As Attacks on Gaza—and Escalation Risks—Grow, Free Debate is More Vital Than Ever. Are All Pro-Palestinian Protesters Antisemitic? PLUS: Matt Taibbi | SYSTEM UPDATE #172
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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.
It is hard to overstate the death, destruction, and misery being rained down on the 2.2 million people of Gaza.
It is quite likely, however, that we are going to be hearing significantly less about exactly what is happening there, and that's by design.
The Israelis have ensured that all internet service and other forms of outside communication with Gaza are now almost entirely cut.
All of that comes as Israeli bombardment of Gaza reaches its most intense level yet, And that's saying a lot given that Israel in the very first week of this war dropped more bombs on this tiny strip of land than the U.S.
dropped on Afghanistan in an entire year.
Meanwhile, the U.S.
last night bombed Iranian sites in Syria as retaliation for Iranian missile attacks on U.S.
troops deployed in Syria.
Yes, we still have U.S.
troops deployed in Syria.
And the State Department today issued an urgent warning that all American citizens in Lebanon should immediately leave the country.
That followed a prior travel advisory from the State Department that Americans now faced increased risk of violent attacks on them due to their government's support for the Israeli war effort.
All of this is happening as Joe Biden and his Republican and Democratic allies in Congress, fully bipartisan, vow unlimited support for Israel and insisting that they intend to impose no limits on how Israel can bomb Gaza or invade it, even though they are using American bombs and American money to pay for those bombs to bomb all of Gaza and the entire region.
Knows that.
Given the obviously grave consequences of all of these developments, ones that are certain to get far worse with an imminent Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, the need for a free debate is more vital than ever.
And yet, as we documented last night and will document again, calls for censorship from Republican presidential candidates and countless politicians and very prominent journalists and pundits who have spent years denouncing censorship, those continue to skyrocket.
And this is all based in the premise that pro-Palestinian protests are inherently or highly likely to be anti-Semitic and that pro-Palestinian voices are motivated by a hatred for Jews.
We'll examine that premise and then we will talk to the independent journalist Matt Taibbi about a significant new story that he has revealing the latest scheme to dictate who is and who is not a valid source of information coming from the Pentagon all as a means of controlling the flow of political debate and news.
Before we get to our program, a few programming notes.
First of all, we will be traveling next week.
I don't know why I'm using the word we.
I will be traveling next week, but we will have episodes of System Update, new episodes of System Update, almost every night if not every night, and we have several Very interesting interviews that we have taped in the last 48 hours, including one with Professor John Mearsheimer.
We had him on our show a couple of months ago and it was one of our most watched episodes ever.
And he is an incredibly interesting and informed and illuminating voice on foreign policy in general, on the Middle East and Ukraine in particular.
We also have a very wide-ranging interview with David Talbot, who is the founder of Salon.com, and more importantly, in my view, the author of The Devil's Chessboard, which is the best history of the way in which the CIA and the national security state was formed after World War II, and the way the Dulles brothers, and Allen Dulles in particular, who ran the CIA for Oh, more than a decade.
Ended up controlling that part of the government with barely any limitations in the way in which the CIA and Alan Dulles had a huge clash with John Kennedy and the possibility that the CIA had a role to play in John F. Kennedy's assassination, even though Alan Dulles, after leaving the CIA for a decade, sat on the Warren Commission and he has a lot to say on all of those issues.
And then we also have an interview with the musician Roger Waters, who is in Brazil.
this week in Rio de Janeiro today for a show that he will be performing tomorrow night.
And that discussion as well was very wide ranging.
It was, of course, about political issues, the war in Ukraine, the war in Israel and Gaza, but also a lot of personal reflections on his career, on the way in which he is widely vilified as an anti-Semite, whether there's validity to those claims, how it affects him, why he's made these choices to take the very polarizing positions why he's made these choices to take the very polarizing positions that he It was very contemplative and personal interview as well as a political one.
And we're looking forward to showing you all of those.
And those will be next week as I'm traveling.
And also from my travels, be commenting and weighing in specifically on major news events.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can follow the program on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
Each episode airs 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble, and if you rate, review, and follow our program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we are done with our show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have an interactive live after show with our audience, and that's available exclusively for subscribers to our Locals community.
We take your feedback and hear your critiques there.
We've had a lot of very smart, good-faith critiques about our coverage of this war over the last several weeks that we've been purposely elevating and addressing on that show.
And if you become a member of our local community, you also get access to the daily transcripts of each program that we provide, the original journalism we intend to post, and it just helps the independent journalism that we try and do here.
If you want to become a member of our local community, simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It's always very difficult to try and say that one particular war is the most horrific to have to watch.
It's impossible for, first of all, to pay attention to all wars, to really understand them in a way that will allow you to put them on a scale or a spectrum like that.
And for another, on some level, all wars are just intrinsically horrifying.
They on purpose stimulate the worst impulses of human beings.
They caused human beings to dehumanize others, to have their tribal instincts at their highest point.
They necessarily require a complete cutting off of empathy and compassion because if you allow yourself to feel that it will be very hard to support your government while they kill and bomb huge numbers of
the enemy population including children and innocent people of all kinds and having said that I do have to say that it may be it's just a byproduct of my own limited experience in terms of the words I pay attention to as an American as a Western journalist but there haven't been many things if there have been any more depressing and more traumatizing and just more difficult to have to witness than this war that's currently taking place in Gaza.
And it began, of course, with extremely horrifying imagery that came first out of Israel of Hamas's attacks on Israeli civilians, of the way in which they were massacred, often in the cruelest way possible.
They were abducted and kidnapped.
A lot of the hostages are still in Gaza.
And then there's been three weeks almost, three weeks to the day tomorrow, of just the most relentless bombing.
At the same time that food and water and medication and fuel are blockaded and cut off and prevented from entering Gaza.
We just had a few trucks enter through the Egyptian border with Gaza a few days ago, but it's a tiny drop in the bucket in terms of what Gaza needs.
The hospitals are on the brink of collapse.
There are stories of people, including children, having to have limbs amputated because the dirty drinking water is causing infection.
They don't have Antibiotics in order to stop the infections.
The only solution is to amputate the limbs where they're isolated and they have to use surgical instruments while not administering any anesthesia or even painkillers because they don't have medication coming into that country.
And at the same time, the scenes of death and mutilation and bombing and destruction in Gaza are absolutely sickening to look at and to watch and to hear about.
And we're only at the beginning of this.
We're nowhere near the end.
We're far closer to the beginning than the end.
By all accounts, there's going to be an Israeli ground invasion that is almost certain to last weeks, if not months, and that's going to entail immense amounts of violence and suffering for the people of Gaza, for the Israeli soldiers entering as well.
And there's just no end in sight, and there's not going to be any end in sight, because the United States government is filled with people
With a couple of exceptions, literally just a few, who either believe in the necessity of killing what will probably be, certainly be, tens of thousands of Gazans by the time this is done without any limitations being placed on the Israelis and or people who are too politically cowardly to stand up in public and have it known that they are trying to impose restraints on the Israelis.
The pro-Israel sentiment in Washington has been steadfast and bipartisan for decades and it's never been at a higher point than it is now.
We had Lee Fong on our show last night who talked about the role that certain evangelical dogma plays, the belief that Israel has to be strong for Jesus to return, which if you're an evangelical you will do anything to facilitate.
That is the Kind of endpoint the nirvana of your religion and you of course have a very significant Pro-israel lobby composed of American Jews and Israeli Jews as well And then you just have national security state hawks and the combination of all of those Makes it almost impossible to expect anything from Washington other than what Joe Biden has promised which is an endless array of bombs and money going from Washington to Tel Aviv
And at the same time, not having any sort of imposition of constraints, humanitarian or otherwise, placed on the Israelis, even though American citizens, the people the United States government is supposed to care the most about, are now themselves at risk in terms of their security.
Not by Hamas.
No one thinks Hamas is a danger to the United States.
They've never attacked the United States.
They can't attack the United States.
No one would credibly argue that with a straight face.
The danger has come from American support for Israel, something that generals have warned about for decades, that it makes Americans more vulnerable to attack and anti-American sentiment.
And now the State Department is, as I said, issuing warnings to American citizens that traveling is more dangerous than ever because of the perception, the obviously accurate perception, that the bombs that are dropping in Gaza and causing so much humanitarian suffering come directly from Washington.
Just to give you a little bit of sense of why we think it's so vital to preserve open and free debate and not allow these calls for censorship to take root on premises on which they're based, here from NBC News today is an article, Death and Trauma Stalk Palestinian Children.
The staggering rate of deaths and injuries of children in Gaza, quote, is a growing stain on our collective conscience, UNICEF said.
And by the way, I know that any source that criticizes Israel, the World Health Organization, the UN, countries in the region, journalists in Gaza, are automatically told, you're automatically told, they're biased, they hate Israel, you shouldn't listen to them.
But especially with all communication now cut off from Gaza, no more journalists can tell us what's going on there, the Gazans themselves can't show us what's going on.
You have to listen to somebody and it doesn't take a genius to understand that if you drop this amount of bombs on a tiny little strip of land filled with civilians and children, you're going to kill enormous numbers of people.
Children make up about half of Gaza's nearly 2.3 million people, many of whom were born during Israel's strict 16-year blockade of Gaza and are now watching bombs destroy their neighborhoods.
In 2022, four out of five children in Gaza were already living with depression, fear, and grief.
According to a report by Save the Children, more than half said they have contemplated suicide.
The war has only made it worse.
At least 2,704 children have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials.
Since Israel began its bombardment on Gaza for retaliation for Hamas's terror attacks in Israel on October 7th that killed more than 1,400 people in Israel and saw more than 220 taken hostage.
Now, Joe Biden called into question the authenticity and reliability of these statistics about how many people have died saying they come from Hamas.
And as I said, You don't have to trust Hamas.
You don't have to trust anyone to understand that there's mass death taking place in Gaza, way more than the number of Israelis who have died, many of whom were members of the military or the police.
We never really see those numbers about how many of those 1,400 people killed in Israel were actually civilians.
A strange omission, I think, but again, If you don't think it's this amount, it's the amount close to it.
Quote, another 830 children are estimated to still be trapped in rubble in Gaza.
Those are some of the worst videos I've seen of families, of women, of children, buried underneath rubble from the buildings Israel bombed.
And they're alive.
You can see their hands sticking out.
But the Gazans can't rescue them, can't move the rubble because they don't have fuel or equipment because Gaza has been blockaded for so long and is particularly blockaded now.
So these people are dying under the rubble even though they're alive for a long time because they can't be pulled out.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 12 hospitals have been shut down due to damage or lack of supplies in food, fuel, along with another 32 primary health care centers shifting the burden to facilities that remain open, but are overwhelmed and struggling to function, with death looming seemingly indiscriminately.
Parents have begun writing the names of the children on their legs so they can be identified if they are taken to hospitals or morgues.
At Al-Shifa, Al-Buddha said medical staff have also begun writing names on the hands and legs of the children.
Now, some of the worst videos are the ones from hospitals because you have doctors talking about how they cannot be I cannot conduct surgery on patients with anesthesia because the anesthesia and other medications to block pain has run out in Gaza.
And there's nowhere safe in Gaza.
So you have families who are just sitting there with bombs all around them.
Just imagine One bomb going off near your house, let alone a continuous relentless stream seeing buildings destroyed all over, hearing of entire families wiped out, and you're just sitting there in Gaza.
There's no safe place.
The Israelis told half the population to evacuate to the south where there's no shelter, no infrastructure.
And even when they started going to the south, Israel then bombed the south of Gaza as well.
There's no safe place in Gaza.
And all you can do is just sit around and wait, hope that next bomb doesn't fall on the building that you're in, and you go to sleep at night having no idea whether you're going to wake up in the morning.
I guess, theoretically, that's true for everybody, but there's levels of risk, and the risk for people in Gaza not to wake up every day they go to sleep is extremely high.
There's no recovering from that, even if you survive.
Obviously, children are going to be psychologically destroyed forever being in the middle of these relentless bombing Campaigns every day.
Fires.
Here, let me show you from the Times of Gaza.
Here's a photo of the Gaza Strip.
They say the Gaza Strip is being annihilated.
There you see it literally on fire.
Here is a video also from the Times of Gaza.
Here is a video.
Here is a video.
Here is the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Jordan, Ayman Safadi, who is a close US ally.
Jordan is.
And this is what he tweeted earlier today.
Quote, Israel just launched a ground war on Gaza.
The outcome will be a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions for years to come.
Voting against Arab UNGA resolution means approving this senseless war, this senseless killing.
Millions will be watching every vote.
History will judge.
He's talking there about what seems not to be a full-scale ground invasion but another incursion preparing for the ground invasion while the bombing campaign has escalated to an all-record high because they're preparing the ground to soften it up for the invasion.
Here's Time Magazine on October 20th talking about the psychological state of what it's like to be in Gaza and I would love to turn away from this as much as you would.
I promise you.
I've been going to the chat, trying to go into the chat as much as I can, the live chat of our show.
Certainly before we begin, it's hard to do it when I'm on the air, although we are going to start having segments where we do that as well.
I've been saying that for a while, so I've been going to the chat as kind of a preparation to customize myself to the chat.
in the Wild West culture that you all have created there.
And sometimes I go in and people say, oh wow, you're doing another show on the war.
I wish we could talk about something else.
And I understand.
I wish I could too.
We have talked about other things.
We've talked about the speakership, the new speakership of Mike Johnson.
And we talked about, we're going to talk tonight about my, about several unrelated censorship programs.
But if you're an American citizen, this war is your war.
Not in the sense that Nikki Haley said that we have been attacked because we weren't attacked.
Israel was attacked and it is still a foreign country.
It's our war in the sense that we're providing the bombs and the money and the weapons and other logistical support and diplomatic cover for this war to continue.
And so if you're an American citizen, you have a duty to Pay attention to understand what is being done in your name and by your government and to engage in a debate about whether this is something that you want.
And I had a comment yesterday from a viewer in our Live After Show and we're going to next week.
We're going to make that available for everybody or play it because I thought it was an important episode of our Live After Show because we specifically went out of our way to address criticism and critiques.
And it was from a viewer who said, look, I'm a supporter of Israel, but I'm not somebody who craves any of this, who wants this to happen or who supports it.
I haven't lost my empathy for the Palestinian people.
And I do absolutely agree and believe That there are many Israel supporters who believe that Israel has a right to defend itself, that has the right to exist and to react to the Hamas attack, including with violence, but doesn't necessarily sanction the full unleashing of a humanitarian crisis on the people of Gaza.
So I think it is important not to generalize and to remember that inside Israel, there's a lot of criticism of the Israeli government.
In fact, we put on a member of the Knesset, Who's a full-scale critic of the war, but there are also people who are kind of in the middle who are Israeli or identify with Israel, support Israel in the West, but who don't sanction all of this.
But this is the war, not some make-believe war where things are a little more restrained.
This is the only war that's happening.
So it's either this war that you support or you oppose.
Now, here's from Time Magazine.
The headline is, Our Death is Pending, Stories of Loss and Grief from Gaza.
And this is the sense I get.
I follow a lot of Palestinians, a lot of people who live in Gaza on social media.
I always have.
I've been paying more attention to Israelis and to Gazans and what they're saying about their experiences because ultimately that is one of the most trustworthy ways to just get a sense for what's taking place.
Every time I hear somebody from Gaza speaking, the sense that you get from them is basically just kind of one of fate, resigned to the fate that they have, which is there's nothing going to stop these bombs from coming and all you can do is just sort of hope that the next one doesn't kill you and your children.
But you can't really do anything about it because you're trapped there.
Quote, but for all the attention being paid to Gaza in the last two weeks, it remains difficult to hear the voices of Palestinians living there.
Israeli authorities have cut off fuel and electricity to the enclave, making it difficult for residents to keep their devices charged, let alone reach the outside world.
While many international journalists are based in Israel, there is a very limited foreign media presence in Gaza.
The picture is a grim one.
To live in Gaza today means not only facing airstrikes, thousands of which have been carried out on Gaza over the past 13 days, but also the threat of malnutrition and inability to access medical care, as Gaza hospitals reach a breaking point.
Quote, the health system had 2,500 beds when the war started, and now it has 12,500 wounded.
Says Ghassan Abu Sita, a British-Palestinian doctor currently working in Gaza.
He notes that the health system was already, quote, on its knees as a result of a 16-year blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt that has severely curtailed the movement of goods and people in and out of the Strip, half of whose 2 million residents are children.
So there was already very limited news coming out of Gaza.
No media outlets can function there safely.
In fact, the correspondent from Al Jazeera, who is based in Gaza, he was working.
He wasn't at home.
He was covering the war for Al Jazeera.
And then a bomb came on his house or where his family was and killed his wife and his children and his sister and her husband.
He lost six or seven members of his immediate family at once.
Extinguished.
Including his wife and children.
And that's not even a comment.
But now, even the little information that we were getting from people like him, from people who had internet connection, all of that's gone.
From NBC News today, the near total internet and cellular blackout hits Gaza as Israel ramps up strikes.
Quote, the largest telecommunications provider in Gaza that was still largely operational, Paltel, said Friday it had suffered a complete disruption of all services.
A near total blackout of the internet and cell phone services has taken hold across much of the Gaza Strip, according to witnesses there and companies that monitor global connectivity.
The largest telecommunications provider in Gaza that was still largely operational, Pathel, said Friday it had suffered a complete disruption of services after a heavy Israeli bombing earlier in the day destroyed its last remaining infrastructure connecting it to the global internet.
I don't know why they can't have Starlink, the kind of internet service of Elon Musk's company that kept Ukraine connected to the internet even while Russia bombed it.
We'll see if that happens, but right now there's going to be tons of Israeli bombing of Gaza and we're going to hear very little about it by design.
That's not a coincidence that right as Israel is massively bombing more than ever in preparation of its ground offensive, its invasion into Gaza, suddenly we cannot hear any more from Gazans about what they're suffering.
We can't see any more than the videos that we just showed you of what's happening.
So.
We're going to be supporting a war and having almost a complete blackout on what's going on.
Here's the First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, who's a citizen of Scotland but he's of Palestinian descent.
His family goes in Gaza, and this is what he said, quote, Gaza is under intense bombing.
Telecommunications have been cut.
We can't get through to our family who have been trapped in this war zone for almost three weeks.
We can only pray they survive the night.
How many more children have to die before the world says enough?
Is there an answer to that question?
If you identify as pro-Israel, if you identify as supportive of the war in concept, that Is there a number of Palestinian deaths that becomes excessive?
Where you say, you know what, this is intolerable.
Whatever the number is, maybe it's 10,000, maybe it's 30,000, maybe it's 70,000.
Right now the position of the United States government is there's no such limit like that.
Israel not only has a right to defend itself, but to do so however they wish.
And the United States won't impose any humanitarian conditions on the delivery of weapons and money in unlimited amounts, whatever the Israelis need.
We showed you last night Nikki Haley saying, my position is that you do whatever Israel tells you to do, you give them whatever they ask, no questions asked.
Which has more or less been the position of the United States government with regard to Ukraine.
Sometimes they've been a little bit slow giving.
Sometimes they first said no and then said yes.
But essentially, that's what we've done in Ukraine as well.
But Israel obviously is much more powerful politically in Washington than Ukraine.
And even the limits that Ukraine confronted, Israel is not going to.
But at some point, this can turn into a serious crime against humanity, an actual historic humanitarian disaster.
And the question is, what is the limit?
Is there a limit?
Should there be a limit?
We've seen Israeli protesters, we've seen Israeli officials saying that they believe Gaza and the West Bank are theirs, that they want to obliterate Gaza.
The member of the Knesset we had on, members of the Israeli press have said the real goal of the Israeli government is to drive the people out of Gaza, to kill them or drive them out.
So there's no more Palestinians left in Gaza and Israel can take over the land that they believe is theirs.
And Ron DeSantis in his statement yesterday seemed to endorse that view by calling that land not Gaza and the West Bank, which is what it's internationally called under international law, But Samaria and Judea, which are the terms that the Israelis who believe it's their land, use for those, those, those strips of land that they believe constitute greater Israel.
Here is a tweet from Ali Hashem, who is a journalist in the region, and he says, Israel's military has told international news organizations, Reuters, and agency Franz Press that it cannot guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in Gaza.
And then here from NetBlocks, which is a organization that monitors telecommunications data, they posted the following.
Quote, confirmed live network data shows a collapse in connectivity to the Gaza Strip with high impact of Paltel amid reports of heavy bombardment.
The company is the last remaining major operator to supply service as connectivity declines amid ongoing fighting with Israel.
So no more communication.
If you're in Gaza, no internet.
Nothing to distract you to let you stay connected to the news or anything else.
And if you're in the rest of the world, no more hearing from people in Gaza.
We showed you a couple weeks ago, a State Department advisory that warned Americans that wherever they go in the world, they should be at heightened alert on heightened alert because the risk that they will be attacked violently by a terrorist or whomever out of anger over US support for Israel.
has now increased.
So you would think our foreign policy is supposed to increase the security of American citizens.
By definition, that would be the goal of US foreign policy.
And yet in this case, it's doing the opposite.
It's making Americans more vulnerable to violence, to their physical security.
Here's a new State Department advisory today about Lebanon.
Quote, the State Department recommends that U.S.
citizens in Lebanon leave now, now, leave now, leave the country now, while commercial flights remain available due to the unpredictable security situation.
You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S.
government assistance.
The best time to leave a country is before a crisis, if at all possible.
Now, I wish that our leaders, our political officials in Washington, approving, by overwhelming votes, these military and financial packages to fuel the war in Israel, the war by Israel and Gaza, would be asked these questions.
Aren't Americans being made more in danger by your actions and your policies, not less so?
How does participation in this war by the United States government Help the security of the United States and of American citizens?
Or does it even matter?
I don't think it matters.
That was the question we've been asking since February 2022 about the war in Ukraine.
How does American participation in that war feeding and fueling this war, prolonging it and flooding Ukraine with dangerous weapons with the risk of escalation?
How does that increase the security of the American citizens or the American homeland?
It doesn't.
Plainly, it doesn't.
And They continued anyway because they don't care.
That's not their objective.
That's not their concern.
Tucker Carlson gave a speech a couple days ago where he essentially said that all these American politicians who have been singing the praises of America First and non-interventionism obviously are frauds.
Because they're likely to vote on a new emergency spending package to send $105 billion to other countries for their wars, even while Americans suffer at home to the point where, for example, the leading cause of death for American citizens under the age of 45 is suicide.
There's something very wrong with a society when you have that level of suicide.
And yet, We showed you that Mike Johnson, the newly elected Speaker, who we think highly of in certain ways, why am I using this royal we, who I think highly of in certain ways, who I said impressed me in many different things that he's done and said, nonetheless gave a speech as soon as he got elected Speaker saying my first priority is to pass a bill to help our friends in Israel.
Now one of the focal points of our journalism since the war began was not on what's happening over there because we're not in Gaza.
But instead is what's been happening in the United States in American political discourse.
And of particular concern have been the efforts, including on the part of many conservatives, by no means all.
Many conservatives have been vocally opposed to this and prominent ones too, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Candace Owens have been standing up and saying, we're not going to engage in cancel culture and censorship over this foreign war.
But so many, including politicians, the kind who have been waving the banner of free speech and now suddenly have rediscovered the joys of censorship, have been in all kinds of ways, as we've been reporting almost every day, demanding that people who support the Palestinians or who are critics of Israel be silenced, legally compelled to not express their views.
And the way it's justified is the same way people on the liberal left justify their calls for censorship by saying the people who we want to silence are not really expressing legitimate political views but instead are inciting hatred.
It's hate speech, they say.
And it's designed to incite violence against a marginalized minority group.
Only in the case of the conservatives calling for this, the marginalized minority group who's being threatened by speech that has to be curtailed are not trans people, or black people, or immigrants, or women, or Latinos, or Native Americans, but they're American Jews.
And the premise of this censorship campaign is essentially very explicit.
Which is that a pro-Palestinian protest, almost by definition, is anti-Semitic, is one that is urging violence against Jews.
And it's such a, first of all, it's also a copy, a copying of left liberal tactics.
If you ask an American liberal or someone on the left why they want to silence certain speech or why they believe that their political enemies are not just political adversaries but criminals, they will tell you because they're driven by hate, bigotry, racism, transphobia, misogyny, xenophobia, etc.
You've heard them all many times, I'm sure.
And now, conservatives are doing the same.
Not all, but many.
They're saying anyone who opposes Joe Biden's support for Israel, or who questions what the Israelis are doing, is not engaged in dissent, but engaged in anti-Semitism.
They're calling for genocide against the Jews.
They're calling for the murder of Jews, and that's why they need to be silenced.
When Ron DeSantis banned a pro-Palestinian group, he justified it on the grounds that This is material support for terrorism.
Meaning, you're not just expressing support for Hamas, but you are engaged in providing them material support.
That's a crime under the U.S.
Code.
Now, I wanted to ask you, and I've been speaking for 45 minutes, 40 minutes.
And I've been detailing the case that a lot of pro-Palestinian protesters make, which is that what the Israelis are doing is not just excessive, but creating a humanitarian crisis.
Is there anything about any of that?
That sounds pro-Hamas to you?
Have I praised Hamas?
Have I justified the massacre of civilians they carried out on October 7th in Israel?
Have I expressed hostility toward Jews?
Jews as a group, I mean.
Of course not.
Of course not.
It's pathetic, that argument.
It's pathetic.
It's like saying people who oppose immigration aren't really worried about the things they say.
They're just white nationalists who don't want non-white people to enter the United States.
And is it true of some imponents of immigration?
That there are white nationalists who don't want people entering the United States who are non-white and that's the reason.
Yes, there are definitely some of those people.
You can find them at protests, at anti-immigration protests.
But it's not true of the cause itself or the position itself or most of the people who are concerned about immigration.
Same thing with people who support Israel and support this war.
Some of them are motivated by hatred of Arabs and a belief that Palestinian life is inferior and that Palestinians deserve to die.
For sure, some of them are motivated by that.
We've showed you pro-Israel protesters in the United States saying, kill them all, turn the Gaza Strip into a parking lot, obliterate it, flatten Gaza.
But I wouldn't ever suggest because I do not think that the presence of people who think that means that all people who support Israel or who support this war are motivated by a hatred of Gaza.
A lot of them are motivated by a belief, I think misguided, that this war is necessary to keep Israel safe from attacks like the one we saw on October 7th.
And you can go down the list, every single cause has people who support it, who have extremist or repellent views, even bigoted views, but that doesn't mean you attribute those views to everybody who supports that cause because it's not true.
And so yes, there have been pro-Palestinian protestors who have praised Hamas and have expressed what I would consider anti-Semitism towards Jews, but by no means is that true of all of them or most of them or the cause itself.
That is a tactic for arguing that is about destroying the character of people in lieu of engaging their arguments, which the American right has been saying for years they detest.
We read you a Barry Weiss article in commentary from 2021 where she was saying the problem is that we've stopped engaging arguments and instead attack people's character.
Instead of having substantive debates, we accuse people of being bigots.
She went down the list of everything she said was wrong that many of the Israeli supporters are now doing to justify legal action against pro-Palestinian protesters by claiming that to be pro-Palestinian protester means that you hate Jews, are bigoted, are engaged in hate speech, want Jews dead, and it's just not true.
It's just not true.
To begin with, many, many, not a few, many, of the people who are participating in pro-Palestinian protests, or leading them, or organizing them, are Jews, are Western Jews and American Jews.
And it is preposterous to claim that people who are born Jewish, who are in families that are 100% Jewish, whose grandparents they love, and parents they love, and siblings they love, and friends they love, and communities they love that are all Jewish, Are somehow driven by a hatred for Jews because they also view Palestinian life as valuable.
And yet that's the argument that's being fed to everybody.
That to be pro-Palestinian, to participate in a pro-Palestinian protest, to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic.
It is disgusting.
As disgusting as when American liberals just go around accusing everybody of being a racist or transphobic because they disagree with liberal ideology on those issues.
Here from The Guardian, October 19th, quote, hundreds arrested as U.S.
Jews protest against Israel's Gaza assault.
Quote, protesters in Washington demand a ceasefire, marking a rift in community as anti-defamation league condemns demonstrations.
Quote, left-wing Jewish activists campaigned against Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza this week in Washington.
Culminating in protests that have seen hundreds arrested for civil disobedience outside the White House and Congress.
But groups like the ADL have dismissed the actions of unrepresentative of the fellow Jews.
Signaling a growing rift in the community as the war in the Middle East continues to claim thousands of lives.
Police detained about 400 demonstrators on Wednesday after they staged a sit-down protest on Capitol Hill inside the Cannon Building, the oldest congressional office building, demanding an immediate ceasefire on the latest hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians.
The arrest followed a similar protest on Monday when 50 activists were detained for blocking the gates of the White House.
The events were organized jointly by Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, two leftist groups campaigning on an avowedly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian platform.
It reminds me a lot of when black conservatives gather and denounce Black Lives Matter or defend the police.
Or Muslims in the United States gather to oppose the teaching of gender ideology in schools and white American liberals come and accuse those black people of being racist, of having internalized white supremacy.
Or white liberals come and tell those Muslims that they've just internalized white supremacy and that's the reason that they're engaged in these protests to say that
Large numbers of black people who are conservative, a large number of Muslims who oppose teaching of gender ideology in their school are all, in fact, white supremacists, is pathetic, and I've said that many times, and it's just as pathetic to come and say that a cause that many, many American Jews and Western Jews and Jews in Israel support is an anti-Semitic cause.
It takes so much presumptuousness and arrogance and audacity To accuse people like that of being anti-Semitic, but it's just as wrong and bad to accuse non-Jews who support this cause of being anti-Semitic because there's nothing anti-Semitic about this cause.
The cause of saying pro-Palestinian life is valuable.
And people should have compassion and empathy and should abide by the laws of war and humanitarian precepts when attacking Gaza.
That has nothing to do with hating Jews.
Nothing to do with hating Jews.
Any more than opposing immigration has to do with white nationalism.
Here from The Intercept today, the Senate condemns student groups as backlash to pro-Palestinian speech grows.
Do we risk losing our careers over an ephemeral social post that doesn't save a single life in Palestine?
On Friday, the U.S.
Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning what it called anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups across the country following a day of walkouts.
Hundreds of students, led by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, Walked out of classes at Columbia, Princeton, NYU, and dozens of other colleges in what they described as the demand for a ceasefire in Gaza and anti-US military support to Israel.
The Senate resolution condemned those student groups for ostensibly supporting Hamas as part of a broader government and corporate pushback on protests over the war.
And Nikki Haley is calling for censorship on college campuses based on her view.
Nikki Haley, the Arbiter of anti-Semitism, condemning Jewish groups and Jewish students for being anti-Semitic because they oppose her policies that enriched her greatly when she left the Trump administration and was paid millions of dollars by neocon groups and militarist groups and sitting on the board of Boeing and giving speeches to pro-Israel groups.
Now Nikki Haley is the one who gets to go around saying who hates Jews to the point that they're not allowed to speak.
Here's her tweet from October 21st.
No more federal money for colleges and universities that allow anti-Semitism to flourish on campus, by which she means people who criticize Israel.
Or who oppose the ideology of Zionism, a brand new ideology that began in the early 20th century that people debated for decades, but according to Nikki Haley, cannot be debated any longer in the United States.
Here's her tweet on October 26, quote, You can't fight anti-Semitism if you can't define it.
Joe Biden in the left refused to call anti-Zionism anti-Semitism.
God, imagine trying to claim that Joe Biden is anti-Israel when you can find speeches of his from the 1980s.
Attacking critics on the left of Israel on the grounds that they have no idea what foreign affairs is, how Israel is the greatest investment the United States makes.
The only way she can do it is by complaining that Joe Biden wouldn't call anti-Zionism anti-Semitism, even though I'm sure he would have no problem doing that.
Quote, as president, she says, I will change the official federal definition of anti-Semitism to include denying Israel's right to exist, and I will pull schools tax exemption status if they do not combat anti-Semitism in all of its forms in accordance with federal law.
The October 7th massacre and the ensuing weeks have proven what many of us have long known.
There is no difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
In order to combat anti-Semitism, we have to define it, and that starts at the top.
So over and over from people like her and Ron DeSantis and the Biden administration and Josh Hawley and Tim Scott, we're hearing we need more and more restrictions on free speech in the United States as a result of this attack on a foreign country.
And the reason they give for this, the framework they're demanding be accepted, Is that to be pro-Palestinian or to criticize the Israeli government or to question its core ideology or to question this war makes you so anti-Semitic that somehow you fall outside the scope of the First Amendment, just like left liberal censors call everybody racist and bigot in order to take them outside the scope of the First Amendment?
This is as dangerous as the war itself, this attempt to exploit this new war in a foreign country to abridge our core constitutional protections.
And the reason it's more dangerous, aside from the fact that attempts to limit free speech are always dangerous, especially when done in the name of providing security and keeping us safe, which was one of the lessons of 9-11, or of World War II when we interned Japanese-Americans in the name of keeping us safe.
The reason it's so dangerous now is because there's an extremely destructive war happening in the Middle East.
And it's not a war that's distant to you.
If you're American, it's a war that is right at your doorstep because your government is playing a crucial role in enabling it.
And the people in that region who are furious watching the Israelis do this to Gaza are blaming the United States and not just the United States, but American citizens.
Every bit as much as a lot of people want to hold all Palestinians responsible for what Hamas does.
That's that Osama Bin Laden theory of eliminating the category of civilian by saying, well, American citizens elect their government and therefore are responsible for when their government enables the bombing of innocent Palestinian families and extinguishing the lives of Palestinian children.
Whatever else is true, I know there are viewers who don't agree with my view on this war, who don't agree with some of my views on this war, all of them.
What I've been saying all along is what we have to be able to unite on is the urgency, the necessity of keeping debate free in the United States.
If we have a free debate and the people who believe that the U.S.
government is harming its own citizens by giving endless support to Israel, by attaching itself to this war, then so be it.
That's democracy.
Sometimes you win the argument and sometimes you lose it.
But that's not what's happening.
Just like Israel has silenced all the people in Gaza by cutting off their communications with the outside world on purpose so we can't see what's going on, many politicians and journalists with a lot of influence in the United States, including many who built their careers over the last seven years, ranting and raving against the evils of censorship, now want to impose censorship to prevent Americans from hearing the full debate.
And that is the thing that I hope, regardless of our views, we can unite in denouncing.
Matt Taibbi is an independent journalist who is a friend of the show.
I don't think he needs much of an introduction, so we're not going to bother to give him one.
He is a journalist who writes at Substack, and he has several recent articles, including one recent one in particular about several different ways that censorship continues to come to the shores of the United States, the way the Pentagon is attempting to control the flow of information, and we're going to talk to him about the reporting he's been doing.
Matt, it's great to see you as always.
Thanks for joining us.
Great to see you, Glenn.
How's it going?
I'm doing all right, I guess.
So let's talk about, as well as you can do, paying attention to a word this horrific.
Let me ask you about this recent article that you have, which involves this entity called NewsGuard, which is used by the Pentagon and other American institutions to Decree who is and is not a reliable source of news.
There's the headline on the screen of your article that you published at your Substack Racket News.
Newsguard case highlights the Pentagon's censorship end around.
How is this Newsguard case illustrative of the Pentagon's attempt to censor in a way that the Constitution wouldn't permit?
Well, so this case comes about because of the website Consortium News.
I'm sure you're familiar, right?
It's Bob Parry's, the investigative reporter Bob Parry's site, which he founded in 1995, because he felt the mainstream media was suppressing too many stories.
Consortium got a very negative rating by this supposedly independent rating service, NewsGuard.
They called it a purveyor of disinformation, of Russian disinformation, and I think worst of all, anti-US, because of six articles out of a library of 20,000.
Most of them having to do with American foreign policy, questions about Ukraine, Russia, Middle East, And the insidious part, Glenn, is that NewsGuard has a $750,000 contract from the Department of Defense, U.S.
Cyber Command, to do a quote, misinformation fingerprinting program.
So this is how the Pentagon gets around the accusation that it directly censors organizations.
It just pays a quasi-private middleman organization to slap big red labels on sites.
And, you know, this ends up having a direct impact on the bottom line of these little independent news sites because they will be shown less, their circulation is less, they have fewer ads.
And that's just the way they win in the end.
It's really insidious. - What, talk a little bit more in detail about how specifically you're harmed when NewsGuard gives you a negative rating.
And first of all, I found it interesting when you went through the laundry list of labels applied to Consortium News.
They seem very familiar to me and I know to you as well.
Pro-Russian propagandist, source of disinformation, anti-American.
Those are the labels that get slapped on anybody automatically these days who Doesn't praise Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin, may even hate Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, but simply opposes U.S.
foreign policy.
But in this case, what would a negative rating from NewsGuard actually do?
Who uses the site and what's the implications of that kind of a rating?
Well, this is one of about a hundred different ways these private anti-disinformation sites work.
NewsGuard's system is that they have roughly 40,000-45,000 subscribers.
A lot of them are big institutional customers like libraries and universities.
So, basically, imagine students at a big state university will plug into the library, or maybe even just through their dormitory system, and they'll go looking for research about, say, the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and they'll call up one from CBS News, which has a big healthy nutrition label from NewsGuard on it, and that's what they actually call it, nutrition labels.
And if they call up consortium, which says the United States was involved in the Maidan coup, it will say it's anti-US, unreliable, unsafe, disinformation, and so on and so on.
And of course, the user never knows that this is sponsored, essentially, by the United States government, which is maybe upset that it's disagreeing with their policies.
So this has an effect on the revenue of these independent news companies because they're distributed less.
Fewer ads will advertise once they see that label.
And again, as you know from being around independent media, the margins are really, really small to begin with.
So this kind of thing can be crippling.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, of course, that is the goal, as well as just giving a general sense of kind of making a site radioactive if it descends from U.S.
government policy.
That's what I wanted to ask you.
Certainly, you have demonstrated over the years and so have I, it's a major focus of ours that the real ideology or the real bias of the American corporate media, the largest media corporations, there's not so much left versus right, although they have that too.
It's this kind of subservience to the U.S.
security state, to the most powerful institutions of authority in the United States.
They carry out their agenda, they treat their pronouncements as gospel.
And I wanted to, in general when you see things like this, this attempt to define who is a reliable site and who isn't, it's almost never done based on what stories end up being vindicated or what stories or claims end up being debunked.
That would almost be at least, I wouldn't want the Pentagon doing it at all, but at least if they were trying to do that, it would be a good faith attempt.
But what it seems to be the case is that in every case, what is the determinative factor is the extent to which you recite and ratify and affirm the claims of these institutions, including the Pentagon and the CIA.
and advance rather than impede their agenda.
Is that the sort of thing that you're seeing here in terms of a correlation with regard to who gets the kind of cookie and the little pat on the head and the gold star and who gets the avoid warning?
Yeah, Glenn, I mean, I think you're exactly right.
People, I think they misunderstand the censorship issue.
It's not really a left or right issue at all.
It's really an insider outsider issue.
It's a class issue.
It's a credentialing issue.
When you have independent media that's on the outside, they're not part of the club.
They haven't paid their dues.
They're not This whole anti-disinformation network is essentially a big merry-go-round system, where one NGO gives a good rating to one news organization, the news organization may give a good rating to a site like PolitiFact, which may in turn give a good rating to another news site,
And Google may therefore elevate these sites and their search engines because they have a standard called authority, which is based on which sites are considered more attractive by quote unquote reputable news organizations.
So ultimately, this is all the whole thing is about driving traffic away from independent organizations or just sort of mere contributors.
And towards these big credentialed corporate institutions.
And a great example of this is, take for instance, there was an independent videographer named John Farina who was briefly famous because he took the video on January 6th that was very famous of people trying to get into the door.
Well, he sold his footage to CNN and a whole bunch of other networks.
They get to use his footage, but he's an independent.
When he tries to post it on his own site or when status coup his employer does, they get suppressed because they're independent.
So it's a total double standard, and that is built into every level of the system.
Yeah, I want to ask you about this thing with Amy Klobuchar on Amazon, but I just have one more question about this story, which is we did a show on Wikipedia, and this is how Wikipedia is manipulated as well.
I mean, if you look at Wikipedia, it isn't even just bias.
It is just a neoliberal propaganda arm.
Like, if you're somebody who descends from neoliberal orthodoxy, your Wikipedia page is going to be defaced and vandalized.
Every sentence is going to be written to be negative.
There's going to be falsehoods.
You might even just get labeled out.
Conspiracy theories right in the very first sentence has happened to a lot of people.
Whereas those who support neoliberal ideology have these glowing sorts of biographies that are made to make them seem like they're these honored, highly accomplished people even when they aren't.
And the way that's all done is by playing games with what is considered a reliable source that can be the basis of Wikipedia entry and what can't.
And it's very similar to how this is sorted.
The thing that just drives me insane is that we have had a lot of disinformation in the media and it's almost all come from, at least in the most harmful forms, the largest media corporations.
They're the ones who sold the Iraq War and told people that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, his alliance with Al-Qaeda.
They're the ones who Sanctioned Russiagate and made it our number one political story for years.
This insane conspiracy theory that Putin had taken over the U.S.
by blackmailing Trump with sexual videos and that the Joe Biden, the Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation.
Like, on some level, is there any way to... Yeah, these sites that get, like, labeled the most reliable ones have the biggest record of deceit and error and failure and fabrication.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
And again, you can go back historically, too, right?
Think about, I mean, all the way back to remember the Maine or Gulf of Tonkin or the Missile Gap.
I mean, the most harmful disinformation, almost by definition, is always official disinformation.
And the only defense the public has against this is absolute unfettered free speech, because a free press is designed in our system To be the one thing that can keep the government honest and keep it from being basically untrammeled deception all the way through.
If you impose all these controls and only do it on the independent press or only do it on the press and not on the government, then what you get It's a government that has a monopoly on disinformation, which will make it even worse.
Then there will be no fear whatsoever of doing another WMD style exercise or, you know, doing another Russiagate or any of the many deceptions that happened during COVID.
It's a huge problem that I think people, again, they misunderstand what the purpose of the First Amendment is.
It's to protect us against that kind of thing, not to enable it.
Yeah, you know, I think probably the best example is COVID, where there was one official pronouncement after the next that got debunked, and all of these media outlets that have the stamp of approval, that like, trust them, were the ones just constantly, mindlessly spreading every one of those claims from Let me ask you about this other story that you've been writing about.
You had an article.
We covered this story, too.
And these independent sites that I'm sure NewsGuard is saying beware of and stay away from were the ones that were questioning them the whole time and ended up getting vindicated.
And yet these rankings don't change because they're not about determining reliability, but controlling information.
Let me ask you about this other story that you've been writing about.
You had an article.
We covered this story, too.
We didn't have the same title on our reporter's view, but yours was Amy Klobuchar, You Suck.
And it was about the fact that Amy Klobuchar and some other Democrat in Congress who's a ranking member of some committee, I think the Elections Committee, wrote to Amazon basically insisting that Amazon exclude from its services any news that comes from Rumble and Substack, wrote to Amazon basically insisting that Amazon exclude from its services any news that comes from Rumble and Substack, our two platforms, which would mean that Amazon would be barred which would mean that Amazon would be barred from using anything that we report in whatever it's telling people to believe.
For those of you, for those people who didn't hear, who didn't see that show or who don't remember it, talk about what Amy Klobuchar did.
There's the headline, Twitter files extra Amy Klobuchar went too far even for pro-censorship media.
And you're talking about the Twitter files here who were cheering when one of her proposals for censorship was banned.
There's something in the Twitter files about Amy Klobuchar and then this other case of her going to Bezos and Amazon.
Yeah, I mean the Bezos case that targets Substack and Rumble is a classic example of that sort of merry-go-round... I mean, there are other analogies there that are probably too rude to use on the air, but... We're an R-rated show.
We're an R-rated show, but you can't... yeah.
It's a reach-around, basically.
It starts with a Washington Post article, which complains about how Alexa is citing Substack and Rumble, and some of the contributors are making points about what they call election misinformation, or claiming that the 2020 election, that Trump won it.
As a result of this article, Amy Klobuchar and the other congressman you mentioned, Joe Morrell, from I believe it's the Rochester area in New York, they send a letter to Jeff Bezos, now at Amazon in his other hat, demanding that he take measures to prevent the even accidental sighting of either of our sites, Rumble or Substack.
And again, what's so critical about this is it's the same pattern as you saw with the Consortium case.
The Consortium has six articles that the Pentagon takes issue with, but it demerits all 20,000 in their library.
Here, God knows how many articles in Substack they object to, or Rumble they object to, but they want to ban the entire platform, basically, from being cited.
And this comes from the Washington Post, which, by the way, had to print a whole raft of corrections because of something I wrote on Substack.
And they didn't even credit me for that, by the way, which is another thing.
But the whole thing is just one establishment organization saying to another, help me, and then appealing to a third establishment organization, which is related.
And I have no doubt that probably in the end, this is what's going to happen.
Yeah, and also just with these newspaper articles too, so often they print these articles by consulting these disinformation experts, many of whom are often funded by Big Tech or by the U.S.
security state or this handful of neoliberal billionaires like Pierre Midiard and George Soros and Bill Gates.
Yeah, Craig Newmark, who's obsessed with this.
And so there's this, as you say, I mean, it's a consortium.
And you've been describing this such as sort of censorship industrial complex.
And it reminds me of that time when Dick Cheney leaked to the New York Times that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy aluminum tubes that could only be used for nuclear weapons.
And then they printed it.
And then he went on Meet the Press and said, look, I can't share classified information that makes me know Saddam Hussein wants nuclear weapons.
But oh, there's a New York Times article just out today, so I can talk about that.
Because they got a leak that says Saddam Hussein is looking for aluminum tubes and it was that same kind of cycle where they all worked together to achieve the same end.
Let's talk about this Twitter files issue with Amy Klobuchar where apparently Twitter executives kind of were tired of her badgering over censorship and celebrated when they were basically rejecting her claims.
What happened there and what's the basis for your knowledge of this?
Well, first of all, one of the reasons, I just kind of lost it with Amy Klobuchar this week.
I mean, it's been a long year, Glenn, I'm not going to lie to you.
And this stuff, the number of incidents that have happened on the speech front, everything from, you know, even this jailing recently of Owen Schreier, to the arrest in Germany of, you know, the playwright CJ Hopkins, who I know for a book cover, I mean, there's just a million different ways that the pressure is coming.
And when she did this thing this week, it just hit me that, you know, I had seen her so much in the Twitter files that she was there.
This whole thing really, I think, started to go bad in 2017 with Russiagate.
And there was a moment when the Senate Intelligence Committee was heavily pressuring Twitter to change its ads policy.
And they were kind of thinking about pushing back.
And the response to Twitter was, hey, if you give us a hard time about this, there's going to be new legislation that we're going to be sending your way.
Twitter thought they were bluffing.
Next thing they know, they wake up and there's a new Amy Klobuchar drafted bill called the Honest Ads Act, which would heavily police, you know, basically Silicon Valley.
So from that point forward, they started taking Congress very seriously on the content moderation front.
They created new standards, which basically said, we'll decide what is and isn't this information on our own accord when it's normal content.
But when the security state says so, you know, we'll remove it at their behest if it's an advertisement.
Then there's a whole long list of other proposals that she made over the years, you know, asking for new authority for the director of national intelligence to go after misinformation.
There's a new law she was calling for to be passed.
She pressures Google to adopt new standards to restrict content.
Finally, she introduces something called the Health Misinformation Act of 2021.
Here's what it did.
It essentially would have put the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department in charge of defining all health disinformation.
From that point forward, any person who Who committed disinformation, as defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, could face a lawsuit.
Any of the platforms could face a lawsuit under a new car vote under Section 230.
So essentially, she wanted to grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services absolute power to decide what is and isn't true about health.
No, it's worth noting the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, is not a doctor and not a scientist, he's a trial lawyer.
So that's who would be in charge of health information under that law.
So she got laughed at in the media, finally, for this law, and there's a whole long list of, the Twitter Files episode here is just a whole long list of Twitter executives basically saying, finally a W for us in this case.
But it just shows how much they got used to losing on this issue and how people like Klobuchar and Mark Warren and Adam Schiff, they just win on this no matter how extreme they get most of the time.
Yeah, I think as I'm sitting here listening to this, what is so disturbing is how normalized it has become for these people who are elected officials in Washington.
Yeah, I think as I'm sitting here listening to this, what is so disturbing is how normalized it has become for these people who are elected officials in Washington.
They're elected to the Senate or the Congress, and they spend a lot of their time now demanding that speech be censored on the Internet.
They really think it's their job to look at the speech that's flowing and being heard and say, I don't think this speech should be heard because this isn't really convincing.
This isn't really true.
I think this is disinformation.
I think it's hateful.
Well, you know, we had, speaking of just the insanity of censorship, we had Roger Waters in our studio today because he's in Rio to perform a show, show and he reminded me of this story that was so insane where he got criminally investigated early this year by the German government because he performed The Wall, which he's been performing for 40 years, and it entails a costume that is a little bit...
It's a satire.
It's a satire of Hitler and of despots in general, and the Germans decided in their standard literal humorless and tyrannical way to act as though they thought it was some kind of tribute to Hitler and that he was committing a crime by doing it in And the Brazilians told him, the Brazilian government, you want to come to Brazil, you better not bring this fascism glorification here, and we're going to have the federal police at all of your concerts.
And it's just, this kind of thing is in the air in the West so much, And so just as the last question, let me just ask you, I know you've been reporting on this a lot, haven't been following the war necessarily or covering that a lot, but there are a lot of efforts surrounding the war in Israel to try and usher in censorship in various ways.
I don't know if you saw, but Ron DeSantis this week banned a pro-Palestinian group in all of the University of Florida systems and fire.org came out and vehemently denounced it, said it's a grave violation of the First Amendment.
We've seen this before when it comes to this topic.
Given that our government is supplying arms and funds to Israel the way it's doing to Ukraine, and it's kind of a dangerous word that we should be able to debate, what are your general views of the kind of censorship sentiments that just arises around this issue in general?
Yeah, just a two-part answer to that quickly.
going back to something that you just said, or actually something you said on the day after the Hamas attacks, that, you know, to remind everybody what happened after 9-11, when sort of the Overton window about rights shifted dramatically overnight and things that when sort of the Overton window about rights shifted dramatically overnight and things that would have been ridiculously strange in the 90s Nobody would have had a torture debate in the 90s.
It would never have come up or there would never have been a politician who came out and said, hey, we need to throw out habeas corpus.
But suddenly that was normal after 9-11 because of the way people talked over and over and over again.
And now we have a generation that's grown up and thinks that that's OK.
And in the wake of this thing, we've been talking about censorship and the need to eliminate hate speech and disinformation and any speech that could be aiding, quote unquote, terror for so long that people have now accepted terror for so long that people have now accepted the idea that this is normal and And so things like that you mentioned like, you know, the Ron DeSantis thing, you know,
Nikki Haley, all of that has become normalized.
You know, I first started writing about this issue in 2018 in Rolling Stone, and even back then, I pointed out that sort of Palestine has always been kind of the canary in the coal mine, no matter what you think of the issue.
When it comes to digital censorship, they're always kind of first in line for every innovation.
It's tried out first there.
The Intercept, when you were there, did a great story in 2016 about a deal that was made between the Israeli government and Facebook, and this is kind of the classic quid pro quo.
Facebook wanted to continue to operate in Israel, and in return, they granted 95% of the requests That was actually the first time I ever reported on big tech censorship was exactly that story about how the Israeli government was giving Facebook censorship requests of Palestinian journalists and activists and in 95% of the cases Facebook was accepting it and banning the people the Israeli government demanded to be banned.
That was the first reporting I ever did on big tech censorship.
Yeah, exactly.
And it was very prescient, right?
Because this turned out to be, I think, the model that a lot of other countries around the world, they looked at that and said, hey, that looks pretty good to us.
I mean, we get a political monopoly and the company gets to make money.
It's a win-win for everybody, right?
Countries around the world started adopting it first in the kind of more autocratic third world regimes.
You started to see it, but then gradually in the West, we started moving towards the same model.
And as we've done so, the classic thing that happens with disinformation, and this is the last thing I'll say, is they start off with a definition that sounds okay to most people.
They say, oh, we have to get rid of health disinformation.
So that means when people say, you know, you're going to get a microchip implanted if you get the vaccine, we have to get rid of that, of course.
Right.
But behind closed doors, what they're doing is they're expanding the definition.
And pretty soon they're saying anything that promotes vaccine hesitancy is disinformation.
And we're going to call that malinformation, even if it's true.
So if we have a true story about somebody dying of myocarditis, well, that's also disinformation because it creates the wrong political behavior.
And that's what they're going to do with this issue.
They're going to define anybody who...
That's the whole problem with all censorship regimes.
It's who's doing it, and what is the standard that they're creating, and do they have any checks on it?
or an aiderer of Hamas, even if they vocally condemned Hamas's attack, they're going to do that.
And I think it's a huge danger.
That's the whole problem with all censorship regimes.
It's who's doing it and what is the standard that they're creating and do they have any checks on it?
The answer in this case is no.
Couldn't agree more.
And I think it's incredibly disturbing, not just in this case, but as the model for every one of our debates that will be restricted in police in the same way.
Well Matt, I know it has been a hard year as you said earlier and I wanted to say that's what happens when you break a gigantic story that is a threat to a lot of power centers which is what you did.
With the Twitter files, which I think history will reflect, even though the media decided to proclaim it a nothing burger that everyone should ignore, that in fact it was one of the most significant journalism stories in years.
It's having a lot of effects on court rulings and other kinds of reform that I think are urgently needed.
So whenever you think it's hard, just remember that that is kind of a tribute to the efficacy of your work.
And I really appreciate you coming on and talking tonight.
It's always illuminating and I'm glad to have you.
Thanks a lot, Glen.
That means a lot, especially coming from you.
I really appreciate it.
All right, Matt.
Have a great evening.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
A few programming notes.
Next week, I will be traveling, but we will have a system update program, a new system update program.
If not every night, almost every night.
Hopefully every night, though.
And in order to prepare that, we have some amazing interviews for you that we recorded over the last 48 hours, including with Professor John Mearsheimer, who I think is one of the most important voices on foreign policy.
The show we did with him a couple months ago on Ukraine and China and BRICS was one of our most watched shows because of how compelling he is.
And he obviously spends a lot of time talking about this new war and the U.S. role in it.
We also have a great interview with David Talbot, whose book, The Devil's Chessboard, is to me, as I've said many times, the definitive history of how the CIA and the U.S.
security state was formed in the wake of World War II under Harry Truman and how it just became this out-of-control monster.
And he has a lot of Interesting perspectives as well on the role the CIA might have played in the assassination of JFK and the way in which that was covered up.
So I think you'll find that interview very interesting.
And then, as I mentioned with Matt, mentioned at the top of the show, we had the opportunity to sit down in studio today with Roger Waters, who obviously is an extremely controversial figure.
He has been widely vilified as an anti-Semite because of his views on Israel, but he has a lot to say on Ukraine and Syria and U.S.
foreign policy.
And we had a lot of really contemplative discussion about his music and the politics behind it, but also the kind of very humanistic strain that ties together all of his views.
And we talked a lot about them.
I had the opportunity to spend time with him in 2018 when he was here and saw that when he comes to places he meets with activists and goes to neighborhoods that you wouldn't expect a musician of his stature to go to And it's very motivated by this kind of authentic and genuine belief in the value of human life and the need to connect.
And I think that will shed new light on Roger Waters and the kind of character assassination campaign that has been devoted to him.
And we're going to have that for you next week as well.
I'm really looking forward to showing you that.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form where you can listen to each episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, and you can listen on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate and review and follow the show on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive aftershow, where we take your comments and feedback and your criticisms and engage with them.
And it is something available only for our Locals subscribers, but if you join the Locals community, you get access not only to those two twice-a-night aftershows, but also the daily transcripts we post of each program, as well as the independent journalism
