Musk/X Officially Targeted by EU for Israel-Hamas Disinfo/Hate Speech. Western Sanctions Cripple the EU While Russia Thrives. Calling All Establishment Enemies “HITLER!”
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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, back in August, the EU adopted one of the most potent and repressive online censorship laws of any entity in the democratic world.
Dress up with the benign-sounding title of the Digital Services Act.
The law permits e-regulators, led by its chief French censor Thierry Breton, to impose massive fines on any social media platform that fails to censor content that e-regulators deem to be either hate speech or disinformation.
In other words, it's a law that punishes tech platforms if they don't censor in accordance with EU demands.
Ever since its enactment, Breton and his henchmen have repeatedly threatened big tech platforms with punishment unless they immediately start censoring more.
But knowing that Elon Musk is particularly vulnerable politically, given how much of the neoliberal order and their left liberal allies have turned against him, precisely due to his refusal to censor on command, The EU has decided to make Musk's Twitter, X, its test case.
And, quite cleverly, they have decided to exploit the new war between Israel and Gaza to lure conservative support to their side.
Earlier today, the EU launched a formal investigation against X and against Musk, their first census laws enactment, claiming that X has allowed too much anti-Israel or pro-Hamas propaganda and disinformation to circulate.
In other words, much is being done in the U.S.
EU censors are insisting that more online censorship is needed to protect Israel and that X should be punished for its failure to censor sufficiently in order to protect Israel.
We'll show you this new pernicious investigation and the tactic that the EU is now using.
We have spent the last two years hearing that Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler, posing a threat similar to the Nazis.
We have spent the last seven years hearing that Donald Trump is the new Hitler, posing a threat similar to the Nazis.
And now we have spent the last two months hearing that Hamas is the new Hitler, posing a new threat, or a threat similar to the Nazis.
That is because it seems that American elites have been educated about only one single historic event.
World War II and the aggression of the Nazis and the perpetuation of the Holocaust.
As a result, while Hitler and the Nazis on the one hand are supposed to be the singular evil, on the other every single new enemy of the neoliberal order who we're supposed to support new wars against or rearrange our society to combat are instantly declared to be the new Hitler.
It is hard to overstate how frequent this tactic has become, or how many new enemies of the West have been bestowed with this hilarious title, so we'll show you a video montage we prepared just to underscore this point.
Finally, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.
and the EU announced a series of sanctions on Russia that they insisted would squeeze the Russian economy and make it difficult to wage the war.
That included pressuring American and European businesses to cease doing business in Russia, to simply up and leave, and it barred countries from trading with Moscow.
Two years later, it is now clear that the only countries hurt by all of this are the EU and the US, while the only people hurt by it are their own citizens.
Meanwhile, few things have benefited Russia or produced greater wealth for Putin than these sanctions.
This is just one of many disasters of Biden's policy of funding and arming Ukraine in its new war.
There are new studies showing just how much benefit Russia has received from the sanctions we were told would actually cripple it.
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One of the most important trends of 2023 is how many different countries and governments have enacted new laws that give them the power to censor online and to force and coerce big tech platforms upon pain of punishment of law to coerce in accordance with their agenda, with accordance with their dictates
We've seen laws enacted in Canada, In the UK we've seen laws pending in democracies such as Ireland and Brazil which we've covered extensively and probably the most pernicious of all those laws is the one that was enacted back in August by the EU called the Digital Services Act which allows EU regulators
To fine any social media platform 6% of their overall revenue, not 6% of their profits, 6% of their gross revenue in the event that they find that those platforms are not doing enough to censor what EU regulators regard as disinformation or hate speech.
You can only imagine, it's not hard to imagine, what EU regulators regard as disinformation Anything that is contrary to their policies on things like COVID, the war in Ukraine, the war in Israel.
Essentially anything, especially their elections, which they are very desperate to control to ensure that populist governments, such as the one governing Hungary, such as the new government in Slovakia, where the prime minister who won ran on a platform of cutting off aid to the war in Ukraine to ensure that they can control the outcome of elections as well.
That is their primary objective in wanting to censor, but essentially it's to ensure there's no dissent to their policies, to the policies of Brussels, to the policies of EU elites.
And they have yet to initiate any formal investigation under this law.
They've been repeatedly threatening to do so.
The minute war in Israel between Israel and Gaza broke out, they immediately threatened Twitter, Facebook, and Google that they weren't doing enough to censor anti-Israel content or what they called pro-Hamas propaganda and disinformation.
In other words, they demanded big tech platforms censor more to protect Israel or else be punished with massive fines under this new law.
And today, the EU actually initiated its first formal investigation They chose Elon Musk's ex in order to capitalize on how much political opposition there is to Musk among the centrist and the left liberals that compose the Western establishment.
Animosity to Musk due to the fact that he's refused to censor on command the way the other platforms have and they know that he's therefore politically vulnerable.
And they've decided to initiate this investigation specifically, explicitly on the ground that he's not censoring enough to protect Israel.
The EU is supporting Israel in its war against Gaza, as it usually does, and they decided to exploit this issue as the grounds for saying that Musk is being reckless, in fact breaking the law, by not censoring enough.
They first exploited this war for these ends five days after the Hamas attack.
Here was AP on October 12th, 2023.
We reported this at the time as well.
EU asks Musk X for information on hate speech and quote, illegal content related to Israel-Hamas war.
So they knew as soon as this war broke out, as soon as Hamas attacked Israel, that this was an excellent opportunity for them to exploit to claim that they were just trying to protect Israel, that they need censorship powers, and that they need to punish acts for failing to censor enough to protect Israel.
They weren't doing it for some left-wing cause.
They were doing it for a cause that a lot of conservatives support.
Obviously, the pro-Israel case is something very important to people across the ideological spectrum, but certainly a lot of people on the Western right and the American right are fanatical supporters of Israel, so they were very clever in implying that they were censoring in order to protect Israel.
Quote, The European Commission on Thursday made a formal legally binding request for information from Elon Musk's social media platform X over its handling of hate speech, misinformation, and violent terrorist content related to the Israel-Hamas war.
It is the first step in what could become the EU's inaugural investigation under the Digital Services Act.
In this case, it determined if the site, formerly known as Twitter, is in compliance with the tough new rules meant to keep users safe online and stop the spread of harmful content.
Don't worry, they're not trying to censor, they're not trying to suppress dissent.
They're just trying to keep users safe through censorship.
Quote, since the war erupted, photos and videos have flooded social media of the carnage, including haunting footage of Hamas fighters taking terrified Israelis hostage, alongside posts from users pushing false claims and misrepresenting videos from other events.
The conflict is one of the first major tests for the EU's groundbreaking digital rules, which took effect in August.
Breton fired off a similar letter Thursday to TikTok, telling CEO Zhou Zichu that he has a, quote, particular obligation to protect child and teen users from, quote, violent content depicting hostage-taking and other graphic videos reportedly making the rounds on the video-sharing app.
When the EU threatened both TikTok and Twitter, they picked the two most politically polarizing platforms, knowing that there'd be a lot of people on their side in doing so.
Thierry Breton went to Twitter to announce the following, quote, the DSA, the Digital Services Act, is here to protect both freedom of expression and our democracies, including times of crisis.
We have sent X a formal request for information, a first step in our investigation to determine compliance with the DSA.
Now, even before the enactment of this act, they have been threatening Elon Musk.
Whenever Elon Musk would say things like, we've freed the bird, meaning we're no longer going to have censorship on Twitter, this French censor on behalf of the EU would come and say the bird will only fly in accordance with our rules.
They've been telling him for a long time, we in the EU are not going to allow the kind of free speech that you are vowing to usher in.
Here is the EU Commission, the formal letter they sent.
On October 12th, they didn't even wait a week.
No.
to exploit the Hamas attack.
Five days into it, they were sending this request.
The commission sends requests for information to X under the Digital Services Act.
Quote, today the European Commission Services formally sent X a request for information under the DSA.
This request follows indications received by the commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation.
Note, illegal content and disinformation.
In particular, the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech.
The request addresses compliance with other provisions of the DSA as well.
Now this is why I have been spending so much time and so much energy warning people on the right who claim that they support free speech not to endorse the idea that colleges and American authorities and institutions ought to be censoring in the name of
Barring terrorist ideas because when you do that, you're going to be handing people like the EU and Homeland Security and Canadian officials and British officials and Brazilian officials and Irish officials the weapons to use against you.
They've been using the censorship regime against anti-establishment voices on both the right and the left.
They will continue to.
So by suddenly turning around and cheering the censorship regime and the rationale that accompanies it, oh, we need to suppress calls for violence against Israel or calls for violence against Jews or terrorist speech, you're fortifying the system.
They're now using your arguments to justify the censorship regime that they want to impose.
You think they're going to confine it?
Only the anti-Israel speech?
They're doing that on purpose to generate more support for it than they would if they started with a left-wing cause.
But they're gonna go right back to censoring the way they've always have been, with much stronger weapons in hand as a result of how many people have been demanding this.
Here is Thierry Breton today, December 18th, announcing very proudly, quote, today we open formal infringement proceedings against X.
And then he lists the alleged violations of the law that X has committed.
Suspected breach of obligations to counter illegal content and disinformation.
So, they have in mind this idea that they can identify what disinformation is.
About a month ago, there was an article in the Washington Post about a commission, a study that the EU commissioned That determined that X was also allowing too much pro-Russian disinformation.
And when we dissected the study, as we did for you, what we found was exactly what we expected to find, which was that the outside company that commissioned to identify quote-unquote disinformation was a group of self-proclaimed disinformation experts funded by the neoliberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who's obsessed with Russiagate, And by pro-Russia disinformation, all they meant was people who are opposed to the war in Ukraine.
They defined it as people whose views align with the Russian government.
And obviously if you're against the war in Ukraine, if you're against Western funding of the war in Ukraine, then automatically it means that you are guilty of pro-Russian disinformation.
And obviously when they say anti-Israel propaganda or pro-Hamas propaganda, They're going to classify that as well as anyone who is opposed to the Western arming and financing of the Israeli war.
Now here is a tweet that Elon Musk posted in response to The announcement from Thierry Breton that the EU is now formally investigating acts for failure to censor enough anti-Israel material.
It was not nearly as defiant as you would expect from Elon Musk.
Can we put this tweet on the screen?
Do we have this tweet on the screen that we can put on there?
I don't know.
We're going to have this in a second, I hope.
But what Elon Musk said was, there you see it, was, are you taking action against other social media?
Because if you have those issues with this platform and none are perfect, the others are much worse.
Now you can see in this tone of voice that Elon Musk is using, it's very kind of non-confrontational.
And it's surprising.
He's speaking to a EU official, the chief censor who's been threatening Twitter for over a year with punishments for not censoring enough.
And usually Elon Musk is very defiant.
Here, he's on the defensive.
Why?
You see him saying, we're not perfect.
We know we've not done enough.
But are you also going to do this against other platforms?
Because they're much worse.
The reason he's being so defensive Is because the accusation here isn't that he's allowing too much free speech on COVID, or that he's allowing too much free speech on Ukraine, or too much free speech on January 6, or Trump, or Russiagate, where he would be all defiant and say, we believe in free speech.
No, here they're accusing him of not censoring enough anti-Israel content.
And he's very sensitive about this.
Remember, he got accused of being an anti-Semite for weeks, and then he flew to Israel And pledge to Netanyahu all of his support.
He mouthed and recited almost every pro-Israel bromide as a way of getting out of being accused of anti-Semitism.
And then he announced new censorship policies on the platform where you weren't allowed to say from the river to the sea or decolonialize Israel on the grounds that that's now genocidal.
He gets very defensive when the accusation is he's not doing enough to protect Israel.
That was what made this so clever on the part of the EU that they decided to initiate this investigation explicitly by accusing him of not doing enough to protect Israel, hence his defensive posture.
And it produced headlines like this one from the British Telegraph.
The US investigation into Elon Musk's acts over Hamas propaganda.
Can we put the article on the screen?
There it is.
The EU launches investigation into Elon Musk's acts over Hamas propaganda.
The social network is under fire for failing to counter misinformation and violent content.
So this is the Headline they want.
This is the framework they want.
Not that they're charging Elon Musk a failure to censor in order to protect left liberal causes.
Instead, they're charging him with failure to censor anti-Israel content.
And what we've seen is there's a lot of support among conservatives in the United States and in Europe for censorship, for censoring Israel criticisms.
We've seen them demanding that on campuses.
We've seen them demanding that when Ron DeSantis banned a pro-Palestinian student organization from existing in the University of Florida system on the grounds that it gives material support to Hamas even though it does nothing but express its views.
There's been a censorship craze over the last few months and much of it has been supported by American conservatives, the very ones who have been claiming to be in favor of free speech for years who would normally denounce the EU.
But they're framing this as a censorship campaign to protect Israel.
Quote, the European Commission has opened a formal investigation to Elon Musk's Twitter over its alleged dissemination of misinformation and propaganda related to Hamas.
The commission announced that it had launched a full probe into Twitter, now known as X, to see whether it had broken new EU rules governing online services.
The investigation is the first under the Digital Services Act, a sweeping set of laws for social networks and search engines, which came into force in August and can impose massive fines on companies seen to break the law.
It comes two months after EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote to Mr. Musk asking him to crack down on, quote, the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech on the site.
It launched a preliminary investigation in October.
The opening of formal proceedings allows the EU to impose interim measures on X, such as changes to its algorithms or stricter monitoring of illegal content.
Now, when they say illegal content, what they mean is anything they deem to be disinformation or hate speech.
And we've seen how much that's abused.
Do you see how grave this is?
The EU is now able to make changes to acts upon pain of having them pay fines that are astronomical.
That's where the censorship regime has arrived.
Quote, X has come under fire since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th for failing to counter misinformation and violent content on the social network.
Mr. Musk himself has been accused of fueling anti-Semitism by endorsing a conspiracy theory and major advertisers have boycotted the service after their adverts were found next to pro-Nazi material.
Do you see how this war is being used to justify greater authoritarian powers in the hands of officials all throughout the world?
Every crisis, every perceived crisis is used this way now.
Oh, this is too dangerous to allow unfettered speech to thrive.
COVID and January 6 and Russiagate and the 2020 election And the war in Ukraine, all were used to elevate and escalate censorship powers.
And now they're using this war in Israel to do so as well, only they know that in the West, the way to become a popular censorship movement to incur a lot of support from people who otherwise have scorned for e-regulators is to claim that they're doing it to curb pro-terrorist or pro-Hamas or anti-Israel speech.
And there are so many people playing into this in a way that will be extremely self-destructive.
The problem is once you cheer a censorship regime once, you lose all credibility to cheer it in the future when, as is inevitable, it is turned back against you.
And the people who are cheering this are likely going to be the ones paying the biggest price.
So we have covered before, and I've actually been writing about this topic for as long as I can remember.
I think the first time I wrote about it was in 2006, how in neoconservative discourse, anytime they want the public to support a new war, they immediately claim that the people who they now want to fight, either foreign or domestic, are the new Hitler.
Even though there are organizations like the ADL that exist Explicitly in order to prevent the trivialization of the Holocaust by recklessly using it to compare it to everything and thus making it an ordinary crime.
The idea was Hitler and Nazism and the Holocaust were supposed to be singular crimes.
That you don't just go around comparing things to casually otherwise you turn Hitler into just an ordinary bad guy in history and the Holocaust into an ordinary bad event.
And they've done it to such an extent that now they've resorted to having to say the new enemy is worse than Hitler.
Michael McFaul, the former Obama ambassador to Russia, had to apologize for going on MSNBC and essentially saying not even Hitler did the things Putin is doing, meaning Hitler had ethical constraints that Putin doesn't have.
Douglas Murray wrote an article and other conservatives wrote articles saying Hamas is worse than Hitler.
Hamas is worse than the Nazis.
Because even calling people Nazis at this point doesn't work anymore because of how many times it has been invoked.
Here was New York Magazine that counted 61 times alone that Bill Kristol, the neocon, was reminded of Hitler or Churchill.
It's the only example they know.
Everybody who they want to go to war with is Hitler.
Everybody who supports the war is Churchill.
Everybody who opposes the war is Neville Chamberlain, who notoriously tried to appease Hitler by opposing war against Hitler.
That's the only framework that they use.
Now here, if we can go down to This video, we kind of put together a video montage just to highlight how long this has been going on, how many different people in the last 25 years, foreign and domestic, were accused of being the new Hitler, the new Nazi.
They just every year find a new Hitler because that's just the standard of propaganda that American warmongers use.
So let's go ahead and play that video.
We're hoping to convince the President and White House administration to take the next steps to save Kosovo.
USA!
You mentioned the first President Bush.
I believe he compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler at that time.
And you of all people can talk about what it was like living under the shadow of Adolf Hitler.
You were a very young girl at that time.
Tell us how this incredible career started and relate perhaps to what you learned then instilled in you in the world.
That we would go after terrorists where they exist, we would go after haven.
The voices, the voices of concern about what Adolf Hitler was doing were very few.
There was not unanimity.
There were all kinds of diplomats running around holding meetings with him.
There were people saying, don't do anything.
He'll stop.
He won't do anything terrible.
And as they occupied one country after another country after another country, it wasn't until each country was attacked that they stopped and said, well, maybe Winston Churchill was right.
Mr. Netanyahu, you recently compared Hitler with President Hamadinejad of Iran.
Would you please restate what you said and do you still consider that to be the case?
I said a year and a half ago that the year is 1938 and Iran is Germany and it's racing to acquire nuclear weapons.
Well, if that's the case, then we're in 1939.
There is evil in the world today.
It's always been there.
For a free people, the choice has always been the same.
Call it by its name, and face it with courage.
Or lead from behind, and hope it goes away.
The lessons of history are clear.
The strong survive and endure, while the weak are forgotten.
In a dangerous world, it's time for American leadership.
Not surrender.
But I've seen that you called the Ayatollah Khamenei the new Hitler of the Middle East.
Absolutely.
Why?
Because he wants to expand.
He wants to create his own project in the Middle East, very much like Hitler, who wanted to expand at the time.
Many countries around the world and in Europe did not realize how dangerous Hitler was until what happened happened.
I don't want to see the same events happening.
He prefers isolation.
Look prior to World War I. Look, Mr. President.
Prior to World War II.
Some prefer isolation.
That's an easy thing to do.
But sitting on the sideline isn't what made the United States of America the greatest nation in the world in years past, and yes, today.
You look... We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II.
You know, you had a...
You know, someone as despicable as Hitler, who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons.
So you have to, if you're Russia, ask yourself, is this a country that you and a regime that you want to align yourself with?
So not far from here are the Churchill war rooms where a leader of this great country stared evil in the face and recognized the threat that evil presented to the entire world.
How concerned are you that if you kick Gaddafi out, that you allow Islamist then to get, as bad as he might be, to take control in Tripoli? - Man.
Well, I don't think we worried too much when we wanted to get rid of Hitler as to who would take his place.
That I think what happened this weekend with North Korea, with China, I think it was Donald Trump's appeasement tour.
And they talk about historic moments.
This is historic.
Him going to North Korea is like Chamberlain going to talk to Hitler.
I mean, this guy was lobbing missiles into the Sea of Japan just a few weeks ago, and the President's going to talk to him?
is that the claims by President Putin and other Russians that they had to go into Crimea and maybe further into eastern Ukraine because they had to protect the Russian minorities.
And that is reminiscent of claims that were made back in the 1930s when Germany under the Nazis kept talking about how they had to protect German minorities in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere throughout Europe.
This was an unprovoked war.
It reminds me of September 1st, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.
And we need to be crystal clear about that.
A journalist said, you know, there's one difference between Hitler, when he was coming in, and Putin.
Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans.
He didn't kill German-speaking people.
That's a very... I think people need to remember that we're... And what I say about this moment is we cannot have a Munich moment.
Sympathizer.
We can't return to 1938 and when Neville Chamberlain said, let's give Czechoslovakia to Hitler, thinking that would end his desires.
This is the same.
Putin will not stop for so long as he thinks he can get away with it.
Sympathizer.
Here's how it went.
Vladimir Putin hates us.
He is malevolent.
And he is as close to pure evil as I can find.
He's also brilliant.
And so I don't understand why any American would want an alliance with Russia.
He's a killer.
Hard to see why he's a threat to us.
How many wars can we fight at once?
How many people can we be in opposition to at once?
Why not just accept that people who are bad people share our interests and side with them?
You sound like Charles Lindbergh in 1938 saying, Hitler hasn't attacked us.
I beg your pardon?
Slow down.
Slow down, Colonel.
I'm not in any way, you cannot compare me to someone who would make apologies for Hitler.
And I don't think Putin is comparable to Hitler.
I think Putin is.
I think it's a grotesque overstatement.
Putin, he assassinates dissidents and journalists, he bombs women and children on purpose in Syria, he is as bad as Hitler, and yet you want us to align with the Russians, with Iran, with Assad.
I want us to act in America's interest and stop I'm making shallow, sweeping moral claims about countries we don't fully understand and then hope everything will be.
I actually want to read for folks what it is that Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf to understand how similarly what Donald Trump said is to Adolf Hitler.
And he said this.
A lot of people have tried to draw similarities between Mussolini and Hitler and the use of the terminology like vermin and the drive that those men had towards autocracy and dictatorship.
The difference, though, I think makes Donald Trump even more dangerous, and that is he has no philosophy he believes in.
I remember as a young student, you know, trying to figure out how did people get basically drawn in by Hitler?
How did that happen?
And I'd watch newsreels and I'd see this guy standing up there ranting and raving and people shouting and raising their arms.
I thought, what's happened to these people?
Why did they believe that?
You saw the rally in Ohio the other night.
Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour.
And you have these rows of young men with their arms raised.
What I said started about two and a half, maybe three years ago, after one of you stated the unions.
But I feel very strongly that this man has taken on strong-arm tactics.
And I feel very strongly that he is Mussolini.
Putin is Hitler.
I said that back then, and I believe that.
I believe very strongly.
This guy never had any idea I would say the same thing about Nazis.
Yeah, look, I will tell you something, you know, 1939, right down the street at Madison Square Garden, 1939, there was a rally on behalf of the Third Reich here in New York.
20,000 people showed up at MSG.
I gotta tell you something, I think we will look back on these people, these kids, these individuals supporting Hamas today, look at them at the same way those people supported the Nazis in the 1930s.
Morally reprehensible.
Stand with the people of Israel.
This war is based on religion.
They're trying to kill all the Jews.
That's what the Nazis tried to do.
The Nazis believed that the Jewish race had to be exterminated to ensure their dominance in the creation of a master race.
The Ayatollah wants to destroy the State of Israel.
He literally wants to wipe it off the map and so does Hamas.
Now you can find Lindsey Graham comparing all kinds of people just like Bill Kristol to Adolf Hitler.
He compared Gaddafi to Adolf Hitler explicitly when he was supporting the Obama administration's regime change war there.
Do you see how they've reduced Hitler to just a cliche?
Just a name that they call anybody that they want to get you to support a new war against or to deconstruct society in order to undermine or subvert, even if it's the elected president, somebody who was the president for four years from 2016 to 2020, who they're desperate as they watch polls showing that he's likely to be reelected.
And now they want to convince everybody that this time he's going to be the new Hitler.
He's really going to put up death camps and start a bunch of new wars when for the first four years he did nothing of the kind.
In fact, he was the first president not to involve the U.S.
in a new war in decades.
But it's just such a rhetorical tick.
It's like an instinct.
They've reduced Hitler to a cartoon.
And this is basic war propaganda.
And when you think about how it is that the United States could possibly continuously convince its citizens to support so many more wars and to fund and arm so many more wars than any other country on Earth right now, we're funding and arming two foreign countries, Ukraine and Israel, on massive new wars while we're being told that American citizens have to endure cuts to Social Security and Medicaid because we're drowning in debt.
The reason is because they use this tactic.
Here, by the way, is from Salon in 2009.
Lindsey Graham, Gaddafi is like Hitler.
This from the senator who warmly shook the Libyan dictator's hand during a 2009 visit.
So there you saw, it was just like Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in the 1980s when the Reagan administration was allied with Saddam Hussein in their war against Iran.
And then by 1991, when the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, wanted to go to war against Saddam, Bush said he was like Adolf Hitler.
Lindsey Graham was in Tripoli, hugging and shaking hands with Qaddafi.
And then three years later, when he wanted to support the Biden administration's regime change war against Qaddafi, suddenly Qaddafi became just like Hitler.
It is a childish and a condescending but an extremely destructive rhetorical tactic that sits at the center of our political discourse and the people who do it are all the people who are deemed serious foreign policy experts.
Every time there's a new war these people are trotted out and their rationale is so simple-minded.
And in part, it's because they are simple-minded, but in part, some of them aren't, but they know that the media is simple-minded and you just use Hitler and the specter of Nazism and call everybody who opposed their words Neville Chamberlain and everyone who supports it gets to be the powerful, strutting Winston Churchill, and it's a very effective rhetorical technique, which is one of the reasons why the United States constantly fights one war after the next.
Speaking of fighting one war after the next, the primary foreign policy objective and policy of the Biden administration has been the war in Ukraine.
We went all in with that, not just under President Biden, but under the bipartisan establishment wings of both parties that supported him.
Democrats were overwhelmingly, in fact, unanimously in support of funding the war in Ukraine.
Republicans overwhelmingly were.
And now here we are almost two years later.
Russia controls almost 20 percent of Ukrainian territory.
There is zero chance that the Ukrainians are going to expel Russia from Crimea or the four provinces in eastern Ukraine that they currently control.
In fact, the only question is how much more is Russia going to take of Ukraine before they allow a diplomatic resolution before they allow that war to either just kind of freeze or have an actual agreement that codifies their gains.
The Ukrainians were already losing in part because they don't have enough people to fight the war, in part because they called on Westerners who support them to get off social media and come to Ukraine to help them fight the Russian army and so few answered that call in the West.
And in part because they have a huge artillery shortage.
And they already had a huge artillery shortage and now the United States is taking the artillery it's able to produce, which is far less than what the Russians can produce, and they're giving it to Israel instead of to Ukraine, which is exacerbating their shortages even more.
So there's zero chance that the Ukrainians have To expel the Russians from the 20% of that country that the Russians currently control.
And by the estimate of Professor John Mearsheimer, who gave a great interview, which I highly recommend on both Israel and Ukraine, with the online site UnHerd.
It was a pretty adversarial interview, so Mearsheimer was constantly questioned in an adversarial way, which made it really compelling.
It's on YouTube.
You can find it there.
And you can see, obviously, our own interview with Professor Mearsheimer about both of those wars just recently.
Every time we have Professor Mearsheimer on, it's one of the most watched episodes that we have.
Professor Mearsheimer thinks that the Russians may end up with as much as 40% of Ukraine when all is said and done, that they may take four more provinces, that they essentially want to leave Ukraine as a dysfunctional, rump state.
And have not only these four Russian-speaking provinces that they now control as a buffer against the West, but even move further westward.
Not take Kiev, but move toward Kiev.
And the Ukrainians have almost no leverage now because they're losing the war.
The West can no longer support this war.
The populations have turned against it.
Viktor Orban just vetoed more European aid to Ukraine.
The winning candidate in Slovakia, which was a longtime ally of Ukraine, ran on a platform of cutting off all aid to Ukraine and he won.
And we're going to show you what he said about the war, which is incredibly prescient and insightful, but very harsh, a very harsh condemnation.
So that part of the war, the military war, is a huge failure.
The Biden administration announced that the only objective of the war is to expel the Russians from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including from Crimea.
There's zero chance that's going to happen.
And now they've resorted to saying, oh, the Russians wanted to consume all of Ukraine and we prevented that, so we really won.
I mean, if you want to believe that the Russians ending up with 20% or more of Ukrainian soil is a win for the West, you have to be a hardcore jingoist and willing to believe your government and anything it says to accept that.
But the other part of the failure is the economic one.
Part of the claim of the United States and the EU is we were going to suffocate and cut off Russia from the rest of the world's economy.
We're going to choke them, collapse their currency, Prevent any business from being done in Russia, which is a thing the United States has always been able to achieve using the dollar as the reserve currency to sanction countries that disobey it.
And yet the Russians have not just thrived militarily, but also economically, often in part because of the very sanctions that the United States and the EU impose and the countries that are suffering the most.
From these sanctions are the Americans, and especially the Europeans, which is why running against the war in Ukraine has become such a potent electoral platform.
Because people in Europe know that they're suffering economically for this war in Ukraine that they don't see any end in sight to.
Can we put the article up from the New York Times that is really now turning against the war in Ukraine.
They finally are now admitting that the Ukrainians don't have anywhere near enough people to go to the front line and they're snatching people off the street, which we'll show you.
This has been going on for a year and the New York Times just acknowledged it.
But here is an article on how Putin has benefited greatly from the demands of the Americans and Europeans that Western businesses leave Russia, here from December 17th, how Putin turned a Western boycott into a bonanza.
If companies want to leave Russia, the president is setting the terms in ways that benefit his government, his elites, and his war.
Quote, Mr. Putin has turned the exits of major Western companies into a windfall for Russia's loyal elite and the state itself.
He has forced companies wishing to sell to do so at fire sale prices.
He has limited sales to buyers anointed by Moscow.
Sometimes he has seized firms outright.
A New York Times investigation traced how Mr. Putin has turned an expected misfortune into an enrichment scheme.
Western companies that have announced departures have declared more than $103 billion in losses since the start of the war, according to a Times analysis of financial reports.
He has also subjected those exits to ever-increasing taxes, generating at least $1.25 billion in the past year for Russia's war chest.
In all, Mr. Putin has overseen one of the biggest transfers of wealth within Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Huge swaths of industries, elevators, tires, industrial coatings and more are now in the hands of increasingly dominant Russian players.
You may recall all this celebration at the start of the war that Starbucks and American car dealers and financial services companies and retailers were leaving Russia and somehow this was going to devastate the people in Russia, especially Moscow, because they couldn't buy coffee anywhere from Starbucks or Krispy Kremes on their shelves.
And yet what the Russians did was extracted huge amounts of wealth from those companies as a condition for leaving.
And then they just reopened Starbucks and called it Star Coffee, changed the logo a little bit, sold the rights to those stores to Putin loyalists.
And now they're making a fortune off of those sanctions while those American companies have endured huge amounts of losses as a result of those sanctions.
The Europeans have paid a huge price for this war, not just in terms of how much their governments have given to Ukraine, but also in terms of weaning off Russian oil and as well as the sanctions regime that the Europeans impose.
Here's Reuters from September of 2023.
the Ukraine war is expected to have a bigger impact on European economies, according to a Swiss study.
Quote, the war in Ukraine has reduced European economic growth and quote, considerably pushed up inflation across the continent, the Swiss National Bank said, in a study published on Friday, with worse effects still to come.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Europe has seen a surge in energy prices, financial market turmoil, and a sharp contradiction in both economies of Russia and Ukraine, the report said.
Quote, the negative consequences of the war are likely to be far greater in the mid to long term, especially with regard to the real economy, the study said.
In one to two years, this effect is likely to be approximately twice as large, it added.
The impact of refugees and increased military spending may be more than in recent conflicts, they added.
Now, one of the under-covered, one of the under-discussed effects of this war has been the effect of Ukrainian refugees.
There have been reports that when British citizens take in Ukrainians, they complain about how integrated and racially diverse the neighborhoods are.
There have been Ukrainians who moved out of their host homes because there were too many Muslims or too many black people in Europe because it's a huge cultural difference in Ukraine.
When we interviewed An Irish journalist, Ben Scanlon, over the unrest in Ireland, he said that one of the main causes of anger is how many immigrants are being integrated into Irish society, especially from Ukraine.
Whether well-motivated or not, the Irish government invited 100,000 Ukrainian refugees into a relatively small country in Ireland, and their communities are inundated with immigrants from Ukraine that they can't actually afford.
Here from TASS, November 3rd, EU losses from Russian sanctions reach around 1.5 trillion dollars according to Russia's foreign ministry.
According to the deputy foreign minister, trade turnover between Russia and the EU could fall to 50 billion euro next year and then could even reach zero at some point.
And then just to give you a sense of how disastrous this war has become for the Ukrainians as the Americans As Americans lose support for sending more of their money to Ukraine, as Republicans are unwilling to allocate the $60 billion Biden has demanded without major, major border restrictions that are so offensive to the Democratic base.
So Biden is actually in the position Where he has to fund the war in Israel with $14 billion, even though a huge portion of his base is threatening not to vote for Biden because of his support for Israel.
And yet Biden has to give $14 billion to Israel, in part because he believes in it, in part because if he didn't, the Democrats would lose a lot of Jewish support for not doing it.
So he's screwed either way.
And then the only way to get $60 billion to Kiev, as he wants to do, to even give the Ukrainians any chance to even continue the poor fighting they're doing, is by accepting what liberals and Democrats consider to be very draconian limits on immigration at the border, things that they've repeatedly called fascist and Nazi-like when Trump did it and was advocating it.
And yet Biden is going to either be forced to announce extremely repressive restrictions on the border that his base will hate, or fail to get any more money to Kiev.
They painted themselves into this ridiculously self-destructive corner for this war, a war that has strengthened China.
That was one of the other points that Professor Mearsheimer made in that interview that I highly encourage, which is when he was being asked, oh, won't the Chinese benefit if the Russians win?
Mearsheimer was saying, the Chinese don't want this war to end.
They want this war to go on forever.
They love the fact that the United States is trapped in this war, having to put billions and billions and billions and billions of more and all their focus into Ukraine, which is of no vital interest to the United States, who rules Eastern Ukraine.
No one cares about that except members of the Democratic Party and Lindsey Graham and Mitch O'Connell.
And yet, while they're doing that, China is rampaging through the Middle East, forging peace deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia, significantly increasing their influence in every part of the world, exploiting the resentment people have about the United States, using military force in Israel and Ukraine.
These wars are incredibly self-destructive for both the United States and the EU.
Meanwhile, here's the BBC today.
On the Ukraine war, Kiev forced to cut military operations as foreign aid dries up.
Their top general said troops faced ammunition shortages along the entire front line, creating a big problem for Kiev.
It comes as billions of dollars of U.S.
and EU aid have been held up amid political wrangles.
Ukraine is already using ammunition faster than partners can produce it.
A report by the Estonian Defense Minister said Kiev needed a minimum of 200,000 artillery shells a month to retain an edge against Russia.
The general said that Ukraine could not match the resources of or manpower of Russia and the goal was to achieve technological superiority.
That's how you know things are really bad.
Even the Ukrainians are now publicly admitting that their war effort is collapsing.
We have reported constantly on the huge gap between the propaganda narrative in the West about Ukraine, that this war is being fought by courageous and scrappy and brave Ukrainian patriots who are defending their territory from aggression, with the reality, at least now, that most of the trained fighters, the good fighters,
Have long ago been killed or injured or removed from the battlefield.
The Ukrainians have lost at least 100,000 soldiers, probably more.
And they're now fighting with just a ragtag bunch of unwilling recruits.
People who have been untrained in the military, who are in their late 40s, early 50s.
And they're increasingly using force to compel these people to go to the front lines.
They know if they go to the front lines they're used as cannon fodder and they don't want to go.
And increasingly the Ukrainians have to use incredibly harsh techniques to force the few men they have left to go to the front lines.
In a way that is going to turn the population against Zelensky.
That's part of why he's cracking down on democratic freedom and liberty.
Free speech and a free press and elections.
Because the people of his country are turning against the war for no other reason.
Not because they don't think it's righteous, but because they know it's failing.
Here from the New York Times, December 15.
Catching up on something we've been reporting on all year.
Quote, people snatchers.
Ukraine's recruiters use harsh tactic to fill ranks.
Ukrainian men are reporting incidents of wrongful draft notices, unprofessional medical commissions, and coercive mobilization tactics.
Quote, recruiters have confiscated passports, taken people from their jobs, and at least one case tried to send a mentally disabled person to military training.
According to lawyers, activists, and Ukrainian men who have been subject to coercive tactics, videos of soldiers shoving people into cars and holding men against their will in recruiting centers are surfacing with increasing frequency on social media and in local news reports.
The harsh tactics are being aimed not just at draft dodgers, but at men who would ordinarily be exempt from service.
A sign of the steep challenges Ukraine's military faces maintaining troop levels in a war with high casualties and against a much larger enemy.
Complicating the issue is the fact that Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia invaded in February 2022.
Some lawyers contend that this has laid the ground for a subjective interpretation and abuse of conscription laws.
Just think about this for a second.
You have all these pundits in the West Who love to write articles and columns and blog posts about the glories and virtues of the Ukrainian war effort and the need of the Americans in the West to fund it.
And what you really have are young Ukrainian men and now old Ukrainian men being sent to their unwitting deaths, not wanting to fight, knowing the fight is lost.
That losing their lives over this cause is worthless.
They're being forced under threat of weapons and threat of prison and even violence to go fight so that Western pundits can feel strong and purposeful.
Again, Zelensky knew at the start of the war that a major disadvantage that the country would have is that Russia is just a much larger country and therefore has way more men to send to the front lines.
And he said at the beginning of the war, if you're in the West, And you're claiming that you love our country and that you support Ukraine.
Don't put Ukrainian flags in your social media bio.
Get off social media and come to Ukraine and help us fight the Russians.
So few Western men answered that call because they wanted to feel safe and strong and purposeful from cheering the war from a safe distance, but almost none of them was willing to go and risk their lives in that war.
The only real litmus test for whether a war is justified is whether people are willing to risk their own lives or their loved ones' lives to fight it.
And so few in the West have been willing to do so to the point that as public opinion eroded for the support in Ukraine, support for the war in Ukraine eroded in the West, neocons have started to say things like, this is the best war we've ever invested in.
Not one American has died.
We're just sending all these Ukrainians to their deaths.
And it has been obvious from the beginning, and we've been saying it and others have said it, that the real American goal is not to protect Ukraine, it is to destroy Ukraine.
It's not to protect Ukrainians, it's to sacrifice Ukrainians, that they will fight Russia until the last Ukrainian man is alive.
Because the real goal is to weaken Russia.
They don't care about Ukraine at all.
Here is Robert Fico, who used to be the center-left Prime Minister of Slovakia, a country that is in Eastern Europe, that is a longtime ally of Ukraine, and he was just re-elected after being out of power for some time, running against a coalition government that was vehemently supportive of the war in Ukraine, giving tons of money from Slovaks to this war.
He ran on a platform saying, no more money for Ukraine, no more money for this war, and he was elected.
And here he is in an interview on December 16th, just a couple days ago, giving an incredibly dark and sinister explanation of the real Western motives in this war.
Let's listen to this.
I'm going to read it even though it's on the screen for the part of the audience that listens on podcast.
It says, I am convinced that a large part of the European Union lives in the question of war in Ukraine intentionally in a big lie.
I would say that a large part of the member states is occupied by Ukraine and a hatred of the Russian Federation.
In fact, Ukraine is only used for geopolitical purposes to weaken the Russian Federation economically and internationally, and serves as a gold mine for arms companies and death merchants.
I am afraid that in the name of these geopolitical goals, the West will fight with the Russian Federation to the last Ukrainian soldier.
And we are not far from this goal.
Of course, no one openly admits to these immoral goals.
That is a pretty harsh condemnation of the West's policy in Ukraine.
That the only people who are benefiting are the arms dealers, what he calls the death merchants.
And that the real Western goal is not to save Ukrainians, it's to kill Ukrainians at the altar of weakening Russia due to hatred of the Russian Federation.
That is a sick policy.
And I really believe that the three major components of Joe Biden's legacy, when he finally loses power and then leaves the earth, Is number one, the crucial role he played as the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002 and 2003 in convincing enough Democrats in the Senate to vote for the authorization for the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
He was not just a vocal supporter of the war in Iraq like Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, but he was, as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, A vital voice in convincing House and Senate Democrats to giving enough votes to the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
So you have the Iraq War on his legacy, something that killed thousands of American troops, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, if not over a million.
Then you have this war in Ukraine.
Based on absolute lies about the objective and that was a total failure, at least in terms of the stated goals, and now you have the unstinting support for the war in Israel that, according to every study, is killing civilians and journalists and medical professionals and healthcare workers at a rate not seen since at least World War II.
And if you really want to add domestically to his legacy, you would say that protecting banks and corporations and bankruptcy against consumers trying to discharge personal debt or the construction of the prison industrial complex are crucial parts of his legacy.
But when you talk about wars that are killing huge numbers of people, civilians, Iraq, Ukraine and Israel, It's hard to say that anything other than that will be his legacy.
It's like LBJ who had a lot of domestic achievements and yet the war in Vietnam overshadowed them all.
You have three wars on Biden's legacy.
And the part of the domestic agenda is barely any better.
And here you have now the winning candidates in Europe, the most popular candidates in Europe, admitting the truth.
Things that if you were to say in the United States as recently as six months ago, you would be officially accused of being a Russian propagandist.
Every war ends this way.
It begins the same with an avalanche of emotionally manipulative propaganda to convince you that this time we're really fighting the Hitler, the new Hitler.
This time, even though the other words are wrong, no, this time you're on the right side.
You can feel good about this war.
We're doing good.
We're fighting for the right things.
We're against evil.
And then weeks later, or months later, or years later, it becomes apparent that what you were told about the war at the beginning ends up being a lie.
The stated goals are not realized.
There's huge wealth transfers from the American citizenry to the arms industry, what Prime Minister Fico calls the death merchants.
And there's a massive amount of bloodshed that achieves no good at all.
That is the addiction of the neoliberal elite.
And you just see it one after the next after the next.
And even though people rationally know that they're exploited and misled into supporting prior wars, which they turn against, the war propaganda has been perfected to a science.
And they play on the emotions of good, decent people by showing them things like what happened October 7th or old Ukrainian women weeping over the effects of a bomb that They don't show you
The last eight years of the victims of the war for independence against the central government in Kiev or what happened and who got killed during the attempt to oust the democratically elected Ukrainian government, they don't show you the Palestinians who are being killed.
The entire war on terror, every time there was a terrorist attack, you would learn the names and life stories of whoever Americans or Westerners were killed in attacks in Madrid or London or in the United States.
And you never heard the name, let alone the extinguished aspirations of the innocent people killed by our bombs and our drones.
That's what war propaganda is.
It convinces you that one side is pure evil, you're on the side of pure good by deliberately hiding some things from you and deliberately shoving certain things down your throat.
And at some point, it's going to be crucial If the United States isn't going to continue to engage in these destructive wars, drown further into debt, have all this resentment in the world that leads people into the arms of China, just stop falling prey to this.
To realize what this rhetorical framework is.
But unfortunately, with both the war in Ukraine and now the war in Israel, both of which the United States are paying for in front of the entire world, that time unfortunately is not yet here.
It seems, though, based on political trends, at least in Europe, as well as the popularity of President Trump, who ran on a campaign against these sorts of wars, That there is growing sentiment realizing that these wars are in everyone's interest but their own.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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