Sen. Klobuchar Pressures Amazon to Blacklist Rumble/Substack. Censorship Demands on Israel/Gaza Escalate. Glenn Reacts to Explosive Report: Brazil’s CIA Illegally Tapped His Phone | SYSTEM UPDATE #168
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
We have long documented that a weapon that is central, not ancillary, but central to the entire Democratic Party, one they have repeatedly defended and demanded the expansion of, is the power to force social media companies to censor political speech in accordance with the agenda of Democrats.
They have made no secret of their commitment to this censorship power.
They frequently boast of it.
Publicly threaten big tech executives with legal and regulatory reprisals for failure to obey, and now explicitly defend the CIA, FBI, and DHS, Homeland Security, as noble for their parallel attempts to coerce tech companies to censor political speech the U.S.
security state dislikes or find threatening as well, which happens to coincide with what the Democratic Party dislikes.
Just two months ago, an appellate court ruled that the Biden White House and the FBI, by coercing, threatening, and effectively forcing big tech platforms to censor for them, had committed one of the gravest and most drastic attacks on the First Amendment's free speech guarantee in the nation's history.
Yet that scathing ruling has evidently not deterred congressional Democrats in the slightest from pursuing these coercive censorship schemes.
Just late last week, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Democratic Representative Joseph Morrell of New York wrote a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that argues that free speech sites are spreading, quote, disinformation.
It's like the liberal Mad Lib to fill in their pro-censorship template.
And they strongly implied that they want those sites, Rumble and Substack particularly, banned from all Amazon services.
The entire letter rests on a Washington Post article which, citing self-proclaimed disinformation experts, claim that Rumble and Substack, which are known for refusing to censor dissidents and critics of liberal orthodoxy, that they're too permissive of free speech in order to permit the internet to be safe.
As always, we yet again find the same component arms of the industrial censorship regime.
So-called disinformation experts, funded by the same handful of neoliberal billionaires and intelligence agencies, accuse free speech sites of allowing dangerous speech, meaning sites that won't censor on command.
Liberal corporate media outlets like the Washington Post then amplify those accusations as true, And then Democratic lawmakers seize on those media reports to demand censorship of their political enemies, citing those disinformation experts as gospel, that these sites are allowing dangerous speech to be heard.
That they continue to do this, not only continue, but celebrate themselves for it, even after this appellate court ruling shows how lawless and fanatical they are when it comes to suppressing dissent to their propaganda.
Then over the last two weeks we have documented on several occasions the disturbing and even unprecedented attempts to abuse the force of law to ban dissent from the policies of Joe Biden and EU states when it comes to the war between Israel and Gaza.
Countries like France, which have announced an agenda of full support for Israel, have imposed a nationwide ban on all pro-Palestinian protests, even while protests that align with France's policies, namely pro-Israel protests, are fully permissible.
Campaigns that seek to ensure the firing of any critics of Israel, which to me at least resemble almost completely the so-called cancel culture campaigns long criticized by the right, have now become commonplace, often cheered on by the very people who spent years denouncing them.
As this war grinds on, as it's about to escalate with the ground invasion into Gaza by Israel, these censorship and cancellation campaigns are dangerously increasing, not diminishing.
And we'll tell you about the latest and why these are so dangerous.
Finally, a new and quite explosive report in Brazil today revealed that for the years 2019 to 2021, Brazil's domestic spying agency called Abin was illegally spying against both myself and my husband, David Miranda, who at the time was a member of Congress opposed to the Bolsonaro government.
This revelation is based on leaks from the federal police and dominated headlines in Brazil for obvious reasons.
It would be as if we learned that the FBI and CIA were illegally spying on the phones and emails of anti-Biden journalists or members of the House Republican Caucus.
And I'll share some thoughts tonight about this new report and what it reveals about state secret powers, secret state powers generally, and the dangers of domestic spying specifically, and what the function of journalism is and how you recognize a real journalist from a servant of centers of power.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the most disturbing things about reporting on dangerous trends is how often one observes the following.
You start off reporting on something that is rather shocking to people, such as, say, the explicit, overt attempts by the U.S.
security state and by one political party in Washington to pressure and coerce big tech to ban from the internet people and views they dislike.
And at first people are shocked.
People were shocked when Donald Trump was banned as a result of a collusive decision by big tech platforms, even though he was the sitting president of the United States.
People were shocked when Parler became the most popular and most downloaded app in the wake of Trump's banning, only for Democrats in Congress like AOC and Ro Khanna and others to publicly demand that Google and Apple ban Parler from its stores and prevent it from being downloaded and pressured Amazon to kick them off their hosting services, which those companies obeyed within 24 to 48 hours, crippling
Parler making sure it was never able to really recover that kind of brute censorship of the internet and of course all of the revelations from the Twitter files about how the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security were picking up the phone with great regularity, daily in fact, and calling big tech companies or emailing them demanding that particular posts with political content they dislike and regard as threatening be deleted and that the authors of those posts be banned.
At first, what happens is people are horrified and indignant and shocked.
They can't believe that in the United States, this kind of censorship that is perpetrated by executive branch agencies or members of Congress are permitted, given that we have a First Amendment that clearly prohibits state actors from either directly censoring or pressuring private actors to censor for them.
Long history of Supreme Court cases.
But then what happens when one fails to defeat it, when one attempts to but is unsuccessful in attempting to uproot it?
Each time that it happens, each time we learn about a new episode, our anger diminishes just a little bit sometimes because it starts to become normalized.
It happens so often that people now expect it.
It's hard to keep reaching up to the same level of enigmation when something becomes just part of our political woodwork.
It reminds me a lot of the Patriot Act.
This is the best example to illustrate this dynamic.
When the Patriot Act was enacted, even in the wake of 9-11, when people were willing, as we documented in a two and a half hour special on Friday night about 9-11 and the aftermath, even when people were willing to give the government everything it wanted, the Patriot Act was considered such a radical piece of legislation.
Such an extreme departure from American norms and values that even in that climate of 9-11, many people warned how dangerous this piece of legislation is to the point where they ended up inserting, which they didn't want to do, a cause that made it temporary that said that unless Congress renews it every four years by finding that the emergency that justifies it still exists, then the Patriot Act will simply cease to be valid.
Every four years now, Congress has to renew the Patriot Act, and every four years the same thing happens.
A couple of people in Congress object and call for reforms.
The White House, under four consecutive presidents now, insists on the extension of the Patriot Act, the renewal of the Patriot Act, with no new reforms and no new limits, and then Congress just overwhelmingly Renews it by a vote of something like 89 to 8 in the Senate and 411 to 40 in the House.
I think that math is a little off.
That's over 435, but 411 to, say, 20.
It's those kind of votes.
And now the Patriot Act's barely ever talked about.
When's the last time you heard somebody express indignation at the Patriot Act?
Because it has become part of the political woodwork.
It's just part of our government now.
And that's what's happening with these kinds of overt censorship efforts emanating from elected officials in Washington over the Internet, the thing that we most use and most depend on for the dissemination of information.
They now control it.
They are able to demand the removal of content and even this appellate court ruling that we extensively covered.
I heard today from a very reliable source, I don't know if it's been publicly reported yet or not, that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case on appeal from the Fifth Circuit.
The Fifth Circuit ruled that the Biden administration committed, in the words of the court, one of the gravest frontal assaults on free speech in the history of the judiciary.
Even with that, Democrats continue To out in the open, not only not hide it, but brag about it, boast of it.
Their efforts to demand and force and pressure tech companies and social media platforms to censor political speech they dislike.
And this is one of the most extreme examples yet.
Now, this whole campaign, this recent effort, was initiated, as it so often is, by corporate media.
That is one of the most remarkable parts about this whole censorship regime is that it is led by, its primary advocates are, most vocal advocates are, people who are employees of media corporations who call themselves journalists.
These are the primary censorship advocates in the United States.
Journalists are the enemy A free expression, a free speech in the United States, corporate journalists in particular.
And what happens is they have this roster of disinformation experts, this whole industry of this fake expertise funded by Pierre Omidyar and Bill Gates and George Soros.
It really is that small handful of billionaires.
I'm sorry if that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but under every disinformation rock, one finds that funding, along with funding by the U.S.
government, British intelligence agencies.
It's this tiny group that controls this industry and therefore defines what is and is not disinformation.
And the newspapers like the Washington Post justify these disinformation experts claims as a basis to publish articles claiming that some site ought to be censored because it produces so much disinformation.
Even though the irony of course is nobody produces more disinformation than these media outlets themselves and often the disinformation experts on whom they rely.
So all this started on October 7th when the Washington Post published an article with this headline, Amazon's Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen.
The popular voice assistant says the 2020 race was stolen, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source, foreshadowing a new information battleground.
Foreshadowing a new information battleground, meaning the Washington Post has opened up a new front in the information war because they are now finding new reasons why free speech platforms that refuse to censor, like Substack and Rumble, A new reason why they now need to be controlled and banned because they're responsible for contaminating Alexa, the noble and sacred oracle of truth, with claims about the 2020 election.
And so much of this is going to intensify, more than you can anticipate, more than I can anticipate, as we head toward the 2024 election.
Especially if, as looks likely, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee.
There are no limits that they will recognize When it comes to doing everything possible to ensuring Donald Trump cannot win, they'll censor, they'll lie, they'll propagandize beyond what they did in the 2020 election when all media ratified the CIA lie, most media did, that Joe Biden's or Hunter Biden's laptops and the documents that came from it were inauthentic frauds and Russian disinformation.
And then big tech censored those stories.
That was extreme.
Wait until you see what they're going to do to the 2024 election.
So here's what the Washington Post, the seed they planted, quote, amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source, Amazon's Alexa.
Which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Asked about fraud in the race, in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes, the popular voice assistant said it was, quote, stolen by a massive amount of election fraud, citing Rumble, a video streaming service favored by conservatives.
Now, there's so much packed in there designed to manipulate people's brains.
Including the fact that Rumble is not a conservative site.
It is a site on which a lot of conservatives appear because they have escaped and fled from big tech censorship, but there are a lot of liberals and leftists on Rumble.
There are a lot of independents, people who can't be characterized one way or the other because they're sometimes endorsing views associated with the left and sometimes with the right.
There are a lot of people who are just anti-establishment and a lot of demographic data suggests that at least one-fifth and even higher of viewers of Rumble identify as Democrats and another 20 or 30% as independents.
But that's all, of course, a way of trying to suggest that Rumble is inherently untrustworthy because it's a right-wing site, even though it's not.
Now, I don't know.
Are there really any people who regard Alexa as the place they go to learn about the world?
Wikipedia, as we documented in a show we did a couple of months ago, including by talking to the Wikileaks, the Wikipedia co-founder, is one of the worst sewers of disinformation I've ever seen.
Everything is geared toward promoting neoliberal orthodoxy.
Anyone who descends from it is smeared with lies on that site.
That site is a font of disinformation, but because it's intended to serve the agenda the Washington Post likes, you'll never see an article like this about Wikipedia.
It goes on, quote, the 2020 races were, quote, notorious of many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers.
According to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription news service, a newsletter service, Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing, quote, an Alexa answer contributor.
Multiple investigations in the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election.
Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race.
Even his parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.
So Because there are a couple of substack articles that claim the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, because Rumble doesn't censor that claim, and there are a few videos on Rumble claiming that, somehow the sacred Alexa got defiled.
Because it used Rumble and Substack and therefore the Washington Post is trying to create the foundation to say that these sites are dangerous and Amazon should ban them, should only allow the Washington Post and the New York Times to contribute to its services, but not sites that actually allow a multiplicity of views.
So that was the Washington Post performing its function.
Here now is a news outlet that noticed the following.
It's called Must Read Alaska, and we fact-checked this article, and as we're going to show you, it's entirely true.
It just does a very good job of explaining what happened.
I didn't want to steal their narrative.
I wanted to give them the credit they deserve.
So there you see the headlines.
D.C.
Democrats want Amazon to stop Alexa from using Rumble and Substack as sources of information.
Do you see how it migrates from the Washington Post to the Democratic Party?
All working together to try and constantly silence and marginalize whatever sites allow dissent and criticism of their orthodoxies.
I obviously don't need to go through how many lies the Washington Post disseminated about the Iraq war, about the 2016 election in Russia.
They got Pulitzers for endorsing the CIA unhinged conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia.
They constantly called into question the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop to prevent Joe Biden from being negatively perceived by the American voter by maligning that evidence based on lies They obviously spread countless lies about COVID and the war in Ukraine.
And yet here's what happens now as a result of that Washington Post article, quote, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Congressman Joe Morrell of New York are concerned that Alexa site sources they don't approve of, like the video site Rumble, and they worry about the spread of misinformation leading up to the 2024 election.
They definitely do worry about the spread of misinformation leading up to the 2024 election because they intend to disseminate a lot of it.
And they don't want any sites that permit people who are there to document the propaganda and deceit that they're using in anticipation of the election.
Quote, the demands for answers come after a Washington Post story worried that Alexis sometimes refers to Rumble and Substack as sources when answering questions.
Here is the letter that Amy Klobuchar and Congressman Morrell wrote to Jeff Bezos on October 19th citing the Washington Post story and nothing else.
Quote, Dear Mr. Bezos, and obviously, needless to say, the Democratic Party, with Biden in the White House and their control of the Senate, has enormous power over Jeff Bezos and his various companies.
They award contracts to him and to Amazon worth billions and billions of dollars.
They can punish Amazon and regulate Amazon, and he also is the owner of the Washington Post, the outlet that published the story that they're now using.
Dear Mr. Bezos, As we approach the 2024 elections, we write to express serious concern about recent reporting that Amazon Alexa, a virtual voice assistant tool relied upon by millions of Americans, is repeating false claims about the outcome of the 2020 elections and to request information about your efforts to combat this troubling content.
Now, again, what's crucial here is these are not just ordinary citizens writing to Amazon with a complaint.
These are people writing in their official capacity as members of the U.S.
Senate and the Congress.
Knowing all the power and influence they have over Jeff Bezos, it reminds me a lot of when U.K.
officials wrote to Rumble saying, I demand to know what you're doing to demonetize Russell Brand.
Obviously, trying to intimidate Rumble and other sites to cut off Russell Brand's livelihood, even though he's still, by the way, not been charged.
Let's remember that Russell Brand still to this date has never been charged, let alone convicted of any crimes they try to, with these kind of, I demand you provide this information requests, try to coerce various sites upon pain of being banned in the UK from punishing Russell Brand.
And that's what they're doing here.
Quote, according to public records, when asked about the 2020 presidential election, Amazon Alexa cited unvetted sources to make false claims about election fraud.
While Alexa relies on a variety of sources to answer questions, when asked about the 2020 presidential election, it appears that some answers were provided by contributors instead of verified news sources.
What is a verified news source?
Who verifies these news sources?
Who determines what are legitimate news sources and what aren't?
We're going to do a segment at the end about a new report from Brazil that Brazil's domestic intelligence agency, the CIA and FBI, illegally spied on me as reprisals for my reporting.
Something that has happened many times in my career from other governments including the Ukrainian government putting me on a blacklist and the U.S.
government and the U.K.
government doing all kinds of reprisals.
That to me is what a real reporter is.
That's how you can identify them.
Not by people who are constantly patted on the head by Democratic Party officials.
People who are never threatening in any way to anyone in power.
By verified news source, Amy Klobuchar and this congressman mean people who don't ever defy their worldview, never question it, but who serve it.
Quote, the spreading of election-related misinformation and disinformation is particularly troubling given the emerging use of artificial intelligence to mislead voters.
With some ballots for the 2024 election being sent out as early as this December, it is important that proactive measures What is Amazon's existing policy to address the spread and amplification of election misinformation and disinformation by Alexa?
What steps have been taken to improve the accuracy of information repeated by Alexa?
How is Amazon vetting responses from contributors, particularly responses pertaining to our elections?
I mean, are you comfortable with Democratic Party officials being this fixated on what information is available to the public about our elections and which information ought to be banned?
It seems very right for abuse to me.
They go on, quote, In advance of the 2024 elections, what additional protections does Amazon intend to implement to prevent the spread of election misinformation and disinformation?
What procedures does Amazon make available for users or others to raise concerns or complaints of misinformation shared by Alexa?
Thank you for your attention to these important issues.
We look forward to your response.
I mean, this is as heavy-handed and despotic as it gets.
And this is just one example, but it's a particularly vivid one to me because it shows you how these arms function.
This all started with a Washington Post article.
Claiming that precious Alexa has been defiled and vandalized by these ruffians on Substack and Rumble, who aren't even verified news organizations.
And now it deserves a letter from the Senate and the House to Jeff Bezos saying, we expect you to fix this.
We expect you to opt to impose greater controls on the flow of information on all Amazon products, especially as it concerns our election.
This is not the role of government officials.
That's what the appellate court just ruled.
It is, though, amazing, again, how it's journalists who lead these crusades.
Here's Oliver Darcy, who works for a news outlet that nobody watches, CNN.
The number of people who watch CNN is just humiliatingly low, given the massive brand recognition that they have and the
Amount of money that goes into promoting their crappy shows They barely can get a few hundred thousand people watching 90% of them are elderly and One of the main reasons is because nobody trusts CNN because of how many times I got caught lying We've showed you clips many times of CNN putting people on the air to claim that Trump was being blackmailed by Putin was sexual and Videos we've showed you many times.
They put James Clapper on the air.
He works for CNN.
He was President Obama's senior national security official who got caught lying when he testified before the Senate three months before we started the Snowden reporting when he was asked whether the NSA collects data on millions of Americans and he said no, not wittingly, even though Snowden was holding in his hands, and soon I was holding in my hands, the evidence proving that exactly what Clapper denied was happening, in fact, was what the NSA was doing.
And as a result, as a reward for that lying, CNN hired James Clapper and then put him on the air in the days and weeks before the 2020 election to repeatedly claim that the Hunter Biden laptop documents were Soviet tradecraft.
And that nobody should trust them because it's likely Russian propaganda.
Just a complete and utter lie.
All of which emanates from CNN.
And then you get these little corporate minions like Oliver Darcy, who knows that nobody trusts him as a journalist, who has no journalistic accomplishments at all.
And whatever sites they can't control, whatever sites like Rumble refuse to obey the censorship commands that emanate from these media outlets.
Hey, you're putting these videos on that contain views we want gone.
And Rumble shoots its middle finger up.
Instead of saying, oh, we're so sorry, we're going to take it down right away so you don't agree.
accused us of things they can't stand those sites and they devote themselves as an activist crusade to maligning and destroying them in the hopes of having them censored in silence like Amy Klobuchar is trying to do.
Like so many media outlets have been trying to do with corporate advertisers of Rumble calling them and saying, "Are you really comfortable with being associated with content of this So here's Oliver Darcy in a CNN article whining about the fact that the Republican Party for the third straight debate gave exclusive rights to broadcast the debate on the internet to rumble.
And as a result, the first two debates were sponsored by Fox.
NBC News is hosting this third debate.
I don't know what The rationale of the Republican Party leadership was Mitt Romney's sister.
But she, what is her name?
Ronna McDaniel, I believe.
She decided to partner with NBC News.
So NBC News journalists are going to be presenting the Republican debate.
I don't know why a Republican Party would want their candidates filtered and presented by NBC News, but that's what they've decided to do.
So here Oliver Darcy sees an opportunity to try and pressure the Republican Party and NBC on the grounds that they're now peddling, that they're now partnering with a site that he claims is peddling, it peddles disinformation.
Here's the headline.
For a Republican debate, NBC partners with right-wing outlets with history of peddling extremist rhetoric.
NBC News is uniting with a pair of strange bedfellows for the third Republican Party primary debate.
Quote, "The Republican National Committee on Monday formally announced that it will partner with the Peacock Network to host the Miami Face-Off, along with the Salem Radio News Network and Rumble, two right-wing media companies That is, it's just such a lie!
It is not a right-wing media company.
The person who founded Rumble, who still is the CEO and majority shareholder, Chris Poplowski, is, at least always was, a Canadian liberal.
And there's nothing about Rumble that has any ideology.
They're a free speech platform allowing everybody to come and say what they want.
And a lot of left-wing voices or anti-establishment voices that have been censored by YouTube are here now doing it for that reason.
They have massive cultural commentators as well.
Very famous influential Gen Z cultural commentators who aren't remotely right-wing.
Right-wing is a term that liberal activists use, like Oliver Darcy and CNN, to just signal to their viewers this is something that's bad.
So even if it's a lie, it doesn't stop Oliver Darcy.
So he says they're partnering with Salem and Rumble, two right-wing media companies that have a history peddling and profiting off of extremist rhetoric.
I don't need to go into all the ways CNN profits off extremist rhetoric.
It's no surprise that the GOP, which veered sharply to the right during Donald Trump's presidency, Is that even true?
They veered sharply to the right?
That makes no sense.
Donald Trump was more to the right than George Bush and Dick Cheney and John McCain and Paul Ryan.
What does that mean, to the right?
They veered sharply to the right during Donald Trump's presidency, would select Salem and Rumble as partners, but it is striking that NBC News would agree to link arms with such organizations.
The video sharing website has become home to the far right.
Is my show far-right?
I'm hearing from a lot of conservatives who vehemently disagree with a lot of my views all the time, including my recent views expressed on the war in Israel and Gaza.
I spend most of my time criticizing the US security state, the CIA, the Union of State and Corporate Power to censor.
Are these right-wing views, let alone far-right-wing views?
Are the views of Russell Brand far-right, or Kim Iverson, or the Revolutionary Blackout Network, or an endless number of voices?
To say nothing of people like Kai Sinat and iSpeed, the African American 21 or 22 year olds who have a gigantic following commenting on music and culture and rap.
But there's just no editorial standards at CNN, which is so ironic that they're the ones who posture as those who are credible to arbitrate who is a reliable news network and not.
The video sharing website has become home to the far right, offering unsavory figures unsavory who have been banned from mainstream platforms such as YouTube, giving them a space to continuing poisoning the public information.
This is a news article.
And yes, the fact that someone has been banned by Google except to a drooling authoritarian is not evidence the person is a poisonous voice contaminating the public.
Quote, "And not only has the company allowed some of the most menacing forces in politics to maintain sizable platforms, meaning they allow free speech, it has also allowed them to earn treasure in doing so.
Andrew Tate, the far-right, misogynistic, alpha male influencer charged with human trafficking and rape in Romania, has privately boasted that he has a $9 million deal with Rumble, as we reported earlier this year.
And Rumble has even allowed the Holocaust denier and openly racist Nick Fuentes the ability to profit off of his neo-Nazi rhetoric.
See, you just see that over and over their real complaint is Rumble won't censor.
Rumble has never said a single positive thing about any voice on the site or a single negative thing about anyone on the site.
They're just a platform.
That refuses to censor on the grounds that they can't arbitrate competently right from wrong, truth or false.
That's not their role.
Oliver Darcy thinks it's his role because he's an authoritarian hack who serves institutions of power.
That's why it's a joke that he calls himself a journalist.
But that's what enrages them about Rumble.
Quote, News organizations will need to grapple with this uncomfortable reality as they navigate the 2024 waters.
Do they really want to associate themselves with, and as a result, help legitimize companies that are in the business of mainstreaming extremism to the American public?
Is doing so really worth hosting a debate which the party frontrunner will likely refuse to participate in?
NBC News has made its decisions.
Now it's up to other news organizations to do so as well.
Just a worm he is, Oliver Darcy, but it's very representative of what these people do.
It drives them insane that nobody's interested in them.
Do you see how often he mentions that the people he hates, the ones he wants silenced, are extremely popular and have very big platforms and earn a lot of money?
Think about the bitterness and professional jealousy inside of him bubbling over at all times.
That is driving him to be on this crusade to get other platforms silenced or forcing them to either censor or be stigmatized.
That's the entire media.
This is the corporate media.
That's their mentality.
What they really want at the end of the day is to force you to pay attention to them by eliminating the alternatives.
They know that the only way people will listen to them is if they're forced to.
Is if every other alternative is banished.
And that's how desperate they are and how authoritarian they are.
What makes them angriest is free speech.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
As I've said before, it's like watching cardiologists enraged that people aren't smoking any longer and telling them to smoke.
That's how anathema to journalism A belief in censorship is supposed to be and yet these are the leading censors.
And if it were just them, it would be bad enough.
The fact that members of Congress and the executive branch, the FBI and the White House are all formally and systematically engaged in efforts to censor the internet.
Don't let that become normalized.
Don't lose your anger over it because it's every bit as dangerous as you think it is.
So we don't need much of a segue for this next segment because it pertains pretty directly to the one we just did and namely that is the Growing efforts, unfortunately growing on the part of people who support the Israeli war effort, who support Joe Biden's policy of supporting and arming and funding Israel, which is a position that I know a lot of our viewers share.
I've heard from you and we knew from the start that was going to be something that we weren't going to agree on.
And I have enough respect for my audience to state my views and make sure my audience understands that I'm not going to patronize you by saying the things I anticipate you want me to say.
I'm going to always do the reporting and analysis that I think is the most honest.
But as I've said from the start, although people can debate the war itself, I would hope Now one of the things we've been able to unite on is the fact that censorship from states and cancel culture campaigns to get people fired for expressing their views on social media is a social ill, is something that is toxic and dangerous and undesirable.
And I will confess that when I began seeing a lot of conservatives, not all conservatives by any means, there are a lot who have been consistent and who have even expressed discomfort with what's happening, but when I saw a lot of them who I've seen over the years vehemently denounce censorship, emphatically defend the need for free speech, mock and deride the left's cancel culture campaigns,
When I saw them turn around and start explicitly not only supporting it but demanding it, when I saw them doing things like applauding France for banning all pro-Palestinian protests while still allowing pro-Israel protests, meaning allowing protests that support the state's war policy but banning protests that oppose it, or when I watched them cheering the UK Home Secretary for saying it can be a crime to wave the Palestinian flag,
Or when I saw them cheering campaigns led by billionaire hedge fund managers to compile a list of students who signed on to pro-Palestinian petitions with the explicit intention of barring them from ever being hired?
I found it disturbing but I honestly thought the following.
This is what I really believed.
The Hamas attack and the videos we saw from it We're genuinely horrifying to any decent person.
I reacted the same way everybody else did.
Seeing families subjected to the worst horrors in front of each other, kids killed in front of their parents, parents killed in front of their kids, grandmothers abducted, people abducted, a musical festival gunned down.
I also reacted with the same kind of disgust and horror as anybody else, just being human.
And I knew that those emotions were going to spawn a lot of extreme measures and extreme reactions.
Just like I knew the first week when Russia invaded Ukraine and we were subjected to all those videos of Ukrainian women weeping.
I did a lot of videos, a lot of shows, warning people that that kind of emotion can be very deceitful and subject to manipulation.
And I could see that those emotions were going to lead to a lot of Americans committing to these endless war policies that they would soon come to regret, but not too soon because their emotions had been so worked up.
And I really thought that once we got a few days or at least a couple weeks away from the intense horror and disgust of the Hamas attack, I'm not saying it should be gone, but I thought there'd be some reason that would return, which is what I was hoping for.
That a lot of the conservatives who have spent years denouncing censorship on principle or mocking cancel culture campaigns would start to at least recognize and grapple with the contradictions between everything they've been saying.
Some have built careers as free speech warriors.
And what they were demanding here in the wake of the Hamas attack and I thought there'd be some consensus returning that while of course they're still going to want the United States to support Israel in this war and want Biden to fund and arm them.
I didn't expect that to change.
I thought at least they would realize that censorship and getting people fired for dissenting was the sort of thing we did after 9-11 that led to a lot of Horrific policies being adopted because people were afraid to question or dissent it because they were accused of being pro-terrorists.
I thought those tactics would recede but they're not.
In a lot of ways they're intensifying as this war drags on and we're nowhere near the end of this war.
We're at the beginning.
Israel is going to launch a ground invasion which they haven't done yet and that's likely to be the most prolonged and bloodiest part.
Right now they're just Massively bombing Gaza.
Killing thousands and thousands of people, children.
You can see the videos all over the place.
And I personally find those as horrific as I found the videos from the Hamas attack because I don't think Palestinian lives or the lives of Palestinian children have less value than the lives of Israelis.
But unfortunately, it's not receding.
It's actually intensifying.
So let me just show you a few examples of what I mean.
Here is Meghan McCain, who I'm not saying she's an intellectual giant, but she's embedded in Republican politics and she has a lot of people who listen to her, especially now.
Oh, we have her credential on the screen there.
You see it in one of her interviews.
Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Senator John McCain, which is pretty much the summation of her credentials.
Here's what Megan McCain says, Arizona State University, which is benefiting from my last name and family legacy with my dad's new library is still silent on their pro Hamas protest and it's unacceptable.
Still nothing to say I'm just not going to be away and I'm not just going on to go away and be silent on this.
So they have her dad's name on things.
Her mom, Cindy McCain, is an extremely wealthy woman.
I don't know if they've donated money to the University of Arizona or to Arizona State or they just put John McCain's name on it the way the John McCain Institute has, which the funding we went over that for, it's intelligence agencies and neocons and neocons running it, the John McCain Institute.
But she apparently thinks that her last name being on a building or some wing or something, a library, entitles her to dictate what the school has to do in, I guess, silencing students who she calls pro-Hamas.
Now, one of the things that, and I went over this on Friday, that's at the root of a lot of this is after 9-11.
Everybody who criticized or questioned Bush-Cheney policies, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, torture, the invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, it was automatic.
Media people, including people who work today in media and politicians, would accuse them of being pro-terrorist, pro-Al Qaeda, on the other side, unpatriotic, disloyal.
And that's what's happening now.
There are some people, a small number, none with any power, who have praised Hamas at the beginning.
There were a few student groups, some speakers at DSA and Black Lives Matter chapters.
But the vast majority of people who are protesting are protesting not because they support Hamas or because they Proof of what Hamas did in its massacre of civilians in Israel.
Just like the vast majority of people protesting the Iraq War or protesting Guantanamo weren't in favor of Al Qaeda or supportive of the 9-11 attack.
It's a slander.
It's just propagandistic deceit.
They're protesting because they think that Israel's use of military force in Gaza is killing an excessive and unacceptable number of civilians.
Or they're protesting Israel's decade-long occupation of the West Bank and its expansion of settlements and its blockading of Gaza.
You can do all that without being pro-Hamas, but every protest against Biden's policies against the Israeli government is now deemed pro-Hamas.
That's what Meghan McCain means by that.
But even if they were pro-Hamas, which most of them are not, they still have the right of free speech and universities shouldn't be responding to Meghan McCain saying, my dad's name is on the building, therefore I demand that you silence these students.
I thought we support campus free speech.
Don't we oppose the imposition of limitations from the school?
And punishments on people for transgressing the bounds of political speech?
Obviously, if people are using violence, that's always the case, that ought to be stopped.
But people peacefully protesting?
I thought this was the consensus, wasn't it?
That people have the right to have whatever views they want on affirmative action, on immigration, on transgenderism, and whether people are really transgender, whether they should be respected as the gender that they claim.
I thought we were in support of free and open debate, and that students don't get punished for their views.
Let alone by spoiled children who get to put their parents' or their family's name on a building and then demand the right to set the limits on free expression the way Meghan McCain is doing.
She's far from alone.
Here is Dan Hodges, who is a long-time British pundit, sort of center-right-ish, I guess if you had to put a label on it.
He writes for the Daily Mail.
And here's what he said, quote, the right to protest must be safeguarded.
But now I've talked many times about this before, that this formulation right here is the hallmark of a censor.
If you want to know how to spot a censor, these are people who say, I believe in free speech.
But what follows that but is almost always a call for censorship.
Proof that the person doesn't really believe in free speech.
The throat clearing phrase is designed to try and say I'm a good person even though I'm about to argue for something that you probably don't think is good or that contradicts the value I just pretended that I hold.
So when he starts with the right to protest must be safeguarded but you know what's coming.
An attack on the right to protest and that's exactly what Followed.
But it's clear that over the last two weekends, London's Jewish community has felt directly intimidated by the Gaza demonstrations.
That's it now.
The point has been made.
There should be no further demos allowed for the foreseeable future.
What?
So, first of all, the foundation of the left-wing liberal Advocacy for censorship is exactly this.
If you allow people to protest against trans people, if you allow them to support police brutality, if you allow them to oppose affirmative action, if you allow them to protest against immigration, if you allow them to protest against same-sex marriage, Then minority groups feel threatened and intimidated.
It makes black people feel unsafe.
It makes Latinos unsafe.
It makes immigrants feel unsafe.
It makes trans people and LGBTs feel unsafe.
And therefore to redress this feeling of being unsafe and intimidated, we have to prevent those views from being expressed.
That's the whole foundation of left liberal censorship advocacy.
I really question whether London's Jews feel intimidated by people marching on the street in support of Palestinian rights.
But even if they do, sorry, that's the price of living with free speech, which is what the right says with great unflinching Certainty when it comes to other minority groups, pretty much every other one, claiming they're made uncomfortable or intimidated by free speech and therefore free speech needs to be restrained by the state.
I'm applying the same principle to every marginalized group, not one principle for some marginalized groups and then a totally different one for the one that I like or am a member of.
Beyond that, I think it's worth pointing out Because this has been really angering me, to be honest, is that these are not protests exclusively attended by Muslims.
There are a lot of Jews who are critics of Israel, opponents of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, of the blockade of Gaza, who think that the Israelis are engaging in excessive and indiscriminate military force in Gaza.
You don't have to agree with that.
I'm just simply saying that there are Jews who think this.
I interviewed a member of the Knesset, an Israeli Jew, on Thursday night.
And that's what he said over and over.
There are Jewish groups that exist to defend Palestinian rights and to criticize the U.S.
government.
So there are a lot of Jews at these protests.
There are a lot of non-Muslims and non-Jews.
And then there are Muslims as well.
But there's no number of times you get to use your free speech and then like it expires.
There's no quota.
And to hear a journalist say, okay they had two, that's enough, no more of these protests for the foreseeable future, it's done.
You had your two and that's it.
Now again, what makes this so menacing, just like France's ban of pro-Palestinian protests, is the fact that there are pro-Israel protests that have happened in London and he's not calling for an end to those.
Those can continue.
So you have this debate in the West about should your government side with Israel and fund and fuel its war or should it not?
A very valid debate.
Of course you have to have a debate.
Free debate when your government proposes to enter a new war on one side or the other.
The last time we didn't allow that debate was under Woodrow Wilson.
When we enacted the Espionage Act of 1917 to criminalize dissidents to Wilson's war policy of wanting the U.S.
to be involved in World War I and people were imprisoned for doing so.
The socialist leader Eugene Debs ran for president from prison.
He was imprisoned because he opposed U.S.
involvement in World War I. We don't prohibit dissent to war policy.
At least we didn't before.
Even for our own wars, let alone for the wars of a foreign country, which is Israel.
And yet, here you have a journalist saying, that's enough protests.
And this tweet went viral.
Lots of people retweeting it, lots of people liking it.
When I criticized it, that was pretty controversial.
Not everybody loved that criticism.
I thought I was defending a principle that we had all decided was
Needed defense Here is dr. Eli David He decided to try and make the public become aware of someone who they never heard of before a woman named Courtney Carey Her crime was She posted These social media postings here one of which said Israel is a terrorist state that was the
main crime.
Israel is a terrorist state.
Now, there are lots of people who believe the United States is a terrorist state, the United States uses classic terrorism, that when you go into Baghdad, With a banner of shock and awe that is explicitly designed to terrorize the civilian population by bombing it with such force that they become traumatized and meek and submissive and want to surrender?
A lot of people consider that to be terrorism and that's absolutely an opinion you are allowed to express.
That your government is engaged in terrorism.
That's allowed.
And if it's allowed to be said about the United States, you're certainly allowed as an American to say that about a foreign country.
Which I need to remind everybody again, Israel is a foreign country.
And when I had members of the Congress on who opposed U.S.
support for the war in Ukraine, they would say things like, Ukraine's not the 51st American state, neither is Israel.
And so you're allowed to criticize Israel as an American citizen, you're allowed to criticize your own government, you're of course allowed to criticize foreign governments, and yet, she went on and said that.
Might be an offensive statement to some, might be a very aggressive or extremist way of phrasing it, but that's her view.
And so he wanted the public to become aware of her and lead a campaign to get her fired.
Meet Courtney Carey.
She supports terrorists.
Now, again, where does she support terrorists?
In fact, she's denouncing what she regards as terrorists, which is Israel.
At least from what I can tell, there's no support for Hamas at all.
But again, unless you believe that every criticism of Israel means you're pro-Hamas, which she does, that's the premise.
There's no way to claim that about her.
In fact, he said the thing that offends him is she thinks Israel is a terrorist state, which is exactly what that tweet, that post says.
She works for Wix.
Fun fact, Wix is an Israeli company.
Enjoy unemployment, Courtney.
Laughing emoji.
So he's doing what Media Matters does, what Sleeping Giants do.
They find random people, unknown people, obscure people, no position of power or authority, not known in any way.
And they find social media posts that they publish that contain views that they regard as offensive and then they demand that they be fired.
They go on a firing campaign to put their hat on a pike as a warning to what other people are going to suffer if they also criticize Israel in too harsh of a way.
And then, unsurprisingly, here he is the next day, happy to update that Courtney has been fired.
Next time you write Israel is a terrorist state, make sure you're not working for an Israeli company.
So, again, that seems a lot like cancel culture to me.
In fact, It's worse than what the standard cancel culture cases are where you try and harm someone's reputation or hold them up for vilification.
This is trying to impose an actual punishment on them for the social media postings that they state.
Now I know for some people this is a more offensive statement, Israel is a terrorist state, than what people on the left want people fired for.
But that's the point.
You're always going to support censorship more or cancellation more for those who express views you hate than those who express views you like.
You're always going to think it's wrong.
When your allies are censored or your allies are fired, that's always going to be offensive.
But the difference between treating this as a principle and treating it as a weapon is whether you also object to it When it comes to views that you hate, or whether everything changes and now suddenly you believe in firing, suddenly you believe in censorship, and for a lot of people on the right, and people who have built their careers in defense of free speech, again, not all.
Candace Owen, for example, and Vivek Ramaswamy have spoken out against this sort of thing.
Candace Owen had a pretty vitriolic exchange with Megyn Kelly.
And Megan's a friend of mine.
I'm on her show all the time.
I have a lot of respect for her.
But when she was at Fox, like most people at Fox at the time, people who were critics of the War on Terror were deemed to be pro-terrorist.
And this is something that Megan has been arguing, that these are pro-Hamas.
or pro-terror supporters, and therefore should be fired, and Candace Owen intervened and objected, as did Vivek Ramaswamy.
So there is a debate.
It's not uniform, but there are plenty of people on the right who are cheering this and supporting it.
Here is a journalist for the Toronto Sun, Joe Warmington, and he posed it to a picture of people outside of a cafe waving a Palestinian flag and calling on this cafe that they call a Zionist cafe to be boycotted.
And here's what Joe Warmington wrote, quote, "This is how it began in Berlin in 1933." And then he calls on Mayor Olivia Chao, which is the Toronto Mayor, who I showed you previously was calling pro-Palestinian protests illegal.
Ford Nation, that's the governor of the province where Toronto is, and then Justin Trudeau, the Canadian president.
Do your job in 2023 and end this egregious anti-Semitism now before it's too late.
It's not hard.
Canada has hate crime legislation.
Police have the power to take action.
So now you have conservative or right-wing columnists
Who have long mocked censorship, have long denounced it, sung the praises of the need for free speech, especially on hard issues, now on his knees begging Justin Trudeau and the mayor of Toronto to please use hate speech laws to silence people who are expressing views he deems anti-Semitic.
Now, again, there are a lot of people who support this viewpoint.
They're usually on the left.
That's why there's hate speech laws in Canada.
They were adopted primarily by Canadian left liberals on the grounds that speech against LGBTs and trans people and black people and Latinos are so dangerous that they have to be stopped as hate speech.
And usually people like this mock that and in this case they're not only cheering for it but begging for it.
Because now it's views that they really find as offensive as the left finds the views they want censored.
Here is Joe Warmington just last year, November of 2022, not even a year ago.
And this is what he wrote in response to somebody advocating censorship, quote, free speech is not always comfortable speech.
Same goes for important speech.
What Dan has to say is important.
So he was saying back then, look, Sometimes having a country in which free speech is protected is going to make you uncomfortable.
Too bad.
Live with it.
And now there's speech that makes him uncomfortable and he's begging Justin Trudeau and the Mayor of Toronto to use hate speech laws to put a stop to it.
Here's an article in Time Magazine, not exactly a extremist outlet, and here's what they say on October 20th, 2023.
In Europe, free speech is under threat for pro-Palestine protesters.
Quote, the curtailing of expressions of support for Palestinians across the Western world has raised alarms for human rights groups who say that rather than imposing blanket preemptive bans, governments have an international obligation to protect freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
Sorry, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
But tensions were particularly heated in France and Germany, home to the largest Jewish and Muslim communities in the EU.
In Berlin, Which is also home to one of the largest diaspora communities outside the Middle East with an estimated 30,000 Palestinians.
The police ramped up security and cracked down on pro-Palestinian groups with full force.
Many Palestinians told reporters they felt fearful of being labeled pro-Hamas for speaking out against Israel.
Do you see the climate this is creating?
You now have Germans yet again using police to crack down on dissent.
And yet Palestinians are saying, I'm not pro-Hamas.
I'm not marching in support of the Hamas massacre.
I'm not marching in support of Hamas at all.
I'm marching in defense of Palestinian civilians calling on restraint to be used so that more don't die.
But this conflation on purpose, with people doing that and being pro-Hamas, is what's leading into and justifying this censorship.
Oh well.
The line for me is supporting Hamas when most people being censored are not doing that.
Quote, the demonstrations prompted both countries to impose a nationwide blanket ban on protests in support of Palestine altogether.
In France, Interior Minister Gerard Dominique, someone wrote to me, helping me with the pronunciation, it hasn't yet kicked in.
I'm embarrassed because they actually sent me a very helpful audio they made, so I apologize to that helpful reader.
I'm going to do better on this, but Interior Minister wrote that, quote, Pro-Palestinian demonstrations must be prohibited because they are likely to generate disturbances to the public order.
France has proceeded to ban nine protests since October 7th, along with imposing 752 fines and 43 arrests since October 12th, according to Reuters.
In Germany, the haunting reminder of the killing of 6 million European Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust has especially stirred tensions.
Quote, our history, our responsibility for the Holocaust makes it our duty in every moment to stand for the existence and security of Israel, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told legislators.
Along with banning protests, Berlin's education authorities have also considered banning students from wearing the Palestinian Kaifia scarf and Free Palestine stickers.
I mean, are you comfortable with any of this?
With the German government ironically citing the Nazis who imposed this exact kind of censorship and crackdown on protest?
Banning every pro-Palestine protester?
Banning kids from wearing free Palestine stickers?
Or the insignia of the Palestinian movement?
Quote, since the initial ban, Berlin police have approved two requests for pro-Palestine protests, both proposed as silent vigils.
Oh, how nice.
They will let you protest as long as you're silent.
In the UK, a new law introduced by the Conservative government in April 2022 has been met with criticism from civil liberties groups, who say it is too restrictive on protest and infringes the right to freedom of expression.
Last week, Home Secretary Suella Braverman told senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or chanting specific phrases for Palestine, such as, quote, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, may be a criminal offense.
Other countries like Hungary and Austria have also blocked pro-Palestine protests since October 7th.
Now, if you support this because you so hate people who protest in defense of the Palestinians, just try and imagine, which is what I say to the left all the time when they support censorship, please just try to imagine a view that you like.
Being met with this kind of nationwide police-enforced repression.
Because the lesson of censorship is it is never confined to views that you hate.
It always will come from views that you like.
Now, I understand some conservatives who are saying, look, we've been censored repeatedly and so I want the left to have a taste of their own medicine.
If that's really what this were, I wish people would be clear about that and I could at least appreciate the candor and then we can have a discussion about whether a solution to censorship is more censorship.
Maybe sometimes when a system is so corrupt, one way to fight it, if you try and uproot it and fail, is to force the people imposing it to have to live under it.
I don't think that's what's happening here though.
I don't think people are saying, I know this censorship is wrong, but I'm nonetheless urging it because The left does it to me and now I want to do it back to make them know what it feels like.
I just showed you a bunch of examples.
That did not seem ironic to me or cynical to me.
Those seemed very earnest, earnest calls for the suppression of views on the grounds that they are too dangerous to permit.
It's not just in the West, in the US, but also in Israel.
Where censorship is happening just like in Ukraine it was and we reported on that and you might say well in war free speech has to be put to the side but I would hope from 9-11 that was something we learned the lesson of, that we shouldn't, even in wartime, acquiesce or relinquish our most basic rights.
Here from the New York Times, and this was something the Israeli Knesset member that I interviewed also affirms, some Israeli journalists express fear about conveying dissenting views.
Quote, airing criticism of the country's response has become even more fraught than in previous conflicts, some journalists and press advocates said.
Some Israeli journalists and supporters of the free press say that covering the war has become even more difficult because of the vitriol they have received from fellow Israelis who have been upset by their questioning of the country's actions in response to the Hamas attacks.
Here's an article on Heretz, the Israeli... I guess you could call it a liberal newspaper.
I found this coverage of the Israeli war very informative.
I read the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post as well.
Or something like the Jerusalem Post.
I read Ynet, I read a wide range of Israeli outlets.
But Harris has been editorially in favor of the war in Gaza, while also very critical of some of the excesses.
And the op-ed page presents a very wide range of views, from people vehemently supporting Netanyahu to people vehemently criticizing him.
And it's amazing that a lot of the op-eds published by Israeli media in general can never see the light of day in the United States.
Their range of debate is much wider than in the United States ours is on the question of Israel.
And here's a report about Israel's communication minister, who's long been known as an extremist, who has been trying to censor Israeli speech and press before this war began, and is now really exploiting the war to do so.
Israel's communication minister takes on his role in the war effort, silencing the media.
Spearheading the campaign to abolish freedom of expression is Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, one of the Prime Minister's closest associates.
Even before the attack on October 7th, Karhi was promoting legislation that would lead to political control of public broadcasts.
Just like Zelensky shut down media outlets before the Russian invasion and then used the invasion to go on a rampage of censorship, that's what's happening here.
Quote, the war only intensified Kari's appetite.
Kari has promoted several anti-democratic emergency regulations which would grant him the authority, in consultation with the National Security Minister, to order the arrest of any person publishing something that could, quote, harm public morale.
To shut down media outlets and boycott broadcasting services.
Khari claims he is trying to shut down local broadcasting by Al Jazeera.
In practice, the state is the means to deal with content that is harmful to state security or the expressions of support for terrorism.
The state attorney's office said that over the last week, the last two weeks, hundreds of citizens have been questioned on suspicions of supporting Hamas or identifying with it.
Last week, five indictments were filed against Israelis who identified with Hamas online, including people who have only a handful of followers on Facebook.
That's the kind of crackdown taking place in Israel.
We've heard it from many sources.
Back in the United States, Here's the New York Times with an explanation, a report on how these cancel culture campaigns first targeted students and others at Harvard and elsewhere who actually did express support for Hamas and now, predictably, just like happens with all censorship campaigns, these efforts have expanded to many people who have nothing to do with supporting Hamas but simply are criticizing Israel.
First of all, here's the report from the New York Times on students and their speech.
Quote, after writing an anti-Israel letter, Harvard students are doxxed.
Quote, a truck with a billboard displayed their names and photos, and critics put out, do not hire lists.
The students say it's a campaign to shut them up.
A coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter.
So that is the issue of the students and how they've been attacked.
We have donors demanding that they be silenced.
We've gone over that.
Now, Here's a report from the BBC, just to indicate to you that people calling for a ban on pro-Palestinian protest are essentially ensuring that only one side of the debate just to indicate to you that people calling for a ban on pro-Palestinian There have been pro-Israel protests in the United States throughout the West, here on BBC on October 22nd.
Just this weekend there was a report pro-Israel protest in London called for return of hostages.
Protesters in London's Trafalgar Square have held up photos of those missing with their names being read out from the steps of the National Gallery.
Security in the square was high with a significant police presence.
Many in the crowd chanted quote bring them home And clutching signs that say, release the hostages.
And there have been other reports here, for example, is Reuters reporting on a pro-Palestinian protest held in New York and then a pro-Israel one as well.
And we showed you some of the reporting there.
Now, one of the things that has gotten lost, I mentioned this earlier, Is that there are a lot of Jews who, and you may not disagree with, you may not agree with them, but their existence is important to acknowledge, who participate in the pro-Palestinian protests, who are critical of the Israeli government.
Here's this one representative person, Jeff Young, on October 23rd, who said, as a Jewish American, I am 100% in support of the Palestinian people and 100% opposed to Israel's violent attacks, ongoing violent attacks.
And I think there's sort of an effort to say any Jew who doesn't get on board with supporting Israel is a self-hating Jew or has something wrong with them.
It reminds me a lot of the way that liberals try and scorn and vilify black people who don't support the Democratic Party.
Oh, they're self-hating black people.
They're Uncle Toms.
But Jews and Israelis are no more a monolith than anyone else.
Here is the free speech organization FIRE that is very much like the old ACLU in that they support free speech in every instance, no matter who it pleases, no matter what agenda it undermines or serves, is what the ACLU used to be.
And I'm grateful that we have FIRE.org, who began as a campus free speech organization that often objected to censorship on campus of pro-Palestinian groups.
Now sounding the warning about censorship aimed at pro-Palestinian voices, FIRE.org is often called a right-wing organization because they have vehemently defended right-wing student groups who are the targets of censorship.
But in this case, they're sounding this warning.
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalates, so must our commitment to free speech.
Intense political disagreements demonstrate the necessity of the First Amendment.
Quote, following Hamas's deadly terrorist attacks on Israel, college students, faculty, protesters and others have made statements supporting or justifying the attack, even in some cases celebrating Hamas's atrocities, that have unsurprisingly elicited outrage from many corners.
Any commentary on Hamas's attack or Israel response is, of course, fair game for criticism and condemnation.
That exchange of views is what the First Amendment protects.
FIRE has long defended the free speech rights of speakers on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And the article is a ringing endorsement of the importance of free speech, even when, in fact, especially when you feel particularly strongly about an issue,
And sounding warnings about the growing censorship calls on campuses and media throughout the West and the United States aimed almost entirely at people who are critical of the United States government and the Israeli government or people who are marching in support of Palestinian civilians.
And I know this temptation is hard.
Trust me, even though we vilify them and critique them and mock them, People on the left or liberals who want views censored genuinely believe those views are dangerous.
They genuinely believe it makes people in marginalized groups or minority groups uncomfortable.
And sometimes they're even right about that.
It does.
There are hateful views.
You can go to an immigration march, an anti-immigration march, and find people who are white nationalists, even though the majority of people there are not.
You can go to protest against affirmative action and find people there who are genuinely racist, even though most people are not.
But the fact that it makes people uncomfortable doesn't mean it should be banned, and the same has to be true in the case of this war, where, as FIRE says, the more important the debate is, the more urgent it is that we resist those temptations and rise in defense of these free speech values that we all are accustomed, over the years, to now defending.
So I woke up this morning to a disturbing news report.
It was a report that ended up dominating the headlines in Brazil and it is something that I can't say shocked me.
It's something that I suspected was happening.
But as is true before, in my career, when I suspected the US government and the UK government were spying on my communications and my husband's communications, it was still different when it got confirmed when he sued the UK government.
And they admitted they knew he was coming to London and what he was carrying because they had spied on our communications.
It's still different to get it confirmed.
I knew the U.S.
government was trying to find ways to prosecute myself and Laura Poitras for the reporting we did.
It still was different when Mike Isikoff, in 2019, when he reported that the Obama administration had plotted ways with the CIA to assassinate Julian Assange.
Part of that report was that the CIA also tried to create theories to justify my prosecution and Laura Quartz's prosecution.
It's still different when it gets confirmed.
And all kinds of things were done to me and David during our reporting in Brazil that ended up being very significant in proving that the anti-corruption probe was actually dominated by corrupt judges and prosecutors.
There were reports about them investigating our finances.
They prosecuted me and brought indictments against me that were ultimately dismissed on First Amendment grounds by the Supreme Court.
Still, it's a different thing when it gets confirmed that there's an abuse of power aimed at you even though if you're a journalist who's worth anything that's going to happen.
Power centers are going to be threatened by you and disturbed by you because your job is to make them uncomfortable, to reveal their secrets, and they're going to end up doing reprisals.
Still, it's different when it got confirmed, and it got confirmed today by O Globo, which is one of the largest newspapers in Brazil.
It's part of the global media outlet.
There you see the headline on the screen.
Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda were spied on by Abin during Bolsonaro administration.
Now, Abin is the domestic intelligence agency of Brazil.
And it has functions, but part of its function is not to spy on journalists who are engaged in investigative reporting.
My husband at the time was a member of Congress, part of the parties that formed the opposition to the Bolsonaro government.
And they didn't just spy on me, they spied on him too.
He was part of the reporting we were doing, but he had his own independent role as a member of Congress.
And just to be clear, this is not a story that came from Globo, it came from the Federal Police.
The media in Brazil has long known that, or they just discovered, that Abin was using Israeli spying technology, ironically, so it kind of ties all the stories together.
The first thing Bolsonaro did when he got elected in 2018, the very next day he went to Israel.
In part for religious reasons, he's an evangelical Christian, he was baptized in the Jordan River, But also for, he said, to meet with Israeli security officials to understand how better to protect Brazil's cybersecurity.
And as we know, Israel has the most potent and invasive spying software in the world, Pegasus and things like that.
That was what was used to expose Jeff Bezos' Extramarital affair that broke up his marriage that was typically credited to the Saudi prince who used Pegasus to hack into Jeff Bezos' WhatsApp.
They have very powerful technologies, spying technologies.
And it was recently discovered that Abin was using them, agents of Abin, against political enemies of the government in ways that were illegal.
And it's the federal police in Brazil that are not exactly my friends.
That confirmed to Global and then to other news outlets that on this list of people who were illegally spied against were both myself and my husband.
Here's part of what Global reported, quote, the full list of persons illegally spied on with a cell phone surveillance software during the Bolsonaro administration is still unknown, but the federal police has already located an additional two political adversaries of the former president that were targeted by the spooks, journalist Glenn Greenwald and his late husband, David Miranda, the former congressman for the PDT party that passed away last May.
And as this story played out today and was, as I said, dominating the headlines, Globo just reported a couple hours before we went on the air that the agency inside the federal government that has public prosecutors that's responsible for investigating and prosecuting crimes, they're Globo just reported a couple hours before we went on the air that the Sorry to, got caught up in that translation, Ministerio Publico, which is the public ministry.
They were, ironically, the agency that tried to prosecute me for my journalism.
They are now demanding an investigation into the spying that was done.
And here's what the Globo reported.
Quote, "The section of the public ministry that has jurisdiction over Over the Federal Court of Accounts demanded this Monday that any possible irregularities committed by a being in the surveillance and spying of citizens without official justification during the Bolsonaro administration with the goal of persecuting adversary politicians, ministers, and journalists be investigated.
The way I see it, quote, quote, the way I see it, there is a clear abuse and distortion of the functions of this organ when it is employed to surveil public adversaries of the president, which I believe is a quote from a member of the Ministry of Public Health in this investigation.
So let me just make a couple of observations about this.
Number one, when we did the Snowden reporting, part of the Reporting was that there was this kind of arms race underway between surveillance agents, agents of the security state and privacy advocates that every time privacy advocates would create new weapons against state surveillance to use encryption or to use privacy protecting software
The NSA or the GCHQ or surveillance agencies would immediately get to work on how to invade them, how to render them inoperable.
And we did reporting on how some of the encryption that privacy advocates long believed was impenetrable was in fact penetrated by the NSA.
And there's this constant more privacy advocates make an advance in using encryption and then the NSA learns how to invade that and spy better.
What has happened in the last several years is there's been a huge leap in the powers of spying agencies in the West.
And primarily these come from Israeli companies.
They are very advanced and sophisticated companies and they have created spying software that can invade almost every well-known program, Gmail and WhatsApp and pretty much everything.
And they're a private company so they sell it to other governments, to other private corporations.
And there's been reporting that Brazil is one of the countries that obtained, not necessarily Pegasus, that's unclear, but some of these extremely invasive spying programs the United States obviously has among the best.
And for me this isn't about any one party or one government.
It's not about the Bolsonaro government.
It's not about the Obama administration that did it.
It demonstrates the reality that if governments and political officials can use spying power against their own populations in the dark, they will inevitably abuse it against their enemies, against their political enemies, against the journalists who investigate them.
This is why safeguards are so necessary, not because one party or the other or one side or the other is inherently more corrupt or more abusive of power.
It's because human nature Will lead people to abuse these powers because it's a very intoxicating power.
Just like censorship is.
Imagine the ability to take the internet and cleanse it of all views that you dislike to ensure that only your views are heard.
That's inebriating.
It's addictive.
And that's why these neoliberal billionaires like Pierre Omidyar and Bill Gates are funding it because that's a rush.
To use your billions to have all the views that you dislike declare disinformation and then ban?
That's the same with spying.
They're very similar.
The spying regime we exposed during the Snowden reporting and the censorship regime on which we now focus.
And at the heart of it lies human nature that is likely to abuse power if it can exercise it in the dark and with no safeguards.
And that is what happened here.
Now, the other aspect to this is that this is something that, if you're a real journalist, is going to happen to you.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that one of the main ways you can recognize a real journalist from a fake one Is real journalists are going to be targeted at some point with reprisals by powerful factions precisely because the role of journalists is to confront powerful factions and make them uncomfortable?
Be threatening to them?
Have the ability to expose their secrets that they want hidden to be able to reveal their acts that are criminal or deceitful to the public?
And if governments or other power centers aren't targeting you for reprisals, It's a pretty strong indication that you're not really a journalist in any meaningful sense of the word.
I can't tell you how often these employees at liberal digital outlets like shitty tabloids like the Daily Beast and Huffington Post and Vice, all of them, write articles that refuse to call me a journalist, call me an activist or some far-right influencer.
And while they call themselves journalists, Ben Collins of NBC News, Taylor Renz of the Washington Post have all said I'm not a journalist, I'm not really a journalist, but they are.
What have they ever done that threatens anyone in power?
When is Taylor Renz or Ben Collins or any of these shitty activists, liberal activists, pro-DNC activists of the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast and Vice and Vox and all these digital outlets that love to claim that only they are legitimate journalists, when have they ever been targeted by anyone with pro-DNC activists of the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast and Never.
Because they serve people in power.
They don't threaten people in power.
Go look at what happens to Seymour Hersh, what has happened to him.
and his career.
Go look at the reprisals aimed at Julian Assange, who in my opinion is the most influential and consequential journalist of our generation.
He's in prison.
So when things happen throughout my career like the US and UK government spying on me or the British government detaining my husband as part of the Snowden reporting and threatening him with terrorism prosecutions or trying to find ways to prosecute me or the Brazilian government spying on me and trying to prosecute me, these are things I wear as a badge of honor because to me this is what's going to happen to you if you're a good journalist.
Instead what we get Are these posers and larpers and pathetic narcissists at CNN like Jim Acosta, who wrote this book that sickens me to this day when I look at the title, The Enemy of the People, A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America by Jim Acosta, CNN White House correspondent.
There he is in his blow-dried glory and his little manicured fingertips pointing at Donald Trump as though he in some way was endangered.
Whatever happened to Jim Acosta?
Nothing!
Nothing happened to Jim Acosta and yet CNN and liberals turn him into this like journalistic martyr when all he does is deliver the messaging of the U.S.
security state and the Democratic Party.
He's a threat to nobody.
He's a little servant of those in power.
He's like a pet, a puppy dog.
And so people can fight about the role of journalist or the title of journalist and who deserves it all they want.
And they can try and deny me that title even though I have on my shelf every award that has ever been given to journalists by journalist organizations for doing journalism.
I don't even consider that important because these awards are ultimately very corrupted.
Like I said, the New York Times and Washington Post gave themselves, showered themselves with Pulitzers For their completely fabricated and deceitful reporting about Russiagate, those aren't what matter to me.
What matters to me are the results, what you provoke from powerful actors.
And the journalists that I respect, the people who I think have actually done meaningful journalistic work, are the people who are the target of these kinds of reprisals.
It doesn't make it justified.
I think the people who abuse these spying powers should be investigated, but at the end of the day, it's not a surprise to me.
I operate on the premise that this is happening precisely because I try and make my work adversarial to those in power.
And at the end of the day, that's all that matters in your journalism is whether you are vindicating the rights of the public to know what powerful people are doing.
And if you actually do that, instead of serving as a propaganda arm for those powerful entities, this is the outcome.
So we'll keep you up to date on this.
It's by far not the most serious or the gravest retaliation I've ever faced.
Far from it.
Like I said, it's something that David and I often talked about, we took steps that are probably inadequate to protect our communications, knowing that we were the likely targets of surveillance.
But as I said, even when you know, it's still somewhat disturbing to have it confirmed like it was today.
And we will keep you up to date on how this investigation unfolds.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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