Israeli War Crimes Continue with US Backing—As Red Sea Conflict Escalates. Brazil’s Censorship Regime Drives Rumble Out of the Country. PLUS: The Most Overlooked Stories of 2023
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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, this will be our last show of 2023.
We decided we would take next week off so that our team can have a full Christmas holiday with their families.
It's also been a very challenging year for my own family, and this holiday season won't be easy for us, so spending this last week together with my family and kids,
Is an important way to come back fully revitalized and with full batteries for 2024 which will undoubtedly be a year full of intense, unpredictable, and unprecedented political stories as we head into one of the most unique presidential elections in our nation's history where the leading candidate for president is being charged with all sorts of crimes as the opposition party tries to imprison him and keep him off the ballot.
Now, in order to close the year, I want to take some time to reflect on where we are with the topic that has dominated our show's coverage and much of the world's attention over the last two and a half months, I want to take some time to reflect on where we are with the topic that has dominated our show's coverage and much of the world's attention over the last two and a half months, namely the Now,
As is true for the war in Ukraine with Russia, this is not just a foreign war that Americans and Westerners generally can dismiss as having nothing to do with us.
The opposite is true.
In every conceivable way, with the exception of the deployment of combat troops to the war zone, both wars are American wars and European wars.
The Biden administration is funding and arming the Israelis in this war.
The bombs that drop on Gaza and destroy its infrastructure and kill thousands of its civilians, including children, are bombs that come directly from the United States, from the Pentagon, on orders of President Biden.
Regardless of your views on this war and on the Biden White House's decision to finance it and to arm it, the United States is incurring massive costs for its decision to support Israel and everything it is doing in Gaza.
Public opinion in the West and in the world generally has clearly been moving in the direction of demanding a ceasefire.
There is now a mountain of credible empirical evidence from multiple sources that the level of destruction taking place in Gaza and the rate of civilian casualties has no rival in any war fought in this century.
Indeed, one has to go back to some of the worst civilian abuses of World War II to find comparable data in terms of destruction of civilian infrastructure and the rate of civilian death.
And in some cases, not even the unconstrained and deliberate killing of civilians by both the Allies and the Axis powers during the World War II can compare to some of what is being done in Gaza.
Those are just empirical facts.
And remember that the world decided after World War I, but especially after World War II, after surveying what was done, that the savage and barbaric levels of civilian death were something it never wanted to see repeated.
And thus, altogether, the world implemented an infrastructure of the laws of war, some of which already existed and much of which was fortified, some of which are brand new, that was designed to govern the conduct of how all nations must fight all wars in the future.
Innovations such as the Geneva Conventions and the International Criminal Court and prohibitions on collective punishment that make collective punishment a war crime.
There has been no issue that I had to report on and analyze in many, many years that has polarized my own audience like the Israel-Gaza War.
As we have discussed before, we had a non-trivial number of people cancel their subscriptions over it, the lifeblood of our show, as well as simply tune out.
But our audience remains quite strong, far in excess of what we had predicted it would be after one year of first launching our program on a platform rumble that still 60% of Americans have never heard of, which means there's massive opportunity for growth.
But there was simply no way for me not to talk about this war in the most honest way I could, and not to do so once or twice to say that I did it, but to do so in depth.
And not just cover the war itself, but all of the profound effects it has had on American political life.
From new calls for censorship, to massively intensified limits on campus speech, and cancel culture campaigns far more potent and well-funded than any we have seen up until this point.
Ones that have included dozens of firings from people in media and politics and academia for expressing their political views on this war.
We had a truly extremist, billionaire-led campaign to have students, 20-year-olds and 21-year-olds, put on no hire list and for trucks to drive around their campus with their names and faces on them, accusing them of anti-Semitism due to their criticism of Israel, a foreign country.
Now I am proud that we have had many viewers who are supporters of Israel and the war, both nuanced and qualified supporters of it and vehement ones who have continued to watch that show.
I have many people in my life who are both nuanced and vehement supporters of Israel in this war.
But ultimately, the easiest way to destroy the integrity of a news program or your work as a journalist is to start to become calculating and strategic about what you report and how you analyze events in order to avoid making your audience angry or losing viewers.
That's called audience capture and few things are more corrosive.
The war in Gaza is very far from over unfortunately which means that the cost and effects in the United States and on American citizens from this war are very far from over as well.
The extinguishing of innocent lives continues to mount in Gaza.
Life for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is changed forever, and the U.S.
played a direct role in all of that.
So we wanted to use our last show of the year to look around and see where we are with this war, where it is likely to go, and what the consequences of it are likely to be.
Then, one of the main objectives I've always had with my journalism platform and the reporting I do is to try to cover stories and air viewpoints that I believe are receiving insufficient attention elsewhere.
In general, if something is being covered by everybody else in a way that everybody else is speaking about it, I tend to avoid that.
I just don't see that as a very constructive use of my platform.
That, in my view, in fact, is one of the primary benefits of independent media to be free to cover events that are being largely ignored and to do so in a way that deviates sometimes radically from the standard orthodoxy of mainstream institutions.
On System Update in 2023 we covered a wide range of events and debates Many of the stories we worked on had repercussions in the discourse and in our policies, but as is usually the case, I end the year believing that there are some stories that receive far too little attention and discussion given their significance.
So rather than pick the five stories we thought were the most important of 2023 or some year-end cliche for a show like that, we decided instead to use what will be our year-end show in a last-ditch effort to highlight those five shows where we reported on issues that we still believe merit a lot more attention than they've received thus far.
And then finally, shortly before we went live on the air, maybe an hour or just a little bit more, Rumble, the platform that hosts our program, the one that we came here in order to have our show because of its commitment to free speech, announced that it was blocking the entire nation of Brazil from being able to use that platform or to view that platform.
Now, this has no effect on our show, other than preventing Brazilian viewers who don't know how to use VPNs from being able to continue to watch.
It has no technical effect on our ability to broadcast or to upload, but the reason Rumble felt compelled to leave Brazil The sixth most populous country on the planet, a population of 270 million people that Rumble is saying, you cannot access our platform or use our platform.
The rationale for that is similar to the rationale that caused Rumble to be forced out of France late last year.
Because the censorship regimes of these countries in the democratic world are becoming so suffocating and so repressive that platforms are now faced with the almost impossible choice Of either complying with an endless stream of unjust censorship orders designed to silence dissidents or refuse to make their services available at all in those countries as they try to contest the validity of the censorship regime with judicial challenges.
We'll tell you what happened here with Brazil and Rumble and what it says about the rapid erosion of online free speech in the democratic world.
Before we get to that, a few programming notes.
As we have talked about before, the locals community that we have here on the Rumble platform is really the lifeblood of our program.
It's how we support the independent journalism that we do here.
We have subscribers and members of that community who have access to all sorts of Benefits, and they really, I think, most people do it to support the independent journalism we're trying to do here.
And between now and Sunday, December 24th, we have a special offer, which is 40% off of the annual subscription for 2024.
If you go to our Localist community or click the Join button right below the Rumble page and you join, you simply use the code HOLIDAY on checkout, you'll get a 40% discount on the annual rate.
It's typical Price for other similar shows that use a subscription model to support themselves so we don't have to rely on corporate advertisers that can then dictate to you what the outer limits of your discourse are.
People who join the Locals community have access to, among other things, the twice a week after show that we do.
Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, every Tuesday and Thursday night, we move to Locals where we have a live after show that's interactive.
We take your questions and critiques and respond to your feedback and your suggestions for future shows.
We also have a weekly thread where people post their questions and comments and I try and answer as many of those as I can.
It's the place where we post the transcripts of every program that we broadcast on Rumble in a very professionalized way for people who prefer to read the shows or who have those shows in written form.
And it's where we will publish our original journalism in written form.
As well, like I said, if you want to support the show, if you want to have access to that, you now have a 40% discount offer on the yearly subscription rate for the year upcoming in 2024.
There's going to be a lot going on both here on our Rumble program and our Locals platform, so if you want to join now is a great time to do that.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, where you can listen to each episode 12 hours after they first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
And if you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Even though I said we were going to avoid the year-end cliche that a lot of shows do, saying the five most important stories of the year, I do want to note that I think there are saying the five most important stories of the year, I do want to note that I think there are two stories that stand heads and shoulders above all others in United Why not?
One is the war in Israel and Gaza, given how steadfastly the United States, more than any other country by far, has decided to support that war and arm and fund Israel, and all the consequences that come from that, not just for Gaza, not just for Israel, but immensely for the United States and for Americans.
And then the other issue is the multi-pronged attempt to try and prevent the leading presidential candidate, the person who more Americans say they want to be president in 2024 than any other candidate, to prevent him, Donald Trump, from either being on the ballot at all or from even being a free person by trying to imprison him.
We have the Biden Justice Department and liberal prosecutors trying to imprison the leading opposition candidate of the Democratic Party, the party in power.
We covered on last night's show the extraordinarily corrupted legal rationale that led to the Colorado Supreme Court by a 4-3 ruling banning Trump from even appearing on the Primary ballot on the grounds that he is guilty of being an insurrectionist, which is a crime that he has never been charged with, let alone convicted of.
It's such a full frontal assault on core democratic rights and on core due process rights.
So if you want to hear our show's breakdown of those rulings last night, and we're going to cover as well a show that we did six months ago on why an attempt to depict Trump as an insurrectionist as a result of that speech he gave on January 6th.
Which, whatever you think of it, is pure, core, protected political speech.
Why that would be so corrosive of our core free speech precedents that the Supreme Court has handed down that define free speech rights in the United States.
So that's one of the stories we think has been undercovered, is how crucial and clear those precedents are that are now being run roughshod over.
in the name of trying to imprison Trump or prevent American citizens who want to vote for him from voting for him.
So that's the biggest domestic story, bar none.
I would say the biggest international story is the multi-pronged and multinational censorship regime that we're going to cover at the end of the show and the discussion of Brazil.
We've covered it early this week as well when we talked about the new investigation, the first ever of its kind under a new censorship law enacted by the EU aimed at investigating and punishing X for the crime of failing to censor enough pro-Hamas speech, as they call it, or Israel criticisms.
And so we covered that as well, but certainly the biggest story of war and foreign policy is the very much ongoing and in fact escalating war that is being conducted in Gaza, one that involves destruction and civilian death at a unprecedented rate in terms of not obviously the sheer numbers yet, but in terms of the ratio of civilians being killed, the type of the number of journalists who have been killed,
The amount of civilian infrastructure that has been destroyed in the vital role that the United States has played in it.
Now just to get you up to date in terms of the breaking news of the last minute, over the last several weeks the United States under Joe Biden has isolated itself from the rest of the world.
In repeatedly using its veto power to block any UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, trying to protect Gaza's civilians.
You have almost the entire world on one side, and then Joe Biden in the United States on the other, trying to protect Israel in every way, financially, militarily and diplomatically.
And we've covered before a speech that was given by Fiona Hill, who was a top foreign policy advisor to the Trump administration.
She was a hardcore hawk on Russia and essentially everything on China.
And she was a mentor or protege to John Bolton, one of his main allies in the Trump White House.
And she gave a speech in the middle of this year to foreign policy elites in Europe, warning them That by continuously isolating itself from the world, the United States is driving much of the world into the arms of China.
The more China can depict the United States as a rogue country, as standing alone, as using its military as a means of dominating the world, that is the narrative that China exploits.
With great success now to draw more and more people into an alliance led by China and away from the United States.
One of the most amazing events of this year was watching China march into the Middle East, a region that the United States has long dominated because of how obsessed the United States was with Ukraine, and forge a peace deal between the two most important powers in that region, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
That was a China-led diplomatic initiative that had great success.
And China had a lot of success in convincing the world that what we were doing in Ukraine, arming and funding the Ukrainians for our own purposes, having nothing to do with Ukraine, was yet another example of how the U.S.
abuses its power in the world with its military and increases the resentment of countless other important countries, geopolitically important countries, countries that are important in terms of their resources, driving them closer and closer to China.
And now you have the United States utterly isolating itself in order to defend this foreign country, Israel, sacrificing its own interests, the safety of its citizens, in order to do this.
There was a resolution this week at the UN that simply said we affirm the right of the Palestinians to have self-determination, meaning the Palestinians have the right to have their own sovereignty, to have the dignity of self-governance.
A hundred and seventy-three countries voted yes.
Four countries voted no.
Those four countries were Israel, the United States, a tiny little island called Nauru, and Micronesia.
Israel, the United States, Naral, and Micronesia against the entire rest of the world.
You had 10 countries that abstained.
Paraguay was the largest of them.
Most of them were the kinds of tiny little islands the United States usually bribes into joining it, like the Marshall Islands that became part of the Coalition of the Willing that invaded Iraq.
Even they couldn't get the Marshall Islands onto their side in this case.
And now here at the UN, just earlier today, there was another attempt to facilitate a ceasefire in Gaza, given how much destruction there is that the world will have to pay for in order to rebuild, how much human life is being destroyed.
Thousands of children, no matter how you count, no matter how cynical you want to be about the death totals.
There's no question about that.
And it was a resolution to ensure that humanitarian aid can enter Gaza because now, in addition to dying and being wounded in massive numbers, to undergoing barbarism and savagery, like having to perform operations on people without anesthesia, without any kind of sedative, you have children going to the hospitals, having to have limbs amputated, and there's no medication to anesthetize them.
Just cruelty upon cruelty and savagery upon savagery, the likes of which we have not seen in any war for a long time.
And I say that very consciously, and I will show you the proof of that.
There was simply a call by the UN to ensure that there would be humanitarian aid entering Gaza, because in addition to all of that, there are now a large number of Gazans facing the real risk of dying from starvation.
It is unconscionable anytime a population faces the risk of mass starvation.
The last time it happened, and remember this because we're going to talk about what's happening in Yemen, is when the Obama administration worked with the Saudis to wage a vicious bombing campaign in war on the Houthis in Yemen.
And that was one of the worst humanitarian crisis the world had seen in many years.
The entire population in Yemen was on the brink of mass starvation.
Many died.
Many children died of starvation because that war destroyed the ability even to transport food.
And now we're seeing that in Gaza again.
The world is standing by and watching children face the very real risk of dying from starvation, from extremely treatable diseases because of the lack of clean drinking water or antibiotics.
And there was an attempt by the UN to demand to ensure the entrance of basic humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Remember, from the start of this war, the Israeli defense minister said he didn't say, as some Israel supporters sometimes claim, That we're going to stop giving the Gazans food, water, and medication.
He said we're going to use our blockade of Gaza to prevent any food, water, or electricity or medication from entering Gaza.
Israel has been blockading Gaza, controlling its airspace.
Israel destroyed the only airport in Gaza City and said, if you rebuild it, we're going to bomb it again, meaning no Gazans can fly out of Gaza.
They haven't been able to fly out for 20 years.
You have children who were born in Gaza and are now adults who have never been able to leave Gaza.
The Israelis blockade their sea lanes and prevent anybody from leaving by sea.
They will shoot any boat or destroy any boat of people who try.
And along with the U.S.-supported Egyptian dictator, General Sisi, The Israelis keep the border of Gaza closed as well, so people in Gaza cannot leave, except under very unusual and extreme circumstances.
Occasionally, the most privileged or educated people can leave, but in general, the population is trapped there.
You have some who are able to cross the border to work in Israel, but by and large, the entire population of 2.2 million people, half of whom are children, have been trapped in Gaza for two decades now.
What populations would tolerate that?
And now Israel is using its blockade to prevent food and water except in the tiniest amounts from entering into the UN resolution was designed to demand at least the entrance of food and water so the world doesn't stand by and watch mass starvation of innocent people in Gaza, including children.
And the United States again used its veto power under the Biden administration to water the resolution down to such an extent That it barely says anything now.
Here is the Reuters report from today on what the Biden administration once again did at the UN.
The United Nations Security Council on Friday approved a bid to boost humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, but the proposal was stripped of language, calling for, quote, an urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities in order to allow aid deliveries after the United States threatened to veto the motion.
Instead, it calls for steps to, quote, create the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.
This change frustrated other UN members.
Here's the United Arab Emirates envoy to the UN, Lana Nusseiba.
Let me just say one thing here.
I've noticed in conservative discourse there's this reflexive dismissal of anything the quote-unquote UN does as though the UN is this kind of separate entity like it's Amnesty International or some Soros funded NGO.
The UN isn't anything other than a place where all the country's governments in the world meet.
And when there's a vote at the UN It's not some weird little organization that's left-wing voting.
The votes are being cast by all the governments of the world.
So when you have a 173 to 4 vote, like the one I recounted, you can't just say, oh, it happened at the UN and therefore it doesn't matter.
What you're talking about is the will, the view, the entire world and all their governments that compose the world who meet at the UN and the votes they cast are not separate from the government, they're a byproduct of the governments of the world.
So, it's very odd to me to hear people, conservatives, on the one hand say we need to worry about China, they're our greatest enemy, we need to make sure that they don't take over and exert massive influence, and on the other hand scoff at the idea that we should care about what anyone else in the world thinks, that we should continue to isolate ourselves as a rogue country to protect Israel.
Even though it means that our standing in the world continues to collapse.
You have to really love Israel and be very devoted to it to think that.
So yes, this took place at the UN.
But the UN is just a place where the countries of the world gather.
And even US allies like the United Arab Emirates, with whom the United States is typically like this, are one of the countries expressing rage at what the United States has been doing.
We know this is not a perfect text.
We know only a ceasefire will end this suffering.
UN members.
Here's the United Arab Emirates envoy to the UN, Lana Nuseba.
We know this is not a perfect text.
We know only a ceasefire will end this suffering.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday said Israel's operation was the primary obstacle in delivering desperately needed assistance.
A humanitarian ceasefire is the only way to begin to meet the desperate needs of people in Gaza and end their ongoing nightmare.
Nowhere is the dire need for aid more apparent than here in Deir al-Bala, in the Gaza Strip, where a school has been transformed into a field hospital.
Surgeon Bashir al-Hurani said this patient should be in a proper hospital, but because of overcrowding, was transferred here.
We have nothing.
Medical supplies are not available.
Beds for patients are not available.
Sterilization tools are not available.
We are suffering from the lack of medical staff, medical supplies, and medicine.
Now let me just say here one thing as well that I think a lot of Americans don't realize.
Palestinians are some of the most educated people in the world, including people in Gaza.
If you go and talk to international groups of physicians and nurses, they will tell you that the doctors of Palestine of the West Bank and Gaza are some of the most capable doctors in the world.
This is not a primitive population deprived of the knowledge of the world or basic education.
The opposite is true.
They've devoted a lot of resources to colleges and advanced studies.
Palestinians are very educated people.
They're very civilized people.
And they have one of the best healthcare systems in the region, at least they did until Israel systematically bombed one hospital after the next, using the excuse that Hamas was in all the hospitals.
We'll get to whether that's true, but you have these physicians who have gone to medical school to save people's lives, and they're deprived of the most basic tools Even just to alleviate people's pain and suffering during surgery, what justifies that?
It's one thing for a country at war with another to try and prevent weapons from entering the country.
What justifies preventing medication from entering the country?
What justifies causing a population to die of treatable diseases because no antibiotics can enter?
Or to force surgeons, highly skilled and well-educated surgeons, to perform surgery without anesthesia?
Our war is with Hamas, and we seek to reduce the impact on the people of Gaza.
crossing from Egypt into Gaza on Friday.
Israel says since the start of the latest conflict, more than 5,400 vehicles carrying humanitarian aid have been allowed in.
Here's Israeli Colonel Moshe Tetro.
Our war is with Hamas, and we seek to reduce the impact on the people of Gaza.
Since the beginning of the war, we have set up several mechanisms for continuous assessments of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
Israel launched a massive military retaliation against Hamas fighters after the Palestinian militants attacked Israeli communities on October 7th, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking hundreds captive.
The death toll has been staggering.
Dr. Marwan al-Hams is the director of the Abu Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital.
He said that Friday marked the 77th day of fighting, and the number of Palestinians killed had topped 20,000.
Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Galat on Friday said the military operation was gradually completing its goals in the northern Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has vowed to eradicate Hamas.
Washington has regularly backed Israel's right to defend itself, but has grown increasingly concerned at the suffering of Gaza's 2.3 million people.
Oh, they've grown increasingly concerned as they continue to hand Israel the bombs that caused that destruction.
Joe Biden, I know, one of the interesting things is that oftentimes because of how polarized and insulated Our media are and how you have Republicans or conservatives who consume right-wing media over here and Democrats and liberals who consume liberal media over here.
Oftentimes they have no understanding of people on the other side and A lot of people who are conservative have been trained to believe that Joe Biden is some kind of radical leftist, that he is some sort of social justice warrior, that he's pro-terrorist and pro-Palestinian.
Joe Biden is one of the most conservative members of the Democratic Party and always has been.
He was the architect of the war on drugs and of the prison industrial complex, the thing that put so many Americans in jail for so long.
We had Ron Paul on our show last night, who's been a lifelong opponent of that drug war and of the policy of the United States of incarcerating people for longer periods of time and in greater numbers than any country in the world.
Joe Biden was the leader who helped construct that.
And one of the things that Joe Biden has also been the leader of is working with Republicans on all of America's wars.
It was Joe Biden who was the single most influential Democratic senator, more so than Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, in selling the invasion of Iraq and getting enough Democrats to vote to authorize Bush and Cheney's invasion of Iraq when he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And beyond anything else, what Joe Biden has been his entire life is one of the most pro-Israel politicians in the United States for decades.
His policy has been that the United States should give Israel everything and anything it needs and not ask questions.
One of the last acts that the Obama administration did before it left in 2016, where Joe Biden was the president, was negotiate a record-breaking deal with Prime Minister Netanyahu to give Israel $40 billion of aid, $4 billion every year over 10 years.
Some of that aid is required to be spent on U.S. arms dealers.
So the United States gives Israel money, which they're then required to give to Boeing and General Dynamics, which in turn gives Israel weapons.
So you see, we take from the American taxpayer, we give to Israel, even though Israelis have a higher standard of living than a lot of Americans.
We pay for their military.
They buy weapons from American arms dealers, enrich the stockholders of the American arms industry, and then they get their weapons from the American taxpayer.
And then when they have new wars like now, we don't say to them, we're already giving you billions of dollars a year.
Biden goes right away and says, we want another $14 billion for Israel to pay for this new war.
And both parties agree.
You cannot deny that Joe Biden is one of the most pro-Israel politicians in the country.
And that was why the first thing he did after October 7th was fly to Israel, stand by the side of Netanyahu, and promise to give Israel everything and anything it needs, just like he's done his entire career.
And he's made good on that promise.
And what you've seen is it's come at great political cost to Biden because a lot of members of the Democratic Party base, young people and Muslim voters in Michigan, have turned against this war and are enraged by it and are threatening not to vote for Biden.
So they occasionally, Democrats, do express concern about the level of civilians suffering in Gaza, but they have in their hands one weapon and one weapon only that would enable them to put a stop to it or limit it, which is to tell Israel, you either stop killing so many civilians and which is to tell Israel, you either stop killing so many civilians and you conduct this operation with greater caution, or we will stop giving you the bombs you need and the money you use to pay And the Biden administration and Joe Biden will never get close to doing that.
So all these expressions of concern.
are purely theatrical and political to trying to assuage and mislead democratic voters into believing they're doing something to push back against Israel, even though Joe Biden is by far the most important supporter of Israel on the planet.
Now, I know that when some people see that video that we just showed you from Reuters and hearing from those Palestinian doctors, a lot of people look at Arabs, they see someone with an Arab name, they immediately assume they're lying, they immediately assume they're Hamas spokespeople. they immediately assume they're Hamas spokespeople.
Now, the Israelis have done an amazing job of convincing people in the West, some people in the West, the minute they hear of any source critical of Israel, the minute that any source, journalistic or organizational, discloses information that reflects poorly on Israel, they immediately discloses information that reflects poorly on Israel, they immediately dismiss it overshadowed.
Oh, that's a pro-Hamas source.
That's an anti-Semitic source.
You can't believe them.
And they basically have painted themselves into a corner where the only source they believe is credible is the IDF.
Even though the IDF, like most militaries that fight in wars, have been caught lying repeatedly.
Lying is a weapon of war.
But you now have a huge amount of evidence from a lot of independent sources who are concluding based on independent investigations and analysis of data, including the deaths of Palestinians, What I said at the top of the show, which is that the war in Gaza is being conducted in a way that is almost unparalleled, and certainly in recent history, in terms of civilian deaths.
The Health Ministry of Gaza, which now is called the Hamas-run Health Ministry, you're supposed to immediately discount what they say in terms of the number of Gazans dead.
This is not the first time Israel has conducted vicious bombing campaigns of Gaza.
It has done so repeatedly over many years.
And every time, what is found is that the death counts given by the health ministry of Gaza ends up being accurate.
If anything, they're undercounting because they just count the number of people who entered the morgues.
They don't count and can't count the number of dead still trapped under the rubble.
There's a huge amount of rubble from buildings that were bombed in Gaza that can't be removed because they don't have electricity, they don't have access to heavy machinery.
And even the US intelligence agencies have said that the count of the health ministry in Gaza, the number of people who have died, which is now 20,000, 8,000 or 9,000 children, if anything, is an undercount.
But you now have independent sources.
Here is from AP yesterday.
There you see the headline.
Israel's military campaign in Gaza is seen as among the most destructive in recent history, experts say.
Quote, in just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction Then the raising of Syria's Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine's Maripol, or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.
It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against ISIS.
The Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza, but from blast fragments found on site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are U.S.
made.
They say the weapons include 2,000-pound bunker busters that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas, with the Palestinian death toll in Gaza surpassing 20,000.
The overall population of Gaza is 2.2 million, which means 20,000 deaths in 10 weeks means the Israelis have killed 1% of the population of Gaza.
1% of the Palestinians who lived in Gaza before October 7th are now dead. 1%.
With the Palestinian death toll in Gaza surpassing 20,000, the international community is calling for a ceasefire.
Israel vows to press ahead, saying it wants to destroy Hamas's military capabilities following the militant group's October 7th cross-border rampage that triggered the war, in which it killed 1,200 people and took 240 others hostage.
That 1200 number includes at least 350 active soldiers, so you're talking about 750-800 civilians, many of which were killed brutally.
We have been very clear from the start that the way in which Hamas carried out that attack was morally indefensible because of the way in which it deliberately targeted civilians.
No question had Hamas targeted only the Israeli military, it would have been a justifiable attack.
No question that when Palestinians in the West Bank attack Israeli military soldiers or Israeli police that are an occupying force in the West Bank, they are morally justified in doing so.
We've always recognized that occupied people have the right to attack a foreign military, but what you can't do is go to a musical festival and gun down civilians.
But that doesn't mean that what follows is justified.
That's the thing we said on the night of October 8th, when the first time we had a show after October 7th, which was the 9-11 attack was morally indefensible.
It killed 3,000 innocent Americans.
But it didn't mean that the United States had the right to do everything and anything in response.
And in fact, much of what the United States did in response to 9-11 was morally disgraceful and indefensible and counterproductive.
Torture regimes around the world, Guantanamo, the invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, the 20-year occupation of those countries, the drone bombing of eight Muslim countries, CIA black sites and kidnapping programs, and on and on and on.
To observe that much of what the United States did in the wake of 9-11 that was morally indefensible doesn't in any way mitigate the observation that 9-11 was as well.
Just as pointing out that what the Israelis are doing is monstrous does not in any way suggest that the October 7th attack by Hamas was justifiable.
Here from the New York Times, also this week, a Times investigation tracked Israel's use of one of its most destructive bombs in South Gaza.
During the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas that it designated safe for civilians, according to an analysis of visual evidence by the New York Times.
In other words, the Israelis were to order civilians in Gaza to evacuate one place and told them to go to another, said that place is going to be safe for civilians.
They left their homes.
They trekked.
Very large distances, obviously no cars on foot, with old people and disabled people and young children.
And then they would get to the place they were told to go.
And the Israelis wouldn't only bomb them, but use the biggest bombs that exist in the arsenal that no other country uses in civilian areas, certainly not the United States.
and would use them against those civilians in the areas the Israelis told them to go.
Quote, "The video investigation focuses on the use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area of southern Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to move for safety.
While bombs of that size are used by several Western militaries, munitions experts say they are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore." In response to questions about the bombs used in South Gaza, an Israeli military spokesman said in a statement to the Times that Israel's priority was destroying Hamas.
End quote.
Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.
So the New York Times went to the Israelis and said, we have evidence that you've been using 2,000 pound bombs that are certain to kill a huge number of civilians.
And you're dropping them in exactly the areas that you told Gazan civilians to go so they would be safe.
And the Israelis said, we'll get to that at some other point.
We don't really care about that right now.
Quote, since October, the United States has also sent more than 5,000 MK-84 munitions, a type of 2,000 pound bomb.
In other words, the bombs the Israelis are using in Gaza to destroy civilian infrastructure, to destroy one hospital after the next, to kill thousands of children, are bombs being supplied to them in real time by the Biden administration.
As we said, we covered this at the time the Israeli Defense Minister promised to use the blockade of Israel to prevent food or water from getting into Gaza.
And while a few humanitarian quarters were open, it was nowhere near enough just to keep the population on a basic path to survival.
Human Rights Watch conducted a major investigation that they published on December 18th, 2023, the title of which was, Israel.
Starvation used as a weapon of war in Gaza.
Evidence indicates civilians were deliberately denied access to food and water.
Let me say that again.
Evidence indicates civilians deliberately were denied access to food and water.
If denying civilians access to food and water in a civilian population where half of the people are children is not a war crime, please tell me what is.
And if your view is you don't care what the Israelis are doing because war is hell and all these kind of John Wayne cliches that people like to throw around when they want to feel tough, what basis do you have then for condemning what Hamas did on October 7th?
After all, war is hell.
The reason I was able to condemn what Hamas did is because I believe that the laws of war and these moral standards have to be abided by.
But if you don't believe in that, then what was your basis for condemning what Hamas did?
Since Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7th, high-ranking Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Galant, National Security Minister Inmar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz, have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water, and fuel, statements reflecting a policy being carried out by Israeli forces.
Other Israeli officials have publicly stated that humanitarian aid to Gaza would be conditioned either on the release of hostages unlawfully held by Hamas or Hamas' destruction.
On October 9th, Defense Minister Yoav Galant said, quote, we are imposing a complete siege on Gaza.
No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.
Everything is closed.
We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in a tweet on October 17th, quote, so long as Hamas does not release the hostages, the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of explosive, of Air Force explosives, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.
Again, this is not Israel refusing to feed Gaza.
This is Israel refusing to allow other people's humanitarian assistance to enter.
On November 4th, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrik declared that no fuel must enter Gaza, quote, under any circumstances.
He later called Israel's War Cabinet's decision to permit small amounts to enter the Strip, quote, a grave mistake, and said that it, quote, should stop the scandal immediately, prevent fuel from coming into the Strip, as reported by the Jerusalem Post.
Fuel is needed for things like Machines in hospitals, and life support, and incubators for newborn babies.
Things like that.
In a video posted online on November 4th, Colonel Yogev Varshash, deputy head of the civil administration, said in an interview for Inside Gaza, quote, whoever returns here, if they return hereafter, will find scorched earth.
No houses, no agriculture, no nothing.
They have no future.
This is why it's so irrational, even though a lot of people have been trained to do it, to dismiss these reports by human rights groups as some sort of pro-Hamas propaganda campaign.
These are all based on the statements of Israeli officials.
Statements that were reported in the Israeli press, that you can watch videos of them making.
They actually said these things repeatedly throughout the war.
Not obscure officials, but top-level officials.
Now, one of the things that has happened in the United States, To justify censorship, like when Governor DeSantis banned a pro-Palestinian student group from existing in the University of Florida campuses.
Or when there were attempts to justify the decisions by France and Germany to ban all pro-Palestinian protests.
Or to insist that colleges needed greater constraints on campus speech.
The tactic used was they would find very obscure people, undergraduate students who have no power, random protesters on the street.
They would pick the worst signs they could find for the pro-Palestinian cause to try and say, look at these people, what they really believe.
They believe in genocide.
They're violent.
They're savage.
You don't have to go look for obscure, random street protesters.
Saying repulsive things about Gaza.
You can find them.
There's plenty of them, as well.
But mostly you find it coming from top Israeli officials, like we just read to you, or mainstream Israeli journalists.
When they're not speaking on CNN in English, but speaking in Hebrew on their own networks, they reveal what they really think.
Here is one of them on Israeli TV, Shimon Ricklin.
Just last week, December 17th, so not even the excuse that October 7th just happened, he was speaking out of rage.
Here he is on December 17th, 2023, saying, not only I don't care about war crimes in Gaza, I'm for the war crimes.
Here's what he said.
- - I'm gonna read this for people who are listening by audio, by podcast.
They're kind of having a grand old time They're chuckling and laughing as they say it.
Quote, I am for the war crimes.
I don't care if I am criticized and honestly don't care.
I am unable to sleep if I do not see houses being destroyed in Gaza.
What do I say?
More, more, more, more houses, more buildings.
I want to see more of them destroyed.
I want there to be nothing for them to return to.
In the Torah it says they used to, In the Torah they used to say, they used to spread the earth with salt.
They must remember they are Amalek.
This is why we cannot reach a solution with them and that is what war crimes mean to me.
Amalek is a biblical term referring to entire population that was wiped out by the Israelites.
This is the sort of thing in the bloodstream of Israeli discourse.
They don't pretend they're trying to defeat Hamas.
They don't pretend they're trying to create a security buffer.
They're very open about the fact that they want ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
They want to eliminate any Arabs or Palestinians from Gaza so that Israel can take it over.
The official position of the Likud party, to say nothing of the more extremist parties in Netanyahu's government, Is that all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which consists of what is recognized by the international community as Israel, and then the West Bank, which Israel is legally occupying, and then Gaza, all belongs to Israel.
Israel, to them, is all of that land, not just the land that the international community recognizes.
Here was a local official in Israel, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, on December 17th, who said the following, Israel should make Gaza look like Auschwitz Museum.
David Azul, head of the Metula Council, that's a city in Israel, proposed sending all Gazans to refugee camps in Lebanon and flattening the whole strip so it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz.
A couple of months ago, the New Yorker's Isaac Shatier interviewed a woman named Danielle Weiss, who is the leader of the settlement movement, one of the leaders of the settlement movement in Israel that has basically forever destroyed the possibility of a two-state solution, which the United States government for decades has said is foundational to U.S.
security.
The Israelis have destroyed that.
We fund them, we give them the weapons, and then we say to them, the one thing we want is a two-state solution because we need that in the region, because we're being attacked because of the failure of the two-state solution.
And although there's been this endless propaganda campaign in the West to claim that the Israelis so generously have repeatedly offered the Palestinians a state, but they've turned it down, Netanyahu just this week admitted, admitted, That he has spent 30 years, along with his allies, blocking any possibility of a two-state solution.
That it's not Yasser Arafat or the PLO or Hamas that has done that.
It's the Israelis who have blocked a two-state solution.
They don't believe in a two-state solution.
They want all of that land for themselves.
And they have a settler movement that has just built track housing in the West Bank, which the entire world recognizes as belonging to the Palestinians.
They view the occupation of the West Bank as an illegal occupation.
It's a foreign army.
The Israeli army is in the West Bank.
In addition to the mass murder and killing and slaughter taking place in Gaza, there's been a serious escalation of violence in the West Bank as well.
Sadistic violence, often by settlers backed up by the IDF.
And here is Daniela Weiss, one of the leaders of that settle movement.
She gave an interview on December 19, 2023 about what she would like to see in Gaza.
And here's what she said.
Gaza must be erased so that the settlers can see the sea.
The situation needs to end.
What we did in northern Gaza, we must do it to the south of Gaza, evacuating Gaza of Arabs.
And building Jewish settlements in all of Gaza.
Because the settlers of the Gaza Strip want, they want to see the sea.
In order to see the sea, all homes in Gaza must be destroyed.
There are no homes or Arabs left in Gaza.
This is a logical and romantic demand.
The settlers want to see the sea.
How will they see the sea?
We must do it south of Gaza.
The settlers will see the sea.
Gaza is a Jewish city.
Gaza is not a Hamas city.
Gaza is one of the cities of Israel.
We will simply go back there.
A historical mistake has been made.
Now we correct it.
Now, it would be one thing if these fanatics, these extremists, these sociopaths, We're having a little regional war with their neighbors over land.
These are the people we are funding.
These are the people who hard-working Americans are going to work and paying their taxes in order to send to Israel to make that sick vision a reality.
The weapon she's talking about using to cleanse Gaza ethnically of all Arabs so that only the Jews can have it comes from the United States.
And we have shown you many times reports that the desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza is not just something that random protesters or college students say, like we focus obsessively here in the United States when we want to indict the pro-Palestinian movement because of a straight comment that some 20-year-old made.
It is coming from the highest levels of the Israeli government, the idea that we want to ethnically cleanse Gaza of all Arabs so that only Jews live there.
Here was a prominent Israeli journalist, Eddie Cohen, and he was talking about the Al Jazeera correspondent, Wael Al-Dador, who went on air moments after an Israeli airstrike, blew up his home, killed his wife, four children, siblings, parents, and multiple other members of his family.
The only reason he didn't die in that airstrike was because he was covering the war for Al Jazeera.
And the question that this Israeli journalist posed in a poll on Twitter in the form of A poll was, quote, Do you hope that Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dadu will receive martyrdom, enter paradise, and enjoy rivers of wine and perfumes?
Meaning, should he be murdered by the Israelis?
Like so many Gazan journalists have.
And his followers voted 61.3% yes.
This is not what every Israeli thinks.
This is not what every Israel supporter in the United States believes.
Many are disgusted by these people.
Nor, though, is this a trivial or fringe opinion in Israel.
This is the Israeli government.
The iteration of it that exists.
Not the fairytale one or the ideal one that a lot of the queasier Israel supporters in the United States, the liberals who love Israel, wish were governing Israel.
Or the people who they wish were prosecuting this war with nicer, more limited goals.
These are the people who do not believe in the humanity or the value of life of Arabs and Palestinians.
And that is the reality.
Now, as I said earlier, one of the justifications that the Israelis give, along with their pro-Israel supporters in the United States and both political parties, is that the reason that the Israelis were justified in blowing up one hospital after the next and rendering them inoperable was because Hamas was using them as command and control centers.
And the primary claim was made about the Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the biggest and most important in Gaza, that now doesn't function.
The Israelis made very precise and specific and concrete claims that there was this vast underground layer that Hamas used.
They produced a 3D image of what it looked like.
They went and they used snipers to shoot a bunch of doctors, nurses and patients coming in and out of the hospital, bombed other parts of it.
And now it's functionally inoperable.
And the Washington Post, which has long editorially been in favor of Israel, long supported their wars in Gaza, including the current one, conducted a great journalistic investigation using all kinds of forensic sources and, in very polite terms, concluded that Israel lied about this hospital and the claims it made.
They found a few small tunnels Israelis have said that when they were occupying Gaza, they were the ones who built a lot of those tunnels, because that's what you need in a tiny, densely packed place for large buildings to be able to function, is you dig underground.
That's not what the Israelis said.
They didn't say there were a few tunnels.
They said there was this vast, complex layer that Hamas used as the command and control center, and yet when they got there, the IDF, And they showed journalists they couldn't find anything remotely substantiating that claim.
To the point where even newspapers in the West that have long supported Israel and still do, like the Washington Post, were compelled to say so.
From December 21st, the case of Al-Shifa investigating the assault on Gaza's largest hospital.
Quote, weeks before Israel sent troops into Al-Shifa Hospital, its spokesman began building a public case.
The claims were remarkably specific, that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities, that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters, And that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.
The assertions were backed by, quote, concrete evidence, Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagri said as he laid out the case in October 27th briefing.
But the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open source visuals, satellite imagery, and all of the publicly released IDF materials.
The Post analysis shows the rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by the IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hoggery appear to be connected to the tunnel network.
There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.
Now note the very polite formulation the Washington Post uses.
If they think they caught Donald Trump in some inconsistency, they'll scream in the headline, Trump lied about this!
When it comes to Israel, they walk much more delicately.
But they still left no doubt.
about what they were saying when they said the evidence simply didn't establish the Israeli claims.
Now, speaking of lies by the Israelis and the IDF, I have no doubt, in part because I've seen evidence, because I've seen testimony that I find credible, that Hamas committed atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7th.
I have no doubt about that.
When you get a group of people that large and that revved up to do something like fly hang gliders into a country that is one of the most powerful and militarized on earth and get them to be willing to kill without blinking, you're going to have some of those people committing atrocities.
That is inevitable.
So I don't doubt that in any way.
Nonetheless, we were inundated with extremely dramatic claims, deliberately dramatic claims, that ended up being completely fabricated.
Stories of babies being cut out of a mother's womb.
Stories of babies being baked in ovens.
Stories of 40 babies being beheaded on October 7th.
All of that, a lie.
Fabricated.
False.
And the source that debunked it was an Israeli newspaper.
I think the best Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which is an opponent of the Netanyahu government, but is also a vocal supporter of the Israeli military action in Gaza, like pretty much all Israelis are.
And here on December 4th, they conducted a major investigation.
And they published an article that said the following, Hamas committed documented atrocities, but a few false stories feed the deniers.
The extensive evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th should not be contaminated by unverified stories disseminated by Israeli search and rescue groups, army officers, and even Sarah Netanyahu.
So they're trying to frame it to say, look, we're in Israel and we know we've been attacked.
As being treasonous.
Because some of our reporting has been used by Western critics of Israel to debunk and call into question Israeli claims.
We don't care.
We're going to do our job as journalists and our job as journalists is not to lie for the government.
Even though it's our country and we support this war.
And that's why they frame it over and over.
Look, there were atrocities committed on October 7th.
But that doesn't justify the lies that were told.
Quote, according to a reporter for I-24 News, an army commander told her that at least 40 babies had been killed, some of them beheaded.
The channel said, quote, reports of the atrocities and the estimated numbers are based on testimonies by officers who removed bodies from Gaza border communities.
It said these accounts were collected during the IDF spokesperson's unit's tour for foreign correspondents four days into the war.
The report above was later quoted on social media, often referenced as, quote, dozens of beheaded babies.
Though sometimes it was, quote, burnt babies or hanged babies.
For example, the Israeli Foreign Ministry published an account by Colonel Golan Vak from the Home Front Command who said that in one house he found the bodies of eight burnt babies.
The ex-account of the Prime Minister's office also referred to the murder of infants and showed very graphic pictures.
According to a tweet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed the picture to U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
According to sources, including Israel's National Insurance Institute, kibbutz leaders and the police, on October 7th, one baby was murdered.
One baby was murdered on October 7th.
10 month old Mila Cohen.
She was found killed with her father Olad on Kibbutz Berri.
Remember all those stories?
40 beheaded babies.
Babies cut out of the womb.
Babies baked in ovens.
None of that was true.
There were horrors that happened on October 7th, no doubt.
Civilians were kidnapped into Gaza.
But why did the IDF lie continuously about these sorts of things?
Why did the IDF lie about the hospitals that they destroyed?
At the very least, at the very least, if you want to apply skepticism to human rights groups and journalists inside Gaza, and try and pretend that thousands of people aren't dying who are civilians, even though the Israelis are dropping 2,000 pound bombs on densely packed civilian areas, You should at least have an enormous amount of skepticism for everything Israel and the IDF says.
And of course it's emotionally significant to hear these things.
It was a major part of why so many people in the world immediately sided with Israel.
They knew what they were doing.
40 beheaded babies.
It plays into the worst stereotypes of Arab and Muslim savagery about beheading, beheading babies.
Babies being baked in ovens implies or is deliberately designed to invoke memories of the Holocaust.
Now, the argument is always asked, well, what were the Israelis supposed to do when you get attacked that way?
And of course, no country can stand by and get attacked that way and do nothing.
But the Most foundational problem with the narrative in the West about the war in Ukraine was that the war began on February 24th, 2022 when the Russians invaded.
So that you were only allowed to look at the Russian invasion and not anything that came before it.
So you couldn't analyze what the Americans were doing or what NATO was doing inside Ukraine, why the Russians would feel threatened by that.
You had to pretend that the war in history began on February 24th, 2022.
Exactly the same thing happened with the 9-11 attack.
You had to pretend that the conflict between the U.S.
and the Muslim world began on September 11, 2001 when the United States was just minding its own little merry business and out of nowhere a bunch of savage Muslims attacked for no reason other than the fact that they hate us for our freedoms.
So they manipulate and propagandize and deceive By arbitrarily declaring that history begins on whatever date they want it to begin on so that you don't ever look at what preceded it or caused it or provoked it or triggered it.
And that's exactly what happened with this October 7th attack.
A lot of people will insist that the war between Israel and Gaza began on October 7th, 2023 and not the decades that preceded it.
There is no group of people, there is no group of people That would swallow and accept being occupied by a foreign military for decades and being denied the basic guarantees and dignity of self-governance.
Especially when that occupation is brutal and savage and designed to humiliate as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is.
Nor would any group of people accept having their airport bombed and their sea lanes controlled and their borders closed and told that they cannot leave ever this tiny little strip of land.
They're imprisoned in this tiny little strip of land.
Yeah, we'll make the land a little bit nice for you.
You'll be in complete poverty, but you have this beautiful sea you get to look at.
You get to walk around inside this group of this little tiny strip.
You'll never get to leave.
What group of people would ever accept Having those deprivations imposed on them by a foreign military.
None with any dignity.
So when people ask, what should the Israelis do?
If you want to begin history on some arbitrarily cooked up date of October 7th, 2023, I understand why that's hard to answer.
Oh, Israel was just there, minding its own business.
These Palestinians out of nowhere decided to attack, just like Muslims out of nowhere decided to attack.
The United States on September 11th, and just out of nowhere, the Russians decided to attack Ukraine, the United States, the West, Israel, totally blameless, doesn't do anything to feed this conflict.
But if you actually look at actual history, not the deceitful little bits of propaganda, or the fairy tale that is fed to us constantly, then asking what Israel should do is not a hard question.
And the answer is not go and destroy all of Gaza and kill who knows how many people or eliminate what percentage of the population will be destroyed by the end of all this.
You think Israel is going to be safer while the entire world watches Israel commit violence and atrocities and barbarism on a scale not seen for a long time?
You think there are going to be more people or less who now want to go bring violence to Israel?
Just like we talked with Congressman Paul last night and reviewed his History and record in Congress, where he was trying to warn people, even before 9-11, that if we go into that part of the world, and overthrow their leaders, and bomb them, and impose dictatorships on them, we're going to create huge amounts of anti-American radicals.
Because again, what population would accept being controlled by a foreign army over and over and over for so long that way?
Nobody with dignity would.
And we're creating our own enemies.
And so is Israel, more than ever.
And so when people say, oh, there's a rise in anti-Semitism, I think a lot of that has been deliberately exaggerated to justify censorship.
That's how crises work.
They get manipulated and fabricated.
And a lot of Israeli professors have said the same thing, that they work on campus and there's nowhere near this level of pervasive There aren't groups of people walking around chanting, gas the Jews or kill all Jews the way a lot of people have been misled into believing, but I'm sure there is a rise certainly in anti-Israel hatred and that spills over into anti-Semitism.
So how do you think that's manifesting in that part of the world as people watch every day more and more dead babies?
More and more little girls screaming as they get operated on without basic sedatives?
And obviously, everyone in the world knows that it's the United States linked to Israel, enabling all this, paying for it, feeding them the weapons while they do it.
And it's not just anti-Israeli sentiment that is increasing rapidly, but anti-American sentiment as well.
That's why the State Department repeatedly has warned Americans that we face a much greater risk, a much higher risk of violent anti-American attack anywhere we travel in the world.
Our foreign policy has made us less safe, more subject to violent attack because of how much hatred there is for the United States and the world because we've tied ourselves at the hip to the Israelis as they do this.
So what should Israel do?
The only thing that's ever going to make the Israelis safe is solving the crisis, the conflict, and ensuring that these people, who hate Israel more than ever, How do you think people who are currently 5 and 6 and 7 years old, or 9 and 10 and 12 years old, who somehow are going to survive this, watching people die around them, watching their entire society destroyed by Israeli bombs, how do you think they're going to feel about Israel for the rest of their lives?
How would you feel about a foreign country for the rest of your life if you watched them doing that and you were in the middle of it, and you saw that level of destruction and bloodshed and hunger imposed on you?
So what Israel should do is finally live in peace with their neighbors.
And what the United States should do is stop funding all of Israel's wars.
Israel has a much higher standard of living for many of its citizens than America has for its.
And there are enormous amounts of costs that the United States incurs as a government and as citizens for this kind of fanatical support Joe Biden is giving to Israel, along with the support of a lot of the Republican Party as well.
But right now, all of the people who live on this planet are watching one of the most horrific humanitarian crimes to take place in a long, long time.
And if you're an American citizen or you're a European citizen, your government is paying for it, your government is supporting it, and your government is enabling it.
And because of Joe Biden's willingness to isolate the United States, to block any attempt to stop it, It seems clear that more and more people are going to die.
More and more Gaza is going to be destroyed.
Gaza will be rendered uninhabitable for the people who manage to survive it.
And this will transform life forever for Gazans, for Israelis, but also for Americans.
And that's the reason why, even though we watched People week after week writing to us saying cancel our subscription, we don't want to hear these criticisms of Israel anymore.
Or people saying we're going to turn off your program.
Why it was that I would never have been able to have any kind of dignity or feel any sort of positive sentiment about the work I did if we decided not to cover this.
You have a responsibility, I think, as a human being before anything else, when things like this are happening, to give your most honest assessment of what it is that's happening and do everything that's in your power to stop it.
So we want to move just a little bit away from the focus on Israel to what is happening in the Red Sea and in Yemen, even though it's very related to the Israeli conflict and even though it's very related to the Israeli conflict and everything we just discussed because it's incredibly significant what's going on.
Yemen is a country that the has been divided for a long time.
The Houthis are a minority in Yemen, but has become increasingly powerful and increasingly populous.
And the government of Yemen that was recognized that was a puppet of the United States has been rendered basically powerless by the Houthis, who have built a militia and have become very powerful in this country.
It's why the Saudis were obsessed with attacking the Houthis and bombing Yemen for all those years under the Obama administration.
Both as because they felt threatened by the Houthis and because they viewed the Houthis as an extension of Iranian power and the Saudis and the Iranians are wrong.
Rivals in that region.
And so the Saudis elicited the support of the United States and the British to help them bomb Yemen and Yemenis relentlessly.
This is 2013, 2014, 2015.
And those teenagers are now adults.
And those little children are now teenagers.
And they remember that.
For a long time, Yemen was by far the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
Mass starvation.
And they're also looking at what the Israelis and the Americans are doing in Gaza to Palestinians with whom they empathize as Muslims.
And they're armed.
And they have decided that they are going to use their proximity to the Red Sea, a very important shipping lane, One of great economic importance to the Israelis and to the world to target those countries they perceive as being responsible for what's taking place in Gaza and for what was done to them.
So they're not targeting Brazilian ships or Korean ships or Japanese ships or Swiss ships.
What they are doing is targeting Israeli ships and American ships and French ships and EU ships.
Yet another Example of what the CIA calls blowback, that if you want to go around the world doing things like what the United States is doing in Gaza, there are going to be some people who want to bring violence to you.
And it's becoming an increasingly serious threat, economically, but also to the ability to have commercial shipping through this region.
Here from the New York Times this week, the Houthi militia in Yemen has gained clout with ship attacks in the Red Sea.
Quote, across the Middle East, people have hailed the Houthis as one of the few regional forces willing to challenge Israel with more than harsh words.
It is interesting, there's Hezbollah that has a stockpile of 150,000 very precise missiles aimed at Israeli cities that could do enormous damage to Israeli civilian infrastructure if they wanted, that has done very little.
They've had some pinprick attacks against the Israelis, the Israelis have done it back, Nothing else.
It's really the Houthis who have stepped up and launched these attacks in retaliation for what's being done in Gaza.
Quote,
They have described their recent attacks as a campaign in solidarity with the 2.2 million Palestinians living under Israel's siege and bombardment of Gaza, which was launched in response to the October 7th attacks by Hamas.
Now, Note there that their attacks on shipping have caused a great rise in popularity in the region.
People in that region are applauding it.
Why?
Because they hate the United States and the Israelis, because of the interference in that region over many many decades, and because of what they're doing in Gazan.
Yet another cost to the United States of standing by Israel.
Now, They hate the Americans for their own separate reason that the United States bombed Yemen continuously.
But do you see the politics here?
In the United States, elite political discourse so often talks about what Arab governments want.
They'll say, even Arab governments hate Hamas.
Even Arab governments are fed up with Hamas.
And what they really mean by, even Arab governments, Are not representative governments that were elected by the people of those countries and therefore have any standing to speak for the people of those countries?
What they mean are the dictators that have been imposed by the United States and Europe and propped up in power by the United States and the EU precisely to ensure that popular opinion in those countries never has expression.
Those dictators are there to suppress the Views and beliefs and values of the people of those countries.
Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain.
These are all the countries that are dictatorships propped up by the United States.
So when American elites say, even the Arabs have had enough of Moss, what they mean are these dictators.
But the people in these countries are utterly anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, anti-American.
And that's why the Houthis are gaining popularity among the actual people, not the dictators that have been imposed on them by the United States.
Here was The Economist with a background piece on what's happening, and it's very important what's going on in the Red Sea.
It's causing a huge amount of economic instability, and seems to be escalating.
The Economist on December 12th.
Who are the Houthis, the group attacking ships in the Red Sea?
The Yemeni rebel group is operating on the fringes of the Israel-Hamas war.
Since the bombardment of Gaza began, the Houthis, a Yemeni rebel group, have launched a series of attacks on cargo ships.
The insurgents who are backed by Iran say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians.
They have threatened to attack any ship bound for or leaving Israel without delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.
In 2014, the Houthis swept out of their northern stronghold and took control of Sanaa, Yemen's capital.
With the support of Iran, they seized most of western Yemen.
The country's then president fled to Saudi Arabia in 2015 at his request.
The Saudis launched a campaign against the Houthis.
In the years that followed, around 25,000 airstrikes killed more than 19,000 civilians.
The UN said in early 2023 that it was still the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
So you had a figurehead government in Yemen that was supported by the United States but that had no popular support among the people and once the Yemenis got enough arms to fight back against their government, they forced the government that they never wanted to flee to Saudi Arabia and essentially took over an otherwise ungovernable Yemen.
Here from the Wall Street Journal, December 19th, the U.S.
leads bid to secure Red Sea, but shipping firms remain on edge.
Now, the U.S.
tried to put together a coalition to go and secure the Red Sea and to prevent the Houthis from continuing to attack ships linked to Israel and the United States.
And they got basically nobody in the region to join them.
Because those countries don't want to make enemies of the Houthis and because they know that their populations are so intensely pro-Palestinian that any appearance that they're citing with the United States or Israel at this point would be very threatening, even to these well-entrenched dictators.
We saw in the Arab Spring how well-entrenched ones like Hosni Mubarak, who were in power in Egypt for 30 years, were unseated.
So they're scared of their populations oftentimes.
The United States has no soft power anymore.
It could only get Bahrain, I think, as the one country in the region that has no military.
Regional politics and well-armed Houthi adversaries in Yemen are among the challengers facing U.S.-led naval force.
The rising threat has prompted many of the world's biggest shipping companies to find alternative routes.
Fearing widespread disruption to trade flows that could reignite inflation by boosting prices for goods and energy, the U.S.
said this week that its navy would lead a force involving almost a dozen countries to deter the Houthi strikes.
The sliver of water separating the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean is bookended by the Suez Canal to the north and Bab el-Mandeb to the south.
The two straits, along with an Egyptian pipeline, carry about 12% of the world's seaborne oil and 8% of its liquefied natural gas.
More than 20% of the world's container trade passes through the Suez.
According to shipbroker Clarkson's, Gregory Brew, an analyst at geopolitical consulting firm Eurasia Group, said that reflects the difficulty of the U.S.
bases in juggling its support for Israel and the war against Hamas alongside its commercial interests in the region.
Do you see how much the United States sacrifices of its own interest to fund and arm Israel?
It's been going on like this for decades.
You've had generals come forth like David Petraeus and others and say, the reason we're so hated in the region, the reason why our forces are constantly attacked, is because we're supporting Israel.
And they've had to apologize for it, they've had to withdraw it, but everyone in Washington knows that's true.
Here's a video from the spokesman of Yemen's armed forces, the Houthis.
Spewing his contempt for the idea that they're going to be deterred by this little force that the United States has put together.
If we look at the crimes being committed in Gaza, he says, they're similar to ones that were committed against us in the past nine years.
Bombarding hospitals, they bombarded our hospitals.
Bombing markets, they bombarded our markets.
Bombarding roads, people while they're soundly sleeping in their homes, just like it happened to us.
It's the same aggression, the same American bombs being poured in Gaza or the same ones being poured on us in Yemen.
The aggressor is one, the aggression is one, the leader of it is one, America.
The one who has led the aggression in Yemen is the same one who is leading it in Palestine.
Majorities were saying, quote, strike Israel, we dare you.
Well, we did strike them.
They said, seize a ship, we dare you.
We seized one and took it to our port.
It greatly honors us that we mobilized against the enemy, that we are confronting the Zionist enemy who is aggressing on Palestine in our homeland.
We will continue to confront the American-Israeli enemy until the aggression on Gaza stops.
As for the battle on our homeland, we are, God willing, fully prepared and ready for anything from the enemy.
If Saudi and Emiratis even think of leading an aggression on us, commanded by Israel and USA, we are present and ready.
They've tried us for nine years.
If they want to do it again, we're here and we're ready.
As for America and Israel, if they attack our homeland, they will commit foolishness they've never committed before.
The response will be fierce from the people and the armed forces.
We are with our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon facing Israel because they're our greatest enemy.
We didn't say death to America with our heads turned.
We are serious about it.
Now, they've demonstrated that's not bluffing.
And you see they threatened the Saudis and the Emiratis, and then the Saudis and the Emiratis pointedly refused to join the American coalition to confront the Houthis in trying to protect these ships.
Look at everything we're risking for the Israelis to destroy Gaza.
How is it in our interest to do this?
Is Hamas remotely a threat to the American way of life?
Here from Harriet's December 22nd, the conflict seems to be escalating both in rhetoric and force.
Quote, any ship comes near will hit it.
Thousands rally in Yemen against US-led Red Sea operation.
And we've seen gigantic protests from the start of this war in Gaza in almost every major Arab capital in the region.
Quote, supporters of Yemeni's Houthi rebels, who have claimed a series of attacks on ships in the Red Sea, took to the streets in several cities on Friday to protest against a multinational alliance led by the U.S.
to protect trade in the Red Sea.
Thousands of Houthi loyalists rallied in the rebel-ruled Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and voiced support for the Iran-backed group, the anti-U.S.
and Israeli stance.
The rally was staged under the motto, quote, the coalition to protect Israeli ship does not terrorize us.
Here you see a protest in Jordan, and remember, we keep a dictator in Jordan to prevent things like this, but the popular anger against Israel and the United States is so great that they have to let these protests erupt.
Here you see the protest in Jordan.
And you see signs like stop the genocide in Gaza in case you have any questions about what they're there to protest.
Now, as I indicated, the Yemenis don't just hate the United States because of our support for Israel, but also because of what we did to their country.
Here from the New York Times in June of last year, 2022, the headline, U.S. fails to assess civilian death in Yemen war.
Internal report says, quote, A Saudi-led coalition has killed civilians with U.S. weapons, But the State Department and the Pentagon have fallen short on tracking the death U.S.
investigators found.
The report from the Government Accountability Office is focused on attacks in recent years by a Saudi-led coalition that is fighting Houthi rebels for control of Yemen.
The alliance, which includes the United Arab Emirates, has carried out deadly strikes using combat jets and munitions that have been supplied and maintained largely by American companies with the approval of the State Department and the Pentagon.
The Pentagon managed $54.6 billion in military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 to 2021, according to the report.
The Pentagon has 140 advisors working in Saudi Arabia on training missions, and they mostly focus on tasks related to weapon sales.
The strikes have hit hospitals, schools, buses, And a funeral hall, among other sites.
On January 21st, an airstrike on a prison run by the Houthis killed at least 70 people and injured dozens of others.
According to Houthi officials and international aid groups, more than 150,000 people have been killed in the war, including nearly 15,000 civilians, according to an estimate by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
The conflict has resulted in what the United Nations has called the worst man-made humanitarian crisis.
Why would you expect the people of Yemen to have anything but hatred for the United States?
Why?
Why would they have anything other than that for the United States along with all the other countries we've spent the last 20-25 years bombing?
25 years bombing.
Here is a poll from YouGov that asked Americans, "Which U.S. military interventions do Americans think were right and wrong?" They said, given what you now know, do you think it was right or wrong decision for the US military to intervene in the following wars?
The only wars that Americans say were the right ones.
There's only three.
There's actually four.
World War II, Americans say by 67 to 9 that that was the right decision to intervene in that war.
World War I, 57 to 11 percent, and I think that that's largely a byproduct of not a lot of knowledge about World War I or what it entailed.
The goal for of 1990 when the United States expelled Iraq from Kuwait, only 38 to 27% say that that war was the right decision.
And then the Korean War by 33 to 24%.
So of all the wars that the United States has fought, only four of them command a majority that says it was the right thing to do.
The first war that they say was wrong was the invasion of Panama, where for whatever reason, George H.W.
Bush decided we had to invade Panama and arrest his leader, Manuel Noriega, on drug charges.
We went and invaded Panama.
George Bush had been called a wimp up until that point, even though he had served in World War II.
And then the New York Times said he's no longer a wimp, he invaded Panama.
Then you have the war in Afghanistan, the Kosovo War, the Syrian Civil War, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Yemeni Civil War, the Iraq War, the Cambodia Campaign, and the Vietnam War.
There you see the Yemeni Civil War.
Only 15% say that that was a right decision to involve ourselves in that war.
32% say it was wrong.
The Iraq War is now 28% to 45%.
The Vietnam War, only 18% of Americans say that was right.
52% say that was wrong.
or only 18% of Americans say that was right, 52% say that was wrong.
So you see this long history of Americans knowing that they're constantly induced into wars that are the wrong decision.
And yet, war propaganda, as we discussed before, is such a science that at the start of every war they show Americans enough emotional images to convince them that, oh no, this time the people we want to go fight are really the new Hitler.
And this time you're on the right side.
There was a poll earlier today that was released from Gallup of public opinion in Israel.
And they asked Israelis, what do you think about a whole variety of issues?
And one of the things they asked Israelis is, what is your view of the American government and of U.S.
leadership?
Meaning Joe Biden.
And turns out Israelis have a more positive view of the U.S.
government under Joe Biden now than they have ever had Of any prior US leadership or American government.
Here you see the line.
It's usually been at 60%, a little under 60%, and now it's shot up to 81% under Joe Biden.
The Israelis love Joe Biden.
And the approval is down to 14, only 14% of Israelis say they disapprove of Joe Biden.
And the Gallup writers summarized the finding this way, Israelis approval of the leadership of the US One of its longest standing and staunchest allies has never dipped below a majority since 2006.
Even so, approval ratings of U.S.
leadership climbed to a new high of 81% in 2023, up from 65% in 2022.
And why wouldn't they love the U.S.
leadership under Joe Biden?
We pay for their wars.
Whatever they want, Biden gives them.
Even if we have to pay a huge price on every level, even if we're risking other wars, even if our citizens can't travel the world safely, even if we have to go further into debt, for Israel, a country where its citizens have a higher standard of living in many ways than the U.S., of course the Israelis are going to love Joe Biden.
Any country would love a foreign leader that says, we're going to pay for all your wars, we're going to fund you in everything that you want.
We're going to justify what you do.
We're going to use our veto power at the UN, even if it pits us against the entire world, to permit you to do anything that you want.
You see the results, the very logical results.
They recognize, even if a lot of conservatives in the United States want to deny it, that Joe Biden is their staunchest ally and protector.
Joe Biden, however, in the United States is extremely unpopular.
And the reason is he pays a lot of attention to foreign wars that he loves to fight and always has, and not very much attention to the welfare of our own citizens.
And we decided to cover what was going on in Yemen, in part because it's an extremely important development that has a high likelihood of escalating and it's not very well covered, but also because it illustrates the point tying all of these things together.
Which is that all these wars that the United States keeps fighting, all these attempts to intervene in foreign countries, to bomb them, to overthrow their leaders, to impose dictatorships, has a gigantic cost.
And it's past time for Americans to stop realizing only after the fact that these are the wrong decisions and to stop and to start realizing at the start of the war that they have to realize this is very emotionally
Potent propaganda in order to realize at the start of the war that there is way too much cost and human suffering that we cause from our constant involvement in our own wars and our paying for it and fueling the wars of other countries as well.
All right, so as we said at the top of the show, this being our last show of 2023, we decided that instead of picking, say, the five most consequential stories or events we think took place in 2023, and I talked about the three stories I thought were most important at the top of the show, The censorship regime being implemented, the attempt to keep Trump off the ballot to put him in jail in the Israel-Gaza war.
We decided instead to focus on the shows that we did, the five shows that we did, that covered five issues that we think were the most under-discussed.
So I just want to go through those quickly for you.
If you are a new viewer, if you haven't watched these, These are the ones that we think really deserve a lot more attention.
There's a lot of original reporting in them, and we think they tie into a whole bunch of other things.
We all put together a long list, and we kind of debated, and we picked these five as the ones that we think were the ones that deserve a lot more attention.
So here on May 22nd of this year, we produced a show that was entitled Mystery of the 2001 Anthrax Attacks and the Links to the COVID Debate.
And we covered the extremely confounding narrative about what happened with the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001, just a couple of weeks after 9-11 attacks, which were instantly blamed on Iraq.
We discussed the FBI's official narrative about who perpetrated the anthrax attack and the gigantic holes that it has in it.
But ultimately, the FBI's narrative is that a U.S.
Army scientist named Bruce Ivins, working in a U.S.
Army facility in Fort Detrick, was weaponizing very sophisticated strains of anthrax that could be used in an offensive biological attack.
And that he was the one who attacked the United States.
That the attack came from a U.S.
Army lab, says the FBI.
And one of the things that we wanted to do, in addition to making people aware of how significant that story was and how many holes there are in its explanation, is to understand the connection that it has to COVID by proving that the United States and China do in fact do the sorts of highly dangerous gain-of-function research and manipulation of biological agents that Anthony Fauci vehemently denied that he was actually doing.
To demonstrate that we still don't have answers on the COVID epidemic, where that strain came from, how it emerged, the way in which debate was shut down in the United States.
Scientists with no evidence early on, including ones who said they were sure that it came from a lab, and then were told by Fauci to change, signed a letter in the Lancet, calling anything other than the story about a natural origin to be a grotesque conspiracy theory and an attack on the Chinese scientists who they regard with such integrity.
People were censored by big tech for trying to have this debate.
And then the lie got too big.
The United States government admitted it didn't know the origin of the story, but there's so much light to be shined on it by what happened with these anthrax attacks in the United States and the major role those anthrax attacks played in elevating the fears that led to all the aggressive reaction by the United States all throughout the Muslim world that became the war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq.
And when you really break down that anthrax attack and what the United States government said about it at the time and where it came from and why, it really undercuts a lot of the claims about the COVID narrative.
So we wanted to Cover that.
For those who prefer to read about it, in June of 2021, I actually wrote an article on Substack about all the reporting I've done over the years on this issue.
It was entitled, The FBI's Strange Anthrax Investigation and How It Sheds Light Onto the COVID Lab League Theory and Fauci's Emails.
Remember, there were all those emails released from Dr. Fauci proving that so much of what he said and did At the start of the pandemic turned out to be utter lies.
And while that got some attention, I don't even think it got near enough, the relationship of anthrax and what that investigation reveals, just as a standalone important story, And the light that shines on this COVID mystery, I think, has never gotten anywhere near the attention it deserved.
Here was on June 13th, a story that we did a lot of original reporting on, and we found this actually kind of stunning, which was a new report that was prepared by the CIA and Homeland Security, and then obtained by the Senate, About the fact that U.S.
intelligence agencies purchase enormous amounts of data about you personally that they would be prohibited from collecting about you by the Constitution.
Here was the report that we reported on.
It was from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Senior Advisory Group, a panel on commercially available information.
And one of the things that happens is that Facebook and Google and all kinds of firms collect massive amounts of invasive data about who you are as a person and what you do online.
And then they sell it.
And there are programs inside the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence Office to buy this information about American citizens, so they're keeping gigantic sweeping dossiers on very private information about American citizens, and they themselves admitted in this report they have no legal basis to collect directly.
But by buying it, using your tax money to buy dossiers on you, They are able to gather enormous amounts of information about the American population.
We've talked about this before, that in an ideal democracy, we would know everything that our government was doing.
That's why they're called the public sector.
With very rare exception when they have to hide what they're doing for some legitimate reason.
By and large, we're supposed to know about what they're doing.
With public power, there's supposed to be transparency.
Conversely, they're supposed to know very little about what we're doing.
We're private citizens.
We have a private realm that surrounds us.
And yet, in the United States, that has been completely reversed.
We know very little about what the U.S.
government does.
Because so much of what they do is conducted behind a wall of secrecy through an abuse of classified powers.
I talked about how when I reported on the Snowden Archive and the hundreds of thousands, if not more, top secret documents I read through, so many of them were actually banal.
Just ordinary documents that should never have been classified, but in Washington, everything is automatically classified, reflexively classified, and kept from the population.
So we know very little about what they do, and they know enormous amounts about us, the population, through programs like this.
And we thought that was an incredibly important story, both on its own right, but also in terms of what it reflects about how this dynamic has been perverted, how it's been reversed, and the extent to which they're spying on the United States.
Now, the next story Obviously we spent a lot of time covering the Twitter files and the revelations of it.
We had Ahmad Taibbi and almost every other reporter who did that reporting.
We spent many shows discussing the implications of what it meant that the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security were constantly calling and in contact with Twitter, Facebook, and Google and successfully demanding the censorship of all kinds of political speech.
But the thing we want to focus on here that we don't think got enough attention because of how significant it is, is that when there was a congressional hearing, finally, on the Twitter files, and Matt Taibbi showed up with Michael Schellenberger to talk about the reporting they did, the Democrats on this committee, and we had been saying for so long that this was the case, but they made it so explicitly clear, the Democrats on this committee did not deny
That the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security were trying to censor the internet.
Instead, they defended it.
Every one of the members of the Democratic members of this committee, before which Taibbi and Schellenberger appeared, rose in defense of the CIA and Homeland Security.
And it shows how the Democratic Party has really become, and polling data shows this, a party that reveres the U.S.
security state, sees them as a political ally, and shows the extent to which these agencies are interfering in our politics.
I don't think these Democratic Party members have any concept of the history of the CIA and the FBI and the abuses it committed and the way in which the liberal left of the United States, almost by reflex, has always hated these agencies and been highly suspicious of them and opposed to their abuse of power for domestic ends.
But the Democratic Party has none of that in it.
All the skepticism of the U.S.
security state exists on the populist wing of the Republican Party.
There's plenty of Republican-established politicians who are with the Democrats and loving these agencies.
That's why the FBI's spying powers just got renewed in a bipartisan vote that we reported on last week.
But to the extent there's any skepticism at all, it's in the populist wing of the Republican Party and almost none in the Democratic Party.
Here is Colin Allred in one of the most extraordinary videos I've seen this year.
A Democrat from Texas explicitly telling Matt Taipi that not only should he not be concerned about CIA and FBI and Homeland Security censorship of the internet, he should be grateful for it.
Listen to what he said.
We live in an information age where malign actors do want to use social media to influence our elections, both big, the ones that you've spent a long time talking about, And small, like mine.
And it should be a bipartisan goal.
No, you don't get to ask questions here.
It should be a bipartisan goal to ensure that Americans and only Americans determine the outcome of our elections, not fear-mongering.
And I think, I hope that you can actually take this with you, because I honestly hope that you will grapple with this.
That it may be possible, that if we can take off the tinfoil hat, that there's not a vast conspiracy.
but that ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn't get people hurt or see our democracy undermined.
And that the very rights that you think they're trying to undermine, they may be trying to protect.
So the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security, when they're telling big tech companies what they can and cannot allow to be said, are just trying to protect our democracy.
They're censoring for our own good.
Big Brother loves us, says the Democratic Party.
That is the position of the Democratic Party stated so beautifully and so clearly.
Up until maybe like seven years ago, If you were a Democratic Party member of Congress and you stood up to say that the CIA and the FBI and DHS are filled with good, kind, benevolent people who are censoring our political speech for our own good to protect our democracy, you would be laughed at.
Now, none of them laugh at it.
They all think that way.
Every last one of them.
There has not been a member of the Democratic Party who has expressed any serious concern or doubt about the right of the FBI or the CIA or the NSA to engage in online censorship in this manner.
Remember that that program that he just defended was declared unconstitutional, in fact, one of the gravest attacks on the First Amendment, first by a federal district court judge and then by an appellate court judge ruling, a three judge appellate court ruling.
That said, it's one of the gravest attacks on the First Amendment right to free speech that the Biden administration, the FBI, and various agencies within it have been systematically not just requesting, but demanding and coercing censorship of Americans' political speech by Big Tech.
The reaction of the Democratic Party to that was, this is a good thing.
We should be grateful for them.
Just like they think it's a vindication of democracy to kick Donald Trump off the ballot, They're willing to say it's a vindication of democracy and a protection of democracy to have these U.S.
security state agencies censor our political speech.
That is the view of the Democratic Party.
That was the reason why the Twitter files, remember, not only didn't get attention, but were affirmatively mocked by most members of the corporate media who told people to ignore it because it was a nothing burger, only for federal court judges to unanimously say, That it revealed a grave attack on the First Amendment?
They didn't just say, ignore it.
They said, be grateful for it.
That is the view of the Democratic Party.
They are the party that wants the CIA and the FBI and the U.S.
security state interfering in and controlling and governing not just our politics, but our political speech.
And that has been something that that shift in the Democratic Party's posture toward the U.S.
security state has gotten nowhere near enough attention.
Now, Here is our fourth story that we think needed more attention, which we, again, this is our original reporting that we presented on May 19th, the title of which was Bellingcat, the shady mouthpiece of elites.
Bellingcat has become one of the favorite independent media outlets, in quotes, of corporate media outlets in the U.S.
government, and for good reason.
Because they are funded by arms of the United States government that are adjacent to the CIA.
And so much of what they do is designed to promote the agenda of the U.S.
security state, of whatever wars the U.S.
security state are fighting.
And out of nowhere, they got presented as these scrappy independent journalists who, through open source work, Reveal all these kind of truths that the mainstream media doesn't report, and yet when you look at who they are and who their funding is, you see that their funding comes from the very Western security agencies whose agenda, with few exceptions, they dutifully serve.
This is the same thing that you find when you look underneath the hood of disinformation organizations and disinformation experts, the people trying to censor the internet.
Wherever you look, you find the hidden hand of these security state agencies and the fact that the corporate media decided to take Bell and Cat and venerate it, hold it up as an example of trustworthy independent media when in fact they see the world through the prism of their benefactors.
That's why those are their benefactors.
The CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy and Western European governments don't fund media outlets that report on things that undermine their agenda.
They report on things that promote and advance it.
That's what Bellingcat is.
Of course it got very little attention, who they are and where their funding comes from, because they've become a creature of the corporate media, which has the same allegiances.
So it's not that this story is some blockbuster, groundbreaking report in and of itself.
What matters about it is what it illustrates about who controls our, the flow of information, what the real allegiance of the corporate media in the United States is.
And finally, On June 26th, we published a show, the title of which was The West War on Dissent, on the right to dissent.
And what we did in this show, principally, was at the time, there was a lot of calls by Democrats for Jack Smith to indict President Trump on the crime of inciting an insurrection.
And the theory they wanted to use was that the political speech that Trump gave on January 6th To that assembled crowd was outside of the bounds of the First Amendment.
It wasn't protected speech because he was trying to incite violent or lawless action, even though the only comment he made about whether violence should be used is when he told them to march to the Capitol peacefully.
We showed you all of that this week when we reported on the decision by the Colorado Supreme Court when we broke it down and dissected it.
But when Jack Smith unveiled his indictment of Donald Trump and it did not contain a charge of inciting an insurrection and it did not try to use Trump's January 6th speech as a basis for criminality, we were very relieved because what we did in this show was we took the key precedents of the U.S.
Supreme Court in the latter part of the 20th century, particularly Brandenburg v. Ohio and Claiborne v. the NAACP.
To show you what the Supreme Court has said on the outer bounds of free speech and why those key seminal cases would be so endangered if there was any attempt to indict Trump as an insurrectionist.
And yet, amazingly, this week when the Colorado Supreme Court, by a 4-3 ruling, went to bar Trump from appearing on the California Republican primary ballot, the theory they invoked was that he was an insurrectionist based on that January 6th speech, even though he's never been charged with it.
And we touched on the reasons why that is such a threatening theory to core First Amendment freedoms.
But if you really want to hear about Brandenburg and Claiborne and what it did, those seminal cases, in creating such robust protections for free speech rights of Americans, one of the best things about our country, this is the show that...
We recommend that you watch.
And it doesn't just walk you through the case law, but also makes very clear, and we obviously didn't know at the time that this Colorado case was coming, why that Colorado case is such a full frontal attack on free speech rights of the United States.
So those are the five stories we picked as ones that we think merit greater attention.
There's obviously commonalities and through lines with a lot of the reporting that we do here that is about the way in which free speech rights and core civil liberties are being eroded and under attack by neoliberal institutions.
But some of these stories, like the standalone story about anthrax and COVID and Dr. Fauci, I think merit attention unto themselves.
Obviously, he spent a lot of time this year covering the war in Ukraine at the beginning, and now the We're in Israel at the end but there's a lot going on that we think does not get covered by the mainstream media and one of the reasons we love doing this show and want to continue to do it is because it gives us an opportunity to cover these stories that we think would receive very little attention in most mainstream venues unless we were and other shows were covering it.
That to me is what independent media is for.
Not to tell you what you want to hear.
Not to become a place for partisan organizing.
But to take the flaws of the corporate media and the things they deceive on and correct them and the things they ignore and shine a light on them and that's what we think these five stories did this year.
All right, for our last story, which we weren't planning on doing because it only happened about an hour before we came on air, but for obvious reasons, it is something extremely relevant to the topics we cover since it involves both Rumble, the platform that our show appears on and that we devote a lot of attention to because of its free speech commitment,
And the country of Brazil, where we've done a lot of reporting, in part because I live here, and in part because we reported on it a lot, and in part because it's become one of the leaders of the global censorship regime.
And those all come together in this story.
We have constantly reported that the Brazilian Supreme Court is one of the most aggressive bodies anywhere in the democratic world for censoring political dissent.
They often ignore the law in doing so.
They just frequently send out notices with no due process, no trial to every social media platform with a list of people that they say cannot be heard on those platforms.
And even though a lot of these powers were supposed to be unique to the 2022 election, when we were told that the Brazilian Supreme Court needed better, more controls than ever over political speech to safeguard the integrity of the election, to protect it from disinformation,
In a lot of ways, even with that election done and over almost a full year ago, in fact, over a full year ago, their censorship orders are continuing to escalate and Rumble is inundated with constant demands and orders that they censor all sorts of Brazilians who have fled to Rumble as the only place where they can be heard.
Obviously, Rumble doesn't want to be in the business of banning dissidents.
They, in fact, were created to do exactly the opposite.
So a year and a half ago when the French government came to Rumble and said, you either remove Russian state media, RT, and Sputnik, or we will ban you in France.
Rumble said we would rather not be available in France.
Sue you then obey your unjust censorship orders and if you go try it access rumble in France You've got a note saying rumble is not available in France as the rumble now goes to the French court system Trying to win the right to platform anybody that they want and not to have to take orders from the French government that is something rumble has done repeatedly when the British government
Tried to pressure and coerce Rumble to cut off Russell Brand because of anonymous media claims that he engaged in sexual assault many years ago against various women.
Charges, by the way, that have never turned into formal criminal charges.
They may at some point, but they haven't yet.
Rumble stuck their middle finger up at those British officials and said, you're not going to tell us who we can have on our platform.
We're not going to punish people.
who haven't been convicted of any crimes just based on the say-so of the media.
So they've really demonstrated their commitment over and over.
And now they've done the same thing in Brazil.
Here, if you were in Brazil and you try an Axis Rumble as of today, this is the notice that you get, very similar to the one in France.
Quote, note to users in Brazil.
Because the Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in Brazil.
We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon.
Now, what really is needed at some point is for a major big tech platform like Twitter under Elon Musk Which says it's devoted to the cause of free speech or YouTube or Facebook to unite and say to a country, whatever country, as a signal to the rest, if you're going to try and control what political speech we can and can't permit, we're just not going to be available in your country.
And you can deal with your citizens and their rage and anger over the fact that they now can't use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Rumble.
So far they're unwilling to do that.
Rumble is the one that, even though they're the smallest of those, seems to be willing to bear the brunt of this crusade.
But what this really shows is that even though we are really inculcated in the West to believe that we are free, that we live in a democratic world, we call ourselves a democratic world, this censorship regime has advanced to a point that you can almost not overstate.
The amount of control that Western governments have seized, and I include Brazil in that as part of the democratic world, and systematized, is beyond what four years ago anybody would have ever imagined.
The first test case for this was Alex Jones and Malia Nopoulos.
When Facebook and Google and Twitter got together and banned those two, expecting that most people wouldn't care because of who it was, and everybody cheered, and now this system is with us, and it predictably expanded, not just in the United States, but in multiple countries all over the world.
And one of the reasons we're so proud to be on Rumble, one of the reasons we hope you will support Rumble, both through supporting our show, but also supporting the Rumble platform itself is because they are genuinely committed, even at times when they have to sacrifice their own economic self-interest to combat this censorship regime. even at times when they have to sacrifice their own It is not just part of their business plan, it is part of their DNA, of their moral crusade.
And there are lots of ways to support Rumble, watching shows obviously when you can watch them on Rumble instead of somewhere else, patronizing advertisers, supporting the shows through independent journalism, through subscriptions and memberships and the like.
But this is a very important case.
There are a lot of Brazilian dissidents who use Rumble and obviously the Brazilian people are now going to say that there's yet another service saying to Brazil, we refuse to enter your market because you just don't afford basic freedoms.
We need more of this.
We need more of these kinds of crusades.
I can guarantee you, guarantee you, That as the 2024 election approaches in the United States, and as more and more elections approach in the EU, this is going to severely escalate.
And the few places left on the internet that are devoted to free speech are the ones whose importance can really not be overstated.
And as I said, this is our last show for 2023.
We're going to be back on January 2nd of 2024, so right after the holiday.
We also have a debate that we're doing, that I'm doing, in I believe Austin, Texas on The events of January 6.
I don't know if we can Publicize this yet or not, but it's a event that is tentatively scheduled to be myself and Alex Jones on one side Arguing about January 6 and how it's been wildly exaggerated into some sort of Historic insurrection that merits all sorts of criminality and changes to our body politic and then on the other side former congressman Joe Walsh
Who ironically called for violence in 2016 if Trump didn't win and then became a never-Trump conservative and really a Democratic Party liberal and also the YouTuber Destiny arguing that I think January 6th is some sort of moment of grave significance.
We're gonna be able to livestream that debate.
I think it's being hosted by Zero Hedge.
We'll have the details for you.
We'll give them as the date approaches, so look forward to that.
We hope you have a great Christmas, a great holiday, a great New Year.
We really appreciate those of you who have been watching our show and making it a success, and we look forward to seeing you back on January 6th at our regular time of 7 p.m.
