a windowless room with counter-terror police.
We also have Wyatt Reed, who is financially sanctioned.
And just to remind people, during this note and reporting, one of the many forms of retaliation we received was when my husband, David Miranda, was traveling back to Brazil from visiting Laura Poitras in Germany, where he was in part taking a part of the archive that had been come corrupted that she had fixed.
He was also detained exactly under that same law accused of terrorism for his work with journalists on journalism put also into that's probably the same room as
Windowless room for eight hours, cut off from outside contact, wouldn't let him speak to me or to The Guardian's reporters, was threatened the entire time with prison, was only released because the Brazilian government raised such a diplomatic scandal with the British government that they were forced to release him, and then he won a lawsuit prohibiting the use of that law against journalists in the future on the grounds that it violates the European, the EU Human Rights Convention of Freedom of the Press, and so that amazed me that they used
That law, it seems, against Kit Klamberg and retaliation for his journalism.
But go ahead and tell the other story that you wanted to mention, I think, about Wyatt.
Yeah, well I should also mention the National Union of Journalists condemned Kit's detention, and then Paul Mason's allies intimidated the National Union of Journalists to retracting that statement of condemnation, and they said Kit is harassing people, Kit is involved in all kinds of disinformation activities, but they never said what That harassment or disinformation constituted or consisted of, and it's just simply that he was exposing powerful people.
You're not supposed to do that in the UK.
You're supposed to be a stenographer for power.
So the top union that's supposed to represent journalists totally sold him out.
We've had this happen again and again.
Wyatt Reed, no one spoke up for him when PayPal and Venmo financially sanctioned him, basically blocked him from receiving any kind of payment.
This happened just like three or four weeks after he had been in Donetsk on the separatist side of the Donbass reporting on Ukrainian human rights abuses when Wyatt's own hotel in Donetsk City was shelled, and he filmed it.
He was 100 meters away from a US-supplied howitzer hitting his hotel.
So you're not supposed to do that.
He never received any explanation from PayPal or Venmo.
Me and Aaron Maté, when we went to the invitation of Patti Cosgrove, who's the CEO of WebSummit, the largest gathering of the international tech industry in Lisbon, Portugal, we found out on our way there that thanks to pressure from Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and his wife Olena, who is due to appear at that conference, we had been Removed as speakers.
And we constantly face this pressure campaign.
Aaron himself was the target of a lobbying campaign by the Ukrainian SBU Security Services, which was working through the FBI, to pressure Twitter to remove users it didn't like.
And Aaron, a Canadian citizen, was on that list.
Twitter, this is under the old regime before Elon.
thought that that was even too much.
That was a step too far even for Twitter to have the FBI basically handing over Ukrainian intelligence list of American journalists or North American journalists who they dislike.
You know, obviously the war in Ukraine is the CIA's top foreign policy priority.
It's the top foreign priority of the entire foreign policy establishment in the West and people who have been opposed to that war from the start, including doing reporting that undercuts the lies and the narratives that are told, are being targeted with genuine kind of persecution campaigns.
I was put on various lists as well by the Ukrainian government along with a bunch of other people who I proudly serve with as alleged propagandists of the Russian government in the eyes of President Zelensky for Daring to question the idea that we should fund that war to the end.
Max, let me ask you, you're somebody who has long been associated with the left.
Your father, of course, is a well-known Democratic Party operative who worked with the Clintons.
There's been a perception for a long time that your views are on the left for a long time.
Your cause was, and still is, the Palestinian cause.
And yet, you often found yourself, as I did, as a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson's show.
But nonetheless, this is the sort of thing, an attack on a free press that ought to Be of concern to the Democratic Party and to Democratic Party leaders.
Have any Democratic Party politicians spoken out on behalf of the gray zone or in condemnation of the punishment by GoFundMe?
And yes, I do know the answer to that question already, even without checking, but I nonetheless want to hear it.
Well, I actually wasn't a frequent guest on Tucker, but... But you were a guest on Tucker, as were the Rayzone journalists, I guess I should say.
That's more accurate.
I think I was, you know, one of the first people identified with the left to really call out Russiagate as the sham it was, and Tucker provided me with a platform, and I think, you know, if you're an alternative independent media and you get offered a national platform, within reason, you should take it.
So, obviously, it was a rhetorical question.
The answer is no.
And, you know, we're identified with the opposition to the Ukraine proxy war, to sending billions and billions in military aid to Ukraine.
And this war is part of Joe Biden's re-election campaign.
It's something that Biden and his National Security Council and the people behind him and his core constituency, the donor class of the Democratic Party, believe in on not just an ideological level, but on a political level.
That the Ukraine counteroffensive was linked intimately to Biden's re-election campaign.
And it's failing.
So we see these forces lashing out at all of their perceived enemies, and they don't care what my history is or what, you know, my background is.
They see me as an enemy.
They see the Grey Zone as an enemy because we are disrupting the narrative, and they want to suppress All this background noise and have us just speaking to each other in a small echo chamber while everyone is fixated on CNN and MSNBC and reading legacy media about the, you know, the brave Ukrainian warriors who continue to slog ahead and how we have to send them more F-16s and, you know, we can do this.
So I think that's what this comes down to.
And we can even go back to the 2016 campaign, Glenn, when I was formally condemned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign, because Elie Wiesel, who was the saint of the Holocaust, had died.
And I called out the fact that he had lost his fortune to Bernie Madoff and had begun taking millions of dollars from Pastor John Hagee, the Christian Zionist pastor in San Antonio, who said that Hitler was half Jewish and that the Antichrist who said that Hitler was half Jewish and that the Antichrist would be half Jewish and homosexual, who said that Jews would ultimately burn in an everlasting lake of fire during the revelation, that Elie Wiesel was palling around who said that Jews would ultimately burn in an everlasting lake of fire during the revelation,
that Elie Wiesel was palling around with anti-Semites and being guided by anti-Palestinian forces into making racist public statements. that Elie Wiesel was palling around with anti-Semites and being And that prompted the Hillary Clinton campaign to condemn me because of my father's association with Hillary Clinton.
And then the Trump campaign, through the future Israel ambassador David Friedman, called me the biggest anti-Semite in the world.
So that was pretty much the end of me having any association with either of the two parties.
You can't support Palestine and be welcomed by either party.
Exactly.
So the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which I referenced earlier, was begun as a way of collecting funds to give to WikiLeaks on behalf of those who wanted to donate for it, since it lost its ability to do so.
But we did end up collecting a lot of funds for other groups that face similar blockades, including groups that I actually didn't like very much, media outlets that I really didn't support, simply because I thought it was so important that in order to retaliate against these attacks on independent media and a free press, That the real way to do that is to ensure that those independent media groups who are trying to suffocate instead end up funded, whether you like or love every journalist at these media outlets or not.
So I think it's an important cause.
As I said, I personally think Ray Jones reporting is of great value.
You know I'm a huge fan of Aaron and other journalists that you've mentioned, including your own reporting.
So for those who do want to support Grayzone, either in support of the journalism you do or in retaliation against these kind of attacks, I know you mentioned the site, but just one more time tell people how they can donate if they're so inclined.
Yeah, the site is called SpotFund, and you simply have to just go to the site and look up Grayzone or defend the Grayzone, that's the name of the fundraiser, or just go to my Twitter account, Max Blumenthal.
The pinned tweet will take you right there.
And supporting us will mean supporting three of the best young journalists working today who are really disrupting the narrative of the national security state to such a degree that they are being targeted By the intelligence apparatus from Kiev to London to Washington.
Right.
I mean, I really believe that on some level you can pretty much distinguish who a real journalist is and who a real journalist is not by which journalists are the target of retaliation by the most powerful centers of authority in the world.
And by that metric, Greyzone is certainly doing great journalism.
Max, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
I really appreciate you coming on and good luck with your fundraising campaign.
Thanks for all your support, Glenn.
We really appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Have a great evening.
So speaking of the propaganda that has been raining down upon Western citizens regarding President Zelensky and the war in Ukraine, from the very beginning we have a trailer of a new film produced by Sean Penn that we are very eager to share with you.
Let's first remind you, though, of the context of the latest developments this week, which are that there is great fear.
on the part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that pulling data now shows that a majority of Americans don't want any more money going to Ukraine.
And this is happening throughout governments in the West.
Populations are starting to realize that they were constantly lied to and told the Russian government was days away from collapsing, that their supplies were being cut off, that they didn't have any support, that their ruble was collapsing, that they weren't going to be able to fund this war.
And they continue to occupy roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, are dug in in extreme trenches.
And if this war is going to end in Ukraine's favor, by expelling the Russians from Ukraine, it will not be for very long into the future until that happens.
And in the meantime, Ukraine will be destroyed.
Ukrainians will die in record numbers, as will Russians.
And the only people who will benefit are arms dealers and the arms industry and the intelligence communities that serve them.
And as a result of this fear, President Zelensky this week said that he wants and expects the United States government to essentially create a relationship with Ukraine based on the model that the United States has with Israel.
The model that the United States has with Israel is that we have an absolute guarantee to provide Israel with billions of dollars a year.
The last deal was signed in 2016 by the Obama administration under a A congress that was bipartisan.
I believe the House was controlled by the Republicans.
The Senate might have been, I don't remember, but there was huge bipartisan support for the deal.
Obama signed with Prime Minister Netanyahu to give $38 billion in U.S.
funds to Israel over the next 10 years, much of which is used, or some of which is used, to purchase weapons from the American arms industry, but most of which is used To strengthen the Israeli military industry and to enable Israel to maintain military superiority over its neighbors.
President Zelensky said he wants Ukraine to be in that same position.
Namely that both parties are on board with it, that it is a 10-year guarantee, that the money, billions of dollars, will flow in because what he is afraid of is that in 2024 Americans will have a choice There will be a Democratic nominee called Joe Biden who wants to fund the war in Ukraine until the very end with no end in sight.
They don't want to win the war.
They want to protract the war.
The goal is not to defend Ukraine.
The role is to destroy Russia.
The goal is to destroy Russia.
And so the longer the war goes on, the better it is for the United States.
That's why they're not giving Ukraine everything.
They're giving them just enough, just like they did in Syria.
To ensure that the country is destroyed and the war goes on but no side ever wins.
And they're very worried that you'll have Joe Biden over here and Donald Trump over here or maybe even Vivek Ramaswamy or Ron DeSantis who runs on the opposite platform of saying we want to cut off funds to the war in Ukraine because we don't think that money should be going there any longer.
And as we demonstrated last night in the segment we did on Nikki Haley, the goal of trying to desperately find somebody like Nikki Haley or Chris Christie or Mike Pence to become the Republican nominee is to ensure that you don't have that choice.
That both parties are in full agreement on this foreign policy goal of supporting Ukraine into the end, of encircling China, of a Cold War with China, and of militarism in general.
And that's what Zelensky wants.
And so, lo and behold, at exactly the moment that the war in Ukraine and support for it in the West is starting to seriously erode, A trailer is released by the actor Sean Penn, who was already working on a hagiography, a worshipful documentary about President Zelensky months before the Russian invasion in February of 2022.
He so happened, coincidentally, to be in Kiev with a camera crew on the day that Russia invaded.
And as you'll see in the trailer, it's nominally about the bravery of the Ukrainians, the justice of the cause of their war, the supreme greatness of President Zelensky.
But it's really about Sean Penn's courage, Sean Penn's grit, Sean Penn's integrity, Sean Penn's manliness, Sean Penn's greatness.
And there's an amazing cameo appearance as well by Sean Hannity.
So let's take a look at this trailer of this film that is about to be released.
Sometimes in pursuing a curiosity about something going on in the world, maybe part of it is because you're looking to believe in something.
There are people that you meet who are the embodiment But it's important to note that this is not an independent film.
It has a gigantic media corporation behind it called Paramount, which is the owner of CBS, among other things.
And obviously it is a longtime major studio in Hollywood.
And it's the kind of studio, the kind of company that only allows propaganda that aligns with the U.S.
security state to be released.
So that's who's funding this film.
That hope that you want to have.
The film we'd set out to make was not meant to encounter an existential threat to democracy.
Just a spirited story of a comedy superstar turned president.
Be careful.
We're currently in this situation where there's a major Russian build-up.
The situation was changing and feeling more urgent.
Go, go, go.
They had two impacts in town.
Oh my God.
This modern country was suddenly at war.
Ukrainians have this historical willingness to be a democratic state, and because it is so hard to get, it becomes very precious.
This is about vengeance.
Putin's angry that this country wants to divorce itself from Russia forever, and he wants it back.
Now, as you see there, magically, you see this right here, the, uh, I'm going to mess this up if it's not done for me.
I don't know if I can do this with video, I guess is the point.
So as I predicted, I was going to mess this up.
Just go ahead and get that video back, undo all of my problematic behavior, and just go back to where we were.
Sorry to everybody in the control room watching.
I shouldn't be touching the screen except in the most simplistic way possible because I will ruin it if I try.
Alright, I think we have it back.
So the point I was trying to make was right here on the screen you see that Sean Penn was in Ukraine on the very first day of the Russian invasion.
So let's watch from there.
They had two impacts in town.
Oh my God.
This modern country was suddenly at war.
Ukrainians have this historical willingness to be a democratic state.
And because it is so hard to get, it becomes very precious.
This is about vengeance.
Putin's angry that this country wants to divorce itself from Russia forever, and he wants it back.
Alright, so there you see Sean Penn.
He's there on the first night of the invasion with Zelensky in his quote-unquote bunker.
And there you see Sean Penn.
We are just ordinary people who want to live in our country.
Welcome to my home.
What can we help you carry?
We need Americans to understand the price we have to pay to be free.
Because of our proximity to active combat, that's the priority.
Guys, no grass.
At least it fills our mind.
Okay.
When you step into a country of such incredible unity, you realize what we've all been missing.
We're in agreement.
We absolutely agree.
I mean, that is a microcosm of the unbelievable change in ideology.
Sean Penn has spent his life essentially as a leftist.
He used to be very close friends with the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
And over time, Sean Penn became something much different.
He became a spokesman for the U.S.
security state.
I was at an event.
There was a pretty small event in Hollywood in early 2013, just before the Snowden reporting began, and it was an event organized for what was supposed to be the Hollywood Left about foreign policy and economic policy.
There were a lot of A-list names in that room.
There were about 60 people there, and Sean Penn was one of them.
Most of the people in that room were opposed to Obama's war on terror, his use of drones to indiscriminately kill people, and yet Sean Penn angrily attacked anybody who criticized President Obama, said that he knew things that nobody else knew, that he had been taken to Pakistan and shown the truth that anybody questioning President Obama didn't know and he was there to defend.
C.I.A.
dirty wars all throughout the war on terror and this is a continuation of his alignment as is Hollywood aligned with the U.S.
security state and while most primetime hosts on Fox, Tucker Carlson before he was fired particularly, but also Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters have questioned or opposed the U.S.
security state's role in Ukraine.
Sean Hannity is a vocal defender of the Biden administration policy, which makes sense because Sean Hannity has been defending every war, going back to the earliest ones of the Bush-Cheney-Neocon administration in 2001 and 2002.
So he's very consistent.
Yet here you see him having completely common cause to the point of physical contact with a person who I'll bet you any amount of money Sean Hannity has called all sorts of names over the years.
When you step into a country of such incredible unity, you realize what we've all been missing.
We're in agreement.
We absolutely agree.
If Ukraine fails, it's not just a failure for democracy.
Everything that happens here is going to affect every other place in the world today.
That's the reason that we're all so invested in this.
When stakes are so high, of course we will keep fighting.
Whatever it takes.
Now just to interrupt and point out one just completely deceitful propagandistic premise of this entire film, Ukraine is not a united country.
Virtually all of eastern Ukraine has been in a civil war since 2014 with the government in Kiev ever since Victoria Nuland and the State Department she served under John Kerry in the Obama administration connived to remove the Ukrainian leader who had been elected to a five-year term that was going to expire in 2015 because of a perception that he was getting too friendly to Moscow and too defiant to the West.
And I believe some of that footage that was designed to look like it was war footage from Kiev was actually footage of those anti-government protesters in Maiden Square in 2014 protesting the government when John McCain and Chris Murphy and other U.S.
officials, including Victoria Nuland, went to openly encourage them to use violence to remove the democratically elected government.
And ever since then, Eastern Ukrainians, who are Russian ethnically and who's Russian-speaking and who have felt repressed by the pro-Western government in Kiev, have been essentially in a civil war with Western Ukrainians for their independence and their sovereignty, backed by Russia.
And so this idea that Ukraine is completely unified because Sean Penn went to Kiev or other parts of Western Ukraine, I don't know if you went to Eastern Ukraine or not, but there's no way to know anything about this country and to claim that it's completely united against the Russians.
Unless you're deliberately lying.
Zelensky is the face of this extraordinary courage that's come up in all the Ukrainians we saw and talked to, whether they were in uniform, out of uniform, school teachers, even children.
I want to protect my country, my mom, my family.
The Ukrainians will win this.
The question is at what cost.
You were born for this moment.
I'm ready to win.
All right, that's incredibly exciting.
It's coming out September 18th.
It's from Paramount.
There you see Sean Penn and Sean Hannity, two of the wealthiest Americans in the country, both agreeing.
That we need to spend billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine without end, while people like Sean Hannity believe that there's no money for basic subsistence for the poorest people in the country.
That has been the pre-Trump Republican ideology that Sean Hannity, pretty much alone at Fox, continues to voice, at least in terms of prime time.
Which is one of the reasons you'd have the bizarre spectacle, which you would never see at CNN or MSNBC where there's no dissent allowed, of the 8 o'clock show with Tucker Carlson coming on night after night condemning the war in Ukraine and the U.S.
role in it, and then right at 9 o'clock, Sean Hannity coming on and doing exactly the opposite.
He would wear a CIA pin or a Ukraine pin on his lapel, Sean Hannity would.
But that got taken care of when they fired Tucker Carlson.
And now this is the ideology that prevails at Fox News.
And there you see him hugging or shaking hands, manly shaking of hands with Sean Penn in full agreement over this propagandistic lie to which the West has been subjected from the very beginning.
But finally, Americans are starting to see the truth.
And that's the reason Americans now, in a majority, oppose further funds to the war in Ukraine and why The only people gaining traction in the Republican Party are candidates who say they want to stop the flow of money to Ukraine, stop fueling this war, and facilitate a diplomatic resolution.
So this propaganda from Paramount, from Sean Penn, strangely coordinated well before the war began to create this hagiography about Zelensky and the cause of the Western Ukrainians against Vladimir Putin and the Russians is about to drop at the key moment.
I don't think it's going to matter though.
I think Americans and people in the West are starting to understand that this war has nothing to do with them, except that it's prejudicing their lives, their financial prosperity, and that they've been lied to yet again.
This is yet another war where Americans were deceived into supporting it by the very same liars that always deceive them into supporting wars, and the media outlets who went on board with it, only for them to realize, just like I knew was going to happen, that they had been deceived and that the war was a mistake.
But this is Sean Penn's effort in part to fortify support for the cause of the war in Ukraine and President Zelensky, but really in part to pay tribute to Sean Penn.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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