New Russell Brand Accusations Deserve Scrutiny & Due Process; Yoel Roth Wails Over Censorship-Regime Backlash; & 4 Republicans Demand Insane Ukraine Escalation | SYSTEM UPDATE #149
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The accusations against Russell Brand.
The famed comedian, actor, and political commentator stands accused by four different women, all of whom are anonymous, of various forms of sexual misconduct, including an allegation of rape from one of those women.
The year-long investigation that culminated in these accusations was conducted by a consortium of British media companies, including the newspaper Times of London, that is owned by the Murdoch family, as well as the television network Channel 4.
All of the allegations concern alleged behavior he undertook from the period of 2006 to 2013 when Brand worked for Channel 4 as well as for the BBC.
There are no allegations involving behavior after 2013.
Prior to publication of the Times article and the Channel 4 documentary, none of these women had ever filed a criminal complaint and there are no indications that even with the publication of these accusations they have done so yet.
Brandt skyrocketed to cultural celebrity as a result of hosting numerous television programs, acting as the lead in several Hollywood studio films, and being married for a short time to the pop star Katy Perry.
He has always been political and was long associated with the British left, being a vocal supporter of the British socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and himself identifying for a long time as a democratic socialist.
But over the last several years, Brand's politics has become less susceptible to being ideologically pigeonholed, for many of the same reasons that's true of the independent journalist Matt Taibbi and myself.
In particular, Brand has developed profound distrust of and deep contempt for the leading institutions of authority in the West, including the corporate media, The Western Security State, neoliberal financial institutions, and with the COVID pandemic, one of his main targets became the pharmaceutical industry.
He is an outspoken opponent of the U.S.-EU role in the war in Ukraine and has long crusaded for the freedom for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and he vehemently denounces the union of state and corporate power to censor political speech on the internet.
Views which now bizarrely code as being right-wing and thus provoke the greatest amount of animosity from establishment centers of power, particularly from corporate media outlets.
Until the last few years, Bram largely worked within mainstream media and mainstream culture.
He has been extremely candid about the difficulties of his past, including the years he spent in substance abuse and sex addiction and generally living what he describes as a spiritually deprived lifestyle built around hedonism.
He wrote a book on that and the recovery process in which he engaged to get out of that lifestyle.
But he has also now built one of the most influential and powerful platforms in independent political media.
His nightly show or daily show on Rumble and the segments of it that he posts on YouTube are routinely watched by millions of people and that's been true for several years now.
The allegations against Brand obviously have the potential to destroy his reputation permanently.
It is the biggest story in the UK, occupying the cover of every newspaper and tabloid and dominating news programs on television, and it has also flooded the American media as well.
The allegations deserve to be taken seriously, in the sense that they are likely to have massive ramifications on numerous levels.
We'll take a look at the accusations themselves, what we know and do not know about what happened in these events, and we will also examine the reaction to the story and the ways in which it is being predictably instrumentalized.
There are a lot of important lessons in all of this, and we will do our best to examine those lessons with the intent to highlight what we think are the more generalized insights this case offers.
Then, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022, an extraordinary amount of transparency was brought to that company.
In particular, we learned a great deal about the censorship regime that had taken hold of Twitter and the other big tech platforms, and in particular, the ongoing, continuous, aggressive pressure from the U.S.
government to engage in that kind of censorship.
One of the key figures in Twitter's censorship scheme was someone named Yoel Roth, who headed what the company called its Trust and Safety Unit.
Many of the disclosures from reporters who had access to the Twitter files, to Twitter's internal corporate documents, revealed that it was Roth who was at the center of many of the platform's most controversial censorship decisions, including, but by no means only, the ones involving restrictions on the political speech of the then sitting president, Donald Trump.
Once Roth began speaking in public in an attempt to justify and rationalize what he had done, it was clear that he sounded like some extreme liberal elite caricature, and that the censorship inclinations that drove him were based almost entirely in his ideological and political convictions, which, like so many of those similar to him, he mistook for objective truth, data, and science.
Roth, after effectively disappearing for a good while, has returned today with an op-ed in the New York Times.
Part of the op-ed is designed to recount his victimhood, the threats and insults he received online, but its real point is to lament what he says is the weakening of the censorship regime he helped build, and the growing backlash among Americans at having to have their political discourse limited and policed by the E.O.L.
Roths of the world.
I think and most definitely hope that he is right about this, that the public backlash is now making it more difficult for social media companies and their government allies to continue to degrade the internet into one of the most potent weapons of thought control and propaganda ever created.
It is definitely long past time for Americans to backlash against this sort of despotic control and we'll examine Ross' warnings to determine whether some victories are finally emerging against the wannabe authoritarians who are increasingly fearful of allowing free political discourse to flourish because they know free speech results in their being exposed as chronic disinformation agents and then ultimately and they're losing their stranglehold on power.
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here for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Whenever anyone is publicly accused of rape, that obviously is an extremely serious event that deserves to be taken very seriously.
And when the person is somebody who is a politically polarizing figure, it is often the case that the reactions to those allegations tell us a great deal about how these kinds of accusations of sexual misconduct and sexual assault and rape
We've had a great number of cases in the past several years of politically controversial figures being accused of rape, often or at least sometimes, in a way that, if not disproven, ended up going nowhere due to lack of evidence.
Julian Assange's cases that were called rape in Sweden, but that were actually accusations by women who were having consensual sex with him, that they asked him to use condoms and he ended up having sex with them without one, got called rape.
To this very day, people will say Julian Assange is a rapist, even though that case was never actually brought in a court.
He sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy and then it was closed.
A more recent case involves the obviously controversial Congressman Matt Gaetz, who was branded not just a rapist, but a pedophile in leaks in the New York Times as a result of allegations that he hired underage prostitutes, at least one of them at the age of 17.
The Biden Justice Department conducted a sweeping investigation of those allegations.
And in the meantime, Matt Gaetz was accused over and over and over again.
Of being a pedophile, of being someone who hired underage prostitutes, allegations that, like Assange, he vehemently denied.
And the Biden Justice Department, not the Trump Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department, announced that it was closing that investigation with no charges being brought of any kind due to their inability to obtain reliable evidence that they believe could convince a jury that he was actually guilty.
So it shouldn't require much
Controversy, in order to point out that accusations are not tantamount to proof, that due process is not just something we require before we allow the state to punish somebody for a crime, but ought to be something that we insist upon before analyzing or evaluating or reaching a conclusion about whether we believe an accusation of serious criminality is in fact true or not true.
I just want to spend a second before delving into some of these critical issues that I think warrant a great deal of scrutiny, especially given how many media outlets, the most powerful media corporations in the world, have all but declared him guilty, are speaking of him as though he is a convicted rapist.
Even though I don't believe, at least to my knowledge, that a single one of these allegations has resulted in a criminal complaint with the police.
Obviously, there have been no criminal charges brought, let alone convictions obtained.
And yet all sorts of people, for all kinds of reasons, with all sorts of motives, including people with the most influential platforms in the world, have succeeded in
And I think it's incumbent upon everybody who has an interest in this question to think a little bit more deeply about whether that process has been fair based on what we know and what we don't know.
So before I get into the specific allegations which are necessary to conduct a meaningful analysis, let me just put a couple of cards on the table.
First of all, I have heard for, I would say, maybe a year and a half, two years, something along those lines, that British media outlets have been aggressively pursuing this story.
And what I mean by that is not that there have been women stepping up and going to these media outlets with these allegations.
Instead, these media outlets have been going to as many women as they could find who they know have had sex with Russell Brand or who in some way were connected to him and encouraging and pressuring and pushing these women to make these allegations so that they could publish stories like this.
There have been stories in the past from 2003 and 4 and 5 about Russell Brand's personal life that he ended up successfully suing British media outlets for publishing even though courts found there was not sufficient evidence in order to make those allegations.
And so the media outlets that were clearly intent upon being able to publish this story have been engaged in a full court press.
It's a consortium of British media outlets that dislike Russell Brand for all sorts of reasons, who have been attempting to turn this into a story that they could legally publish.
Now I want to make clear, when I say that, that does not in any way mean that the allegations are false.
The fact that these media outlets were pushing this story.
I'm just pointing out that they have been trying for at least two years, a year and a half or two years, which is when I began hearing about it.
It's been an open whisper campaign for quite some time.
And it is, I think, a little bit notable that it was the media outlets who are playing such an aggressive role in trying to make this case happen, as opposed to women coming forward and trying to be heard or believed.
So this has been something that's been out there for quite some time.
The other disclosure that I will make is that I do consider Russell Brand to be a friend of mine.
I've appeared on his show many times, various shows over the years.
I wouldn't call him a very close friend, but he's somebody with whom I have an interaction and a relationship that extends beyond just, say, professional colleagues.
We have spoken about things beyond journalism and politics, about each other's lives.
In many ways, so I think it's important for me to note that, although I think you will find that everything that I have to say about this case is extremely consistent with things I have said about very similar cases involving people who I didn't know at all, including people like Matt Gaetz.
I remember very well being one of the very few people willing to stand up when the New York Times story about Matt Gaetz was published, knowing how
One will instantly be accused of being sympathetic to a sex offender if all you do is stand up and remind people that these are leaks from the government, unaccompanied by evidence, and therefore they ought not to be believed, that it is unjust and unethical to assume allegations like this to be true when there's not even a process of any kind that subjects the evidence to critical scrutiny.
I did the same.
Many of you probably don't remember this, but in 2020, there was a Democratic primary challenge to one of the longest standing typical swamp creatures, the Democratic Congressman Richie Neal from Massachusetts, who has served many, many years in Congress.
He's the chairman of the Appropriations Committee or the Ways and Means Committee.
And this young mayor from his district, Alex Morse, launched a primary challenge against him.
I didn't know Alex Morse at all.
And when Alex Morse launched that primary challenge against him, it was basically a primary challenge against Richie Neal, kind of from the left, a kind of AOC-style primary challenge.
Alex Morse, who was gay, he was the mayor of a small town.
Immediately, there was the story that erupted that accused Alex Morse of having had sex with numerous young men, all of whom were above the age of 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and they tried to turn it into a sex scandal, and I was one of the very few people willing to defend him as well on the same grounds.
This is my posture in essentially every single case.
I vehemently believe in due process and the virtues of it, as much as I believe in free speech.
And I don't just believe in it in terms of a legal doctrine, something that people are entitled to before the state can punish them.
There's a reason that things like trials and evidentiary hearings have developed the way they've developed over the course of many centuries.
It's a critical truth-finding tool to have an adversarial procedure where someone makes a certain claim or testifies to a certain version of events, and then they're subject to adversarial scrutiny.
They're questioned by the person they're accusing.
They have evidence presented that negates or calls into question the claims that they're making.
Those processes are vital.
To understanding whether or not accusations are true or not.
And what we've been doing over the past several decades, and particularly since the emergence of the Me Too movement in the context of sexual assault, is abandoning that as a value.
Obviously, the phrase believe women was designed to say we don't actually need that process any longer.
Maybe we need it to put people in prison, but not to assume that the accused are guilty.
And obviously, reputational destruction is not as grave as sticking somebody in a cage, but it's not trivial either.
It's something that deserves to be taken seriously on both ends.
The accusations deserve to be taken seriously.
But the possibility that they are the byproduct of malicious intent or poor memory or misinterpretation or outside influences or any other kinds of distortion also deserves to be taken seriously.
And I realize that if you stand up in the middle of a case like this and say that, and I'm actually relieved that in this case a lot more people seem willing to be saying it than in other cases, You not only will be accused of making apologies for a sexual offender, but then questions get raised about why you're really doing it.
You must yourself have those kinds of secrets.
I remember very well when I defended Alex Morse, was one of the very few people who did.
All of these cowardly left-wing groups who had endorsed him immediately withdrew their endorsement or suspended it based solely on these accusations.
It turned out those accusations against Alex Morse came from These Democratic Party operatives were hoping to curry favor with Richie Neal, this very powerful Democratic Congressman.
The whole thing was a setup and a scam.
And a lot of people will now claim that they were skeptical from the beginning, but I can assure you they were not.
Because what was done in the case of me when I defended Alex Morris or Matt Gaetz, and I was not the only person, I don't mean at all to suggest that I was, I'm just recounting my own personal experience, is you immediately get accused of defending or siding with the sexual offender because you yourself are also one.
That's the tactic.
To try and intimidate people into raising these questions and insisting on evidence and denouncing the idea that people ought to be assumed guilty of some of the most horrific crimes Based on the untested say-so of anonymous people, especially when the person being accused is a politically polarizing person.
I don't care what the consequences are.
I just refuse to go along with that kind of mob justice.
I think mob justice is terrifying and something that we always want to avoid.
I think trial by media, or worse, trial by social media, is an incredibly destructive way of trying to understand truth.
And there is nothing to the Russell Brand accusations other than, at least so far, trial by media and trial by social media.
I want to emphasize, I'm not here to say that I disbelieve the accusations.
I'm just not going to believe them until it's subject to some kind of a fair process.
And so far that's been the opposite of what's happened.
I'm going to show you a part of the mini documentary that aired on Channel 4, which is a fairly centrist, trustworthy news outlet in the UK.
But before I do, let me just make clear what these accusations are.
There are four women.
All of them acknowledge that they had consensual sex with Russell Brand.
There's no allegation that he just, out of nowhere, without knowing who they were, attacked them one night, or abducted them, or jumped them in an alley.
Those are not the nature of the allegations.
All four of these women consensually dated Russell Brand, but allege that at some point in the course of that consensual relationship, He engaged in behavior that they had indicated they didn't want him to engage in.
One of the cases involves classic rape allegations where one of the women claims that she had had sex with him consensually several times.
One night she said, I don't want to do this.
I don't want you to do this.
And he did it anyway.
There's another woman who says she was 16 at the time that she dated Russell Brand for three months.
It was in the UK where the age of consent is 16, so there's no suggestion that an adult male having sex with a 16-year-old girl is illegal under British law.
But she now says she retrospectively realizes that this was a form of grooming.
She didn't realize it at the time.
She says that he was emotionally manipulative.
And then the other two cases are essentially ones of just being controlling, being emotionally and sexually aggressive.
But the one case of rape, of kind of rape in the sense that the woman said, I don't want to do this after having consensually had sex with him, is where this rape is coming from.
And as usual, what ends up happening is these things end up getting conflated on purpose.
Remember the rape charges against Julian Assange were actually brought by two women who he was dating simultaneously, unbeknownst to the other he was dating each, and they were engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with him.
And their allegation, which emerged after the 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, was that they had requested that Julian Assange always use a condom when having sex with them, but that on at least a couple of occasions he had sex with them without using a condom, something they realized afterwards.
And once they ended up speaking to one another and realized that he was cheating on each of them with the other, they both went to the police department to file a complaint.
And under Swedish law, it is considered rape to have sex with somebody and not use a condom.
And that's where this idea that Julian Assange is a rapist came from.
So that's the basic breakdown.
Here's the sort of thing that Channel 4 did.
They actually, at least in one of the cases, had an actor portraying the victim in order to protect her identity.
I phoned and somebody asked what it was regarding.
and I said, "That's regarding Russell Brand being a sex offender." Let me just stop that right there.
Look at what's on that screen here.
I found this to be odd and notable.
So, I don't think I'm able to, yeah, I go through this every time.
I don't think I'm able to use the graphics for the video.
So let's get that pulled back up, that screen.
There you see it.
The allegations include rape, sexual assault, If the allegation is that Russell Brand raped a woman and sexually assaulted a woman, why add on to that this much more ambiguous phrase, emotionally controlling behavior?
That's the kind of accusation that ended up at the immediate height of Me Too, destroying a lot of people's reputations and careers.
It was always very vague.
It didn't really involve allegations beyond things like the person was possessive or manipulative, something that happens in many relationships.
It just seems very odd to have these incredibly grave crimes like rape, and then just tacked onto that.
The category of controlling and emotionally abusive behavior.
And I think one of the reasons for that is because the idea of how this got conflated is by saying, oh, we have four women who are accusers.
Make it seem like all four of them accused him of rape.
When that's not the case.
I believe two of them in particular, their allegations are that he was controlling and engaged in emotionally abusive behavior, which is universes away from rape.
And yet you see, you want to kind of call this reckless, this sort of conflation, but I think it's quite deliberate. - He's grabbing at my underwear, pulling it to the side.
I'm telling him to get off me and he won't get off.
Like holding me up against the wall, pushing himself in me.
He grabbed me and got me on the bed.
I was fully clothed and he was naked at this point and he held me down and he was just aggressively trying to, you know, f*** me.
I was like, oh my God, he raped me.
I have to say, you know, I find This kind of, this use of theatrical devices, like the camera angles and the sinister music, to be deeply inappropriate if you're trying to actually present a news story that's trying to be fair about whether these accusations are true.
This is cinematic manipulation.
We all know it.
If you go to a horror movie, The music is crucial to raising your level of suspense and fear.
This is supposed to be a news story with incredibly serious consequences for a lot of different people, the accusers, the accused.
Why use these kinds of techniques to manipulate the emotional reaction of the audience if the substance of the news story is as credible and substantive as they're trying to present it to be?
Um, forced his penis down my throat, and I couldn't breathe.
I was just choking me.
I was crying, and he said, oh, I only wanted to see your mascara run anyway.
Then, then blood jobs where mascara runs a little bit.
Oh! Good!
I've never, ever spoken publicly ever spoken publicly about this before.
Russell seems untouchable.
Let me, let me ask about that as well.
So again, we're talking here about alleged events that took place from 2006 to 2013, the most recent one of which then was a decade ago.
The most recent one of which then was a decade ago.
And we've all been through the Me Too movement, where people far more powerful than Russell Brand were taken down.
Harvey Weinstein was probably the most powerful figure in Hollywood, wanted to say like the top 10 most powerful people in Hollywood.
And incredibly famous and popular comedians like Louis C.K.
had their careers, I'm not going to say destroyed, but harmed significantly as a result of accusations far less Serious than this.
So the whole point of the Me Too movement was to create a network, which it did, to enable women to come forward with a support network to be able to accuse powerful, famous, and influential men of engaging in sexual misconduct.
The idea that Russell Brand, who is a famous and popular comedian, but he's not anywhere near the level of fame and power that a lot of people have been taken down over the last five and six years.
I mean, taken down like as in go to prison, fired completely, rendered off limits.
And so the idea that, I do understand that if you're somebody who doesn't have a lot of power, it is and can be intimidating to bring accusations of this kind against somebody who has a very popular following But the idea that, you know, we're back in 1987, where this sort of thing is impossible to do, or Russell Brand is some kind of immense giant.
I think that the fact that there was a 10 to 15 year wait between the alleged incidents and the time that people came forward, even assuming the best of motives, that's why there's statute of limitations on crimes.
The main reason is because people's memories fade over time.
They become unreliable with each passing year.
And so I absolutely think it's a legitimate question to ask, even though there are valid answers, why it is that if these things all took place in the way that it's being portrayed, why it is that it took so long for these accusations to emerge.
And you see here these media outlets doing anything but trying to create a fair picture of the story.
They are obviously acting in a prosecutorial way.
with the music and the camera angles and everything designed to have this be something that is not a serious news, bit of news reporting at all, but is a theatrical production to convict somebody in the media who they dislike but is a theatrical production to convict somebody in the media All right.
They do include Russell Brand's denial.
He denies it very vehemently.
Instead of reading his denial, let's listen to what Russell Brand said.
He knew the story was coming the day before it came.
He may have known before that.
Obviously, if I heard these things, of course, he has as well.
And here's what he said the night before the story was published.
Hello there you Awakening Wonders.
Now this isn't the usual type of video we make on this channel where we critique, attack and undermine the news in all its corruption because in this story I am the news.
I've received two extremely disturbing letters or a letter and an email.
One from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper listing a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks as well as some pretty stupid stuff like a My community festival should be stopped.
I shouldn't be able to attack mainstream media narratives on this channel.
But amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refuse.
Hello there, you into the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies.
And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous.
Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual.
I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent.
And I'm being transparent about it now as well.
And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play?
Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of, and we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language.
I'm aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out Russell, they're coming for you, you're getting too close to the truth, Russell Brand did not kill himself.
I know that a year ago there was a spate of articles.
Russell Brand's a conspiracy theorist.
Russell Brand's right wing.
I'm aware of news media making phone calls, sending letters to people I know for ages and ages.
It's been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there's a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices.
And I'm in my voice along with your voice.
I don't mind them using my books and my stand-up to talk about my promiscuous, consensual conduct in the past.
What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations.
Also, it's worth mentioning that there are witnesses whose evidence directly contradicts the narratives that these two mainstream media outlets are trying to construct.
Apparently, in what seems to me...
All right, so I think it's an important last point there, which is he is claiming, and I completely understand why he's reluctant to talk to specifically in the media or publicly without lawyers present.
About the specific points he's making, because you're talking here about allegations of criminality that could ultimately result in a criminal investigation, potentially criminal charges.
I doubt that that will happen, given the age of these allegations.
But that's easy for me to say.
If you're Russell Brand, you're obviously going to be concerned about that.
But nonetheless, he references there The availability of witnesses who directly negate at least some of these allegations, and this is what I'm talking about.
In a process designed to test accusations, these are all the sorts of things we see.
We have the witnesses who come forward with their version of events, they produce whatever corroborating evidence they may have, and then you have the accused and The ability of their lawyers to summon people, to obtain evidence, to present all sorts of testimony that calls into question the veracity of the accusations.
We haven't seen any of that.
None of it.
None of it.
And so, for anyone who's going around either explicitly stating or strongly implying That Russell Brand is guilty of these crimes without having even spent a few days pondering or thinking about the evidence presented.
I really question the ethics of people who are willing to do that.
Now, I will say, there is this kind of counter-narrative.
That I'm also reluctant to jump on board with, which is the idea that because of Russell Brand's political perspective and his strong critiques of establishment centers of power and their orthodoxies, that this is nothing more than a kind of plot on the part of powerful people to take down a influential critic.
And I'm unwilling to jump on that bandwagon for the same reason I'm unwilling to assume the evidence or the accusations here too, which is there's not yet evidence for that.
Maybe there will be.
But what I will say is this is the sort of thing that is done to people who become influential establishment critics.
I'll tell you a story that really stuck with me.
When I was a child, one of my childhood heroes was Danielsberger.
I've talked about this before.
I wrote an article on Rolling Stone when Daniel Ellsberg passed away two or three months ago.
And I was always obsessed with the Pentagon Papers in my childhood.
I read everything I could and got my hands on it.
I thought it was this incredibly fascinating story that this person very high up inside the U.S.
government Who had been trained for all sorts of security clearances to be one of the most influential and powerful people in Cold War U.S.
security state policymaking, turned on the very establishment that had given him all of his credentials and power because he realized the government was systematically lying to the country about the Vietnam War, conscripting Americans to go fight and die in the jungles of Vietnam in a war that the United States That American elites who are making these decisions knew they couldn't win.
And as a result, he risked his liberty to take these documents that were top secret that proved the government was lying and give them to the media, much like Edward Snowden did 30 or 40 years later, which is why Ellsberg said he considers Snowden a hero.
But one of the things that I can never understand, I don't just mean childhood but even into my adulthood, was the response of the Nixon administration when Ellsberg leaked these documents was to break into the office of Danny Ellsberg's psychoanalyst in order to discover his psychosexual secrets so that they could leak them to the media and discredit Ellsberg.
And the reason I didn't understand that in my naivete was it was a gigantic non sequitur.
Here's evidence proving the US government systematically lied to the American people about the Vietnam War.
Oh, well here's evidence showing that Daniel Ellsberg has bizarre fetishes and sexual fantasies and a wild sexual life.
Why would one Have anything to do with the other.
I wondered in my naivete.
And then as I began understanding better how these events work, I came to realize that this is often a tactic to discredit people that you want to discredit.
Sexual scandals are the thing that people love to wallow in.
They pay attention to them.
They make somebody radioactive.
It's the same that was done with Julian Assange.
I'm not suggesting again that these cases are identical.
I'm simply saying that it is not some bizarre conspiracy theory that when you want to go and discredit somebody because they have a politically influential platform spreading an ideology you find menacing.
One of the favorite ways to do that is to dig into somebody's sexual past and reveal things about what they did in their private life.
It's one of the most effective ways.
People love sex scandals.
They're easy to understand.
And eventually, they make people just want to turn away from the person that they've linked them to.
And again, there are cases where this was done and it turned out to be evidence-free.
Matt Gaetz is one of them.
And there are a lot of other ones as well.
So it's easy to mock, oh, Russell Brand got too close to the truth and the establishment decided they were going to concoct or fabricate accusations against him.
It doesn't have to be that primitive.
Again, this was a concerted effort on the part of media outlets to go searching for these kinds of allegations.
And they found one or two women.
Willing to make rape allegations from many years before, conflated them with two or three other women to make it seem like he has been accused of serial rape.
And again, this is something that he vehemently denies and anybody who purports to know the truth other than Russell Brand and these women are either extremely ignorant or extremely dishonest because there is no way to purport to know the truth.
about what happened here and there won't be until there is a kind of process that enables that to take place.
Now one of the other points I wanted to make here is I think it is so telling that Russell Brand has been widely labeled over the past several days as somebody who has changed his political beliefs and has become this far-right conservative figure.
And I say that because, as is true of so many other people about whom that is said, Like Matt Taibbi and of course I'm one of those people and so I have a lot of insight into understanding how this works.
The reality is Russell Brand has not really changed any of his views at all.
So let me just show you how these labels are so cynically weaponized by the corporate media and discourse generally because it has become part of the story that Russell Brand
Move to the right became a far-right figure and he did so as I'm about to show you in a viral conspiracy theory because he knew that this story was coming and could only find support if he was willing to become a far-right figure.
So the New York Times itself in reporting on Russell Brand's story says this in trying to explain Who he is.
Mr. Brand, an actor and former TV host, who has more recently built a significant following on his YouTube channel.
Now, in reality, he's on Rumble.
He puts clips on YouTube, but that's fine.
But he does most definitely have a very significant following.
He's one of the most watched political voices on video platforms.
He's a very influential figure.
There's no denying that, and that is absolutely part of the story.
And so the New York Times wants to turn their readers against Russell Brand, and this is what they say.
On this show, he opines on wellness and interviews prominent conservative figures.
That's how they define his show.
Russell Brand is a conservative where he interviews conservative figures.
Now, Russell Brand does interview conservative figures.
He interviewed Ron DeSantis recently.
He, I believe, just recently interviewed Candace Owens.
He has interviewed Tucker Carlson.
But Russell Brand never stopped being a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and a lot of left-wing figures in particular.
So here, from just a couple of months ago, from March of this year, Is Russell Brand interviewing the left-wing third-party candidate, Cornel West?
And here you see Cornel West on his Instagram page.
And this is what Cornel West says, quote, I enjoyed this rich dialogue with my dear brother, Russell Brand, who is a force for good.
There you see it.
There's a force for good.
And then he links to the interview.
If Russell Brand has become this far-right fascist figure, as is being routinely alleged, as part of this conspiracy theory to suggest that he did that in order to ensure he would get support when these... Can we stay on this page?
We don't have to keep moving.
In order to say that he did that in order to get support, here you have Cornel West, an indisputably left-wing figure, his whole life and still, Not just saying I enjoyed this dialogue with Russell Brand, but that he is a force for good.
Seems odd, doesn't it, that the leftist Cornel West would describe a right wing fascist as being a force for good?
Many of the topics that Russell Brown covers, many of the views that he most forcefully advocates are ones that have always previously many of the views that he most forcefully advocates are ones that have always previously He is, for example, a very harsh critic of the pharmaceutical industry.
And the way in which the pharmaceutical industry has seized control of the regulatory process of the United States government, regulatory capture, that has been a long-standing left-wing critique that is central to Russell Brand's worldview.
He is a vehement opponent of the US-EU data war in Ukraine.
He is somebody who denounces all the time the union of state and corporate power to censor the internet.
Only in the last couple of years, when the liberal left in the West has become militarist and aligned with neoconservatives and fanatical supporters of the censorship of political speech, have these views become considered right-wing.
But whatever else is true, the New York Times says, on this show, Russell Brand interviews conservative figures.
So here's the Cornell West interview.
In 2022, in late 2022, here you see him with Noam Chomsky, probably the most classic left-wing intellectual figure.
Noam Chomsky is too left-wing to appear on programs like MSNBC or CNN, and yet Russell Brand is putting Noam Chomsky on his show, speaks of Noam Chomsky frequently.
And then he also here interviewed Marianne Williamson, the Democratic Party challenger to Joe Biden, who is running from his left.
And that was just a couple of months ago as well.
Now, in part, it's just interesting in its own right, who gets accused of being a conservative and who gets accused of being far right and when and for what reasons.
From my understanding of leftism, Russell Brand is still, to the extent these labels even matter at all anymore, is still somebody who clearly has at least one foot in classic political leftism.
But here's the reason why There was an attempt to suggest that he is now on the right.
Here is this person, Rebecca Boynton, and this went very viral as this conspiracy theory offering her analysis, her conspiracy theory that Russell Brand moved to the right knowing these allegations were coming.
And he knew if he were on the right, he would be protected.
Let's listen to what she has to say.
Do we have this video that we can play?
- A couple of things that I wanna say about this Russell Brand in plain sight, Channel 4 dispatches documentary.
The first is if you don't think that Russell Brand has been waiting for this day to arrive since Me Too started, you are beyond help, my friend.
Of course he's known since Me Too started that there are women out there who have stuff on him and that it's only a matter of time before they come forward and expose him for what he is.
He's not an idiot!
He has known that this day was coming and so he's had the incentive over the last few years to cultivate a following of people who distrust the media, who think that the media are out to get Russell Brand and that they'll do anything that they can to do that.
That's what he's been doing since Me Too started.
That's the only way that he avoids being cancelled.
That's the only way that this guy with a God complex stays relevant.
It's if he cultivates this following of people who will disbelieve anything the media put out about him because they don't trust the media.
He has everything to gain from doing that and that's exactly what he's done successfully.
And the second thing that I want to say about this is These women have come forward with their evidence and they've kept their identities hidden.
And it's really easy to presume that the reason that they've kept their identities hidden is because they're afraid of Russell Brand.
And I would not blame them for that.
They have no doubt seen what happens to women who come forward and make accusations against men like Russell Brand.
Their entire lives are ripped apart.
These women could have families now.
We know that at least one of them, Alice, who started a relationship with Brand when she was 16 and can see that now for what it was, grooming, is working in television.
And we don't know in what capacity she's working in television.
She could be behind the scenes, but she could also be a presenter.
She could also be a celebrity.
And if she was, and she revealed her identity, the public would 100% say that she was looking for attention.
That she's making this up to make herself famous.
That she's not telling the truth, she's just trying to ride off Russell Brand's popularity in order to seek fame for herself.
So whilst it's easy to presume that these women did not expose their identities because they're afraid of Russell Brand, we should also consider that they might have done that so that the evidence stands on its own and nobody can accuse them of just wanting fame, notoriety, attention, money.
They have nothing to gain, absolutely nothing to gain from coming forward with their evidence.
And still we see the public choosing, wanting to believe this guy with the God complex, the one who has everything to lose and everything to gain in this scenario over the multiple.
So that is a deranged conspiracy theory that has been getting all sorts of support from all kinds of corners.
And it's this idea that Russell Brand had this years-long plot, this ploy, to move to the right in order to gain support.
Now, I want to say a couple of things, several things actually, about that video, this deranged, unhinged person rambling with this conspiracy theory that got a lot of ratification from all sorts of people.
First of all, it reminds me a lot of this Similar theory that people who are said to move to the right do so because they're motivated by money.
I know this is said about Matt Taibbi all the time.
It's said about myself all the time as well.
And the reason it makes no sense for such obvious reasons is that no one needs to move to the right to make money.
In fact, the easiest way to make money in media is to plant yourself inside the Democratic Party and spend all day talking about how Donald Trump is Hitler, how his movement is filled with Nazis, how American democracy is jeopardized.
If you look at who has gotten rich over the last six to seven years in media, it's the people who have done that.
Rachel Maddow went on air every night and said those sorts of things and was rewarded with a $30 million a year contract from Comcast and the ability to only broadcast her show one night.
They're paying her $30 million a year to broadcast a one night per week television program.
Richest person on Substack with the biggest subscriber base is this professor of history named Heather Cox Richardson who basically gives this primitive academic veneer to every kind of resistance liberal theory about how Trump is this historically unprecedented menace to democracy and that's how you get rich.
That's how the Lincoln Project scumbags pursued what they called intergenerational wealth and The most lucrative Twitch streamer who makes millions of dollars a year, maybe millions of dollars a month.
It's Hasan Piker, who essentially brands himself as this radical leftist because he is attached to the Bernie and the AOC wing, those incredibly radical anti-Ista.
And so this idea that you have to move to the right in order to get wealthy is the opposite of reality.
You can make so much money and become so wealthy, and so many people are, by planting yourself in the Democratic Party or in the mainstream liberal left.
Nobody needs to move to the right to make money.
And that's exactly the same here.
Look at the Democratic Party.
Every four years when they have their Democratic National Convention, one of the most beloved and featured speakers is Bill Clinton.
Somebody who was credibly accused of being a rapist and most definitely a sexual predator by all sorts of women.
And they don't care at all.
At all!
Women's groups spent the 1990s defending Bill Clinton because he had the right politics.
Every faction has tribe loyalties.
Are there going to be some people defending Russell Brand because they agree with his politics?
Of course!
But that's true of every political faction.
You wouldn't need to change your political tribe in order to get that kind of support.
And the proof of that is that the Democratic Party is perfectly willing To defend the most powerful people in their party when they're accused of rape.
Remember, Joe Biden in the 2020 election had several women who had accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior.
And then he also got accused of sexual assault, of something very similar to what Russell Brand is accused of doing by Tara Reade.
And most Democrats immediately step forward to brand her a liar, to insist she not be believed, to call into question her motives.
So there's plenty of examples of people who, if you're important enough to the Democratic Party or to the American left, and you get accused of something like this, you will be vigorously defended.
And that is because these kinds of accusations are constantly weaponized and selectively defended based on the politics of the person who is accused.
There is an endless number of examples demonstrating that.
Now, the other part of what that conspiracy theory said, that woman in that video said, that I find so fascinating, is what she said was that Russell Brand decided that he needed to groom an audience to distrust the media, the corporate media, so that when these accusations came, people wouldn't believe them.
Since when is distrust of the corporate media a hallmark or a indicator of moving to the right?
And this really gets to the heart of the political part of this story and the way in which these labels are used that I've been trying to find ways to express for a long time, which is that 15, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, where you fell on the spectrum of political debate probably was determined in a lot of ways by whether you identified as being a political conservative or a political liberal, or someone on the right or someone on the left, or a Democrat versus Republican.
And there are some issues where that's still the case, culture war issues in particular.
If you're on the right, you're likely to support pro-life policies.
If you're on the left, you're likely to support pro-choice policies.
There's still some relevance to those labels, but way, way less.
Much more important as a political metric Is whether you trust and respect and place credibility in the leading institutions of authority in the United States.
That is a much more relevant metric.
Because what happened after the election of Donald Trump was that most institutions of authority viewed Trump as this grave menace, as this destabilizing force, as somebody who needed to be stopped at all costs.
The CIA, the FBI, the corporate media, Big Tech, Wall Street, put their money behind Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden and now Donald Trump.
The FBI and the CIA concocted Russiagate in 2016 to stop Trump.
And then they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 in conjunction with Big Tech and the corporate media.
And so what happened was, in a sense, that woman is right.
That if you're somebody who now has as part of your fundamental worldview a distrust of leading institutions of authority, the corporate media, U.S.
security state, Wall Street, Big Tech, that does in a lot of ways cause people to perceive you as being on the right.
And the reason for that is because left liberals started to realize accurately that these institutions of authority We're political allies of the liberal left in the cause of stopping Donald Trump and his movement.
And that's why I've spent my entire career as a journalist opposing these institutions, the US security state, the corporate media, etc.
That used to be indicative of someone on the left.
And now, because those institutions of authority are so popular with the liberal left, if you now oppose those institutions as part of your worldview, a defining part of your worldview, it gets perceived as moving to the right, even though you haven't moved at all.
And the fact that she's defining Russell Brand's conservative worldview as defined by distrust for the media, something that of course Russell Brand has been espousing for as long as he's had a political view, really gets to the heart of this point about how these political labels are distorted and manipulated and misused because
It is really about whether you're anti-authoritarian or pro-authoritarian far more than these archaic interpretations of left versus right.
And you see that so often in how Russell Brand is being talked about and other people as well.
Now, the final point I wanted to make was I think it's really worth recalling that when Harvey Weinstein was first accused publicly, when these accusations finally emerged,
He also issued a statement in which he essentially suggested that the accusations were politically motivated because he expected that because he was aligned with American liberalism, a big-time supporter of the Clintons, that they would rush to his side.
And the evidence got so overwhelming that eventually they didn't, but that was his expectation.
Here is Harvey Weinstein's statement in the New York Times in October of 2017 at the very start of what kicked off the Me Too movement.
He said, quote, I realized some time ago that I needed to be a better person, and my interactions with the people I work with have changed.
I appreciate the way I behave with colleagues, and the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it.
I am going to need a place to channel that anger, so I've decided that I'm going to give the NRA my full attention.
I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party.
That is what Harvey Weinstein understood, was that if he could keep a lid on the worst accusations, that by declaring himself a liberal and a democrat, someone devoted to destroying the NRA, he would be supported because he had seen that happen with Bill Clinton and so many others.
Just today, or yesterday rather, a group of four senators, Tom Cotton, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lindsey Graham issued a letter urging the Biden administration to send new weapons to Ukraine.
Because they are among the greatest supporters of Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine.
Here's what they said.
Quote, this is their press release.
Tom Cotton, along with Senators Roger Wicker, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham, sent a letter today to President Joe Biden urging him to send MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems to the Ukrainian military for use in its war against Russia.
Quote, for many months, Ukrainian officials have stated the need for these weapons to fill a critical gap in long-range fire capability, providing that would enable Ukraine to strike key Russian logistics and communication targets as well as cruise missile and drone launch sites within Russia-occupied Ukraine.
They basically want the Biden administration to give long-range missiles to the Biden administration.
So here you have two of the most despised Republican senators in liberal culture.
Tom Cotton, who remember liberals said was such a fascist.
That whoever published his op-ed in the New York Times ought to have been fired, and he was.
The op-ed editor of the New York Times page was fired for publishing Tom Cotton's op-ed during the 2020 riots, urging the Army and the National Guard to be marshaled to quell those riots.
Lindsey Graham is one of the worst warmongers in the United States, has supported every single war proposed under Democrat and Republican presidents for as long as he's been in public life.
So here you have a war in Ukraine that is cheered by people like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham.
And somehow the people who cheerlead that war along with them are considered the good left liberals.
While the people who oppose that war, who stand opposed to Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham's warmongering and incessant desire to interfere militarily in other countries, people like Russell Brand, are accused of being right-wing or far-right as a result of taking that position.
Do you see how nonsensical and manipulative these political labels have become?
And you can say, That politics plays no role in these Russell Brand accusations, but if you look at how media outlets are talking about him, they certainly seem to be playing a pretty significant role to me.
In fact, the leading conspiracy theory is that Russell Brand moved to the right even though his worldview is very similar to what it's always been, including when he was a leading socialist or leftist supporting Jeremy Corbyn.
Because that was the only way he knew he could get support from these accusations.
At the end of the day, I do think that is an interesting component to the story, how these political labels are manipulated.
But at the end of the day, I think the way to treat these Russell Brand accusations is the same way to treat accusations of these kinds whenever they emerge in the media, which is You do not jump and assume accusations from anonymous people unaccompanied by evidence is true.
No matter how much you are attacked, you should express skepticism about the veracity of the accusations, especially when it comes to people who a lot of media outlets and a lot of other centers of power would like to see destroyed.
I don't think it makes sense to assume the accusations are fabricated or that they're part of some plot to bring somebody down, although I think it's important to recognize that has happened before and that it's very plausible.
But the only thing that matters when it comes to these accusations is evidence presented in a fair process that allows the adversarial process to seek truth.
And until that has happened, and we're not even close to that, I think it is incredibly immoral and ethically reckless to simply assume that Russell Brand is guilty of these horrible crimes simply by virtue of the emergence of these accusations.
All right, I just wanted to cover an op-ed that was published today in the New York Times by the former chief censor of Twitter, Yoel Raab.
Obviously, he ended up being a major figure in the Twitter files, the reporting that was done that Proved the US government was relentlessly pressuring and coercing Twitter to censor political views it disliked and to ban people that they regarded as their critics.
And it turned out that Yoel Roth was the head of the Trust and Safety Unit that made these decisions, even though he quickly revealed himself in interviews and in writings that had been uncovered to be just a very classic Uh, pretentious, pompous, ideologically charged, left liberal, and have obviously been making censorship decisions based on that ideology.
And today he has an op-ed in the New York Times, and there you see the headline on the screen, which is, Trump attacked me, then must did, it wasn't an accident.
And part of this op-ed is designed to Lament the fact that he went through a lot of personal turmoil.
He had to move his house because of threats.
Who knows how serious those threats were but that's his claim.
The much more interesting part of this op-ed, the only reason why I think it's worth mentioning and I think it is worth mentioning a lot for this reason, is that basically the point he's making is he's trying to warn the public That people are now so angry about the censorship regime and the public has been persuaded that disinformation experts in this disinformation industry are sufficiently fraudulent
That they are now the target of a lot of attacks, these people who are trying to censor the internet in the name of disinformation expertise.
And as a result, he says, the progress that they made after the 2016 election in imposing a censorship regime on the internet, ensuring that people they dislike couldn't be heard, is now finally eroding.
He's probably overstating the case to which that's true.
I hope it's true.
I wish it were true.
But I do think there's some truth to the fact that this backlash is now finally starting to happen.
So let's take a look at what he has to say in this op-ed.
Quote, private individuals from academic researchers to employees of tech companies are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and vicious online attacks.
These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect.
Note, again, this constant equation that goes back to what we were just talking about with Russell Brand, that if you oppose the censorship regime jointly imposed by corporate and state power, it means you're on the right.
Polling data does show, we've been over it so many times, that people who identify as Democrats want both big tech and the government to censor the internet in the name of fighting disinformation.
He says these attacks are having their desired effect.
Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online.
Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump's lies about the 2020 election.
Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election.
Now, I think it's such an important acknowledgement because that is the historical narrative on which I insist.
That it was the 2016 election, the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the election of Donald Trump, it was genuinely traumatic for liberal elites and liberal institutions of power, especially because it was followed or preceded just months earlier by Brexit.
And it was after the 2016 election, and because of the 2016 election, That they decided to get serious about censoring the internet because they realized if people are allowed to speak freely on the internet, that will endanger their power.
That is exactly what happened.
And I'm glad this op-ed confirms it.
He goes on, quote, now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.
You know what?
That's exactly what should happen.
If you're going to go around imposing a new censorship regime that goes so far as to censor the sitting President of the United States, and thinking that you so reside above ordinary political conflict that you have apprehended objective truth, And can decree what is misinformation and disinformation and what is objective truth and put your finger on the scale of our political debates and the primary means through which we conduct them, which is the internet.
You ought to have that kind of backlash and retaliation.
I don't mean violent threats.
But I mean, a big campaign of anger and subversion and targeting against the people doing this.
These are the most fundamental rights we have.
The right of free discourse, the right of free debate, the right of free thought.
And those who are deliberately threatening them ought to be the target.
Of serious opposition and I'm glad that they're feeling that and I'm glad that it's having that desired effect inside these platforms and inside the political culture.
He goes on, quote, when I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump's tweets for the first time.
Trump's tweet, following the violence of January 6th, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether.
Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.
Really?
You censored the sitting president of the United States from the internet and you didn't expect any blowback from that?
The person who was elected by tens of millions of people?
Quote, backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me.
You banned him from the internet!
Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company's head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire.
I've lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months, and repeatedly move.
Now, as I said, I don't think if he's actually gotten credible threats of violence, that's justified.
But everything short of that is.
He says, quote, this isn't a story I relish revisiting, but I've learned that what happened to me wasn't an accident.
It wasn't just personal vindictiveness or cancel culture.
It was a strategy, one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.
These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher.
Listen to why he's so concerned that free speech is starting to thrive again on the internet.
Quote, more than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana, and Mexico.
These democracies will most likely face the same risk of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years.
We should be worried about what happens next.
Now, when we recently reported on the study by the EU, study by the EU which purported to show that there was all sorts of disinformation being permitted online, particularly on Twitter, that they weren't censoring enough.
There they also explicitly said their main concern was the coming elections.
They wanted more censorship explicitly because they wanted more censorship explicitly because We're concerned about how free speech might result in outcomes that they couldn't control.
And that is precisely what this is really about, is the idea that if there's too much free speech on the internet, They can no longer control how people think, and they will therefore lose power, as they did with Brexit, as they did with Trump's victory, and with so many other things, until they started clamping down.
And what he's saying is, the backlash against this, including a recent court decision holding that the Biden administration's pressure on big tech was a violation of the First Amendment, one of the gravest and most systemic in years, is starting to undermine and erode their ability to maintain the censorship regime.
And for that, We ought to be celebratory.
Let me just show you the last part of this article.
Quote, one of the most recent forces in this campaign is the Twitter files, a large assortment of company documents, many of them sent or received by me during my nearly eight years at Twitter, turned over at Mr. Musk's discretion to a handful of selected writers.
The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitter's coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.
What they delivered was something else entirely.
As tech journalist Mike Mansik put it, Mike Mansik, one of the worst, most dishonest liberals in media, who constantly defends big tech.
As tech journalist Mike Mansik put it, after all the fanfare surrounding the initial release of the Twitter files, in the end quote, there was absolutely nothing of interest in the documents.
And what little there was had significant factual errors.
Now, The people who spent all that time claiming that have to be a little bit embarrassed about the fact that the revelations of those Twitter files, the topic that they covered, the pressure campaign emanating from the U.S.
government to Big Tech was just ruled to be one of the worst violations of the First Amendment in Decades.
In fact, the district court judge said it may be a type of censorship campaign the likes of which the judiciary had never seen before.
That is what UL Roth is trying to say.
Citing Mike Mancek and all those other corporate journalists who called it a nothing burger is something that you should ignore.
Now, just to conclude what he says here, quote, facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship.
Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.
Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms, with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct cost.
Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation.
Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts.
As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.
I mean, I'm always amazed by the embedded presumption that these people are qualified to decree what is disinformation and to censor our political speech accordingly.
But what he is saying is that there is now enough political pressure, enough backlash on the part of the public, Enough anger that these institutions are finally starting to feel intimidated and like it's not worth the cost to continue to censor.
I'm not nearly as optimistic.
He sees that as something that is a tragedy.
I see it as a cause for celebration, but I'm not nearly as convinced.
It's to the level that he thinks it's at.
But I absolutely do believe that this tide is turning.
Because inculcated within all of us is the value system that only despots censor political speech.
And it's gotten so extreme, I think, the attempt to actually censor the sitting President of the United States, which provoked anger and concern all over the world, including from leaders like Germany's Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron and the President of Mexico and various UN officials who never liked Trump.
With such an overstep and the ongoing campaigns to just continuously insist that the internet can only be safe if it's controlled by them is starting to become so offensive and facially dangerous that I do think this sort of retaliation is going to start to happen.
That is one of the major reasons we focus on it so much on the show.
I want people Who give themselves the title of disinformation expert to immediately be recognized as what they are, which is con men and frauds.
So that nobody takes these pronouncements seriously and everyone understands what they really are, which are thinly disguised efforts to render political censorship of the most classic and brute form, some sort of elevated data-driven science.
That is the fraud that has been perpetrated for a long time.
It absolutely came from the conclusion of the liberal elite in the West that free speech was too dangerous to permit on the internet.
Go ahead and call this right wing if you want, I really don't care.
I'm going to continue to make this a primary cause of mine because a free internet was the cause of the Snowden reporting.
It absolutely is one of the greatest tools we have to be able to communicate without the control of these maniacs who really are so enamored of their own political convictions that they will do anything to impose it on others.
They've given up on the idea of persuading.
And it is somewhat encouraging to see this cause getting more attention, to see it be the subject of this Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that is almost certainly headed to The Biden administration has appealed the ruling, though you see it on the screen.
We've covered this at length.
This is going to the Supreme Court.
We'll see what ends up happening.
But whatever else is true, the rage that is now building against the institutions that have been agitating for censorship, led by Democrats in Congress, the FBI, the Biden White House, and especially the corporate media is getting more and more intense.
And as far as I'm concerned, that should continue with no end in sight.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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As another reminder every Tuesday and Thursday night we have our live interactive after show where we move from Rumble to Locals which is part of the Rumble community that's for our subscribers only and if you're a subscriber to Locals community in addition to that show you get access to the daily transcripts that we produce for each one of our programs as well as a lot of independent journalism and original journalism that
Especially we're gonna start escalating increasing in the future and if you join our locals community It really does play a vital role in supporting the independent journalism that we do here each night And we hope that you will do that to join simply click the join button right below the video player on the rumble page And it will take you to our locals community for those of you been watching we are as always very appreciative And we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.. Eastern exclusively here on rumble.
