Using Russell Brand as Pretext, UK Govt & US Media Launch Multi-Pronged War on Rumble | SYSTEM UPDATE #150
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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.
First of all, thank you for indulging what turned out to be a small health event that prevented me from doing our show from Tuesday to Friday of last week.
I'm very excited to be back to talk to you about a news item that I think is of the greatest importance, which is the fact that So crucial is the online censorship regime to Western power centers that one thing is certain, any individual or company that even thinks about defying the censorship regime will be severely attacked and punished, often with weapons we have long been taught to regard as despotic when used by our nation's enemies.
And that is exactly what is currently happening to Rumble, the video platform and YouTube alternative that we chose to leave Substack for in order to produce our show here precisely due to its simultaneous ability to reach large audiences while proving its willingness to defend online free speech, even if doing so means confronting some of the world's most powerful institutional actors.
And exactly that which attracts us to Rumble and makes us regard it as so important is what makes it so threatening To these institutional actors now launching a war, there's no other way to describe it, against the platform.
Although we've been long expecting and warning that Rumble would come under sustained attack if it were really serious about its refusal to bow to this censorship industrial complex, and even though we have been warning that the attacks are likely to be extreme, even we are shocked by how quickly and aggressively this escalation has happened over the last week and how extreme are the legal threats and other forms of punishment that have already arrived with almost certainly worse ones on their way.
Last week, as we covered at length on Monday Night Show, the comedian, actor, and political commentator Russell Brand was accused through media outlets by four anonymous women of various acts of alleged rape, sexual assault, and other types of emotionally controlling behavior.
All of these alleged acts took place at least a decade ago, with the most recent one being 2013, ten years ago.
None of the alleged victims filed any police complaint at the time, or as of the time of these media accusations, at least none that we know of.
And our argument on Monday was as simple as it was we thought self-evident, that nobody should assume the truth of these unproven accusations.
Both Brand and his accusers are entitled to full due process, including adversarial scrutiny of the claims.
And that no punishments are justifiable against Brandt until such an investigation has concluded and a reliable finding of guilt or innocence has issued by a competent judicial body.
That's all basic, uncontroversial stuff, or so we would have thought.
But as we have repeatedly seen, most liberal institutions of power in the West no longer even pretend to affirm basic precepts of due process, just as they barely feign support any longer for foundational concepts of free speech.
The day following the emergence of these allegations against Brand in the media, Google's YouTube announced that it was demonetizing all of Russell Brand's future videos and past ones.
In other words, denying him the ability to earn a living the way he's been earning a living, producing video content primarily for Rumble, but also for YouTube without any warning, let alone a hearing of any kind or any adjudication of guilt.
In the following days, an absolute caricature of a British elite absurdity, a Tory MP named Dame Caroline Ginege, who is also the Baroness Lancaster of Kimballton, there you see her in all of her aristocratic gory, she wrote to multiple media outlets and to tech platforms, including Rumble and TikTok, demanding that brand be banned and or demonetized.
The government official demanding punishment against the subject of the crown who has never been accused formally of anything, let alone convicted.
The dame also demanded answers to a variety of questions about how Brand is compensated and what plans exist to cut off all of his revenues.
Again, all based on not even an accusation brought in court, just ones expressed anonymously by people through the media.
Most media outlets and tech platforms predictably, though alarmingly, complied with her demands Indeed, YouTube did so before she even asked.
But Rumble chose a very different course.
It publicly and emphatically refused to comply, noting that Brand had never been convicted of any crime, that Rumble is not competent to adjudicate his guilt or innocence, just like it's not competent to adjudicate truth and falsity in our nation's most complex political and scientific debates, and that, in all events, Rumble is little more than a free speech platform that permits citizens to speak and express themselves Provided that they abide by the law when doing so.
Rumble did not just reject the Baroness's demands, but made clear how dangerous and despotic they viewed her implicit threats as being.
And for that defiance, that very public defiance, the British government, the U.S.
corporate media, and the British media have launched a full-on assault on Rumble.
Obviously determined to punish it and make it an example for its refusal to obey the West's censorship regime.
Articles from liberal outlets like Associated Press instantly appeared proclaiming Rumble, citing as usual self-proclaimed disinformation experts, claiming Rumble was a vector of hate speech and dangerous disinformation.
British news outlets closely tied to both establishment parties in the UK, the Tories and the Labour Party, which was the Times of London, the first to circulate the accusations against Brand, published an article warning that the nation's new Online Safety Act Could be used to banish Rumble from being accessed in the UK altogether.
The Guardian and liberal activist groups like Media Matters, working in partnership as always, boasted of their success in pressuring corporate advertisers such as Burger King to disassociate itself with Rumble and cut off all ads, again, based solely on unproven accusations against one of the users on Rumble's platform.
And perhaps most amazingly of all, one of the most influential British tabloids warned today that Rumble's executives face the threat of arrest under this new online safety law if they try to enter the UK without fully complying with these new censorship orders.
Now, we cannot emphasize enough, even though we try, that the central priority of liberal power centers in the West is this censorship regime that they have imposed.
There is no greater priority for them, as they know they can no longer command trust from the public, and thus see a closed information system, one free of dissent, to be vital to their maintenance of power.
Seeing what they are now doing to Rumble for the simple refusal of Rumble to comply with their censorship orders over Russell Brand, when the platform did nothing more than invoke very basic and long-standing precepts of due process, And we are quite certain, by the way, that we're only at the beginning of the cycle of reprisal, not the end, when it comes to both Russell Brand and Rumble.
Looking at all this is really vital to understanding how this regime is functioning, and most importantly, how increasingly repressive they are becoming.
Then, after the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of Donald Trump, Western elites decided that assuming any degree of blame and responsibility was completely out of the question.
Instead, they needed an all-purpose villain to blame for all of their failures and embarrassment.
And of course, as we know, they chose, after a long list of other alternatives, The New York Times, James Comey, WikiLeaks, Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, pretty much everybody else who questioned Hillary Clinton, they eventually settled on Russia.
Everything became Russia's fault.
From Brexit and Hillary's defeat, to economic decline and racial strife.
The Kremlin really became the one-size-fits-all distraction every time Western leaders get caught in some moral or policy failure.
Oh, look over there!
It's that dastardly Moscow again!
Not our fault, but theirs.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is no stranger to embarrassments.
He has, of course, repeatedly got caught appearing in blackface well into adulthood, multiple times.
But his fondness for dressing up in mocking costumes of black people paled in comparison to what he did over the weekend.
Standing by the side of Ukrainian President Zelensky in the Canadian Parliament, Trudeau led a standing ovation, a very spirited one, for a Ukrainian hero who, it just happens to turn out, amazing how often this happens, was in fact an actual SS soldier who fought for the Nazis against Russia during World War II, in fact against Canada as well.
Rather than sincerely apologize for cheering an SS soldier, Trudeau instead suggested that Russia was somehow to blame.
A tactic that was repeated in a new interview this week on Jen Psaki's MSNBC program by Hillary Clinton, one of the originators of this tactic, and then repeated again by two prominent Fox News personalities who rose in defense of Joe Biden and his war policies in Ukraine.
We'll take a look at all of those instances to remind ourselves of what should be the amazing fact that, right in front of our faces, Western leaders insult everyone's intelligence by pointing to Vladimir Putin and the Russians every time they get caught in their latest lie or act of immorality or failure.
A few programming notes before we start our show.
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Being a subscriber not only gives you access to those Tuesday and Thursday night after shows but also the daily transcripts of each program here on Rumble that we publish there as well as a lot of the original journalism that we've been publishing and will continue to publish.
On that platform, and I think most importantly of all, supporting Rumble for not just our show but any show here on Rumble is a vital way to support the independent journalism that we do here.
As part of what you're going to see, part of the war that they're waging on Rumble is to try and scare away all corporate advertisers from associating themselves with Rumble, a campaign that is increasingly successful.
advertisers from associating themselves with Rumble, a campaign that is increasingly successful and if independent journalism of the kind that we do, of the kind that Russell Brand does, of the kind that Rumble is trying to foster, one that is immune from these pressures from corporate media and corporations is going to succeed, it's only one that is immune from these pressures from corporate media and corporations is going to succeed, it's only going to succeed with the support of those who really believe
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Sometimes when you cover the news every day, there are events that emerge that on the one hand are very disturbing but on the other produce a certain kind of gratitude because they vindicate so much of what you've been trying there are events that emerge that on the one hand are very disturbing but on the other produce a certain kind of gratitude because they vindicate so much of what you've been trying
I'm about to outline for you and dissect and analyze because I think its importance cannot be overstated.
And As anyone who has watched this show realizes, or who's followed my journalism for any amount of time before we began our show here, the centrality of this new online censorship regime, one that really was implemented and began to accelerate in the wake of 2016, both because of the wrong vote that British subjects cast on Brexit, and the wrong vote they then cast when it came to the 2016 presidential election in the United States,
Made Western elites conclude that a free internet and free speech on the internet was something they could no longer risk.
It became too dangerous to allow citizens to communicate amongst one another without their constant intervention, policing, control, and censorship.
And they all have but said so.
They claim, of course, in loftier terms that disinformation is the greatest danger the West faces, that it's threatening the integrity of Western elections.
But by that, what they really mean is that they can no longer allow or permit the Internet to be free, because allowing people to speak freely on the Internet forces them to lose control over how people think, what people believe, and therefore how people vote.
And you can listen to them with increasing candor and explicitness admit that this is the case.
Back in 2013 when we did the reporting enabled by Edward Snowden and the archive that he provided both myself and Laura Poitras when we met him in Hong Kong, the purpose of that reporting was very similar though also different in one important aspect.
What the Snowden reporting was ultimately about was the successful attempt by Western security agencies to grab hold of the Internet and ensured that nobody could act on the internet anonymously without detection.
That reporting proved that Western intelligence agencies under the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada had succeeded in their aspiration to turn the internet from what it was supposed to be, this great tool of liberation and emancipation,
into the most coercive and most dangerous tool of monitoring and control ever known to human history because it ensured that there was now a device a technology and innovation that instead of liberating us enabled our governments to control and monitor and watch everything that we were doing
To an extent never previously dreamed of as one of my stories that I did at the time recounted and I talked about this when it was time for the 10 year anniversary of that reporting that we conducted here with Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden.
I recall at the time that actual agents of the Stasi The notoriously repressive East German spying, domestic spying agency expressed jealousy and envy over what the internet permitted in terms of the kind of ubiquitous spying over populations that they could only dream of.
They were capable manually of opening maybe 25% of the mail that passed among East German citizens, whereas the internet allows full collection of every piece of data, even if they don't read all of it, even if they don't analyze all of it, they're able to store it and monitor it whenever they choose.
And that took surveillance to an entirely new level, one that no one in the West understood had happened because it wasn't done democratically, but in secret.
And the issue on which we now most focus, or one of the issues on which we now most focus that's the subject of tonight's show, is very similar.
It also involves the degradation of the internet, the conversion of the internet from a tool of liberation into a tool of immense forms of coercion.
By essentially taking what the internet was supposed to be, a way of freely expressing our thoughts and views to ones that are under their thumb more than ever in terms of being able to banish and outlaw and silence views they deem to be dangerous to their interests.
Not dangerous to societal interests or to societal security, but to their political interests.
And all these stories that have emerged, including the recent court ruling that the Biden administration is violating the First Amendment through its constant, ongoing attempts to threaten and coerce big tech censorship decisions, is all about the censorship regime.
And what was done over the past week to rumble provides, I think, the most vivid and most alarming illustration of how far we've come To date.
So let me first give you the context of what has happened.
Key to what's been going on is this new bill in the UK called the Online Safety Bill, which is very similar to what a lot of different countries are now adopting that obviously are designed to have a very benign sounding name.
Who's could possibly be against online safety?
Everyone wants the society to be safe.
Everybody loves safety for our children, for ourselves.
So they call it the online safety bill.
It's, in their view, what they want you to think, designed to do nothing other than allow them to take the internet and make it a safer place for you.
They're going to get rid of dangerous disinformation, things that are harmful to your children, any kind of hate speech.
These are benevolent people who are just looking out for your own good.
They're going to have the power to censor, but not for expanding political dissent or entrenching their own power.
No, these are good people.
These aren't people from like Iran or North Korea or Russia.
These are the good people.
These are the British and the Americans and the Norwegians and the Brazilians.
These are the nice people who just want to help.
And the British Online Safety Bill gave immense new powers to the British government to do exactly what all of these laws are intended in fact to do, which is empower the government and state officials to force internet companies to censor on their command according to their guidelines, to take control of what had been called content moderation policies out of the hands of tech executives and put it into the hands of our political leaders.
So it's now governments Deciding what political views can and can be heard online.
There's no more conceit that this is all the decision-making of private corporations acting autonomously on their own.
It's now just out in the open.
That's what all these bills essentially are designed to do is transfer this power to the state to control the flow of political information online.
And when this bill was really picking up steam in the British Parliament and when it became apparent that the establishment wings of both the Labour Party and the Tory Party were on board with it, The Economist, a very centrist news outlet that often is by no means a supporter of free speech absolutism, really sounded the alarm about how dangerous this bill would be.
And I'm citing them on purpose because they do often sanction and support controlling the internet in the name of disinformation.
But this bill went so far, and it's very illustrative of where these kinds of bills are going, that they really made clear how dangerous and despotic this online safety bill is.
And this online safety bill has just passed.
And the first thing they're doing with it is not only trying to force Rumble to banish Russell Brand from their platform, but threatening Rumble with banishment from the UK if it fails to comply.
The ink on this law is not even dry, and they're already proving that the gravest worries of their opponents, such as The Economist, were not just valid and true, but if anything, understated.
So here's what The Economist last year said, quote, there you see the headline Britain's online safety bill could change the face of the internet.
Tech firms will be incentivized to censor their users en masse.
Quote, Britain's government likes to trumpet the benefit of free speech.
Announcing a bill designed to prevent stroppy students, quote, no platforming speakers at universities, Boris Johnson told his millions of Twitter followers last year, quote, freedom of speech is at the very core of our democracy.
The higher education freedom of speech bill was included in the Queen's speech, which sets out the government's legislative agenda earlier this month.
Outside the lecture hall though, Mr. Johnson's government is accused of censorship in its own right.
Also in the Queen's speech was the online safety bill, a bumper piece of legislation that will impose sweeping new obligations on search engines, social media sites, forums, video sites, and the like.
Ministers say it is, quote, world-leading.
At 225 pages, with 194 separate clauses, and with up to 25,000 firms potentially affected, everyone agrees it is ambitious.
The arguments are about its consequences.
To its defenders, the bill, whose origins date back to Theresa May's time as Prime Minister, remember her, is designed to make Britain, quote, the safest place in the world in which to use the internet.
Do you see how they use the language of parental protection about how parents think of making the world safe for their children?
They're talking here about adults.
Obviously, they invoke children constantly, but it's a parental model that is in fact aimed at what kind of content adults can and cannot consume.
No one in this case, for instance, is talking about making Russell Brand unavailable to children.
They're demanding he be made unavailable, period.
To not just children, but all adults, but obviously the pretext of the bill is to make the UK the safest place in the world in which to use the internet.
The bill will impose a quote, duty of care on tech firms, a concept that began in health and safety legislation for the workplace.
Tech firms will be required by law to protect their British users from racism, death threats, sexual exploitation, dodgy advertisements, and much, much more.
Civil libertarians are not happy.
A legal opinion commissioned by the Index on Censorship, a charity, said the bill was likely to fall foul of the free speech provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Britain remains a signatory.
Daniel Davis, a conservative MP, has described it as a, quote, censors charter that would, quote, strangle free speech online.
The bill establishes several tiers of nastiness.
The worst tier is reserved for things that are against existing law, such as assisting suicide, making threats to kill, or assisting illegal immigration.
The biggest firms, the definition of big remains unclear, will have to proactively purge their site of such things.
The sheer size of big platforms means that it is not feasible for humans to check every post.
Firms will have to rely on automated enforcement.
But algorithms are blunt tools, says Mark Johnson of Big Brother Watch, which campaigns on civil liberties.
They often struggle with nuance and context.
Is an algorithm going to be able to reliably tell the difference between someone encouraging suicide and someone with postnatal depression posting about feeling suicidal?
With billions of dollars potentially at stake, he says, the risk is that firms will err heavily on the side of caution, leading to overzealous blocking of innocuous posts.
So even for the well-intentioned part that says, oh, we want to make sure there's no post encouraging suicide or violence or sexual exploitation, even in the best of intentions where a lot of people who hate censorship might agree, that websites should not be able to encourage or allow speech that facilitates illegal behavior, even there, what's instead likely to happen, because there's no way to monitor
The full volume, billions of posts flowing over sites like Facebook and Twitter and Google and increasingly growing sites like Rumble, is that artificial intelligence will be used and it will be done to ensure that virtually everything that's even potentially controversial is banned because the incentive with tech companies will always be to allow only the most tepid and most obviously safe messages to be heard.
I love Joe Biden.
I'm here to cheerlead for the British Prime Minister.
I love flowers.
My favorite color is blue.
Anything that is even slightly edgier than that is subject to being swept up in what will obviously be, by design, an overly zealous censorship regime that is being implemented by these tech companies out of fear that they will run afoul of these laws and their highly punitive fines.
That's the best intentioned part of this law.
Here's how much worse it is.
Quote, a second tier of content concerns posts that are not in themselves illegal but which are determined to be harmful.
Exactly what belongs in that category is unclear.
It is left for ministers to decide later.
But the government has talked about everything from vaccine skepticism and bullying to glorifying anorexia and hurling racist insults at Europe's football teams.
Sites will be required by law to minimize the chance that children see such posts.
For everyone else, they will have to make an active decision about whether to block or downplay such content or to carry on promoting and recommending it as they would anything else on their products.
Campaigners argue that these, quote, legal but harmful provisions amount to censorship by the back door and create an entirely new category of speech in law.
You may remember that the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Iaccarino, created a lot of controversy and a lot of suspicion about Twitter's commitment to free speech when she recently spoke at a panel and she described essentially exactly this framework where she called a category of speech lawful but awful.
Meaning it doesn't fall into that first category of encouraging child pornography or violence or suicide, but instead it's this kind of this amorphous middle ground, where maybe it's the sort of thing that has opinions that are bad, like vaccine skepticism, and even though it's not illegal, it's still awful, and therefore she said Twitter will do everything possible to minimize its spread.
That's what this law requires these sites to do for what's called this new backdoor of censorship, where they're admitting the speech isn't illegal, but because it's, quote, awful to whoever's deciding that, it nonetheless has to be minimized or spread impeded.
Ruth Smeeth, a former MP and the boss of Index on Censorship, calls these provisions, quote, a clusterfuck.
The government has tried to reassure doubters by pointing out that tech firms will be free to leave such posts up if they choose.
Ms.
Smith is dismissive, quote, Can you imagine the political pressure on any platform that publicly says they're okay with this stuff?
Those that decide to suppress it will again depend on idiot savant algorithms.
This could have international repercussions.
Tech firms may choose to try to apply the new law in Britain only.
If they decide that it is too difficult to create a new set of rules for a subset of their users, one option is to apply at least some of the law's provisions to their services anywhere.
There is precedent.
Last year, Britain brought in the age-appropriate design code, which prescribes stricter privacy for children online.
Google, TikTok, and others made worldwide changes as a result.
In other words, Once a country goes further than any other to impose censorship or to make a freedom of speech regimen more restricted than anywhere else, companies to comply won't do the work or spend the money to comply only for that country.
They'll change their laws, their rules to make that censorship regime applicable in all countries because it's easier to do.
So every time one country goes a bit further in its censorship requirements than any other, it doesn't just affect the people in the country that did that.
It also affects everybody everywhere, including people who have no control over those governments, because these tech firms will comply on an international basis, assuming they don't care about free speech, which is true of Google and TikTok and Facebook, and will impose a censorship on everybody.
Quote, another possibility is that some foreign firms, particularly smaller ones, may stop serving Britain entirely.
In various ways, the price of safety may be silenced.
So that was the law, and it was one that the economist, I think, did a very good job of dissecting and laying out the dangers of.
And yet, here we are now, September 19, 2023, just this week.
Right around the time that these Russell Brand accusations emerged, there you see from Reuters, the UK's online safety bill is finally passed by Parliament.
It was just passed this week.
And before the ink has dried, before His Majesty has even given the Royal Assent, as I'm about to show you, British media outlets and politicians are saying, Rumble, we have this new law on our hands, and if you don't start obeying, In the way that YouTube did without even asking, you may be banished from Britain, in fact your executives may be subject to arrest if they try and enter the UK under this new powerful law that we have in our hand, one that they of course
Pretended was so innocuous in order to get it passed.
Here's Reuters, quote, Britain's long-awaited online safety bill setting tougher standards for social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok has been agreed by Parliament and will soon become the law, the government said on Tuesday.
Technology Secretary Michelle Donilon said the bill was a, quote, game-changing piece of legislation.
Do you see how they boast about how unprecedented these new frameworks are?
Quote, today this government is taking an enormous step forward in our mission to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online, she said.
If companies do not comply, media regulator Octcom will be able to issue fines of up to 18 million pounds, $22.3 million, or 10% of their annual global turnover.
Now, given the magnitude of that kind of punishment, do you think any company other than Rumble and maybe Twitter, depending on their commitment, is going to risk the punishments necessary to defy these governments?
Or simply decide I'd rather not do business in a country that forces me to deny to my adult users political content that they want to see simply because the government orders me to censor?
Now, we're seeing how dangerous this is in a very concrete example.
I don't have to speak in the abstract here.
I don't have to speak about the possibilities of this danger.
I don't have to warn of the obvious slippery slope.
We're seeing already how repressive this has made the UK and the US media Now desperate to punish Rumble for its defiance of doing what it's told.
As you know, on Monday, we devoted our show to the allegations that were brought against Russell Brand, who is our colleague.
He has a show here on Rumble.
I believe I'm going to appear on his program tomorrow.
I think he just returned to Rumble today with his show, the first since the allegations emerged.
And As I said, my view on Monday, and there you see it right in the headline, Russell Brand accusations and the importance of due process.
Essentially arguing that these are only allegations that come from anonymous people.
They have not been subject to the rigors of judicial scrutiny or investigative processes.
And even if they get to that stage, even if Russell Brand is arrested, the police go to his house and detain him and he's formally accused, until he's convicted he's still entitled to the presumption of innocence.
And as I said on Monday, the presumption of innocence is not just a legal doctrine that prevents states from imprisoning people until they prove their guilt in a court, it's also a societal value.
We don't go around assuming people are guilty of the worst crimes based solely on unproven accusations.
At least I don't, and I won't.
Now, other companies obviously have a much different view.
Here from the New York Times, on September 19th, the very day the UK announced that the Parliament had approved this bill, from the New York Times, quote, YouTube blocks Russell Brand from making money through its platform.
They didn't even wait to be told what to do, YouTube.
They knew what the government was demanding of it and expecting of it.
To get rid of Russell Brand, one of the most influential critics of the key priorities of the Western security states, such as the war in Ukraine.
As well as the most sacred pieties of the Western establishment over the last three years, which is all of their orthodoxy surrounding COVID and pharmaceutical products and all of the lies that were told as part of that pandemic.
Russell Brand reaches, as a result of his cultural celebrity built up over many years, but also his obvious charisma and talent in how he speaks, millions of politically engaged young people and feeds them a steady diet of anti-establishment, well-articulated messaging that encourages them to be skeptical about establishment pronouncements and not just uncritically ingest them.
That's what makes him dangerous.
That's what makes him hated.
And so here you see YouTube doing exactly what it knew the establishment in the UK and the US wanted it to do.
Which was prevent him from earning a living.
Quote, the comedian's channel has over 6 million followers, but he will be unable to draw income from advertising around his videos.
Quote, YouTube suspended the comedian actor Russell Brand on Tuesday from making money from videos posted to the social media platform, three days after British news organizations published an investigation in which several women accused Mr. Brand of sexual assault.
The channel is a potentially significant source of income for Mr. Brand, who is earning money through advertisements and paid promotions.
A spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email that Mr. Brand, whose channel on the platform has 6.6 million subscribers, was suspended for violating YouTube's quote, creator responsibility policy.
Quote, if a creator's off-platform behavior harms our users, employees, or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community, the YouTube spokeswoman said.
I'd like to ask, what off-platform behavior has Russell Brand been found to have engaged in that harms YouTube's users or ecosystem That puts him in violation of its guidelines sufficient to justify demonetizing.
What is it that he's done?
I'm aware that there are accusations that come from women whose identities we don't know, wandered through media outlets that have made their animosity toward Russell Brand very well known for many years, that accuse him of some horrific acts, undoubtedly horrific acts.
But they're just accusations.
And are we at the point, do we want to be at the point where somebody's livelihood can be destroyed, will be destroyed?
As long as you find somebody willing to make a accusation of sufficient gravity against the person?
Do we all now have the power in our hands to destroy the, not just reputations, but the livelihood and ability to be heard of any individual that we want by accusing them of something terrible?
It appears that way, at least if you believe that YouTube is applying some kind of principle, as they claim, as opposed to what they're really doing, which is engaging in obvious political censorship and capitulation to the commands of establishment sectors that hate Russell Brand, not because they believe he did this, but because his political messaging is so threatening.
I made very clear on Monday, I am not one of the people willing to insist or pronounce That Russell Brand is innocent, that these women are lying.
I'm not getting on board with that kind of evidence-free determination.
I don't know the answer to that question.
Genuinely, I don't know.
And outside of Russell Brand and the four women who have accused him, I don't believe anybody else does either.
And we won't know until there's an actual process with transparency and fairness and adversarial balance that follows the rules of evidence and the systems we've developed as a society over hundreds of years to make the most reliable and faithful determination of truth and falsity we're capable of making under these circumstances.
That has not happened yet.
We are not close to that point yet.
And so to watch the most powerful corporation in the world, Google, Just wipe off, just delete a person based solely on media accusations.
No matter what your ideology is, you have to find that alarming.
Because even though you may be happy that it's done to Russell Brand because you think he's a rapist or you think he has views that are harmful or whatever your justifications are.
Obviously, unless you're somebody who's just a complete establishment servant and hack and believe probably accurately that none of this will ever happen to you because you're always harmless to the establishment, you make no waves to anybody in power.
As long as you're anything other than someone like that, it should be very easy to see the grave danger of allowing YouTube to do this.
And yet very few people stood up and objected for obvious reasons that no one wants to be seen as if they're defending somebody accused of serious crimes of sexual assault and rape.
Now I have to say there was a lot more pushback than typically is the case here and I was encouraged to see that.
I think a lot of people are reaching the point where they've had enough of this sort of game playing that should be so anathema to all the basic values that we have about how society ought to function, about how citizens ought to be treated by governments and by the most powerful corporations in the world.
Obviously there are enough trained SEALs who will never get past their dislike of Russell Brown's politics and will therefore cheerlead and say that he's a rapist and that anyone defending him, they can't ever comprehend that someone might be Instead they must be defending someone for not caring about rape.
I've heard all those same accusations when defending Julian Assange for many years.
Those don't deserve the dignity of even being taken seriously, let alone of allowing them to influence your decision-making processes or your behavior.
It is imperative that people stand up for this principle that people should not have their livelihoods destroyed and their reputations left in tatters and be rendered unable to earn a living to support themselves and their families based solely on unproven accusations, let alone
When it's at the hands of the most powerful and the wealthiest corporation in human history, which obviously no matter how powerful you are, you can never genuinely confront, which is Google.
The New York Times goes on, quote, while Mr. Brand's earlier stand-up routines had a broadly left-wing focus, skewering the British establishment and examining subjects like social inequality, he has recently shifted to content more aligned with conservative talking points, often seeming to target an American audience.
Russell Brand's, first of all, That's true.
If it is true that Russell Brand had generally devoted himself to a left-wing messaging campaign... Excuse me while I drink some water.
I still have the lingering effects of that health issue that forced me to miss my show last week.
I feel a bit like Marco Rubio in the State of the Union response, but I will probably have to ingest water.
But if it's true that Russell Brand has long promoted a left-wing message and now suddenly is perceived as disseminating a right-wing message, I think we ought to be asking, is that a factor in why these allegations that have obviously been lurking for many years, they were an open secret in media?
That there were women out there who had claims like this.
Why is it that after only 10, after 10 years or 15 years, did media outlets succeed in chasing down enough of these women and persuading them to come forward when they never did that before?
When, as the New York Times says, Russell Brand had seemingly always had a broadly left-wing focus.
And it was only when, according to the New York Times, he has recently shifted to content more aligned with conservative talking points, did media outlets suddenly prioritize the weaponization of these accusations against him.
I can assure you people in media have heard these accusations for many years.
And again, none of these women came forward voluntarily.
They were chased down by these media outlets who badgered them and heckled them and persuaded to finally come forward.
And it may not be the motive, but it's certainly notable that it happened at exactly the time when, according to the New York Times, he switched from a left-wing focus to one that aligned with conservative talking points.
But the premise itself, as we've been over many times before, is preposterous.
Russell Brand's primary topics are his opposition to the NATO-CIA war in Ukraine that is being conducted by Joe Biden in the EU.
Since when is opposition to NATO war and CIA war a right-wing talking point as opposed to a left-wing cause?
He is an aggressive skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry and its capture, its regulatory capture, over the parts of the government meant to oversee it.
Since when is being a critic of big pharma and the way corporations control the government for its own corporate interest, a right-wing talking point as opposed to a left-wing talking point.
He is a outspoken opponent of the kind of censorship that he's now being victimized by.
Same question there.
But as we have been over many times, what the New York Times and other outlets like it mean when they accuse people like Mac Taibbi or Russell Brand or myself of switching from a left-wing orientation to a right-wing orientation is that we have maintained our skepticism and distrust of institutions of power at the very same time that the left and American liberals by the left
I mean the mainstream left that stays attached to the Democratic Party or the British Labour Party now views those institutions like the CIA the FBI Homeland Security the CDC as being their allies and therefore sees any critics of it as being their enemies and therefore on the right That's all this means.
But the much more interesting question on whether Russell Brand is on the left or the right is the perception by the New York Times of the world that he suddenly switched and that happened to coincide with the emergence of accusations that have been lurking for a long time while Russell Brand was viewed, as the New York Times put it, as somebody with a broadly left-wing focus.
The article goes on.
On YouTube, recent videos have included Mr. Brand discussing his skepticism toward COVID-19 vaccines and dissecting his own appearances on Fox News.
Mr. Brand also hosts a show on Rumble, a social media network associated with conservative voices, but he did not appear for a scheduled broadcast on Monday.
Do you know how they just take these labels and just throw them around wildly?
Why is Rumble a platform associated with conservative voices?
Same question as all the ones that I just asked.
I can point to all sorts of obvious leftists, such as our friends at the Revolutionary Blackout Network and a bunch of British leftists who are critical of the Democratic Party or the Labor Party from the left, or people like Kim Iverson and myself who have long been associated With the left who have not changed any of our views, even though I don't care about those labels.
But again, that's that same framework that just gets repeated over and over.
All right.
So that's the media part of the context, the part of the context that involves this new law that critics warned would be used for exactly the kinds of repressive ends that before the law is even formally a part of the law because His Majesty has yet to assent to it, is already being used in exactly the way critics were concerned about.
Now!
Outside of the scope of this law, a member of parliament went on a frenzy.
I mean, she had some kind of neurotic break.
She must have been taking either enormous amounts of Ritalin that kept her up all night and made her incredibly productive, or she suffered some obsessive compulsive disorder because the flurry of correspondence that emanated from this baroness, and let's remember, she is a baroness, a real baroness, a dame.
was incredibly prolific.
She was writing to everybody demanding that they either take action against Russell Brand or give her the information to demonstrate that they were taking action against him.
First she wrote a letter And this was actually from the House of Commons to TikTok, there you see, to Theo Bertram, the Director of Government Relations of TikTok, and this is what she said in the letter.
Quote, I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand.
In the context of a user of TikTok with more than 2.2 million followers on the platform, the cultural media and sports, that's the committee she chairs, is raising questions with the broadcasters who previously employed Mr. Brand or production companies who employed him to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today.
Although Mr. Brand no longer appears on television, he now has a follower base on social media, including on TikTok, where this weekend he republished his preemptive response to the accusations made against him by the Sunday Times and Channel 4's dispatches.
While we recognize that TikTok is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand, and his content may be within the community guidelines set out by the platform, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.
We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his TikTok post, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him, and what the platform is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare and victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.
And there you see her, in all her glory, This isn't even her full title.
She just signed it in a very humble way.
Dane Carolyn Gineage, NBEMP, who is the chair of the Culture, Media, and Sports Committee, but as I indicated, she's also a Baroness.
Specifically, she's the Baroness Lancaster of Kimballton.
One of the landed gentry, a real member of the British aristocracy.
So I note this, and here she is, here's a photo of her looking exactly the way that you would expect someone like this to look, because I want to make sure she's given the due respect she is owed as part of the British aristocracy, part of the landed gentry, a real baroness, a dame, And there she is.
You see that stylish hat that she's wearing that matches her dress and she's holding up some sort of book or award that she was given.
Very, very proud.
So I think it's important to understand that we're not dealing here with just some commenter, some member of the House of Commons.
This is a blue-blooded member of the British aristocracy, and for a lot of you, like me, that's probably pretty persuasive about why someone like this should, in fact, be trusted with the power to determine what content should and shouldn't be allowed, and to instruct platforms like TikTok and Rumble Who they can and cannot allow to earn a living on their platform.
This is who's doing it.
In case you need a visual, I think the visual is important.
As well as her aristocratic title.
Here's her full title on the screen.
It's Caroline Julian Dinege.
Dame Caroline Julian Dinege.
I think we omitted that.
Baroness Lancaster of Kimballton, DBE.
Now, it wasn't just...
TikTok that she sent this letter to, although here you see the boasting that she did on the House of Commons site about the letter to TikTok.
She also wrote to the BBC.
C.
So first she had her letter to TikTok, in which she demanded a bunch of information.
She wrote a second letter to the BBC, or to TikTok rather.
Oh, this actually, let's go back to this, because this was not actually to TikTok, my apologies.
This was to GB News, which is a media outlet in the UK, and their crime that had made the Baroness extremely angry Was that one of their hosts went on a program and said positive things about Russell Brand.
And she wrote a formal letter on the letterhead of the U.S.
House of Commons expressing her outrage about this and demanding to know what was being done about it.
Here is the letter that she posted on the House of Commons sites and she said, this is to GB News, quote, we are also aware that during the weekend of 16-17 September, GB News presenters opted to use their social media platforms to defend Russell Brand against accusations of rape and sexual assault.
While GB News is not responsible for the content, it is concerning that Beverly Turner, who described Mr. Brand as a hero and invited him to appear on her show, subsequently fronted GB News' coverage of the allegations regarding Mr. Brand on the morning of September 18.
During that broadcast, Ms.
Turner announced that, quote, if he'd offered to come on the morning, we'd have had him, let's be honest.
While Ms.
Turner was challenged on her comments at length by her co-presenter, Andrew Pierce, Do you see how despicable this woman is?
Having a presenter so clearly supporting an individual who is the subject of intense media coverage, including speaking, seeking their appearance on the show, undermines any perception of due impartiality in the broadcasting.
Do you see how despicable this woman is?
How deceitful she is?
First of all, what she's angry about is the mere possibility that these media outlets would air the allegations that Russell Brand was guilty of rape and violent sexual assault.
She wants those allegations aired.
What she's angry about is that they had considered allowing him to appear on his show to respond to those allegations so that he himself could be heard, not just the allegations for these anonymous victims.
And she had the audacity to incite the need for impartiality in the broadcast.
So here she is trying to control the news content of this media outlet by saying, you better not allow Russell Brand on your set while you're reporting on the fact that he's accused of rape and violent sexual crimes.
He has no right to be heard.
Impartiality demands that you not allow him on your show.
We want you to report on this.
Remember, she's speaking as a member of the government.
Instructing media outlets on what they're allowed to say and what they're not allowed to say.
But even worse than that, she acknowledges that there was a full-on debate between one of these hosts who was saying that Russell Brand deserves due process and her co-host who was very critical of Russell Brand.
And note that she is only angry about the inclusion of a host who defended Russell Brand, while not at all angry about the host who was highly critical of Russell Brand.
And she cites, again, impartiality to demand, not that you have what happened, which is two people offering the audience both sides of a debate, but that instead you have only one side of the debate, her side.
That is heard on the news.
If you are a government official and you are writing letters like this to media outlets, despotically instructing them on what they are allowed to say, and despicably demanding that a person that you want to destroy and have his reputation destroyed, not even allowed to be heard on the media network, and implicitly threatening the outlet with reprisals officially if they dare to allow the person to come on the show and be heard, you are someone completely unfit to serve in that position.
You're pretty much unfit to do anything.
But just in the spirit of civility and in recognition of her aristocratic position, I'll confine my statement to that.
That is not the role of what a government official ought to be doing.
But it's exactly what she's doing.
She did it first at TikTok, then she did it to GB News, and then she concludes this way.
We would be grateful if you could set out your Just set out your discussions with GB News presenters on their responsibilities on due impartiality and professionalism when seeking to front coverage of news events and any actions you intend to take in response to these issues.
She made very clear she wants that woman who defended Russell Brand's due process rights fired or punished.
And she wants to know what's going to happen in the future to ensure that the other side of this debate, namely the side of the debate that says Russell Brand deserves to be heard and he deserves due process, be excluded going forward from the media discourse.
I can't find any more words that I feel comfortable using to express how abusive and revolting this woman is.
But she wasn't done.
She also wrote a letter to the BBC.
Here is the letter she wrote to the BBC on September 20th.
Quote, I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand, which raised significant questions, not only about the culture of the industry in the past, but whether that culture still prevails today.
Please could you also assure us that while respecting any potential police investigations, all information that can be disclosed publicly will be so.
Finally, we will urge you to encourage people to report incidents to the police.
She's telling the BBC, which obviously answers to the government in the UK, we expect you to use your platform to encourage others to go to the police and accuse Russell Brand of crimes.
Now, she wasn't remotely done yet with giving out her orders to social media companies and to media outlets.
She wrote a...
Letter to Rumble as well.
Remember, she didn't have to write to Google.
Google already obeyed what she wanted without even being asked by demonetizing him in advance.
So here's the letter she wrote to Rumble.
As I said, she was a very busy despot.
She, on September 20th, wrote to Chris Papalovsky, who's the chief executive officer and the founder from 2013 of Rumble, and she wrote the following about Russell Brand and Rumble.
I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand in the context of him being a content provider on Rumble with more than 1.4 million followers.
The Culture, Media and Sports Committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed Mr. Brand to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today.
However, we are also looking at his use of social media.
Including on Rumble, where he issued his preemptive response to the accusations made against him by these various media outlets.
While we recognize that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.
We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him.
If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr. Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.
We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.
You're sincerely Dame Caroline Dineage, D-B-E-M-P, chair of that pathetic committee.
Now, think about what she's doing here.
This is a member of the government going around like a little beaver, a little busy bee, To every source of income that she thinks Russell Brand has and trying to cut it off.
Using the power that she has just inherited under this new law to threaten media outlets and social media platforms.
That any attempt to allow Russell Brand to make a living will be looked upon her as something deeply disturbing if not illegal.
She's leaving no question about her intentions.
That's the whole point of why you write these letters.
To put pressure on these companies to say, we're watching you, and you know our position.
We, the government, are expecting you to punish Russell Brand, even though he's never been convicted of any crime.
Now, before I show you Rumble's response that has triggered this war against it, something for which they ought to be very proud, let me just show you a little bit more about who this Baroness is.
Under British law, members of the Parliament are required to disclose their conflicts of interest, in particular gifts or other benefits that they've received from British companies that they may have some effect over in their legislation.
And among the gifts that she's received, you'll be shocked to learn, include Google, the owner of YouTube, the chief competitor of Rumble, A company which Rumble is currently suing over antitrust violations.
And here you see that she received some nice gifts from Google.
Here's the Baroness.
There you see the picture of her.
Dame Caroline Dineage.
I really would love for somebody to, who's an expert in the rituals of British aristocracy, to let us know when is the appropriate time to use dame or baroness, because it seems inconsistent, even on her part.
And we want to make sure to get that right.
Here you see she lists the gifts, benefits, and hospitality from UK sources and one of them is Google UK.
She has the list of the address of the donor.
They're at Buckingham Palace Road.
Sounds like a lovely location.
And the amount of the donation she received was two tickets with hospitality and accommodations as guest of YouTube at the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Arts 2023, a value of £3,300.
2023, a value of 3,300 pounds.
She accepted that on June 26, 2023.
Sounds like a really lovely time.
Who wouldn't want to go to the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Arts and stay at what I'm sure was a very lovely hospitality accommodation paid for by YouTube?
Especially when you're about to be in charge of the law that dictates to social media companies what content they can and cannot Allowed to be held and to impose punishments on other platforms, such as YouTube's potential rival, such as Rumble, to go on a vindictive campaign after them, the way she's doing now.
So, that was among the gifts she has received.
There's other gifts from Google as well, at least one that we know of from that site.
And then, as we mentioned, here from The Independent, You see there her receiving an honor for the campaigning MP who pioneered the online safety bill.
And as we told you, it was Dame Caroline Dineage, who she was recognized by the Princess Royal on Tuesday for political and public service as a result of sponsoring this online safety bill, this repressive censorship law that the UK passed that's now being used to threaten to banish Rumble from the country.
Quote, the MP first responsible for the online safety bill has said, quote, online platforms need to make sure that they're enforcing the law a lot more rigorously than they already are.
Following the inquest into the death of teenager Molly Russell, Dame Caroline Dineage was recognized by the Princess Royal on Tuesday for political and public service after serving in seven governmental departments under three prime ministers.
The former Digital and Cultural Minister, who has held ministerial responsibility for the online safety bill when a first draft was published, spoke about the duty of social media platforms after picking up her honour in Windsor.
Following the landmark ruling at the inquest into Molly's death, remember that's a 14-year-old girl, the senior coroner recommended the government, quote, consider reviewing the provisions of internet platform to children, including the possibility of separate platforms for adults and children.
The 14-year-old from Harrow in Northwest London ended her life in November 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online, prompting her family to campaign for better internet safety.
The MP for Gospod, which is this baroness, now sitting on the back benches, told the PA News Agency, quote, I met Molly Russell's dad a few times during the time I was nearly two years old, I was nearly two years as digital manager, and the story is just so horribly tragic, and it's sadly so not unique.
We hear so often, sometimes it's just young pupils stumbling off in very unsuitable content online, but in other cases, it's a lot more serious as it was in Molly's case.
The internet can be a wonderful place, but we also need to make sure that it's got the right protections in place for children in particular, but also for other vulnerable people.
And certainly the online platforms need to make sure they're enforcing the law a lot more rigorously than they already are.
Do you see how she just so flagrantly exploits the death of this 14-year-old girl who ended up committing suicide?
And she went around the country dressed in that little yellow hat and the matching yellow and black dress, collecting awards for making the internet more safe by pretending she was doing so in order to keep inappropriate content away from young girls, such as the 14-year-old girl who tragically committed suicide.
And the minute she gets her hands on the law, she starts using it to demand that all of Russell Brand's income be cut off because he opposes a war that she supports.
And he's critical of a health policy regime that she supports.
Do you see what lying monsters they are?
I mean, what kind of rotted soul must you have to be willing to use the death of a 14-year-old girl to pretend that you're interested in keeping children away from inappropriate or harmful content on the internet, knowing that as soon as you get your grubby, dirty hands on that law, that instead you're going to use it to demand the censorship of one of the West's most influential dissidents, dissidents of policies that you support?
That little girl was a toy for her, a little prop that she carried around, using for her own purposes, knowing that she was the whole time while speaking to her father.
Now, censorship is part of the family business in the Baroness's household.
Here is her husband.
Let's introduce you to him.
His name is Mark Lancaster.
There you see his picture on the screen.
And the question is, how does this leave ministerial lineup in the Ministry of Defense?
This is how the department currently looks.
Mark Lancaster is a reservist and serves as a colonel in the Royal Engineers.
He has also been selected as Deputy Commander 77 Brigade.
What is the 77 Brigade of which he's a deputy commander?
The Baron is his husband.
I'm glad you asked because it's important for you to know.
Here from the BBC, the Army sets up a new brigade, quote, for the Information Age.
Here's what the 77th Brigade that her husband runs is, quote, The 77th Brigade, made up of reservists and regular troops, based in Hermitage, Berkshire, will be formally created in April.
The Army says it's learned valuable lessons from Afghanistan, not least that it can't win wars using pure military force alone.
Let's put up the text of the BBC article.
The brigade will be made up of warriors who don't just carry weapons, but who are also skilled in using social media such as Twitter and Facebook and the dark arts of psyops, psychological operations.
They will try to influence local populations and change behavior through what the army calls traditional and unconventional means.
Civilians with the right skills will work alongside regular troops and reservists and could be sent anywhere in the world to help with hearts and minds.
He's part of a special brigade for the digital age designed to manipulate hearts and minds.
To engage in the dark arts of propaganda.
Learning the lessons that the British claim they learned in Afghanistan where they were despised and hated.
Until they were finally expelled only for the Taliban to march right back into office and they realized that in the age of the internet, they need to improve significantly their ability to manipulate and deceive the public using the dark arts of disinformation, the very things people like this claim to combat.
And her husband is the deputy commander of this propaganda brigade, this battalion that's part of the British military.
So he's over here spewing out propaganda while she's over here using this law to destroy those who dissent from the propaganda he's disseminating.
It's an incredibly vivid microcosm of how the government itself works, of how Western governments themselves work.
Now we just showed you the Baroness's letter to Rumble demanding that they confirm that they will follow in Google's path and cut off Russell Brand's ability to earn a living on the platform.
Only the response they got from Rumble was quite different than the one they got from everybody else.
And here was that response posted by Uh, Chris Pawlowski, I thought we were going to have the amount of retweets and likes on the tweet.
We don't, but it went very, very viral.
It was something like retweeted something like 30,000 times, like 150,000 times.
It had a gigantic impact.
You see there the view is 17.8 million, which isn't a particularly reliable metric, but the retweets and the likes were certainly one of the highest of the years because the response resonated so loudly, so widely.
And let's take a look at what Twitter said in response to the UK government, in particular to this Baroness.
It was retweeted 27,000 times, this letter was.
Here's what they said, quote, today we received an extremely disturbing letter from a committee chair in the UK Parliament.
While Rumble obviously deplores sexual assault, rape, and all serious crimes, and believes that both alleged victims and the accused are entitled to a full and serious investigation, it is vital to note that recent allegations against Russell Brand have nothing to do with content on Rumble's platform.
Just yesterday, YouTube announced that, based solely on these media accusations, it was barring Mr. Brand from monetizing his video content.
Rumble stands for very different values.
I think that's Incredibly important to note that here Rumble is not just claiming they have different corporate values and political values than YouTube, but they're... anyone can claim that.
They're standing up in a way that they know is a very risky way to write to a very powerful, though ridiculous, person inside the British government to tell them that, yes, we know that YouTube Did exactly what you wanted them to, that they announced based solely on media accusations it was borrowing Mr. Brand from monetizing his content.
Rumble, however, stands for very different values.
And this is something that I have been stressing to everybody I can find ever since I came here as the reason I came here.
And I know there's questions.
Well, how do you know they're really authentic?
And in some way, you have to rely on your intuition.
I've gotten to know very well the founders and managers of this company, and I've seen them in the past do things like choose to not be in France, as opposed to take orders from the French government when they were told to remove RT and Sputnik and other Russian media, even though the French government has no authority to dictate to Rumble what media outlets they can and can't platform.
They chose to prioritize their values of permitting a free internet over their corporate interest of having access to the French market.
But here they're doing so in an even more aggressive way because YouTube just set the example of what everyone can now point to is the act that you're supposed to take regarding Russell Brand, which is cut him off based solely on accusations.
And here's Rumble standing up of infinitely smaller size than Google, obviously, and even YouTube and saying, we're not going to do that.
To our creators.
Because we stand for different values.
Quote, We have devoted ourselves to the vital cause of defending a free internet, meaning an internet where no one arbitrarily dictates which ideas can or cannot be heard or which citizens may or may not be entitled to a platform.
We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so.
Signaling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble.
We don't agree with the behavior of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalize them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.
Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company's values and missions.
We emphatically reject the UK Parliament's demands.
I don't know how you can be more impressive than that.
I have so much respect for people who are willing to stand for a cause when it means that doing so may risk their own self-interest.
It was obviously the thing that made me cause.
Regard Russell.
Edward Snowden is a hero.
That he had no benefit at all from doing what he did.
He did it because he believed the public had the right to know the surveillance system under which they were living and did so knowing that he'd likely go to jail for the rest of his life.
And has instead had to spend a much better alternative, but by no means a good one.
Ten years in exile in Russia, a country he never chose to be in.
Or people like Daniel Alsberg and Julian Assange, who knowingly stood for their cause and went to prison for doing so.
Or a company like Rumble.
I recently, or not recently, last year interviewed a professional tennis player, Tennis Sandgren, who despite having some success on the tour, is by no means wealthy.
And with somebody who always performed best in Australia, but because Australia required proof of vaccination of the vaccine, the COVID vaccine to enter, he preferred and chose not to play in Australia, sacrificing not just a lot of money, but a huge Part of his career in defense of the principle that he had the right to inject into his body what he decided to inject into his body.
People who stand for a principle when it entails actual self-sacrifice is what I respect most.
It's so easy to claim that you are some sort of revolutionary fighter for values, go online and post all kinds of symbols and emojis that define who you are.
But if that's not accompanied by action, if that's not accompanied by self-sacrifice or risk, to me those are empty and meaningless words.
And they become meaningful only when someone shows they're willing to take risks to their own liberty, to their own interest in order to defend them.
And that's what Rumble did here again, and not for the first time.
Now, in case you're wondering how much this position resonated, here from Reuters, reflecting what every media outlet did, which was report on the remarkable defiance.
There you see the headline, quote, Rumble rejects UK lawmakers' call to stop Russell Brand monetization.
Quote, online video site Rumble has hit back at concerns raised by British lawmakers about Russell Brand's ability to make money on its site after the comedian actor was accused of a string of sexual assaults.
Brand used the Canadian-based platform, where he has 1.42 million followers, to deny the allegations on Saturday, saying he never had non-consensual sex.
YouTube said on Tuesday it had blocked him from making money from its channel on the site, which had 6.6 million subscribers.
And of course, that's exactly what Rumble said they refused.
I think one of the points Rumble made was incredibly interesting, which is there's obviously the due process point.
Russell Brand has been convicted of nothing, and we're not going to punish him based solely on unproven accusations.
But the other point they made is, let's assume Russell Brand had done some or all of what he's accused of doing.
Since when do we expect social media companies to ban people from their site based on things they've done off the site that has nothing to do with how they're using the platform?
Do we actually, is there really an expectation that YouTube, every time somebody is convicted of a crime, tax evasion or embezzlement or assault, Or trespassing or drug trafficking is supposed to go and ban that user from their site?
Is that now one of the punishments that people suffer when they're convicted of a crime in addition to going to prison or getting probation?
They're now banned from the internet?
Since when is that an obligation of tech companies, of social media sites?
And in general, since when do we have this principle that That tech companies are supposed to evaluate the ethics and morality of somebody's off-platform conduct and then decide whether they are eligible based on how moral of a person they are to be heard on that platform or to earn money from the content that they're creating.
This is a fabricated standard that never previously existed.
And that we do not want to be imposed.
We do not want to have this extrajudicial punishment in the hands of massive corporations that have no due process or accountability attached to them that when we are accused of crimes or convicted of crimes we now get punished not only through the legal mechanisms set up by the state, But also that corporations start, what, cutting us off from the financial system, barring us from participating in political debates?
These are despotic fabrications, concocted out of whole cloth.
that show you how authoritarian these people are.
They're just like on this mad frenzy, this like inebriated kick of their own power to just finally destroy somebody who they dislike for political reasons and they're just reaching for anything and everything they can to make the destruction as full scale as possible without any nexus to any kind of legal standard or process of any kind.
These are people drunk With despotic power.
And this is why they cannot be trusted with this kind of power.
No humans can.
This is always the outcome.
Now, Rumble obviously knew they were going to be attacked for stepping out of line the way they stepped out of line.
They said so in the letter.
It would obviously be easy for us to comply and be meek little subservient actors the way that YouTube was, but we're not going to do that.
And so the punishment has come fast and furious in just the time off that we have from the show, the few days that took my body to recover.
Look at what has happened.
First, the Associated Press published a standard but nonetheless deliberately harmful article.
There you see the headline, the Republican National Committee's live streaming partner, meaning Rumble, for the GOP debate is a haven for disinformation and extremism.
The same terms they always throw around.
Now, as we've documented so often, nobody spreads disinformation more than the corporate media.
But this is what they'll accuse any site of being the second they show they're not under their control.
Oh, it's a vector of hate speech, a vector of disinformation.
So here's the...you could use chat GPT to write this article.
It's why these journalists are all going to get fired and lose their jobs because of chat GPT, because what they produce is such predictable, formulaic dreck.
That you don't even need a human brain in order to do it.
Quote, the second presidential Republican debate will be broadcast Wednesday on Fox Business Network and Univision, but the exclusive online live stream will take place on Rumble, an alternative video sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing, and at least at times promoting, far-right extremism, bigotry, election disinformation, and conspiracy theories.
It's like the ad lib of corporate media to try and malign someone's reputation.
By bringing viewers to rumble to watch the GOP debate as it did with the first one last month, the RNC is driving potential voters to a site crawling with content.
Crawling with it like maggots that flouts the rules of more mainstream ones such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Do you notice how whenever They want to malign Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube?
They accuse those sites of being vectors of hate speech and disinformation?
But then when they want to malign somebody else, they positively contrast Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube as these responsible corporate actors with this other site, this rumble, that allows all kinds of filth that Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, being the responsible corporate actors that they are, effectively prohibit, whereas tomorrow they could wake up and decide to accuse Facebook of having blood on their hands for allowing right-wing disinformation and hate speech.
There's nothing that they say has any connection to anything objectively real.
It's all based on their political needs of the moment.
Quote, asked about the criticism against the platform, the RNC said in an emailed statement that, quote, hate, bigotry, and violence is unfortunately prevalent on every social media platform.
And the RNC condemns it entirely, but the RNC does not manage content or pages outside of our own.
Rumble, founded in 2013, prides itself on being, quote, immune to cancel culture.
Its website says, quote, everyone benefits when we have access to more ideas, diverse opinions, and dialogue.
That approach has catapulted the site to popularity in recent years as many conservatives have sought alternative social media companies that won't remove their posts or suspend their accounts for false or inflammatory content.
The company, which went public in 2022, has been backed by conservative donors such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Republican Senator J.D.
Vance.
It has grown to average 44 million active users per month.
By comparison, its closest mainstream cousin, the Google-owned video service YouTube, has billions of monthly logged-in users.
Rumble's web traffic is also consistently much higher than that of other right-wing social media platforms, such as Truth Social, Gab, or Getter.
Yet as Rumble's influence has grown, the platform continues to be overwhelmed by content that denies the results of the 2020 election, pushes bigoted views about race and gender, and encourages harmful conspiracy theories.
I don't need to review all the harmful conspiracy theories that AP has pushed over the years to make manifest what a fraudulent and farcical narrative this is.
Quote, in the week since the first debate, the site's leadership of top-performing content, which is featured prominently on Rumble's homepage, has regularly included multiple accounts that promote QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory that has led to violent incidents and deaths.
A search for quote election on the platform populates videos that falsely claim the so-called deep state cheated in the 2020 presidential election and that the 2024 election already has been rigged.
Is it a false claim that the deep state cheated in the 2020 election?
Because I actually recall That in the weeks before the 2020 election, the CIA concocted an absolute lie signed by 51 former agents of the intelligence community that the undermining laptop should be ignored because it was the byproduct, not of authentic material, but Russian disinformation.
And that lie was then spread by corporate media outlets beginning with Natasha Bertrand and Politico to CNN and every other big every other corporate media outlet practically, ultimately culminating in the censoring of that material by Facebook and by Twitter.
Those are irrefutable historical facts that demonstrate that The deep state did, in fact, interfere illegally or at least improperly through lies in the 2020 election.
But of course, if you're not aware of any of those things or you think that those things are fine, as AP does, since they were part of the media outlets that spread that lie, you're going to see videos claiming that that happened and you're going to think that's a lie and count it as disinformation, even though it's completely true.
Do you see who the spreaders of disinformation really are?
An analysis from NewsGuard, a firm that monitors online misinformation, found last year that nearly half the videos suggested by Rumble in response to searches for common election result terms came from untrustworthy sources.
Of course, we don't know who NewsGuard is, who funds them, and what credibility they have to make these assessments.
Now, as I said, this is just a sort of random attack That corporate media outlets will do any time a site, A, begins to reach large audiences and grow, and B, makes clear that they are not subject to the control of the same masters that these corporate media outlets obey.
It's just the automatic attack, not just on media outlets, but on any of us.
We spread disinformation and conspiracy theories and hate speech, it's all the...
Same ad libs, but what's going on with Rumble goes far beyond that kind of standard hit piece.
Here today from the Times of London, the newspaper that originally spread the allegations against Russell Brand, is a very clear threat.
Rumble, the platform hosting Russell Brand, may be forced offline.
Forced offline.
It's an article about how this new online safety bill, sponsored by the lovely and elevated Baroness of the House of Commons, married to the commander of the Online Propaganda Military Disinformation Battalion, can now be used to force Rumble to be banished from the entire kingdom.
The United Kingdom, banished by royal decree, not available any longer in the UK.
That's the threat issued from the Times of London, which is a very centrist newspaper.
The tabloid, The Sun, which is a tabloid, but carries a lot of influence, published an even graver threat.
Here you see the headline, set to tumble.
I'm an online expert.
Russell Brand's Refuge platform, Rumble, may be forced offline under new internet safety laws.
Quote, the Canada-based platform has come under scrutiny after being used by a brand to share videos as he denies allegations of rape and sexual assault.
It now faces being regulated by UK watchdog Ofcom under the new online safety bill, which was approved last week by Parliament and is due to become law next month.
Failing to cooperate with Ofcom could put Rumble executives at risk of arrest if visiting Britain, it has been suggested.
So within 48 hours, Rumble is a nauseating site full of right-wing extremism, disinformation, and hate speech.
Rumble may be banned from the UK for its uppity and defiant behavior, and Rumble executives may be subject to arrest if they even think about trying to enter the UK, absent full compliance with the censorship orders to be issued under this new law.
To add a little cherry to that cake, The Guardian this week, along with multiple other outlets, boasted of the success it had in pressuring corporate advertisers to remove their ad money from Rumble, on which Rumble obviously depends.
There you see the Guardian headline, quote, firms pull ads from Rumble platform over Russell Brand videos.
Burger King, ASOS, and HelloFresh remove ads from site in the wake of allegations about the comedian.
A number of large companies have pulled their advertisements from the video platform Rumble, where Russell Brand broadcasts his weekly show, in the weeks since allegations of rape and sexual assault against the comedian came to light.
The news movement reported on Friday that Burger King, ASOS, and the Barbican and HelloFresh, the recipe box delivery service, had removed their ads.
Brand has 1.4 million followers on the platform.
YouTube suspended Brand's ability to earn money, but Rumble has rejected calls to do the same.
On Friday, Brand said the moves to block him from receiving advertised revenue for his videos on social media platforms have occurred, quote, in the context of the online safety bill.
Burger King told the news movement it has paused all advertisements while investigating into the allegations were ongoing.
ASOS said it has manually removed its ad from Rumble.
Barbican said it had asked its media agencies to exclude the site from where its ads appear.
And then here from the Daily Beast, the American tabloid that is a liberal outlet that loves censorship, also celebrating, quote, Rumble loses advertisers over Russell Brand allegations, accusations.
I think it's extremely easy to see what happens here when you're somebody who in any way is a dissident to the prevailing neoliberal power center.
Look at the multiple punishments doled out to Rumble that are designed to harm and even destroy every aspect of his business in less than a week for the crime of standing up and saying that it would not punish Russell Brand because he's been convicted of nothing.
I want to come back with some closing thoughts, including the importance of supporting Rumble in light of these attacks and the ways that you can do that and the reasons that I hope that you will.
I think given the amount of time I devoted to this topic, which I think was highly warranted given the importance of it, we'll probably postpone the second segment that we had planned for you tonight for tomorrow, which will certainly be newsworthy.
Then, since it's about how Western leaders use Russia to distract from all of their most embarrassing failures and acts of immorality, I'm sure that will be just as true tomorrow as it is today.
So we're not worried about the newsworthiness of it.
So I will have some concluding thoughts right after this word from our very loyal sponsor.
We'll be right back in just a second.
Hey, everyone.
As most of you know, System Update is a part of independent media, which means we chose not to connect ourselves to any corporation or be part of any corporate structure that can control our editorial output.
And what that means is independence is we need ways to support the program.
One way is we rely on our viewers to become members of our locals community.
But another way is through sponsors.
And I've been very lucky because I was able to negotiate that the only sponsors I will ever for the show are ones who really want to support our program and be a part of it and that is true for field of greens which is our first sponsor but also a product that really does align with my actual values the way i live my life so that when i look in front of the camera and talk about it i never feel like a mercenary meaning someone talking about a product because i'm paid to
i would only allow endorsements and sponsors of products that i take and that i take because it really does align with the way I live my life.
And that is true of Field of Greens, which is a fruit and vegetable supplement.
I'm a vegan, so fruit and vegetables are crucial to my diet, but it's crucial for the health of everybody, whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or a consumer of meat.
And what distinguishes it from other supplements with fruit and vegetables is they've very carefully selected over the course of many months with medical consultation, they gave me the full long explanation that each fruit and vegetable is specifically selected to target and strengthen a specific part of your biological system, your cardiovascular health, your liver and kidney functioning, your immune system, your metabolism, That's the reason I take it is to stay healthy in those specific ways and healthy overall.
What I really like about it is it works fast.
I'm not a very patient person.
If you're like me, you don't want to take a product that has benefits 12 months from now, right away you will feel healthier, you'll have more energy, it'll be visible, people will comment that your skin and hair look healthier.
And it can also help you lose weight if that's one of your goals.
And the thing that impresses me the most in terms of the product's integrity and why I feel comfortable is they give this better health promise, which is you take Field of Greens not for very long.
If you go to your next doctor visit and your doctor doesn't say something like, wow, whatever you're doing, keep it up, or your friends don't say, you look much better, you can return it for a refund.
That is product integrity.
I was able to negotiate as part of the sponsorship to help you get started that if you order your first order, you get 15% off, another 10% off when you subscribe for recurring orders.
And obviously patronizing any of our sponsors helps our show, especially if you use the promo code we've arranged, which is to visit fieldofgreens.com and use the promo code Glenn.
That's fieldofgreens.com, promo code Glenn.
I would not endorse any product I don't feel good about, and that is absolutely true for Field of Greens, our first sponsor.
So as I said, we had a second segment planned for you that, due to the time I devoted to the first one, we're going to go ahead and put for tomorrow and And the reason that happened is because, I have to say, I had trouble, at times, discussing this without making my anger manifest.
There's often times I speak with a lot of passion about issues that I feel very strongly about.
I think, in general, I have a lot of experience in ensuring that that passion drives my expression of the views and doesn't overtake it or overwhelm it.
And in this case, I felt at times I had to struggle to make sure to keep that in check because I find what is being done here so enraging, so infuriating.
It's actually, if you just take a step back, it's really unimaginable what is happening in the West.
And I think it's such a cliche, but it's the only one that I can think of that really expresses the idea, which is the boiling frog and the way in which, and I hate this Metaphor because as an animal rights advocate it's a horrific image that I really don't like thinking about but I will sacrifice that cause for the broader one of expressing this point which is you put a frog in water and you every 15 minutes or so turn up the heat
I don't even know if that's biologically true or not, but you get the point.
boiling water that's fatal to it, but it never jumps out because the increase of the heat was sufficient to make the frog continuously get accustomed to the new level of heat and never really was aware that it got to the extreme point that it needed to jump out.
I don't even know if that's biologically true or not, but you get the point.
If you were to tell someone or to think yourself that we three years ago, let's say three years ago, would be at a point where a social media company that has as one of its creators who goes on the site like any other creator and produces content, who gets accused of crimes through the media, would be at a point where a social media company that has as one of its creators who goes on the site like any other creator and produces content, who gets accused of crimes through the media, not even by the police, is never convicted of anything or let alone even charged yet, and
mind.
Demanding that those companies punish the citizen in ways that the state yet can't do because he's been convicted of nothing.
And that of all the companies, only one refuses to comply and that that company then becomes the target of a multi-pronged effort to destroy it.
Led, as usual, by the little cretins in the corporate media that call themselves journalists, and yet, as always, are the leading agitators for greater and greater censorship, who step forward to malign the site, to make it toxic to its advertisers, who call up advertisers under the guise of journalism, when, in fact, what they're trying to do is act as an activist group to scare them away.
We just saw with Dave Portnoy, when he tape recorded the conversation he had with that Washington Post reporter.
Who he found out was calling the advertisers for the event by barstool, and she was pretending to be a reporter.
Hi, I'm calling to see how you're navigating the conflict that comes from the fact that you're involved in an event sponsored by somebody who's known to be a misogynist and has been accused of sexual assault, when in fact, nobody had been thinking about that.
That was a controversy completely manufactured by the Washington Post that they then went and reported on.
With the intention of driving the advertisers of Dave Portnoy away by essentially saying, we're going to publish in our newspaper that everybody reads your name and your business and accuse you of being associated with somebody who's a known misogynist and racist and somebody who has a history of sexual assault accusations.
This is how these corporate media outlets and these fake journalists Under the guise of reporting, instead engage in liberal activism all the time.
It's how they become the leading censorship activists.
They call up Facebook or Google and they say, hey, we notice this far-right extremist on your site who's saying all these terrible things and you're allowing him to say it.
And we have experts who say that you're doing so endangers marginalized populations.
And if you don't ban him, we're going to write about that and we're going to call your advertisers and we're going to say, are you comfortable?
With a platform that allows this person, and the whole point of it is to act as activists to get that person banned, censored from the internet while doing it under the pretense, the masquerading guise of reporting.
And so the fact that the Associated Press steps forward to malign Rumble as this vector of hate speech and right-wing extremism at exactly the time they know that Rumble is now in this fight, this very public fight that they have heroically pursued with the UK government is exactly what these media outlets do that ought to have been expected.
The fact that The Guardian then steps forward along with a bunch of others and says, look at these corporate advertisers we got.
To withdraw their willingness to be associated with Rumble, the advertising revenue on which Rumble depends, is just another prong of the activism under the guise of journalism.
But by far the worst part is that there's state actors involved here.
People who are part of the UK government.
who are threatening rumble not just with banishment we're going to bar your entire media platform and all the shows that you have and the creators that are on your platform from being heard by our citizens by cutting you off at the ip level if you don't censor as we command you but we're also going to threaten you with the rest we're going to treat you as criminals by linking to the sun that under this new law you may be subject to being arrested if you try and enter
our country is the kind of despotism and authoritarianism that we would be outraged over if we heard it coming from any country we've been trained not to think about as democracies before And it's one that should really be provoking our deepest rage.
Because what this is about is taking the internet out of our hands and putting it in theirs.
from ensuring that it can no longer be a place that the one place left where dissidents can communicate with each other and where you can hear alternative views, but instead convert it into a closed propaganda system where only they get to be heard, but no one who challenges what they say.
Because those people are now in a very well-financed industry, characterized as being disinformation agents or guilty of hate speech.
And that's why this couple in Britain is so illustrative because she's the one who attacks dissidents while he's the one who disseminates state propaganda.
That's the two-tooled, two-armed monster that we're fighting.
And really right now the one who's fighting it is Rumble.
We have gone over the ways in which the media completely turned on Elon Musk They revered him for a long time, the person who was going to bring us electric cars and solve the climate crisis and get us to Mars and was this tycoon of our age.
And they turned on him on a dime for the crime of saying he was going to buy Twitter and lower the dial on the kinds of censorship that they've come to expect.
The corporate media and governments have the right to expect or have trained themselves to believe they have the right to expect these media outlets will provide simply for saying, I'm not going to be providing that any longer for opening the corporate files to show what these governments have been doing.
He not only has been attacked and maligned in every way.
The New York Times publishing all kinds of articles saying he's a racist while acknowledging in paragraph 37 that he was an anti-apartheid activist in high school.
There's all kinds of formal investigations against him and his company, all of which arose exactly at the time that he stood up and said, I'm going to challenge the censorship regime.
But Rumble is much more vulnerable as a site.
It's not the richest person in the world that runs it.
And it's also challenging the censorship regime, at least as aggressively and directly, I would say even at this point more so, by doing things, for instance, like accepting the fact that they're unavailable in France on the principle that they're not going to allow any government to dictate to it who they can and can't plot for them.
And if you share my concern and my alarm and my anger over what's happening here, and I hope that you do, I know from experience that people want the ability to take action.
Like, well, I don't want to just be angry about this.
What can I do to help this?
And I talked to Rumble today about developing a plan because I know there are a lot of people who care deeply about free speech on the internet who understand that it's not just some abstract concept, but it's crucial to accomplishing anything.
If we lose the ability to politically organize and to be heard, and everyone else is subject to the same messaging that we can no longer challenge, every other cause just erodes away.
And I know there are a lot of people who understand that, which is why there's so many people fleeing big tech.
We're demanding of our politicians, confrontations with big tech.
The RNC couldn't partner with YouTube or Facebook to broadcast their debate because conservative voters won't accept deals with big tech 'cause they understand what a malicious menace they are.
That's why they did a deal with Rumble.
There is a growing understanding of how dangerous this censorship regime is.
But if we allow Rumble to be destroyed through this campaign It not only will take away one of the very few places where this free speech can still thrive any meaningful way, meaning where you can reach a lot of people.
We're extremely enthused by the audience size that we reach with our programs and that I see others reaching who are on here, including Russell Brand.
Rumble has built a large and young and vibrant audience.
And the good news is there's something like 40 or 50% of Americans who still haven't even heard of Rumble, which means the potential for growth is still so much greater.
But if they succeed in destroying it, it will not only take away one of the very few outlets actually fighting this cause in an effective way, it will also set an example that, look, don't try this anymore.
Remember, Parlor got destroyed overnight.
After January 6th by AOC and the Democrats who demanded that Google and Apple remove them from their store.
Those companies obeyed within 24 hours and then Amazon obeyed within 48 hours and took them off the Internet.
And they were crippled and never recovered at the very time they become became the most popular downloaded app in the world ahead of Instagram and TikTok and every other app because they were promising free speech online.
That's how much of a demand there is for it.
That's how eager they are to destroy it.
If we allow Rumble to be destroyed the way Parler was, it's going to close the ability of other companies or other people willing to devote themselves to this cause because it's going to seem futile.
It's going to seem like the only viable course of action is to obey the censorship regime.
And I know Rumble has taken all kinds of steps technologically and in other ways to insulate themselves against it.
But if they are allowed to stop, to drive away advertisers, to prevent anybody from willing to associate with it in a monetary way, obviously Rumble needs financing and capital and money to function, to operate, to promote itself, to pay creators, to attract creators, to thrive and to grow.
That's why they're going after it this way.
And so the way that you can help is by two things, I think, and I do think there's going to be a specific program that I hope Rumble will unveil that will be done in a coordinated way with all of its biggest creators with its biggest platforms in defense of this platform that I do think has become so important for the reasons I just detailed.
Obviously, patronizing our advertisers.
is incredibly important.
Even if you don't want or love or need the product, if you go buy the product and advertisers see that there are a lot of people willing to support them and that they're not going to lose by associating with programs and rumble but gain, that's an incredibly important incentive scheme.
And then ultimately so is supporting the programs that you like financially by joining each site's locals community.
The Locals community is kind of like Substack.
That's where we have subscribers.
That's where every show has our subscribers.
There's a lot that happens on Locals that we can do more there and we intend to do more there.
As you know now, we have our live interactive after show every Tuesday and Thursday night just for subscribers.
We publish very detailed and professionalized transcripts of each program for those who don't want to watch or can't watch the whole show.
You can read it, which a lot of you prefer to do.
Within 24 hours we have highly professionalized transcripts.
I'm going to try and start writing a lot more now that my family crisis is starting to be more resolved and to have more energy and time to do that, but in general the real reason to do it is to support independent journalism that's under attack in every way the minute it steps out of line.
That's the way to stand up and fight back.
I know it's kind of simple, but This whole war is about trying to cut off money supplies to sites that are disobedient.
That's what they did to Wikileaks in 2011 that I've gone over before.
It's the same thing.
The government said to Bank of America and Mastercard and Visa, Joe Lieberman said, we don't think you should be processing payments For this website that is in danger of national security.
And even though they never charged WikiLeaks with a crime then, let alone convicted of them, they got these banks to cut off all donations, all accounts for WikiLeaks.
They couldn't collect money anymore and obviously couldn't function.
And that was when we created the Freedom of the Press Foundation and we raised millions of dollars for WikiLeaks, which was the right response to that despotic effort.
So you can support creators on Rumble, your favorite shows here, go join their locals community.
You can patronize Rumble's advertisers.
I hope we're going to have more because I know when people get angry, they want to direct that anger into constructive steps to take.
And I do think those are very constructive steps, the ones I've just outlined.
Those matter a lot.
And they matter not only because they help the shows, they help the platform, but they send the message as well.
That you may have a lot of people willing to cheer every time someone who doesn't affirm liberal orthodoxies is silenced and threatened because you've trained them to believe that everybody is dangerous who doesn't affirm neoliberal orthodoxies, but there's a huge number of people at least as big and more engaged
Who understand how dangerous it is for only that group to be heard and who's willing to engage in efforts and use their own money to support the ability of free and independent media to thrive.
So our locals community exists here.
It's the join button right below the video player.
But go pick whatever program you like on Rumble and support them as well.
That is the answer for people to see that happening.
Patronize the advertisers who are still advertising on Rumble despite these threats, despite this climate being generated.
Because this censorship regime You cannot overstate the dangers of it.
It's the reason I've spent so much time over the last two years reporting on it and documenting it and denouncing it and working against it.
It's why I moved from Substack, which is working very well, and which also was devoted to free speech, to Rumble, because I knew and I saw the potential that Rumble had to become this gigantic site that reaches millions of people while defending these free speech rights.
There are a lot of people on Rumble who have shows here who can't have shows anywhere else.
And I consider that incomparably valuable and incomparably important because it's basically a gigantic middle finger stuck up at the people who are trying to destroy our most basic freedoms to degrade the internet into something it was never intended to be.
A incredibly effective propaganda machine that is utterly free of dissent.
And if we allow that to happen, Once that takes hold, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse it.
so the time to fight it is now.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
I realize it was a somewhat unconventional one.
We devoted almost two hours or so to a single topic, but for the reasons I explained, I thought that was highly warranted.
I hope you found that informative and helpful.
It's something, of course, that we're going to cover as events proceed.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can Listen to each episode on Spotify, on Apple, on all major podcasting platforms 12 hours after the episode first is broadcast live here on Rumble.
And as another reminder, if you download the Rumble app, that will enable you to follow the programs that you like and to receive notifications for when each show begins.
For those of you who've been watching, we want to really thank you.
You have been instrumental to the success of our show and our ability to continue it.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.