Under Extreme External Pressure, Big Tech Censors the 2002 bin Laden Letter. More Rejected Invites From Pro-Israel Guests. Plus: Updates on Glenn’s Homeless-Run Dog Shelter | SYSTEM UPDATE #184
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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 devoted many programs on this show to the topic of online censorship of political speech and political expression.
It has been one of the four or five topics to which I have devoted the most journalistic attention over the last several years because of how genuinely dangerous I really believe it is that it is now commonplace, normalized.
That our largest social media companies, often acting with outside pressure from governments, politicians, security state agencies, activist groups, and media corporations, now routinely ban or otherwise suppress ideas that are deemed by institutions of power to be dangerous or inaccurate.
And I've had a lot of company and a lot of support in this cause of defending free speech and opposing this regime of censorship.
Support that had typically come from the American and international right, but also less so from other factions, including parts of the anti-establishment left.
But within the last 24 hours, we have just witnessed what I was going to say was one, but now I would have to say two of the most extreme and abrupt cases of big tech censorship yet.
First, as we extensively covered in last night's show, a 2002 letter from Osama bin Laden entitled Letter to Americans.
Was written by the Al Qaeda leader in order to explain to the country the real reasons there is so much anti-American rage, anger, and even hatred in the Muslim world towards the United States.
Not because our government and neocon-dominated media told us back then because they hate us for our freedoms, our glorious freedoms.
No, that wasn't why.
It's because they hate us for all the ways the U.S.
government interferes in and brings violence to and controls their countries and their part of the world.
That's what the letter explained.
After a large number of young Americans just discovered the existence of this letter for the first time, they began extensively discussing it on social media, especially on TikTok.
To the point that it went very, very viral.
And in response to that, the Guardian newspaper, which hosted that letter on its site for the last 21 years while it was talked about in relation to the United States and American wars, Now that it was being discussed in relationship to United States support for Israel wars instantly removed it precisely to prevent further discussion about it by ensuring that all those links that went viral on social media would be broken would no longer lead anyone if they clicked on it to that letter on the Guardian site.
That's what we covered last night and now TikTok itself under extreme external pressure has announced a complete ban of any content on their site that discusses this letter in any way.
If you discuss what you think of that Bin Laden letter, if you criticize it, if you approve of it, if you just try and draw lessons from it and apply it to today, one of the most extreme acts of big time censorship that we have ever seen means that TikTok will ban that content.
They've rendered broken all of the attempts to find that letter on the site.
And yet the faction that normally objects the loudest to such repression by big tech seems indifferent to it, if not supportive of it.
We'll take a look at this extraordinary censorship event of, whatever you think of it, as an obviously vital historical document.
And then, right before we went live on the show, maybe 30 minutes before, I just saw it a few minutes ago, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, of X, formerly known as Twitter, announced the implementation of a quite radical new censorship policy.
Musk, who, it's not a coincidence, is now embroiled in a scandal where he was accused by the ADL and many other groups of endorsing an anti-semitic tweet to the point where X was losing sponsors over it, just a few minutes ago decreed the following, quote, decolonization from the river to the sea and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
If you use any of those terms in a relationship to Israel, decolonization, from the river to the sea, you won't just have your post taken down, you'll be suspended from the platform.
After he announced that, Elon Musk was quickly congratulated and praised by Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, which often spearheads censorship campaigns, and which had just days ago, or yesterday even, accused Musk of endorsing anti-Semitism, and then today, 24 hours later, turned around and quickly congratulated, and he praised on Musk, patted him on the head, For this new policy silencing specific slogans criticizing Israel.
Apparently, according to Musk, or at least his silence, you're still allowed to say anything you want, even genocidal thoughts about Gaza.
You're allowed to say, erase Gaza, remove Gaza from the map, turn Gaza into a parking lot.
Just today, an Israeli official said, erase Gaza.
There's people saying that every day.
From what I can tell by the policy announcement, it doesn't prevent any of those genocidal thoughts toward the Palestinians, often coming from Israel.
What you can't do is use these phrases that Elon Musk now says, I think quite inaccurately, necessarily implies genocide against Israel, even though, even if it were the case that that's what it meant, it's hard to justify how, given his prior claims about free speech, this could be justified.
We'll get into that as well.
On our live after show on Locals last night, we do that every Tuesday and Thursday, we move to Locals for our live after show where we take questions from our viewers and we've been trying on purpose to respond to critiques of our coverage of Israel and Gaza.
We responded to a critique that we had had far more pro-Palestinian guests on this show than we have had pro-Israel guests since the start of the war.
And that observation is quantitatively correct.
Although we devoted major portions of our show last Thursday night and Friday night to interviewing two of the smartest pro-Israel journalists I know, And my Friday night interview with Tablet's Jacob Siegel lasted more than two hours, the vast, vast majority of which was him speaking uninterrupted.
It is true that we've had on more pro-Palestinian guests than pro-Israel guests, but as I explained to that critic on the After Show last night, that is not for lack of trying.
As we're going to show you, we have invited onto the show many of the most prominent and vocal pro-Israel voices, including people who have been on our show before, who came on happily and with very little notice.
And yet now have handed us a mountain of excuses about why so sadly they just can't come on to talk about any of this.
Finally, over the weekend I visited, along with my kids, the very unique animal shelter that I founded along with my husband David Miranda in 2017 called the Hope Shelter in Rio de Janeiro.
The uniqueness of the shelter is that it not only is a shelter for abandoned animals, one that is devoted to caring primarily for dogs found on the street, abandoned until we can place them in homes, but we also purposely hire homeless people.
To work in that shelter who live on the street with their pets and have thus demonstrated a real affinity for animals and a great capacity to care for them.
Also that we can work with that homeless population as well to work with them to obtain identification, open bank accounts, learn how to manage income all with the goal of permanently exiting the street.
I don't think I've discussed this project on the show before, so many of you may be unaware of it, so we'll just show you a few videos and updates from my visit there over the weekend, and it's always something that I think, especially on a Friday night heading into the holiday season, people enjoy hearing about.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
So I have to confess, over the last six weeks, I feel like I have been catapulted into some strange, new, and deeply unpleasant alternative reality.
Or maybe through some kind of time machine.
I feel like over the past six weeks, out of nowhere, I just got thrown into Fox News Studios in 2002.
In 2000, late 2001, early 2003, or like a neocon conference.
That just goes on and on and on.
Everything just switched on October 7th.
We're back to a political climate in which any dissent or questioning of our government's war policies yet again subjects you to claims that you love terrorists, that you're pro-terrorists, that you're unpatriotic, un-American, on the other side.
Any questioning of U.S.
support for the war in Israel Does it make you a patriot trying to critique your government or ask tough questions that means that you hate Jews, that you're anti-Semitic, that you're bigoted and racist?
And those accusations often come from the very same people who have spent years claiming that only the liberal left runs around screaming racist and bigot and all of their enemies the minute there's a disagreement to try and stifle dissent and ruin the reputation of critics.
And yet now the minute you utter a criticism of Israel, a foreign country, or question the Biden administration's support for this new war, one thing is certain.
You'll be accused of being pro-terrorist and you'll be accused of being a racist or an anti-Semite.
I buy the people who claim to hate those kinds of accusations when it's used against them.
We also have a spate of censorship and firing of people who are critical of the United States or Israel.
Lots of people have lost their jobs in media, in politics, in the corporate world, in government.
As a result, not ever going too far in defending Israel, not by saying things like kill all Palestinians or Arabs or erase Gaza, which many people have said.
No one's been fired for that or deplatformed for that.
Many people, though, everyone who's been fired for political speech in the last six weeks about this war has been fired because they defend Palestinians or excessively criticize Israel.
The climate just doesn't tolerate dissent.
Again, like back in 2001 and 2002 when Fox News was on a jihad for the firing and the heads on a pike of everybody criticizing the Bush-Cheney administration and their various wars and authoritarian policies.
We're right back to that kind of climate.
And we also have been subject to an endless victimhood narrative of the kind the American right claims it despises.
Remember after the George Floyd murder, when we heard that America was a systematically racist country, that it was inherently anti-black, that America was an unsafe country for black people, that black people were just moments away from getting killed every time they went outside their house?
That provoked scorn and contempt from virtually every American conservative, also from a lot of black people as well, that being fetishized and turned into babies And the same thing with LGBTs.
There are LGBT groups that tell LGBTs and trans people in particular you're about to get murdered if you step outside the house.
The American right wants to kill you.
There are hate mobs roving around ready to murder you on a moment's notice.
The NAACP and gay groups issued travel advisories saying it's dangerous for black people to go to Florida or LGBTs to go to certain red states.
This kind of paranoia and neurosis and hysteria That is always accompanied by claims that these minority groups feel unsafe and therefore need protection in the form of censorship so they don't hear views that they find upsetting or that make them feel unsafe.
This is something that has been mocked and derided and had scorn heaped on it by most American conservatives and I was along with them.
I have scorn for those victim narratives too and yet in the last six weeks A new victim of a narrative that the American right embraces, accompanied by all of those demands for protection including censorship, has now emerged trying to convince American Jews that they're unsafe in America, that the United States is a dangerous place for them.
And one of the pro-Israel journalists we had on our show last week, Batia Unger-Sagan, has heaped contempt And that narrative, just like she has for these other groups as well, saying how you're spreading paranoia and neuroses and trying to scare people and to hate the United States.
But most people, from what I can see, seem to be very sympathetic to that claim that American Jews, not these other groups, not black people, not LGBTs, not immigrants, when they complain, they're just little whiny snowflakes.
But when American Jews make the same claims or have those claims made on behalf of them, which is happening often by non-Jewish pundits, Oh, our Jewish friends, check in on them.
They're not doing well.
They're really endangered.
Check in on the Jews.
They're so fragile.
They need our love and help.
Nobody scorns or mocks that.
That is considered heroic.
So everything has changed.
It's like living in an alternative reality since October 7th is absolutely bizarre.
And it doesn't surprise me that a lot of conservatives now favor censorship because it comes to views that they really hate about an issue they really care about, which is Israel and these attacks on Palestinians.
Because censorship is a human impulse.
Everyone is susceptible to it.
When you hear a view that you really find offensive and dangerous, there's a tendency to censor it.
I'm not surprised that conservatives who claim to be such free speech crusaders are vulnerable to that.
We're all vulnerable to that impulse.
We have to fight against it.
But all of the rest of it, Including just cheering for every single left liberal tactic of accusing everyone who dissents of being a terrorist lover or a racist and embracing these victimhood narratives has just metastasized throughout American conservative with a lot of exceptions with prominent exceptions that we tried to highlight on purpose because we don't want to overgeneralize but in general
I feel like just the world spun around on a 180 degree axis in five weeks or six weeks.
And that certainly includes these two stories about unbelievable big tech censorship.
So as we covered last night, The Guardian removed this letter to Osama, by Osama bin Laden, letter to Americans that he wrote in 2002 to explain That Muslims don't hate the United States because of their freedoms, our freedoms.
Instead, Muslims hate the United States, some of them do, because of a long list of grievances about U.S.
interference in that part of the world.
Sanctioning Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
Overthrowing democratically elected governments and imposing brutal secular dictatorships that are there to serve the United States and keep majority opinion in those countries suppressed.
Bombing and invading innocent people in those countries, putting troops on Saudi Arabian soil that they consider sacred, and supporting Israel in its wars against the Palestinians and their taking of Palestinian land.
Those are their grievances.
You don't have to agree with those grievances, but you should want to know them.
There's a reason, if you're a historian of World War II, you have to study the grievances of Adolf Hitler.
You have to listen to his speeches and his interviews and his writings.
You have to understand German resentment about the Treaty of Versailles that was imposed on Germany and humiliated and broke Germany after World War I. Many people consider the Treaty of Versailles to be a mistake because of what it did to Germany.
It radicalized Germany.
It drove them into the arms of Hitler.
They were amenable to his grievances.
Nobody thinks that historians or just citizens who try and understand Nazi Germany and have read Mein Kampf Which is available in every bookstore on every campus because it should be.
No one thinks that people who read the works of Adolf Hitler to try and understand Nazi Germany or any other Nazi German leaders are doing so because they agree with Nazism or are fans of Nazi Germany.
Everyone understands that they're reading that to understand what happened in Germany as part of understanding what happened in both World War I and World War II.
Only anti-intellectual idiots Think that if you study a Hitler speech it means you're a Nazi.
And yet, I can't tell you how many people seem to believe that people over the last 48 hours or 72 hours, young Americans who discovered this letter from Osama bin Laden, and led them to believe they were lied to about 9-11 because they were told that the Muslims hated the United States because of our freedoms, when in reality there and led them to believe they were lied to about 9-11 because they were told that the Muslims hated the United States because of our Whether you agree with it or not, of course people should know about that.
About an incredibly important event like 9-11.
You shouldn't want people to be ignorant so they can be propagandized.
You should want them to have the full picture.
And that's why the letter from Osama bin Laden has been on the Guardian's website for 21 years, because it is a matter of public interest.
It's a historical document that informs and gives context to what happened.
And yet, when people started reading it, no longer in connection to criticizing the United States or thinking the United States played a role in that attack, but now reading it, To understand the Israeli conflict, suddenly that letter became something you could not read.
The Guardian took it off its own site after 21 years of keeping it there because too many people were reading it.
We covered that on last night's show and now it has gone much more extreme.
We have a major act of big tech censorship.
TikTok, one of the most popular social media sites in the country, by far the most popular for young Americans, has announced that people are banned from henceforth talking about the Osama bin Laden letter or speaking about its contents.
From NBC News, November 17th, TikTok removes hashtag for Osama bin Laden's, quote, letter to America after viral videos circulate.
The Guardian also pulled the text of the Al-Qaeda founder's letter from its website after people cited it on TikTok and X.
Quote, throughout the week, TikTok users had been sharing the link to the Guardian's transcripts of bin Laden's letter, which was written about a year after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.
The Guardian took the letter down from its website Wednesday.
In the letter, bin Laden addressed the American people and sought to answer the following questions.
Why are you, why are we fighting and opposing you?
And what are we calling you to?
And what do we want from you?
The letter includes anti-Semitic language and homophobic rhetoric.
The virality of the letter has reignited criticism of the platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance.
The app has faced mounting scrutiny in the last year as the U.S.
and other countries argued it poses a threat to national security.
Since Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel, critics of the app have alleged that it is using its influence to push content that is anti-Israel and contrary to U.S.
foreign policy interests.
TikTok has said the allegations of bias are baseless.
Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said they found 41 Letter to America videos on TikTok.
Well, TikTok has now blocked Letter to America from within its search function.
Those videos are still easily accessible.
Bin Laden's letter condemns U.S.
support for Israel and accuses Americans of aiding the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Bin Laden also denounced U.S.
interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Lebanon.
And then TikTok justified it by saying content that promotes terrorism is banned.
Now, this idea that TikTok is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, I know this is something a lot of people believe.
The Biden administration has tried to convince people of this.
Because the game that is being played is the CIA and the FBI are telling TikTok, we're going to ban you from our country if you don't turn over content moderation decisions to us.
We influence what Facebook and Google and Twitter allow.
And if you don't allow us to influence what you allow, then we're going to ban you from our country as a threat.
And so as a result, TikTok has increasingly outsourced its content moderation decisions to the U.S.
security state because the owners of TikTok are capitalists and want to make money, and they make a lot of money from staying in the United States.
They don't want to be banned there.
And that's why TikTok just went and did something extraordinary.
It banned any discussion of this 2002 letter from Osama Bin Laden to Americans so that Americans can no longer have access to or insight into the version of Al Qaeda about why they had anti-American sentiment.
Now you can only listen again to the official version from the US government.
I, you know, we spent so much time on the Twitter files and all these attempts to censor conservative speech.
And now we have a major big tech platform censoring one of the most important historical documents of the last 20 years.
The War on Terror, the 9-11 attack and the War on Terror was inarguably the most significant and transformative event in the United States in the last 25 years.
It ushered in enormous amounts of authoritarian measures into the United States.
It led to several different wars in multiple countries around the world.
It led to drone bombings and the institution of torture regimes in Guantanamo and due process free camps and kidnapping regimes.
It transformed American political and legal culture.
It's a major historical event.
And when you have a letter from the leader of Al Qaeda accused of perpetrating that attack explaining why he did it, the fact that it's now banned, that you are not allowed to read it, that social media has said this is too dangerous to allow young American adults to see, is exactly the kind of big tech censorship that people have been screaming bloody murder about.
And yet there's very little protest here.
Because the people who have been complaining about big tech censorship, which has mostly been conservatives in the American right, Don't want people reading Osama Bin Laden's letter.
They think it's like heretical to even entertain the possibility that maybe US policy caused what the CIA describes as blowback.
That if you go around the world bombing people and killing their civilians, including their children, and interfering in their politics and overthrowing their leaders and imposing dictatorships on them, They're going to get kind of angry about it.
That's one of the costs of doing that.
And the Bin Laden letter illustrates that cost.
And a lot of people don't want anyone else to understand that or to see it.
And so people are happy that Big Tech has banned this letter.
This is one of the most profound acts of political censorship on the internet in the last six years.
And if you've been complaining about Big Tech censorship, of conservative speech, but don't find this troublesome, at least as troublesome, if not more so, you don't actually believe in free speech.
You're not actually opposed to censorship.
In the same way that so many people claim to find cancel culture so dangerous and yet stood by and cheered while so many people lost their job in the last six weeks in America for commenting negatively on the Israeli war or on U.S. policy in support of it.
Here's what happens if you go to TikTok, as we did, and search Letter to America, which was one of the most popular terms over the last three days or four days.
Here you see what censorship actually looks like.
Sorry, no results found.
Try a different keyword in your next search.
Just not gonna show it to you.
That is what censorship looks like in its purest form.
Here is Senator Mark Warner, who is a Democratic Senator from Virginia, on Face the Nation, talking about this yesterday.
You want guardrails, I imagine, set up with China on artificial intelligence and the like.
Legislating around a lot of this is really hard, and it's not moving very quickly.
Now, Margaret, let me tell you, I did the bill that was terribly bipartisan, 13 in 13 Democrats, Republicans, about saying we need an approach that's not simply focused on TikTok, but on all foreign technology that might pose a national security risk from China or Russia or Iran.
And suddenly we had the extremes on both the left and the right come out against that legislation.
It needs to move, because If you are opposed to the DC bipartisan establishment passing bills to control political speech on the internet, it means that you are just an extremist either on the left or the right.
The losers in life.
The fringe marginalized radicals.
The serious people want Our government to tell Big Tech, including TikTok, what they can and can't allow.
And so if we don't like the Bin Laden letter, we don't want our citizens reading the Bin Laden letter, TikTok needs to ban it on command.
And that's what they did.
Son of young people get all their news from TikTok.
So I hope those kind of issues will be we can get some energy behind them now coming after this summit.
But this technology competition, we've had military competitors like Russia.
We've never had an economy.
It's making the investments the way China is in these new technology domain.
And just to show you how bipartisan it is here, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Kentucky, the Republican from Kentucky, one of the most ardent war supporters in this country, Basically the Nikki Haley of the Senate.
She agrees fully with Senator Warner, the Democrat from Virginia.
Quote, on Chinese-owned TikTok, the latest trend is for young people to praise Osama bin Laden's 2002 letter to America.
TikTok is poisonous.
Ban it.
Now let me just say again, to read Osama Bin Laden's letter and to understand the perspective of America's enemy so we can better understand history is no more praising Osama Bin Laden than it is when people try and understand the German perspective to understand what led to World War II, the election of Adolf Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust.
It's what adults do.
We look at everything that's relevant to try and place things in historical context and have a complete understanding of them.
Do you see how they treat you like children?
They don't want you reading a historical letter.
They don't want you seeing what the other side has to say.
Remember the US government after 9-11 told the networks to ban all interviews with Osama Bin Laden.
They didn't want Americans hearing from him then either.
Because they wanted to keep Americans in ignorance so they could say, the only reason these people attacked us is because you're so free and they hate you for it.
They didn't want Osama Bin Laden being heard by Americans saying, you've been non-stop engaging in violence and interfering in our country and our politics and our government and our culture and our religion for decades.
Because they knew if people heard from them, from him, Well, what happened is what just happened on TikTok, which is a bunch of young Americans were going to be like, wait a minute, I didn't realize this.
I didn't know if this is why they were angry because we've been going around bombing them and occupying them and invading them and overthrowing their governments and imposing dictatorships on them for years.
If you even remotely believe in free speech, you should be indignant at the attempt to keep Americans from knowing this.
That is what tyrannical governments do.
They block out information they don't want their citizens to have.
And they're using big tech to control the internet to do it.
That's what this banning of Osama Bin Laden's letter is about.
It's why The Guardian removed the letter from its website.
And the people who have spent the last five years ranting and raving about big tech censorship of political speech, who are now happy about this.
I see you all.
I've seen you all doing this.
You are the people who are the most craven people ever.
At least the liberal left censors admit they like censorship.
You've been pretending for five straight years that you're indignant about it.
Except when the censorship is applied to your actual political enemies.
People who defend the Palestinian cause, who criticize Israel, the Osama Bin Laden letter, you want censorship.
Because we're back in 2002 Fox News world.
Where everything is jingoistic and authoritarian in the extreme, with the sole difference being that back in 2002, at least we had the excuse that we were actually attacked.
We weren't attacked this time.
A foreign country was attacked.
One that Americans happen to identify with a great deal, many of them do.
And that's why we have the same climate, because people are treating this as an attack on the United States.
Even though it was actually an attack on Israel.
A lot of people don't differentiate that way.
Now, one of the people who has been trying to bring this message to the American public for a long time is not Noam Chomsky on the far left, though he has been doing that.
He's also been saying, look, there's reasons why we were attacked on 9-11 having to do with our own behavior.
But that was also a message brought to the public by Ron Paul when he ran for president twice in 2008 and 2012, the Republican congressman from Texas.
And he used the Osama Bin Laden letter to try and get Americans to understand that there is a cost to all these neocon wars.
That if you want to go around the world bombing countries all the time and killing people, you're not going to be able to get away with it by sitting in peace and not having people want to bring violence back to you.
That is human nature.
If you occupy countries, if you subject people to foreign rule, if you bomb them and their countries, and you impose dictatorships on them and they know that, they're going to be angry at you and want to hurt you just like they perceive that you've hurt them.
So basic human nature.
But very dangerous to the warmongering military-industrial complex, which is why they don't want Americans to see this, which is why this censorship is being applied.
Here is Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential debate.
Needless to say, and I mean needless to say, it's like unnecessary to say, that he was accused of justifying 9-11, which he was not doing.
He was accused of being an anti-Semite, obviously, for questioning US support for Israel.
But here's what he said in that debate.
The intervention was a major contributing factor.
Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?
They attack us because we've been over there.
We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years.
We've been in the Middle East.
I think Reagan was right.
We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican.
We're building 14 permanent bases.
What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico?
We would be objecting.
We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.
Are you suggesting we invited the 9-11 attack, sir?
Do you see that?
They don't understand the difference between causation and justification.
Ron Paul was explaining the costs of going around and bombing people constantly and interfering in other parts of the world.
They're going to want to bring violence back to us.
He didn't even remotely suggest that it was justifiable for them to kill American civilians in numbers of 3,000.
But the minute you try and say we should think about why people hate us, why so many people want to bring violence to our country, that's the accusation you face.
Oh, well, if you want people understanding Bin Laden, you must think 9-11 is justified.
You must want to be trying to defend Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
I mean, it's so childish and imbecilic.
It should require no explanation, and yet it does.
That because you want to understand why people do things does not mean that you support what they do.
If someone is a serial killer, we try and understand what happened in their childhood that caused that.
We don't just say, oh they're evil.
We try and understand what motivated it.
That doesn't mean we approve of the serial killing because we tried to understand the causes of it.
We try and understand the causes of bad behavior all the time.
We try and understand the causes of drug addiction, or crime, or violence.
Or sociopathic behavior?
Understanding the cause of something is different from whether you justify it or think it's a positive thing.
This is so basic.
If I tell you, if you smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, you're highly likely to get lung cancer, it doesn't mean that if you get lung cancer, I'm gonna be happy about it and think you deserved it.
I'm just observing the causality, the causation, the causal relationship between the behavior and the result.
Approval or disapproval or justifiability is a completely separate topic.
But the way they try and suppress discussion of what causes people to want to attack our country is to accuse everybody who raises that issue, like you just saw with Ron Paul, of trying to justify what Osama Bin Laden did.
Listen to the rest of this.
I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.
And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama Bin Laden has said, I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.
They've already now, since that time, have killed 3,400 of our men and I don't think it was necessary.
Wendell, may I make a comment on that?
That's really an extraordinary statement.
That's an extraordinary statement.
That's Rudy Giuliani now about to imply that Ron Paul is some sort of terrorist lover or whatever because of what he tried to get Americans to understand about neocon wars.
One who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.
I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. - Those are the Republican big donors and lobbyists who are behind Rudy Giuliani.
They thought Rudy Giuliani was the best candidate to win the nomination.
The same people who were applauding Jeb Bush in 2016 whenever he would criticize Donald Trump.
But this was the view of the Republican Party back then.
It was right out of Fox News.
If you even hint that the United States was doing things in the Middle East that provoked an attack, it means you are on the side of bin Laden.
Look at that sustained applause.
I don't think I've ever heard applause that enduring before in a presidential debate.
You listen to Ron Paul, what he said.
Was that offensive to you?
That if we go around bombing everyone in the world, or a particular region, and interfering with their politics, they're going to want to bring that violence back to us?
That's all he said.
That's how repressive the culture was then, about anything relating to 9-11 and war and critiques of our government, and that is the climate that has been replicated now, often by the same people who built it then.
Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that.
Congressman?
I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback.
When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes there was blowback.
The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages.
And that persists.
And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk.
If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.
They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free.
They come and they attack us because we're over there.
I mean, what would we think if we were...
He then goes on to say, if you're an American, what would you have to say if China was putting military bases in our country or bombing various parts of our country?
Do you think we would be angry at China, want to attack China?
I think we would.
Now, be on Rudy Giuliani's side of this debate if you want.
At least we were allowed to have the debate back then in 2008, after our own country was attacked.
Now we're not allowed to have that debate.
Ron Paul was referencing the Osama Bin Laden comments, the explanation about why people wanted to bring violence to the United States.
That is banned.
The Guardian withdrew it from its site.
TikTok banned any discussion of it.
Big Tech has suppressed it, so has the media.
And anyone who mentions it is accused instantly of being pro-terrorist.
We're back to that climate of post 9-11 Fox News-dominated, neocon-dominated repression because some foreign country that we love got attacked.
Now, I was gonna talk about that unbelievable act of big tech censorship standing alone, that TikTok has banned any discussion by any of its millions of users of this letter and what it means, but we have another new instance of remarkable big tech censorship.
Elon Musk has spent the last 48 hours embroiled in a very serious controversy because he seemed to have endorsed, or was widely accused of having endorsed, a tweet that many people saw as anti-semitic.
It was essentially arguing that American Jews have oftentimes tolerated or encouraged the demonization of white people.
I don't have the tweet in front of me so I want to be careful not to summarize it, but it was along those lines.
And Elon Musk seemed to say, this is true.
Now, it was kind of a vague tweet, but it was a tweet I was surprised he was willing to endorse.
And the ADL and all the usual suspects immediately accused Elon Musk of being anti-Semitic.
And he began to lose advertisers, including Apple and others.
including Apple and others.
Here from Axios, earlier today, there you see the headline, "Exclusive Apple to Pause Advertising on X After Musk Backs Antisemitic Post." Quote, The move follows Musk's endorsement of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, as well as Apple ads reportedly being alongside far-right content.
Apple has been a major advertiser on the social media site, and its pause follows a similar move by IBM.
Must face backlash for endorsing an anti-semitic post Wednesday as 164 Jewish rabbis and activists upped their call to Apple, Google, Amazon, and Disney to stop advertising on X and for Apple and Google to remove it from their platforms the way they did Parler.
The left-leaning non-profit Media Matters of America published a report Thursday that highlighted Apple, IBM, Amazon, and Oracle as among those whose ads were shown next to far-right posts.
Musk posted to Exxon Wednesday, quote, you have said the actual truth in response to an ex-post that claimed Jewish communities support, quote, dialectical hatred against whites.
That drew widespread condemnation, including from the White House.
Quote, it is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of anti-Semitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement about Elon Musk.
So Elon Musk was widely accused of anti-Semitism.
One of the groups, obviously, accusing Elon Musk of anti-Semitism, they're the all-but-official accusers in the United States of who is anti-Semitic or not, is the Anti-Defamation League.
They're running a crusade to get Tucker Carlson off the air on the grounds that he was a white nationalist.
And here is the head of the EDL, Jonathan Greenblatt, on November 16th, which is yesterday, citing that tweet that Elon Musk endorsed, and then going on to Twitter and saying, at a time when anti-Semitism is exploding and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one's influence to validate and promote anti-Semitic theories.
Hashtag never is now.
Never is now, meaning people have been saying never again, meaning never again will we allow a holocaust of the Jews, and he's saying that we need that now.
There's a holocaust coming of Jews, and Elon Musk seems to be contributing to it.
So he's been embroiled over the last 48 hours in a serious scandal accusing him of being anti-semitic.
And lo and behold, just a few minutes ago he announced a brand new censorship policy for Twitter, for X.
And this is what it is.
And he announced it in his tweet.
Quote, as I said earlier this week, the word decolonization from the river to the sea and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
So if you want to argue that Israel should be decolonized, if you want to say that you think Palestinians should be free from the river to the sea, those phrases are banned on Twitter.
Sorry.
Okay.
They have decided that those are inherently genocidal, even though that is so preposterous.
People have explained a million times, is it the case, yes, that when people say from the river to the sea, they mean eliminate Israel?
Yes.
But many people by that mean, But they want Palestinians to have equal rights both in Israel and in the West Bank and in Gaza.
From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.
It doesn't mean murder all Jews.
And decolonization simply means that Israel didn't exist before 1948 and people think it shouldn't as a state exist anymore.
It also doesn't mean kill all Jews.
But even if it did, All kinds of speech of that kind is allowed.
It's certainly protected free speech.
Remember, Elon Musk, when he first bought Twitter, said, I believe in free speech absolutism.
And when someone asked him what he meant by that, he defined it very clearly to say, any political speech that is not a crime.
Now, he violated that before when he banned both Nick Fuentes and Kanye West.
Neither of whom said anything even arguably illegal, so he has already violated it before, but he has been pretty committed to restoring free speech on the whole, as compared to what was permitted previously.
But that was a deviation, we talked about it on our show, and this is a much worse one.
You think if somebody goes onto Twitter and says, I want to bomb and destroy Iran, they're going to be banned?
Of course not.
I want to erase Iran from the map?
That's totally fine.
If you go on and say, erase Gaza, eradicate Gaza, kill all Gazans, something I've heard every day from various Israel supporters, including people in the Israeli government, do you think you're going to be banned from Twitter?
Of course not.
You're allowed to express genocidal thoughts and views about pretty much every country and every group in the world.
Except Israel.
Because Elon Musk is being accused of anti-semitism and the solution for it is to turn around and give the pro-Israel lobby a new censorship policy that gets certain phrases they dislike and that make them uncomfortable banned.
And right away, the very same Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, and they're notorious for calling people anti-Semites and then allowing them a way out, which is paying the ADL money.
That's what happened with Kyrie Irving, the basketball player who liked or recommended a book on Amazon that the ADL said was anti-Semitic.
He paid $500,000 to the ADL, made a donation, and then the ADL said, OK, you're off the hook.
So, the ADL accuses Elon Musk yesterday of being anti-Semitic.
Elon Musk today bans phrases that Israel supporters dislike from being used on Twitter, saying you'll be suspended if you use them.
If you say, I think Israel should be decolonized.
And then lo and behold, Jonathan Greenblatt comes forth, just moments ago, and he heaps praise on Elon Musk for this censorship policy.
Pats him on the head.
Jonathan Greenblatt, quote, this is an important and welcome move by Elon Musk.
I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.
Do you see this game?
Do you see it?
Daryl Cooper, who I think hosts one of the best podcasts, he made a very viral thread once explaining the mind of the Trump voter.
It went super viral.
We had him on our show, and he's become a very popular pundit since, primarily among conservatives and Trump supporters and the American right.
He responded to Elon Musk's tweet this way.
He writes under the Twitter name Martyr Made, quote, will you suspend the Likud party?
The Israeli Likud Party, to which Benjamin Netanyahu belongs, whose founding charter uses the phrase, from the river to the sea, in the same way Palestinian activists use it, meaning from the river to the sea, that will be Israel.
That is the official position of the Netanyahu government, that every bit of land from the river to the sea belongs to the state of Israel, not the Palestinians.
Here is my former colleague at the Internet, Jed Zalani, the independent journalist, who had another question for Elon Musk's new censorship policy.
This is what Zed wrote.
Is calling for incinerating Gaza also included under your policy?
And here he cites a government official, an Israeli government official, who just earlier today went on Twitter, and I don't know if you can see it on the screen here, But in Hebrew, he wrote, and this is translated by Google, into English, quote, all the preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing.
We are too humane.
Burn Gaza now, no less.
Do you think Elon Musk would ever in a zillion years ban that tweet or ban that user for expressing that genocidal thought about Gaza?
Burn Gaza now, no less?
If he did, I would oppose it.
I think it should be protected political speech.
But you can't have it one way and not the other.
You cannot introduce new censorship rules that protect Israel while allowing people to say exactly the same things about all of Israel's enemies.
That is pure political censorship of the worst kind.
And Elon Musk, I think, is a response to this widespread accusation that he's an anti-Semite and the losing of advertisers as a result assuaged the ADL and people like it.
By saying, oh, look, OK, I have a new censorship policy for you.
I'm going to ban a bunch of Israel critics that use phrases that you most dislike, even though you're free to continue to use them when talking about Gaza or the West Bank or Iran or Hezbollah or any of Israel's enemies.
Two gigantic and disturbing examples of big tech censorship.
TikTok banning any discussion of the Bin Laden letter.
Twitter X.
Now imposing language bans that all go in one direction.
Just like all the firings in the West have gone in one direction.
All aimed at pro-Palestinian activists, none at pro-Israel activists.
Nationwide bans of pro-Palestinian protests while pro-Israel protests are still allowed.
I'm glad Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I think on the whole, he has done an important service in restoring a modicum of free speech to the platform as compared to what preceded it.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to applaud or not object when he imposes brute political censorship of the worst kind, which is what he did today.
And the fact that it was followed by TikTok doing it shows that big tech censorship continues.
It's just that now we have different factions that used to oppose it cheering it because this time their agenda is served by the censorship.
So as I mentioned last night on our after show on Locals, which we do every Tuesday and Thursday night for our subscribers to Locals, we had a critique and we go looking for critiques to interact with those.
I mean we have a lot of praise as well from our viewers and we respond to those and some people just have suggestions we respond to those but we also have critiques.
One of the critiques last night that we addressed was the accusation, the claim, the accurate claim that we have had more pro-Palestinian Guests on our show whom we've interviewed, then we have pro-Israel guests, even though, as I said, we devoted enormous amounts of time on Thursday and Friday night to two of the best pro-Israel activists, Batya Ungar-Sargon and then Jacob Siegel of Tablet.
And I didn't just interview them for 20 minutes.
I gave them an hour in the case of Batya, two hours in the case of Jacob.
I really enjoyed the conversations.
I thought they were good exchanges.
But it is true, we have had fewer pro-Israel guests than pro-Palestinian guests.
And the reason is because from the start, we have tried to get pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel journalists, vocal pro-Israel journalists on our show, including ones, especially ones who have been cheering censorship in the name of protecting Israel, who's pretended for the last six years to be free speech warriors and crusaders.
I just want to give you a little taste of what we've been encountering.
I don't want to name them because I think to do so is to embarrass them.
I don't think it's a professional way to conduct yourself with people.
They don't want to come on the show.
That's their right.
I don't want to try and publicly embarrass them for it, but I do want to show you what we've been encountering.
So here is a DM on Twitter that I wrote to a very prominent pro-Israel journalist who had been cheering censorship of pro-Palestinian activists, even though this person built their career In denouncing cancel culture and censorship and heralding the importance of very free debates where all the kind of taboo views get to be aired.
And I wrote to this person, October 11th, three days or four days after the Hamas attack, and I said, hey, hope you're well.
We want to cover issues of free speech, allegations of cancel culture and the like relating to the war in Israel-Gaza.
I'm not sure I agree with your arguments here, but I'd love to discuss them, obviously in a calm, civil, constructive, et cetera way.
Would you have time to come on and talk about it?" And I showed one of their tweets where they had cheered censorship of pro-Palestinian voices.
And they responded, hey, I'd love to, but this week is really hectic and it may be tough.
Would next week be too late?
And next week came and it never really happened.
Here was a second invitation to a similar person on November 3rd.
This was by, I believe by Diab also.
Can someone confirm that?
They wrote to me and said, when a terrorist group acts like ISIS, it risks the ISIS treatment.
And I said, it seems to me to be something that would also produce terrorism rather than stop it.
I think there is nothing more radicalizing than having bombs dropped on your city.
And we kind of debated that question.
And then I said, do you want to come on our show next week and discuss these points?
We could do an interview about Israel-Gaza conflict, but also the latest developments in the Ukraine war.
And they said, I'd love to be on the show again and have it focused on counterterrorism and the Israel response.
Let's please do it in December.
November is just too jammed.
Thank you for the opportunity.
That was somebody who had been on my show, and I asked on, I think with like hours notice, and they were like, sure, I can come on tonight.
Now, just unfortunately, they're booked for, oh, November.
Here is an exchange I had October 13th, and I asked the person to come on the show, and they told me, I would be happy to discuss this with you when things settle down.
They had cited a bunch of family issues they were having and schedule problems.
I said, hey, sorry to hear that.
Of course, I'm understanding your situation.
I won't criticize you or press the issue.
But when things are better, it'd be great to have a discussion.
Take care.
Yes, we will promise.
I will.
Never heard from that person again.
I haven't been able to get them on the show.
Here, November 13th, someone on my staff wrote to a very vocal, prominent pro-Israel journalist And I should say, all these people, after pushing me off, and these are all people who, it's not like they dislike me, I've been on their shows, they've been on my shows, just didn't want to come on to talk about this, couldn't.
Here we wrote to this person who's been on a lot of shows defending Israel, only on shows where the host is also very pro-Israel.
And when we asked them to come on, they said, what would you like to talk about?
And my colleague said, we'd love to hear your perspective on Israel-Gaza.
We've been trying to expand our coverage to include more opinions.
Recently, we interviewed Jacob Siegel and Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Many members of our audience reached out and requested we try to speak with you.
And they said, would it be live or prerecorded?
And my colleagues said, we could do either.
And that that was it.
We didn't hear from them.
And then the next day, they went back and said, is there a day in time that works best for you?
We are two hours ahead of Eastern time.
Is this something that interests you?
And they said, I'm sorry, I've just left Gaza and I'm on deadline.
Let me think about it.
Meaning they went to Gaza embedded with the Israeli military.
And then we pinged them several times since.
Okay, we have availability this week and also next week too.
Is that still something you are interested in?
Never heard back.
Here is another guest, a fifth guest, who has been all over the place defending Israel.
Been on my show before, been on their show before, have a great relationship.
My colleague Harrison Berger reached out and said, hi, so and so, hope you're well, would you like to come on our show again tonight at 7.30pm?
And they wrote back and said, hi Harrison, I'm out of commission for the next week.
I don't know.
Are they on the injured reserve list for the NFL?
Why are they out of commission?
They're out of commission.
They've been on every show you can find that is a pro-Israel host or somebody who doesn't challenge them, but unfortunately they can't come on our show.
That's the reason we've had more proud Palestinian guests than pro-Israel guests.
I would have a pro-Israel guest on my show every night if I could.
Especially people who are cheering and supporting for censorship of pro-Palestinian voices as so many of them have been doing despite building careers and brands over the last several years as being stalwart defenders of free debate and opponents of censorship.
I'd love to ask them to reconcile those things.
I'd love to ask them questions.
About their support of Joe Biden's policy of giving arms and money to Israel, many of whom didn't want to do that for Ukraine.
I'd love to have those discussions, but this is what we're encountering.
No one's willing to say, you know what, I don't want to come on your show because they don't want to actually be challenged.
I wish they would say that.
I'd honestly have more respect.
Instead, it's, oh, I'm totally booked for the next month.
Try again in December.
I'd love to do it.
What can we do?
When we got two that came on, we immediately put them on.
And I'd put more on too.
But here you have it, in writing, what we've been confronting as we've tried.
All right, so just to kind of wrap up the show, I wanted to share with you something I haven't talked about before.
It's a little bit off the beaten path of what we normally cover on this show.
But it's a Friday night.
We're headed into the holiday season.
So I wanted to talk to you about a project in which I'm involved that I'm very proud of.
And we actually just went and visited it this weekend, so it's on my mind.
And we did some new videos on it.
We did some updates about it to the people who on GoFundMe have been supporting it.
For those of you who don't know, in 2017, along with my husband Dave Miranda, we founded an animal shelter that we built on a small farm in a town right outside Rio de Janeiro that is an animal shelter, a dog shelter primarily.
We have cats too, but mostly dogs.
And we find dogs on the street.
People find dogs on the street, abandoned animals, people, dogs that are suffering.
As some of you know, I have 25 dogs.
In our home, all of whom have been picked up on the street.
And one of the reasons we started a shelter was because otherwise, my husband was going to leave me if we kept picking up dogs, even though he picked up half of them.
He was kind of a hypocrite about it.
But also because we met this woman who was a homeless woman and she kind of built this makeshift family and they lived in the middle of the forest in an abandoned house.
And I used to drive by there all the time.
I lived near there and I used to see these obviously homeless people with huge numbers of dogs.
So one day I stopped and I wanted to find out what was going on and I went and talked to them and they invited me in and they showed me this like unbelievable thing they had built where they were taking care of at least 45 dogs.
And a lot of times what would happen is like wealthy families or middle-class families would take dogs.
A lot of times their parents would have dogs and they would die and they didn't want to take care of these dogs.
They were adult dogs.
They didn't know what to do with them.
They would come and just drop them in the middle of the forest thinking nobody would see them doing it.
It's like actually the worst possible thing you can do to a dog, especially a dog that had previously been domesticated because dogs don't know how to survive.
Who have been domesticated in the middle of a forest, they're going to starve to death, which is the most painful way a human or an animal can die.
And these people were homeless.
They couldn't feed themselves sometimes.
They had very dirty clothing, very old clothing, and yet these dogs were better cared for than my own.
And the reason was because, and I started, there's a lot of research on this, I started talking to a lot of people.
Most people who have dogs love their dog.
I love my dogs.
Most people I know who have dogs love their dogs.
But most people who aren't homeless have other things in their life besides their dogs.
They have their spouse, they have their kids, they have their job, they have their parents, whatever.
They have a lot of other things besides their dog.
Homeless people don't have anything besides their dog.
And the dog that they have, that they live on the street with, doesn't have anything besides that person.
My dog has a bunch of people at home, not just me, they attach to other people.
Homeless dogs have only their person.
Homeless people only have their dog.
And so the bond becomes so much greater.
I used to find people who are homeless on the street with their dogs.
And I used to say to them, like, oh, I'll buy you food.
And any time I did, they would immediately cut it in half and give half to their dog.
Or I'd say, oh, let me buy you a leash and collar so you don't lose your dog.
And they would say, I don't need a leash and collar.
My dog never, ever leaves my side.
Even though they were on the street, I watched, they would get up and the dog would go with them everywhere they went.
They were completely bonded.
And so we decided, you know what, this relationship between homeless people and their dogs is like an incredible power.
We can build a shelter that is based on it, that captures it, that's built around it.
And when I was at The Intercept, one of my colleagues was Laura Poitras, who is the Oscar-winning director of Citizen Four.
She worked with me on The Snowden Story.
That was the film about our work on The Snowden Story.
She's been nominated two other times for documentaries, including one in 2023, The Beauty and the Bloodshed, which is an amazing film about this woman, Nan Golden, who's an artist who worked to hold accountable the Sackler family for opioid addiction.
It was nominated for an Oscar in 2022.
It should have won this film about, uh, Nalvany won because Hollywood celebrities wanted to honor Putin's enemies.
Anyway, she produced a short film about this woman, Caroline, and her relationship with dogs at this shelter that inspired our shelter.
I just want to show you a little bit of it.
I just want to show you a little bit of it.
I just want to show you a little
bit of it. - Right, son?
Here I ride first.
I entered.
I'm going to read it for the people who listen by podcast, but also if you can't see the subtitles on the screen, just a couple more minutes of Caroline explaining.
Here I ride first.
I entered from behind.
Entered from behind.
I said I'll enter from behind because I won't jump the wall.
That was in 2009.
I used to live under the bridge when they told me about this empty place to break into.
I was supposed to come alone.
I felt pity at that time.
Luana, the dog, was under the bridge with me.
Then I said, I'm not going to go alone and leave.
My sister here, I'll take her with me.
And then she describes basically how she ended up with many dogs.
So when we built the shelter, the first thing we did was we hired her to run it.
And she ran the shelter, I mean, with incredible competence.
She was really the boss of the shelter and she had other people who had been homeless and living on the street working there with her.
These dogs were incredibly well cared for.
She learned very quickly how to manage a shelter, how to take care of these dogs, many in number, to receive new dogs, to make sure they got their medication and their surgeries.
And she got cancer and died in 2021.
She was very sad, but she was very well taken care of.
She had health insurance.
She really reformed her life.
We had social workers there working with all the homeless people.
And here was an interview I did when we first unveiled the shelter.
This was now six years ago in 2017 that I did on Democracy Now!
I also did a segment on Tucker Carlson's show about this shelter as well.
But this one was one I did on Democracy Now!
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I'm Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
Glenn Greenwald, I want to turn to a new project you're involved with in Brazil.
It's a new type of animal shelter you created with Rio de Janeiro City Councilman David Miranda, staffed by homeless people who live on the streets with abandoned pets.
This is a clip from your short film about the project.
We started realizing that if we could tap into this power, this incomparable love that forms this mutual needing between homeless people and abandoned animals, we could build something really powerful and really beautiful and that's how we got the idea for this shelter.
We need to organize in order to do this.
We can't leave it in the hands of the state or the city to care for animals.
We must always remember that caring for animals is a critical factor in public health.
If you care for animals, there is better treatment for society generally.
At the same time, with the huge crisis that we're suffering here in Brazil, many people are losing their jobs and ending up in the street.
And the government doesn't have the will or resources for people who end up in this situation, living on the street.
Now we've hired our first employee, who is going to be the manager of the entire project, who is one half of the couple, the same-sex couple, who we profiled about six months ago, who adopted three boys at once.
The intention is that animals don't sit abandoned and lost on the street.
We will rescue many animals and place them in homes.
homes.
And at the same time are giving homeless people the tools and opportunity to change their own lives.
And now we've hired our first person who's homeless as well.
His name is Lucas.
He's 20 years old.
I live here.
I sleep on the street here.
People who live on the street are very humiliated because of that.
A lot of people are on the street because they need to.
Because they hadn't any support.
This will really change my life.
Not to live more on the street.
To have and care for my dog.
With a home, a bed, food that I can eat, to be able to take a shower.
You can go places and be treated like a person.
So, that's the film about a new project being spearheaded by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and his husband, David Miranda, who is also a Rio de Janeiro city councilman.
Glenn, can you?
So we talked about the project, and actually that segment produced a lot of people who donated the project.
We had a lot of donors who helped get the project off the ground and have renewed those donations ever since.
And so I just visited the shelter this week and haven't been able to go for a while, and we're planning a lot of enlargement, including expanding our capacity of how many dogs we have, how many homeless people we employ.
So I just want to show you a little of the video.
We usually have a professional photographer.
He was traveling, so my kids took this video.
It's not as professional.
Don't tell them I said that.
But it gives you kind of a sense for what the shelter is now like.
The idea was always to have only open spaces for these dogs.
Occasionally, dogs that are aggressive with newly arrived dogs get put on this kind of running chain just so dogs can be safe.
But in general, that's the idea.
They're all out in the open.
They're not imprisoned or ever kept in small areas or kennels.
They have this open area with shelter for rain or for heat.
And so this is what our shelter is. - You're recording?
You're recording?
- So it was great there.
Whenever I go there, there's dogs that I've known for a long time, like older dogs that we haven't been able to find a home for.
And so I know these dogs.
I've known them for years.
They're probably going to be there their whole life.
Sometimes we do get dogs that are older placed, but obviously most people want younger dogs.
But then there's always new dogs too that were arrived in the last several months who I only got to know for the first time.
So it's always a great place to visit.
Seeing the people come in and out as well is really gratifying.
And if you want to know more about the project, there's a link in my profile on Twitter.
You can go to our GoFundMe page where there's a lot of... What's that?
Yeah, we'll put in the notes of the video the links that you can go to if you want to support the project, if you want to read about the project.
But we're really excited about the ability for us to expand.
I just wanted to share that with you.
I've written about it before, I don't think I've talked about it on the show since I just finished it there this week and I was excited to share it.
It's something that gives me a lot of fulfillment and gratification.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, our system update is also available in podcast form where you can listen to each episode 12 hours after their first broadcast.
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In addition to those live after shows, if you join the Locals community, you have access to the daily transcripts of each show that we produce, as well as original journalism that we'll publish there.
And it really just helps support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
So if you want to join the Locals community, just click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you there.
For those of you who've been watching, we are as always very appreciative.
We hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 p.m.
