The Ukraine/Zelensky Narrative Collapses. TikTok Permanently Bans our Show. INTERVIEW: Lee Fang Exposes Israeli Propaganda Op & Rapper “Lowkey” on Israel-Gaza
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the Ukraine war narrative has collapsed.
For almost two years, anyone criticizing President Zelensky or questioning the bipartisan U.S.
narrative about the war was immediately smeared as a Kremlin agent, as unpatriotic, as a traitor to all things good and decent in the world.
But as is true of most American wars and U.S.
proxy wars, it's always only a question of time before the propagandistic script collapses, the war is exposed as a failure, and only the dead-enders remain cheering it on.
Throughout the war, it was simply unheard of that any top Ukrainian official would criticize President Zelensky, much less criticize the war.
But now there is a tidal wave of top Kiev authorities running to the Western press to denounce Zelensky as a rapidly growing tyrant, and the war itself as a lost cause, one that only Zelensky and Joe Biden, and maybe Nikki Haley, remain delusional enough to believe can be won.
Earlier this week, the U.S.
Congress refused to approve Biden's latest $60 billion request for Ukraine, as the White House warns that Ukraine is running out of money for its war.
But all signs demonstrate that most of the world, and even Zelensky's top allies, are recognizing That the war is lost.
That the only solution where this can be resolved is the negotiating table.
Yet, needless to say, the deals available to Ukraine now will be far worse than the ones that were available to it at the start of the war.
Before Russia spent hundreds of millions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of men at least in order to secure tight hold of 18% of Ukraine.
Unfortunately, those efforts to diplomatically resolve the war at the start were stopped by Joe Biden and Boris Johnson.
Yet again, the promises and predictions made by our serious foreign policy experts have all proven to be empty.
Then, last week we examined the question of whether TikTok is, as the CIA and the Biden White House claim and as many people have been led to believe, a weapon that it's used by the Chinese Communist Party to propagandize America's youth and turn people against their own government.
As we attempted to document on that show, almost none of TikTok's so-called content moderation decisions, the euphemism for censorship, aligned with that narrative.
Instead, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House have been threatening to ban TikTok from the United States only as leverage to commandeer the censorship and content controls for themselves, so that just like they do with Facebook and Google, they can be in charge of this massive machine that one-third of Americans choose to use to communicate in the platform that is by far the most popular for young Americans.
That thesis of ours was confirmed this week when we received a notice from TikTok that the account For our program, System Update is now permanently banned from TikTok's platform.
They provided us with no explanation why this happened.
When we appealed, we received an absurdly ambiguous and unspecific allegation that we had violated the platform's Terms of Service regarding its, quote, integrity and authentication policy.
Yet not a single allegation that a single video that we posted there, let alone many, were inauthentic or spreading disinformation or violated their sacred integrity policy.
We'll show you what TikTok said and did and the light that it shines on what in fact is more big tech censorship by the U.S.
security state, not by the Chinese Communist Party.
After that, the investigative journalist Lee Fong, my former colleague The Interceptant, a friend of the show and of mine, got his hands on a trove of secret documents, spreadsheets, and WhatsApp chats that show a pervasive information war launched by Israel and its American allies.
Some of those powerful people in the United States serving as its allies, often directed by the IDF itself, to attack Israel critics in the United States, to get people fired, and otherwise create massive pressure for anyone not immediately supporting Israel's wars.
Many of the documents show what Fang and his co-author Jack Paulson call, quote, the heightened coordination among pro-Israel forces in Silicon Valley and the global tech sector.
by which they mean, quote, a loose network of pro-Israel investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials who have stepped up their efforts to combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel script.
We'll talk to Lee about what these documents show, about how this covert network is operating, who is part of it, what tactics they're using, and who they have been targeting.
And then we'll also talk to the British rapper and activist, Loki, who has become one of the most influential commentators on the Israel war in Gaza.
He has been following the Israeli-Palestine conflict for a long time, has a large audience that pays attention to him, and he will join us to discuss the latest developments in the war, as well as many of the arguments being bandied about about that war.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, it has been essentially taboo prohibited to question either the nobility and it has been essentially taboo prohibited to question either the nobility and justness of what the Ukrainians are doing in fighting the Russians, to question the U.S.-NATO narrative about that war, to question the U.S.-NATO narrative about
But especially it has been taboo to question President Zelensky and Joe Biden's policy of funding the war in Ukraine seemingly without end.
Everyone who did that was called a Russian agent.
You know all the terms that people get called when they challenge bipartisan war consensus in the United States.
And yet, starting about a month ago, all of that began to rapidly unravel.
Some of President Zelensky's most important allies went to Time Magazine to depict Zelensky as this megalomaniac who is completely delusional.
And to say everybody in Kiev understands that this war cannot be won.
The goals of the war that the United States and NATO and Kiev said were the only ones that were acceptable, namely fighting the war until every Russian troop is expelled from every part of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, is basically impossible.
There's no way that will ever happen.
Ukraine is not only running out of ammunition, it is running out of men to continue to fight this war.
At the very beginning of the war, Zelensky called on, pled with, a lot of men in the West who were saying they support this cause to please come and help us fight.
Don't just sit on social media cheering this war.
Come to Ukraine, help us fight the Russian Army.
And almost nobody did.
And as a result, Ukraine has very few people left to send as cannon fodder to the front line.
And many of the few who are left are trying to flee Ukraine, knowing what their fate will be if they go to that front line.
So it's a very grim picture.
And not only that, but Zelensky has canceled the election, said that there will be no new election until the war is over, which technically may be for a very long time.
And they're starting now to denounce him as an authoritarian.
He has shut down opposition media outlets and banned political parties.
This great democracy for which we were told we were fighting.
And now we're at the point where the U.S.
Congress is obviously unwilling to continue to fund this war.
Here from the New York Times on December 6th, just this week, Republicans block aid to Ukraine, jeopardizing its fight against Russia.
Quote, the vote spotlighted waning support in Congress for backing Ukraine in the war and left the fate of the effort uncertain.
Maybe we can put the article on the screen as well.
So what I want to say here is that This vote in Congress has followed what public opinion polls have showed for quite some time, which is that the American public long ago turned against this war.
Majorities don't want to keep funding this war.
Quote, the failed vote highlighted waning support in the United States for continuing to fund Ukraine's war effort at a perilous time in the conflict, with Kiev's counteroffensive failing to meet its objectives and Russian forces on the offensive.
Now, you probably remember Back in May and June, when it was clear that nothing was happening in this war, we were sending billions of dollars, people were dying, and the front line wasn't moving, we were told, oh, don't worry, there's a counteroffensive coming that's going to change everything.
Max Boot wrote a Washington Post article featuring David Petraeus, who said he had just gotten back from Ukraine.
Morale was higher than ever.
The counteroffensive was almost certain to succeed.
The counteroffensive was a massacre.
It was a complete disaster.
They lost so many people who don't want to be fighting, who are there as conscripts.
All those tanks that the Germans sent, that the United States paid for, were destroyed.
And they didn't breach any of those Russian lines, let alone to the extent that they said they needed to in order to transform the war.
It was a complete disaster.
Everything you were told about the counteroffensive was false, as usual.
Quote, while the bill faltered over an unrelated immigration dispute, the resistance it has met in Congress reflects dwindling appetite among Republicans for backing Ukraine, as polls show that Americans are losing interest in providing financial assistance.
Now, this unrelated immigration matter that the New York Times cryptically refers to was, in fact, a position that the House Republicans took under Speaker Mike Johnson, where they said, look, we'll fund this war in Ukraine only if You not only fund border security in the United States, but then every time you want another $5 billion
sent from this authorization, you have to demonstrate that you've either sent people back or prevented people from coming in.
So a 15 or 20 percent decrease.
In other words, you want us to pay for Ukrainian border security but don't want to pay for border security at home in the United States.
That's the position.
And the Biden administration thus far has been unable to make the commitments it needs in order to get that 60 billion additional dollars.
But the people of the United States are finally asking, and actually they've been asking for quite a while, why does my life and the happiness and prosperity of my life depend on dictating who runs these provinces in eastern Ukraine?
How does this have anything to do with my life?
Why am I going to keep working and paying taxes only to send it to Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing?
And it was clear it was only a question of time from the start before Americans started asking that question.
Quote, Republicans held ranks against the $111 billion bill which would provide about $50 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, more for economic and humanitarian aid, and another $14 billion toward arming Israel in its war against Hamas.
I want to make an observation about the Republican debate I talked about last night.
There's something I noticed about Republican Party partisans.
Whenever people on the stage like Nikki Haley and Chris Christie were mentioning fighting wars and being tough and sending missiles and bombs, they would all applaud like trained SEALs.
They want to keep building up the military and paying for bombs and arming Israel and arming Ukraine and funding all these people's wars.
And then they also want big corporate tax cuts.
That's one of the things President Trump ushered in.
Big, big corporate tax cuts.
And then at the same time, whenever Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis would talk about how terrible it is that the United States is suffering under trillions of dollars in debt, they would also applaud that as though they were somehow, these people, eager for the debt to go away.
Please tell me, if you're going to go around the world fighting constant wars, And funding other countries wars, like we're now doing in Ukraine and Israel.
And we're going to build up this massive military that we're going to use to threaten Iran.
And bomb it if they don't behave better.
And we're going to go confront China over Taiwan.
And we're going to have bases all over the world.
And at the same time, you're cutting taxes for corporations so you're massively reducing revenue while you're spending, we're almost spending a trillion dollars a year now on our military.
A trillion dollars a year.
How are you going to reduce the debt?
The national debt?
The reason we're borrowing so much money is because we keep funding all these wars.
And the only way you can afford to fund wars like this is if you then increase revenue, which is taxes.
But the Republican Party can't because they're beholden to their corporate donors.
So they're cheering for things that are completely inconsistent.
There's no way to have an empire, to run the world as an empire, to constantly fund the boards of other countries without borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars and then trillions of dollars from China.
It's not going to happen.
Quote, Kiev will run out of resources to defend against Russia's invading army by the end of the year.
So they're trying to do this scaremongering that if you don't fund this war in Ukraine, they're going to lose to Russia.
They're already losing to Russia.
Even with all that aid we've been sending, the Russians control a fifth of Ukraine practically.
They're never leaving Crimea.
And they're never going to leave these provinces in eastern Ukraine either.
It's not going to happen.
This is just pouring money into the deep pockets of the people who run Washington.
That's all this war is for, while people continue to die in huge numbers.
And you have sociopaths like Bill Kristol and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham saying, oh, this is the best war we've ever fought.
We're just sending tons of money, but we're not dying.
We're letting the Ukrainians die while their country is destroyed.
And they have no chance of expelling the Russians except at the diplomatic table.
Here's The Economist from this week.
The Senate blocked aid for Ukraine.
Now what?
Armed supplies are dwindling as America and Europe grow weary of Ukraine's long war.
Quote, during the summer, Ukrainian forces fired about 220,000 to 240,000 large caliber shells each month, but the rate will soon fall to 80,000 to 90,000, said Michael Kaufman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think tank.
Even these numbers are more than America and European countries are producing.
Moreover, European countries will not meet their promise to supply 1 million shells by March.
There are also growing doubts about their ability to meet their promises.
Slovakia has halted military supplies to Ukraine.
That's because Slovakia actually had a national election and the one candidate promising to cut aid to Ukraine is the one who won.
Hungary is holding up a new transfer of EU aid worth $50 billion and Germany's constitutional court has thrown the government's budget into chaos.
Russia, meanwhile, is outproducing the West in artillery shells and has been boosted by ammunition from North Korea.
Ukraine's army is digging in to defend.
Whether it can hold its lines now depends on the vagaries of Western politics.
If America's Congress cannot muster the will to keep helping, European support may well crumble too.
This is an amazing fact, what they just said there, because we were told that it was Ukraine that was going to make advances on the Russians, that's what the counter-offensive was for, to break through the Russian defensive lines, start expelling the Russians from Ukraine.
Not only isn't that happening, the question is now, can Ukraine hold its defensive lines as the Russians get even more aggressive, and they're the ones now on the offense?
This is a lost war.
It's a lost war.
Now here you have, and one of the things Vivek said in the debate was there seems to be only two people on the planet who want this war to keep going, Joe Biden and President Zelensky, although he actually said that Nikki Haley was another one.
Here is John Kirby, the spokesperson for the national security apparatus in the Biden White House, using all the standard neocon scare tactics These are the exact same things we hear in every war that we're hearing in this new Israeli war as well, that somehow if you're in the United States and you don't defeat Hamas over there, Hamas is going to come to the United States.
Hamas has been around for decades.
They're a Gaza-based Palestinian group that was created to resist Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip.
They're not coming to the United States.
But the administration is desperate.
They know this war is getting lost and the people are against it.
So they're trying to scare Americans into believing that if they don't stop Russia in Ukraine, Russia is going to start expanding through all these NATO countries.
Listen to what he said.
And so.
So-- We seem to be having an issue with our video.
So we'll get to that in a second.
But essentially, we'll have this hopefully up in a second.
But what Kirby is basically saying there is what we're told in every single war, which is look, either you stop the Russians in Ukraine, or they're going to go to Poland, they're going to go to Czechoslovakia, to the Czech Republic, they're going to go to eventually Western Europe.
This insane fear-mongering that the Russians are going to start to expand all throughout Europe when the Russians made very clear at the start of the war that all they wanted was a guarantee that Ukraine wouldn't enter NATO and autonomy for the provinces in eastern Ukraine that are filled with Russian-speaking people and ethnic Russians who feel abused and repressed by the central government in Kiev.
And this is what we're being told.
That's what we were told in the war in Iraq.
We have to go fight them there so we don't fight them over here as if Saddam Hussein's army was going to invade the United States.
The United States is constantly fighting these wars that have no impact on or relationship to the lives of the American people.
And the only way they can justify it as American public opinion abandons these wars, as they always do once you get past that first wave of propaganda, is by trying to fear monger and tell Americans that if they don't keep funding this war, it's going to come to their shores.
And this is the same thing we hear about every war for the last 30 years and that we're hearing now.
Here's John Kirby.
Their chief advisor yesterday said they're likely to lose this war if they lose U.S.
support.
And Putin gets all of Ukraine, then what?
Then where does he go?
Because right then, he's up against the eastern flank of NATO.
And if you think the cost of supporting Ukraine is high now, just imagine how much higher it's going to be.
Not just in national treasure, but in American blood, if he starts going after one of our NATO allies.
Because as the President also said, we take our Article 5 commitments very seriously.
Don't you think Putin knows that as well?
That if he attacks a NATO country, it means the United States is going to enter the war?
That's the whole reason why he doesn't want Ukraine in NATO.
Because it's such a grave threat to have the NATO alliance right up to the Russian border.
When the Russians agreed after the fall of the Soviet Union to allow and accept a reunification of Germany, and obviously if you're a Russian, nothing is scarier and more alarming than a reunified Germany given the history of the 20th century and what the Germans did to the Russians twice, the agreement was that NATO wouldn't expand one inch to the east beyond East Germany.
East Germany had been part of their buffer, that whole iron curtain that kept NATO in the West.
And they were already agreeing to allow NATO to expand to the east by having East Germany reunify with West Germany and becoming Germany a NATO member.
And the US has done nothing but expand NATO.
One country after the next up to the Russian border and the border with Ukraine is their most sensitive border.
And that's what they wanted.
So the idea that now, Putin is going to go around attacking NATO countries provoking an American war is idiotic.
It's it insults your intelligence.
But that's the only way they can try and convince American voters to keep funding this.
Here is our good friend Michael Tracy pointing out the following.
The Defense Department is distributing this map to Congress showing which states receive investments to expand their quote defense industrial base thanks to Biden's latest Ukraine war.
Bit awkward that Virginia, home to all the defense contractors, is the top beneficiary as usual.
$744 million.
So this is the new Biden strategy to claim, oh look, the war in Ukraine is not a war where we're sending all this money over to Zelensky in Kiev and going into Swiss bank accounts and offshore accounts controlled by Ukrainian oligarchs.
No, perish the thought.
It's actually helping the American industrial base.
By claiming that all these states are receiving money.
And, as Michael says, by far the state that is receiving the most is Northern Virginia because that's where all the arms manufacturers are.
Now, here is a letter that we obtained, written by several senators, one of whom is Rand Paul, J.D.
Vance.
Mike Braun and the spearhead of this letter, which is Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, that debunks and heaps scorn on this narrative that somehow the United States people are benefiting from the funding of the war in Ukraine.
Quote, Dear Director Young, So it's to the Honorable Shalanda Young, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
We fundamentally reject the premise that the jobs and livelihoods of our constituents rest on whether Congress votes to provide yet another massive blank check to Ukraine.
Hardworking Americans are seeing less and less money in their paychecks as a direct result of out-of-control, unchecked spending by the federal government.
Exacerbated by the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
Further, this administration's rapid entry into a war by proxy in defense of Ukraine and Europe without a clear strategy or restraint has resulted in $113 billion taken from American taxpayers in less than a year.
A majority of Americans fatigued from decades of foreign wars and forever wars and proxy wars in the Middle East remain staunchly opposed to providing additional funding for Ukraine.
The suggestion in your letter that Congress continue to underwrite the war in Ukraine under the guise of protecting the livelihoods of the American people is a farce.
Another blank check for Ukraine will only enrich the elites of the military-industrial complex intoxicated by, quote, the stability of forever wars.
And in addition to the Senators, I named Tommy Tuberville, the Republican of Alabama, signed that letter as well.
That's exactly the point.
Yeah, they're going to spend it on Americans, on the Americans who own defense contractors.
That's whose pockets are going to be filled, who have been filled by this military spending.
Now, we've showed you this before, but we just want to remind you, here from the New York Times in September of 2023 was an article that asked, who's gaining ground in Ukraine?
This year, no one.
Although both sides have launched ambitious offensives, the front line has barely shifted.
After 18 months of a war, the breakthrough looks more difficult than ever.
And here you see, this is the war's front line right here.
And the parts in red are games that Russia has made this year.
They're not very significant.
But they're more than the gains that Ukraine has made, which are in blue.
One here, one here.
But in general, as the New York Times says, despite nine months of bloody fighting, less than 500 square miles of territory have changed hands since the start of the year.
A prolonged stalemate could weaken Western support for Ukraine.
This is the very entrenched defensive position of the Russians.
Here's all the territory of Ukraine.
That they occupy and control, along with Crimea.
That's 18% of Ukraine that they now occupy.
The only part of Ukraine that they controlled before the war was Crimea.
They were funding the separatists here in this region, but they weren't, as a Russian military, occupying it the way they are now and controlling it.
And this front line has barely moved.
So all we've done with these massive expenditures is enrich Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics, which will in turn fund both political parties in the huge numbers as a reward to make sure it keeps coming as well.
Enormous number of Ukrainians have died.
While that country gets destroyed and you have BlackRock and JP Morgan waiting in the wings to go and rebuild it and profiteer off that rebuilding so the United States will pay for Ukraine's destruction and then pay for its rebuilding.
And then everybody wonders, why do we have nine trillion dollars in debt?
That we can't even pay the interest on.
This is a big part of why.
Now, People in Ukraine have seen this for a while and are finally admitting it.
Here from the Kiev Independent, December 3rd, the Ukrainian mayor says Ukraine is turning authoritarian as conflicts with Zelensky persist.
Quote, at some point we will no longer be any different from Russia.
Where everything depends on the whim of one man, the former heavyweight boxing champion said in a December 1st interview.
The Kiev mayor said that Ukraine was leaderless and chaotic in the opening months of the full-scale war and credited Ukraine's mayors with playing key leadership roles protecting their residents and supporting the military.
But Klitschko believes the president's office sees mayors merely as an atavistic obstacle to the centralization of power.
So you're now seeing Ukrainian officials, popular Ukrainian officials, powerful Ukrainian officials attaching their name to extremely harsh condemnations of President Zelensky.
The country is turning against him.
Here in Time Magazine was the amazing article that kicked it off, all of it off on November 1st.
And that was the headline quote.
Nobody believes in our victory like I do.
Inside, Zelensky struggled to keep Ukraine in the fight.
It was basically one quote after the next of Ukrainian officials essentially saying, look, we see this front line.
We know that we can't win this war.
The only thing that we need to do is pursue a agreement with Russia before the terms of that agreement get even worse.
I mean, if Russia keeps expanding, And they have 25% of Ukraine and then 30% of Ukraine.
Obviously, they're going to have a lot more leverage and Ukraine will have a lot less in the negotiations that they will be forced to conduct.
Joe Biden has an enormous amount of blood on his hands for what he did here along with Boris Johnson.
It is now well established that there were serious efforts being made by the Russians and the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace deal at the start of this war.
That would have required Ukrainian neutrality, prevented Ukraine from entering Ukraine in exchange for Western security guarantees, and probably additional autonomy for those provinces in eastern Ukraine that at least wouldn't be under Russian control or annexation.
And now there's no chance of that deal.
And many tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives.
So that Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer and the whole crew could enrich their arms industry donors right after the war in Afghanistan finally ended.
We got a new war six months later.
And so that we could sacrifice Ukrainians at the altar of the geopolitical goal of the United States to weaken Russia, which didn't even work since Russian military, the Russian military is stronger than ever.
This is the demented foreign policy class that has been running U.S.
foreign policy for decades now.
And yet again, we have another disastrous war, a failed war, a war filled with lies sponsored by and sold to the American people by the same people who sell all of these wars.
All right.
It's kind of ironic when you report something and then very shortly after that you have a personal experience that in many ways verifies or vindicates the thing that you reported.
So we did a segment last week knowing that we know that many of you have become convinced That TikTok is this weapon of the Chinese Communist Party that they use to get at the minds of American youth, in particular, that they're propagandizing them, they're turning them against the country, they're filling their head with all kinds of crazy ideas.
And we tried to show you that that is a false narrative.
TikTok is run by A Singaporean who was born in Singapore.
He's a capitalist.
He went to the London School of Economics.
He then went to Harvard Business School.
He then worked for Goldman Sachs.
They have American management, American shareholders.
And the United States has become one of their most lucrative markets because of how many millions of Americans choose to use TikTok.
And they don't want to have to be, they don't want to be banned.
from the United States that are willing to do anything to stay here.
And one of the things they've been increasingly doing is saying to the United States government, look, we don't care about political speech.
If you want to tell us what political speech you find damaging or dangerous, just tell us and we'll censor it.
Remember, they censored the Bin Laden letter once it went viral.
Why would they censor the Bin Laden letter, which explains to Americans Or tries to convince Americans that 9-11 was the fault of the U.S.
government for interfering in that region and bombing that region.
If they were interested in being divisive and dividing the American people against their own government, they would love the bin Laden letter.
They would let the bin Laden letter viralize.
They wouldn't censor it.
And yet they did censor it.
And this first came up for us because we I had a video in December of 2022, so a little bit more than a year ago, that was highly critical of President Zelensky and the Ukraine war and the narrative from the United States.
There you see it on the screen, Erasing Inconvenient Truths.
And this video started to go rather viral.
And obviously the Chinese Communist Party wouldn't want to stop this.
It was a video critical of U.S.
foreign policy.
That's supposedly what the Chinese Communist Party wants.
They want people hearing content, like what we produce, that is critical of the U.S.
government, the U.S.
security state.
And yet, we got a notice.
There you see it on the screen.
Video removed.
This video violates our community guidelines.
It was a segment like the one I just did about the lies around the war in Ukraine.
There you see the video details Ukraine President Zelensky as a corrupt authoritarian oligarch despite what Western media is trying to tell you.
And the reason cited was integrity and authenticity.
Trust forms the foundation of our community.
We do not allow activities that undermine the integrity of our platform or the authenticity of our users.
We got an account warning for that and it said your account is at high risk of being restricted based on your violation history.
The next withdrawal could result in being prevented from accessing some features.
Now we thought it was very strange since this was actually the first time this has ever happened.
And we appealed this removal and we actually won.
They looked at it, they reinstated it, and they removed this warning from our permanent record.
The only other time we've had any issue with TikTok was with this video in June of 2023.
Where we reported on how the CIA had flown to Brazil as part of the 2022 election, basically, according to the US, to warn the Brazilians not to use the sort of election fraud claims that Trump had used and that Bolsonaro was threatening to use if he lost.
But it was the CIA flying to Brazil in the middle of the Brazilian election to basically intervene and say, this thing that Bolsonaro is starting to do, we're not going to accept it.
And the reporting on this was very reliable.
It was from mainstream outlets.
And we did a video and actually you see there it was, we put Portuguese subtitles on the screen so that Brazilians could hear it as well.
This is probably our most viral video on TikTok ever.
Certainly one of them.
It really went viral.
And we got the same kind of notice.
Video removed.
The video violates our community guidelines.
Here you see the CIA's benevolent interference in Brazil.
And the same rationale cited.
Now let me ask you this question.
If the Chinese Communist Party were censoring TikTok and controlling its content, why would the Chinese government be angry that we published a video on CIA involvement in Brazil?
Wouldn't that be something they would want?
If this narrative is true that they're using TikTok to turn the government, the people of the United States against their own government.
They would love our show.
Our show is overwhelmingly a critique of the U.S.
government and the U.S.
security state and U.S.
foreign policy.
Why would TikTok be targeting our show if it were run by the Chinese Communist Party and removing videos critical of U.S.
foreign policy?
That makes no sense whatsoever.
It would only make sense, the only people angry by these kinds of videos from our show would be the U.S.
security state, the thing we criticize.
The entity that has previously tried to think of ways to prosecute me when I went around the world reporting on all their secret documents as part of the Snowden reporting.
When I was at the Intercept where we often publish secret documents about their drone program and their FBI spying programs.
My good friends in the U.S.
security state, those are the people who would want our content censored, and that is exactly who is commandeering the TikTok content moderation.
This time we did appeal, and it did not get reinstated.
This video was removed.
We had this strike against us, but this is the only strike that we ever knew about.
This week, our social media manager went to access TikTok to post and she got this notice.
Your account was permanently banned due to multiple violations of our community guidelines.
Permanently banned.
Our account was permanently banned.
Our system update account.
The only thing we use this account for is to post clips of this show.
When we appealed it or asked for some kind of explanation, they sent us this email.
Thank you for contacting TikTok.
We understand how important your account is to you.
After further review, your account will remain permanently banned due to a violation of our integrity and authenticity policy.
Please note that our community guidelines apply to both public and private videos.
And that was it.
We could not get any kind of an answer.
on why it is that our account is banned, but we know that it's permanently banned.
We can't get an answer why.
I hope this forever debunks this notion that the people controlling the censorship Decisions of TikTok are the Chinese Communist Party.
They have turned over, TikTok has, these decisions to the U.S.
security state just like the U.S.
security state influences and controls the censorship decisions of Facebook and Google and in the pre-Musk era of Twitter.
Because they have used this threat to ban TikTok as a way to say the only way we're gonna let you stay is if you censor the things we want.
This also shows, by the way, imagine if we had this show and there was no rumble, no platform that said to us, we're going to guarantee the right of free speech.
And we were dependent on big tech, on Google's YouTube, on Instagram owned by Facebook, on TikTok.
Do you see how, what a stranglehold there is on free speech in the West?
Do you see this?
Say what you want about our show and my views, but our reporting is extremely fact-based.
I've been doing this for 20 years now.
I've won every journalism award that the West has to offer.
There's no journalist in the United States that has won as many.
Maybe there are some who have won as many, but none who have won more.
And Our show, if you watch it, you know that we are very careful to adhere to facts, usually facts that are easily demonstrable on the public record.
We don't spread disinformation.
We don't rely on conspiracy theories.
This is purely content-based.
Now, the last two months of our show has been overwhelmingly dedicated to a critique of the U.S.
funding of the war in Israel and the war in Israel itself.
I don't know if that's a factor.
But I know that our show, in general, is a critique of the US foreign policy state and of the censorship regime.
We also did criticize TikTok as well.
So who knows why?
But look at how arbitrary and capricious this is.
If your livelihood, if your ability to be heard rests on Big Tech, you're just in the palm of their hands.
They can squeeze it at any time.
It's so Kafkaesque, they don't even give you a reason.
They give you no explanation at all, let alone an opportunity to appeal or be heard.
They just send you a form letter saying, no, you're permanently banned and that's going to remain that way forever.
This is why platforms like Rumble are so important, because if we had to rely on this, imagine how nervous we would have to be about what YouTube allows, what Google will say we can say, what we can't say.
Every time you get a strike against you on a video, you're petrified that the next one might result in the destruction of your show, the destruction of your ability to be heard.
The range of views they allowed was extremely narrow.
And that's why I think this fight for free speech is the most important.
We are happy to welcome to our show the British rapper and political activist and analyst and commentator Loki, who, as I said at the top of the show, has really become one of the most influential voices when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian conflict, and in particular the war in Gaza.
He has a large audience that follows him and listens to him, and that's for good reason.
He's very effective in his analysis, and we've been hoping to get him on the show for a while, and we are happy to have him here.
Loki, welcome to the show.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for coming on. - Thanks so much for having me, Glenn.
I really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
So leaving it with this, you know, we've had a lot of critics of the Israeli war in Gaza on our show.
We've had debates on this.
We've had Israeli supporters.
My view is very clear to my audience, my critiques of this war.
So before we get into that, which I think my audience is kind of familiar with, let me ask you, We're currently in going on the third month of this war.
There are 16,000 people in Gaza who have been killed by the Israelis.
That's probably a conservative number.
Generally, there are people buried underneath the rubble who aren't included in that count.
The US government has said those numbers are, if anything, undercounts.
Just today, there was a resolution that the UN Security Council voted on to call for a ceasefire between the Gazans and the Israelis, and 13 of the 15 countries voted for it.
One country, the UK, abstained, but the United States voted against it.
So the United States is protecting Israel at the UN, as it always does.
It's feeding the Israelis the weapons it's using to bomb.
Do you have any Meaningful hope that anything or anyone will be able to stop the Israelis anytime soon in what they're doing?
Well, to start with, Glenn, I just wanted to deal very quickly with some of the issues you were just discussing.
Now, TikTok has also banned the account of the website that I work for, Mint Press.
It's important to note that the content policy lead for TikTok Canada is Alexander Corbell.
Who is also simultaneously the vice president of the NATO Association of Canada.
What you also have in addition to that was I discovered that the feature policy manager for TikTok is Greg Anderson.
Now Greg Anderson formerly worked in psychological operations for NATO.
Now, when I discovered that and published that information some time back, Greg Anderson actually edited his LinkedIn profile to delete the psychological operations aspect of his work at NATO.
We also know that Beau Patterson works as a threat analyst for TikTok's trust and safety division.
Well, Patterson was previously a targeting analyst for the CIA.
You also have the example of Victoria McCullough, who worked for the Department of Homeland Security and the White House itself, and now currently works at Trust and Safety at TikTok.
So what we're talking about with TikTok, and you can look up the work by Alan McLeod on the Mint Press website, the NATO to TikTok pipeline.
It's very important for people to understand the process that has played out at that company.
There's many who have come from being employed at the CIA and NATO to being employed in very sensitive positions in TikTok.
No, let me just interject there before you go on, because I do want to just add to that, which we did a show, you know, as I said, confronting this moronic idea that the TikTok is this arm of the CCP and that it's being used to propagandize the American public on behalf of China.
And we've also done shows before showing how many people from the U.S.
security state are placed into the censorship units of big tech platforms.
In fact, Facebook's primary censorship official is a longtime operative of the CIA.
He was at the CIA for 20 years and now he runs Facebook's censorship.
And I think some people think TikTok is immune from this because they're Chinese.
But the reality is they've had the same infiltration.
TikTok has been on this hiring spree, in fact, from Facebook, from Google.
To get all these U.S.
security state operatives on board to their content moderation staff to show the Pentagon and the CIA and the Biden White House that they're on board with whatever censorship the United States government wants as a condition to sing in the United States because what they really care about is the profit.
These are capitalists who are trying to make money from the U.S.
market.
So I think it's an extremely good point and I'm glad you detailed that.
All right, go ahead and Unless you have more to say on that, go ahead and address the question about this war and how it might at some point come to an end.
Absolutely.
Well, Israel has the stated objective of driving the 2 million population, 2.3 million population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert.
It seems that the United States, while supplying supposedly according to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Over 200 planes of weaponry throughout this war.
We also know that the British are involved in logistics.
Some of the flights of U.S.
weapons have gone from British base in Cyprus.
We also know that Britain is intercepting communications of the resistance forces from its base in Cyprus.
The NSA is there also and sharing that information on a daily basis with Israel.
There has from time to time been one or two points that the U.S.
has pushed back on.
So, for instance, when Israel cut off communications in Gaza, apparently it was due to some form of U.S.
intervention that communications were then returned to Gaza.
But ultimately, the U.S.
has given Israel a blank check to do whatever it wants to this population.
One could wonder whether this war will turn into the regional war that it seems Israel wants.
It seems to want to knock out Hezbollah in Lebanon and then possibly try and push the U.S. into going for a final regime change showdown with Iran.
But it seems that while they may be able to achieve the movement of a large number of people out of Gaza into the Sinai Desert, it seems the Egyptian government are giving indications that they will agree after being given promises to forgive debt and whatnot.
that the wider regional war hopefully can be pushed back on.
The wider regional war hopefully can be pushed back on.
We need China and Russia to take more forthright positions and stand up to Israel in a more effective way.
We need China and Russia to take more forthright positions and stand up to Israel in a more effective way.
The question is, where are the red lines?
The question is, where are the red lines?
You know, the United States gives Israel normally about $10.4 million of military aid on a daily basis.
But where we are now, it's obviously increased massively.
You know, Israel is believed to have carried out assassinations in 18 different sovereign states around the world.
We really have to question at this point, does what we understand to be the international community even view the Palestinians as human beings?
This is just an unconscionable level of human suffering that has been unleashed on Gaza.
I want to talk a little bit more about the Israeli goal, because...
You said the stated goal was to drive the Gazans into the Sinai.
There have been military documents that have discussed this and I mean this is the open policy of the Netanyahu government that Gaza and the West Bank, which they now call Judea and Samaria, that Ron DeSantis is now calling that in order to indicate that all of this land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belongs to Israel.
That it's all part of greater Israel, and obviously if it has to be part of greater Israel, it means Israel needs to take full control of it all and drive the Palestinians out.
But the stated goal of this operation from the start has been to destroy Hamas.
And in terms of that stated goal, I'm having a hard time understanding what that would even mean because it reminds me a lot of after 9-11, the United States obviously had a great quest and thirst for vengeance.
There were Americans who just wanted to see the Middle East, parts of the Middle East being blown up, wanting to see Muslims and Arabs dying because that's who they perceived as having attacked the United States on 9-11.
And part of that mission was really ill-defined.
It was just pure bloodthirst.
And obviously that's part of what's going on in Israel, but one of the things the United States found, and this is the United States government will tell you this and has said it, is that the more you kill people in a region, the more you bomb them, the more terrorists you're creating.
Obviously the more people standing by watching the United States killing people, the more people want to come and kill the United States and kill Americans.
Isn't it What do you think is going on in the mind of Gazans, the mind of people in the West Bank, the minds of the people in this region, as they watch every day these hundreds of Gazans being blown up and killed and babies being killed by these extraordinary numbers?
I mean, what is this going to look like for Israel when they ever do stop?
Well this apocalyptic war is something that has many people in the region are left with a deep scar on their psyche from viewing these images.
Of course, the war on terror era, which entailed the dropping of 46 bombs per day by the U.S. and allies for 20 years straight, on average, 46 bombs per day, the invasion of numerous countries and the displacing of over 30 million the invasion of numerous countries and the displacing of over 30
We have always understood that the ideals which the United States professes to hold are actually false and have no real truth to them.
But unfortunately, the worry is that you have had this in Nour al-Masalha, in the fantastic book The Expulsion of the Palestinians, goes into detail about the trajectory of the Zionist movement from Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl to Chaim Weisman. goes into detail about the trajectory of the Zionist movement The idea of population transfer has always been there.
And as you say, if Israel is to establish It's complete control over Gaza and push the Palestinians out into Egypt and try and then distribute them around the world.
Without a doubt there will be sustained resistance from many different quarters.
The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Education have for some years been funding organizations who also have the stated objective of replacing Al-Aqsa.
With a temple which some believe to have existed around 2,000 years ago.
Now, this is a form of what Yusuf al-Kabir, the Iraqi Jewish lawyer, termed militant archaeology.
And essentially, for the Zionist dream to be realized, you are talking about the dispossession of Palestinians, the cruelty on an industrial scale.
Absolutely, this will give birth to more resistance.
And not just in Palestine, you will see the US presence across the region become more and more precarious by the day.
I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that.
The former Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, wrote an essay, an article, an op-ed, at the start of the war, I think the first or the second week, in The Economist.
And he was, I think, a lot more candid about the war aim that Israel was pursuing.
He was, first of all, scornful of the idea that the United States was going to limit Israel in any way.
And he was saying, essentially, we're appreciative of Israeli aid, of American aid, but We're going to do what we feel we need to do to secure our future.
And if they don't like it, we're going to do it anyway.
And I think that the Israelis, for the most part, have been true to that.
But what he said was that the real purpose of this war that the Israelis are launching in Gaza is to put so much fear into the heart of Israel's enemies, fear that will endure generations.
And this will be done by basically showing the Israelis are willing to use an amount of force
Previously unthinkable, unprecedented, which is exactly what this war has become, an unprecedented bombing campaign as compared to anything in this century or even in the latter part of the 20th century, such that even though they're going to hate Israel and harbor intense amounts of animosity and even a desire to kill Israelis, they will be so psychologically traumatized and so beaten into submission that
Their instinct just won't let them do it anymore.
They will just be a completely submissive people.
And part of me wonders, and I'm obviously not in Gaza, but I can only look, do what I'm doing, which is listening to the people in Gaza, hearing what they're saying.
I wonder what you think the psychological effect on people in Gaza will be, and in the West Bank as well, where there's a huge escalation of violence of the most savage kind.
From all of this, is it clear to you that there will be greater resistance or do you think Naftali Bennett's conception that you can just break somebody's spirit so much by subjecting them to the worst hells on earth might actually be plausible?
Well, I would say it would contradict the entire history of the Palestinian struggle which has been defined by staying power.
You have to remember that there is a price exacted on Israel For everything it's done so far.
So the taking of a few hundred thousand of people out of the traditional labor market and putting them into the Israeli military for this assertion of power has led to economic ramifications.
Also the shutting down of the Tama gas field cost Israel tens of millions a day at least.
You also have the interesting example of their tech industry continuing You know, much prized tech industry which emanated from Unit 8200 in the Israeli military continually declining.
You also have Israel having the conundrum of functioning on the basis of 65,000 Palestinian construction workers who now they are trying to cancel out of the Israeli economy.
So you are seeing serious economic ramifications for Israel which are Very unlikely to be sustainable.
They are becoming more and more reliant on the United States propping them up.
I do not think that this myth of Israeli invincibility has much validity to it, despite its ability to wage massively technologically advanced warfare on a civilian population.
We've seen, for example, the originator of the Dahiyya Doctrine used against Lebanon in the early 2000s, which advocates for the mass bombing of civilian locations in order to achieve political objectives.
The very general who originated the Dahiyya Doctrine, who announced it, had his own son killed in Gaza within the last 24 hours.
And so you are seeing this reach places that it has not reached before.
And we also have to remember that resistance to Israel is not limited just, and not that I'm saying you are saying this, but I think it's important for Naftali Bennett to know this, it's not limited just to Gaza and to Palestinian territories, it's also taking place off the coast of Yemen, where it's also taking place off the coast of Yemen, where you are seeing the Bab el-Mendeb become a red line, where numerous shipping companies who are owned by the Offa family, and historically those shipping companies like Zodiac Maritime have been reported and historically those shipping
to be fronts for Israeli intelligence.
They have transported Israeli elite units around the region to carry out assassinations.
They have been given a very clear message by the Yemenis that they are not welcome.
And so I think while Israel may be able to assert this type of power on a vulnerable, weak, besieged, starved population like Gaza, they will find it a lot more difficult to do what they have been doing in the region generally, certainly they will find it a lot more difficult to do what they have been doing So I understand that may be his objective, but even in London and in England, for example, it's
Israel's largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, is besieged.
We have successfully, in the last three years, shut down two of their sites in this country through constant direct action.
And also, when it comes to this issue of public perception, Israel has never had a worse reputation than it has today.
At any point in history has it been viewed in the way it is today.
One of the things I don't think we get much news from about is the nature of the war itself, the ground evasion, how that's going.
You get little bits and pieces of news about the number of Israeli soldiers being killed and even there it doesn't seem like it's the complete picture.
What are you able to discern about how well the IDF is proceeding to take over all of now southern Gaza, to eliminate the resistance from Hamas and other Militias inside Gaza, how do you think the war is going just from a military perspective and from the IDF perspective?
Well, their objectives, today you see a perfect example of it, when they tried to return one of their soldiers who had been taken captive within Gaza, the mission failed and they ended up calling in an airstrike because in terms of guerrilla warfare, you have to remember the Israeli military
They are people that are used to sitting in Unit 8200 listening to phone calls, sitting in Unit 8153 and spying on communications.
They are a military that is used to sitting at checkpoints in the West Bank and bullying a disarmed population by the Palestinian Authority who they work in security coordination with.
They are used to striking from F-16s and F-35s.
They're used to striking from drones.
And ultimately, they are not used to hand-to-hand guerrilla warfare, and they are finding themselves in a bit of a quagmire, I would say, in Gaza.
I think it's quite optimistic to say that they could succeed in clearing out Gaza totally with one more month left of the war.
And you have to remember that North Gaza is still not completely cleansed of Palestinians, despite Israel's massive assertion, exertion of...
of airstrikes and whatnot in the north of Gaza, despite trying to starve these people out.
Of course, as you will know, a war of attrition depends on ammunition.
And, you know, this is why just a few days ago, Benjamin Netanyahu said, we need three things from the United States, munitions, munitions and munitions.
So, you know, it will be very difficult for the Palestinian resistance to continue to keep Israel at bay.
But I would say Israel's success rate, even if you were to compare the figures, which, again, it's difficult to really get a good grip on, But in comparison to the amount of civilians killed to how many Hamas people have been killed, you know, at the beginning of this war, there was talk of 40,000 Hamas fighters.
And according to some estimates, Israel has killed as little as even the maximum estimate has about 2,000 Hamas fighters.
So that's not a very good proportion of the amount of people they're killing for supposed Hamas fighters.
So I don't think Israel has achieved much in terms of their political aims.
Yeah, it was bizarre.
Right before the, whatever you want to call it, the pause, when there was the release of the hostages, the numbers that the Israelis were issuing were 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas militants, and they've killed 2,000.
And the day that they're fighting was initiated again, suddenly that number jumped to 5,000.
And according to the Times of Israel, they tried to claim they had anonymous sources telling them this.
So it was a very strange attempt to just almost triple the number of Hamas militants they had claimed they had killed from not even a full day of fighting since the pause and the hostage exchanges ended.
Well, Loki, I'm super grateful for your work.
It's something that I follow.
It helps me understand a lot of what's going on.
We would love to have you back on.
We've been trying to get you on for a while, and I really enjoyed talking to you.
I appreciate your taking the time.
I know it's late there, so I appreciate your staying up and being with us tonight.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Stay strong.
Stay well.
Absolutely.
You too.
Have a good evening.
Friend of the show and intrepid investigative journalist Lee Fong has gotten his hands on some truly fascinating documents.
Documents that had been intended to be secret and that were secret until he and his co-author Patrick Halston were able to obtain them and then write about them.
They are documents and WhatsApp.
Chats that show, let's put the article on the screen, it's on Leigh Substack, which if you're not following and subscribing to, I really hope you will.
It's some of the most important independent journalism, original reporting journalism, and there you see it.
Inside the pro-Israel information war, Israeli government-led zoom calls, what's up chat logs, and other documents provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices.
We have Leigh tonight to talk about Here's reporting Lee.
It's great to see you as always.
Thank you for coming on the show tonight.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah.
So let's, let me just ask you to start with, for those who haven't read the article, and I really encourage everybody to go read this.
What for you are the key findings?
What is it that we learned from these documents you were able to obtain?
Well, this is a very broad look at the organizing behind the pro-Israel kind of side here in the US.
I reported this over the last few weeks with my colleague, Jack Polson.
He's the founder of Tech Inquiry.
He's really a fantastic reporter who covers the tech industry and defense industry.
And we took a look at one organization, the J Ventures Global Kibbutz.
This is an investment fund, a U.S.-Israeli investment fund.
They formed a WhatsApp to support Israel in this war, and it is composed of over 300 members, many very prominent tech executives, venture capitalists, and other investors.
They engaged in a number of activities.
Some of them are very benign and perhaps even laudatory, raising funds for medical supplies, helping with Israeli hospitals and other humanitarian goods for communities affected by this conflict.
But this piece kind of looks also at the advocacy and lobbying.
It's through this WhatsApp channel and perhaps many other channels that Pro-Israel forces have organized to cancel pro-Palestinian speakers to shut down events to support universities in canceling and revoking the status for pro-Palestinian activist groups from students, including the decision by Columbia to revoke the status for two pro-Palestinian groups.
In addition, it looks at how there's a role of Israeli government officials.
Of course, any group in the U.S.
has the right to speak up on a major public policy.
There's no controversy there.
What's unusual here is that We have many examples of Israeli government officials, folks from the IDF or from the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry sitting in on these WhatsApp meetings, providing guidance, providing talking points, guiding the advocacy, kind of suggesting strategy for social media, suggesting strategy for engaging opponents and really encouraging tech elites and Silicon Valley elites to use their influence with universities,
with lawmakers and others to support Congress providing military support to Israel to kind of shape the conversation, the discourse, the with lawmakers and others to support Congress providing military support to Israel to kind of shape the One of the things you say in the article is that part of the goal of this effort is to shape online discourse and also to silence pro-Palestinian voices, What are some of the examples you have of how they try to silence pro-Palestinian voices?
Well, in mid-October, this is just one example, there was an employee of Wix, it's a company, it's a website building company with a big base in Israel.
This was an employee in Ireland who tweeted, free Palestine.
That was it?
No link from the river to the sea, no Intifada, global Intifada, just free Palestine?
Initially, that was the tweet.
She later, or the LinkedIn message, this was on, I apologize, she posted on LinkedIn.
The initial message was just free Palestine.
Later, she elaborated that she opposes an exclusive Zionist project that does not give equal rights to Palestinians, that type of message.
But initially, what was captured and shared with this 300-person WhatsApp group was just the free Palestine message.
Members of the group immediately said we should we need to take action on this.
It's already been referred to a high level executive at Wix and that high level executive said it's been taken care of.
We'll be announcing something later today.
And indeed the next day it was announced that this employee was fired.
In addition, there are many examples in this piece.
Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, was slated to appear for a pro-Palestinian lecture at the Arizona State University.
This was brought to the attention of their group.
Many members collaborated in sending messages to the university campus president, to even the mayor's office on Scottsdale, applying pressure in other ways, and indeed I don't know if this was the determining factor, but it appeared to have some influence over these university decisions.
from the nation from East Jerusalem.
He was slated to appear at the University of Vermont for a lecture.
Again, there was an organizing effort started by tech executives on this WhatsApp group to apply pressure.
And indeed that event was also canceled.
I wanna say, I don't know if this was the determining factor, but it appeared to have some influence over these university decisions.
They were kind of bland or kind of confusing reasons that were publicly given around public safety or procedural reason for why these events were canceled.
It didn't really make sense.
But we're seeing free speech being snuffed out around this country around this issue.
Many journalists, academics and others have lost their job for expressing controversial speech or speech that's perceived as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel.
Yes, and the censorship and the punishment and the cancellation have all almost entirely been in one direction.
All pro-Palestinian voices or critics of the Israeli government, those are the ones who have been fired or have been de-platformed or who have otherwise been punished or taken out of schools or banned from accessing student groups, whereas almost no, there's about maybe one or two cases of pro-Israel activists and advocates who were deemed to have gone too far and had some issues with their job.
But the lopsidedness is so drastic.
And this is, Lee, one of the things that has been agitating me and that I think your reporting sheds so much light on, which is whenever there's an attempt to censor a political speech in the United States-- and in this case, it's being done to protect a foreign country-- you need some kind of a crisis that goes along with it.
You need some reason why people are endangered and why this speech is so menacing that it has to be stopped.
And the narrative that has been created is a kind of victimhood narrative That the American right has spent years in this country heaping scorn on when it was for black people or Latinos or immigrants or Muslims or trans people or LGBTs.
Oh, you poor little babies.
You don't feel safe on college campuses.
Do you need a little security blanket?
And now suddenly because it's American Jews, Oh, American Jewish students at Harvard and Yale and MIT.
These are the most endangered people on the planet.
And the irony of it is that you have, in reality, almost every major power center.
Obviously the U.S.
Congress and all kinds of industrial leaders and hedge fund billionaires like Bill Ackman.
Well, one example is Bessemer Venture Partners.
as is their right, but they're unified and very powerful working to punish people who are critical of Israel.
Who are the kinds of people who are in this group?
Like how powerful are they?
Are they influential?
Who are these people working to control and shape discourse in the United States and punish people who are critics of Israel or pro-Palestinian?
Well, one example is Bessemer Venture Partners.
It's one of the largest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley.
Big investment firm behind some of the leading lights in tech.
Multiple billions of dollars under management.
They have several of their partners in this orbit.
In fact, the head of the Israel office for Bessemer led a webinar last month alongside a spokesperson with the IDF in uniform for tech leaders.
to engage in social media war, really explaining that the only way for the IDF to have space on the battlefield is to win on the media and social media battlefield, that you should ridicule opponents, kind of listing out different talking points to engage here.
And again, Any activist group, any special interest has a right to speak out, to engage on social media.
What's interesting is the level of power here.
Many powerful tech leaders and also the fact that they're doing this alongside a foreign military.
That is unusual.
Looking at this broadly, Several, we've had also several social media seminars from the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry, similarly telling American audience members, how to engage when commenting on university campus news articles, that when you go into the comments section, here are different arguments you can make.
Here's how you should tag the university president to get them involved in the dispute.
Clearly kind of bringing in the issues around safety and security, and that's been made explicit in this 300-member WhatsApp group.
The issues that you reference around What's been called wokeness, that historically disadvantaged or oppressed identity groups, whether that's sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, that because of those histories that we have to create a safe space, a safe and inclusive space, that any kind of criticism that can be perceived as offensive to these historically disadvantaged groups needs to be shut down.
We need to create separate safe spaces for these organizations.
Well, that's the kind of Uh, rhetoric and kind of value system that's being weaponized in this chat group.
They're suggesting in their form letters to elite colleges that you should, uh, cite, uh, the need to provide Jewish students an inclusive and safe environment.
Again, the same rhetoric that was used to shut down debate in 2020 to cancel dozens of speakers, uh, on other racial issues, that same rhetoric is being applied and being recommended by this, these WhatsApp groups, by these kind of government officials and tech leaders that It's being used to cancel events, to pressure the cancellation of student groups.
Yeah.
I really think that someone said this to me and I think it's really true that basically October 7th, the Hamas attack is basically the pro-Israel supporters, George Floyd.
I mean, it's really been so similar in terms of the climate and the tactics and the silencing that has been used.
Lee, I want to show you this video.
I don't know if you've seen it.
It's a little talk from this woman who's a Harvard professor, Ruth Wisse, and she's kind of a well-known and well-regarded scholar of Hebrew, but she also has a lot of ties to Israel.
She's very neoconservative.
She has been an outspoken supporter of the Bush-Geneva War on Terror.
She's a fanatical supporter of Israel, and this is what she said was the duty of all American Jews in media.
In punditry, in any kind of field that is at all influential.
Listen to what she said was the responsibility of American Jews.
And you will say, what?
You want us to make you look good?
That's not my job.
Your job is to make us look good.
Our job is not to make you look good, American Jews.
What do you have to worry about?
Your job is to make us look good.
And here's how you do it.
Every one of us has to serve three years in the Army, two years in the Army.
Some of us five years and then for the rest of our lives.
You have got to serve two or three years in the army of words.
You've got to learn to fight the political battle, which is even more important at this point than the military battle that we are.
We'll fight the military battle.
We're not asking you necessarily to come and be lone soldiers, although some of you can.
You've got to learn how to fight back on the campuses, how to make the arguments.
Now they keep shifting.
You know, the ground keeps shifting under us.
They keep changing the language.
Intersectionality wasn't even a word ten years ago.
Now suddenly it's intersectionality.
You've got to stay on top of it.
And you know how we train for the army?
We don't train for defensive warfare.
If the war against Israel ever had to be fought on Israeli soil, It's an impossibility.
So it's the same thing.
Don't let the war of words ever be fought about Israel's nature.
Let it be fought about why you can't accept Israel.
Why you have to single out this tiny people.
Try to find Israel on the map.
It's hardly there.
You know, we used to play this game, where's Waldo?
You know, where is Waldo on the map?
Are you going to really tell me that this is the country you want to blame?
Push them, teach them how to defend by attacking.
All right, so I have to tell you, Lee, I know a lot of American Jews who work in journalism, who work in entertainment, who work in a lot of different fields, and I think this is a pretty accurate reflection of what they believe their responsibility is vis-a-vis Israel.
And I'm wondering whether in these documents and these discussions that you were able to get your hands on among these extremely powerful people who are Gathering to organize, which as you said is completely legal and appropriate and even though they have the IDF there with them, which seems a little odd that the IDF is helping shape public discourse inside our country in the United States.
But nonetheless, I'm just wondering whether that was kind of reflective of the mentality that seems to be guiding these activities you've been able to uncover.
Sure.
This came up constantly in the chats and the webinars and some of the documents.
There's a constant discussion that there's a battle going on in Gaza, but this is their term, a second war, an information war.
You are our frontline soldiers.
That kind of rhetoric, talking about pro-Israel supporters in the U.S.
in waging campaigns to influence the media, to influence social media, to influence university campuses, to influence Congress, and there were also explicit discussions about the need Uh, to pressure policymakers, noting that, you know, Raytheon, U.S.
defense contractor, supplies a lot of the vital missiles to the IDF.
The munitions also come from the U.S.
The U.S.
plays a vital role in shaping this conflict and enabling the IDF to carry out this war.
In addition, at the end of this piece, we share an anecdote from another one of these webinars.
And this one is not private.
It was actually shared publicly on the internet, just in a very hidden corner of the internet.
We stumbled across it and thought it was interesting and worth sharing for the context of our piece.
But, you know, there is this group Honest Reporting.
It's supposedly an objective media watchdog, one that, you know, really focuses on fairness in the press.
Well, this is a group that released a very controversial report last month claiming that Palestinian photojournalists are working hand-in-glove with Hamas, or they are Hamas members.
And, you know, this was condemned by many press organizations.
Noting that this type of reporting, this type of claim, was not only false, but it placed the lives of photojournalists in danger, basically putting a target on their head for the IDF.
And when receiving a little bit of pushback in public, this organization kind of threw up their hands and said, hey, we're just asking questions.
I'm glad this was clarified.
But in semi-private, because I don't know if they intentionally made this video public, The executive director of this group, a former Jerusalem Post reporter and editor, basically said, look, we're waging a media war.
You're waging a campus war.
The IDF is waging a war in terms of the military in Gaza.
But the media war is also important because by influencing the media, we're discrediting the reports that come out of Gaza that might be critical of the IDF, and we're also giving Israel and the IDF more space to breathe, more time to engage in this military engagement so they aren't pressured by the U.S.
because of the civilian casualties to wrap up and end this conflict.
So it's part and parcel, the information war with the military, physical war.
This is a point that's made repeatedly in all of these webinars and in the WhatsApp chats and the documents we reported on.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the reason I just find it so noteworthy and Objectionable is because basically it's like a foreign influence operation.
We always talk about how the Chinese are trying to infiltrate our political discourse and the Russians are trying to disseminate information to manipulate our public opinion.
Here you have American journalists and American billionaires and oligarchs and hedge fund managers and the rest working in unity with a foreign government to manipulate public opinion here in the United States and to try and limit the free speech rights of American citizens in order to protect this foreign country.
It's incredibly pernicious regardless of your views on the war.
All right, the article, which I really encourage you to go read, which is on Lee Substack, which I very much encourage you to check out.
And if you can to subscribe because journalists like the work of the kind that Lee is and the work that he's doing really need and merit support is Inside the Pro-Israel Information War.
It is you just Google Lee Fung and Lee Fung and Substack and you will find it there.
And Lee, always a great opportunity to be able to talk to you about your work, your work.
Your work, as you know, I already think is fantastic, and I hope you keep it up.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about it.
Glenn, thanks for everything you do.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, Lee.
Have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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