More Israel Officials Call for Ethnic Cleansing as US Escalates Red Sea Attacks. PLUS: Mehdi Hasan Firing & Pat McAfee Controversies Expose Crumbling Corporate Media Prestige
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the U.S.-funded war in the Middle East continues to escalate in very serious and potentially unpredictable ways.
Both US and British forces once again engaged in many fighters in the Red Sea, intercepting what the New York Times called today, quote, one of the largest barrages yet of drones and missiles fired from Houthi controlled areas of Yemen.
It is not hyperbole to say that this is quickly turning into a third war in which the Biden presidency has involved the United States.
First, the proxy war against Russia and Ukraine.
Then the U.S.
armed and funded Israeli destruction of Gaza, and now this increasingly intense military engagement with the Houthi militia in Yemen.
More escalation from the Israel-Gaza war is quite possible, one might even say likely, particularly with the ongoing exchange of bombs on a virtually daily basis now between Israel and Hezbollah in both Lebanon and northern Israel.
The Iraqi government, at least publicly, is demanding the U.S.
leave its country, furious over a drone attack near Baghdad.
And Israel continues, at will, to bomb Syria, where the United States, for reasons nobody will explain, continues to have bases, despite the Syrian government wanting those bases gone.
The backdrop for all of this is that from the start of the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, the United States decided to treat this war the way it treated the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Not as a war between foreign countries on the other side of the world, but as an American war.
As a result, every escalation risk in that region is, by definition, an escalation risk for the United States.
A country which is already involved in fighting in that region with no congressional approval of any kind, which is to say, illegally and unconstitutionally.
All of this takes place as the destruction of civilian life in Gaza by the Israeli military reaches all new levels of historic horrors.
Even the Israeli media is now escalating their rhetoric about the horrors that are taking place in Gaza on a virtually unprecedented scale, at least for modern warfare.
While Americans were told by their media from the start that the purpose of the Israeli war in Gaza was very specific and focused, namely to, quote, destroy Hamas, Israeli officials, when speaking in Hebrew, continued to admit that their war aim is something altogether different and much more expansive.
Namely, after killing more and more Gazan civilians to make life in Gaza so uninhabitable for human beings that they are forced to leave that area so that Israel can then annex it, reconstruct it, and make it its own.
That is what the United States is paying for, an Israeli war not to destroy Hamas, but to ethnically cleanse Gaza in order to take that land that nobody in the world recognizes as belonging to Israel.
Israeli officials just now say this with great regularity.
At the same time, the Anti-Defamation League today released a new report that purported to once again prove that there is a grave crisis in the United States of exploding bigotry, namely anti-Semitism.
Yet an analysis of that report shows that the ADL, in order to accomplish that outcome, is counting as, quote, anti-Semitic acts, any rallies or any protests that include opposition to Israeli action in Gaza or a defense of a Palestinian cause, whether or not such protests feature any expression of hostility against Jews at all.
In sum, all of this is becoming the single most consequential and the costliest foreign policy of the Biden administration, even more so than the two year long proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, one that has not only placed the United States squarely on the side of Gaza's destruction,
but also one that is risking a serious expansion of that conflict, and most importantly one that by design is continuing to transform the foundational rights and political framework of the United States and of Americans here at home.
There is no excess of coverage possible for a conflict of this significance and we'll examine all of these latest developments.
Then two interesting media controversies have exploded into public view this week, though very different at first glance, Both speak volumes about the rapid and glorious collapse of corporate media influence.
One involves the former NFL punter Pat McAfee, who built his own massive online following of young sports fans at the same time that the Disney-owned ESPN has been bleeding those kinds of viewers.
That caused ESPN to pay McAfee $85 million to move his independent show to ESPN, where just this week McAfee publicly attacked one of the ESPN's most influential and powerful executives in the harshest way imaginable.
Only for ESPN, despite a history of severely punishing any employees who speak ill of other employees, to do nothing about it because they realize it is McAfee and not ESPN or Disney who have all the leverage.
Meanwhile, at MSNBC, Mehdi Hasan first had his weekend show, which also appeared on the streaming service Peacock.
Probably none of you have heard of it.
Barely anybody watched it, but he did have a show, a daily show on Peacock.
He had a Sunday night show on MSNBC, and that show got canceled within the last couple of months.
And then Mehdi Hasan announced this week that either voluntarily or because he's being forced to, he's leaving the network altogether.
Under circumstances that almost every commentator speaking about this departure has simply assumed was caused by Mehdi Hassan's harsh and vocal criticisms of the Israeli government and his particularly acrimonious questioning of a top Israeli official.
Something that, according to his defenders, they say that is not permitted at MSNBC.
Now, while many of Hassan's supporters in the media assert Definitively, that this was the cause of his cancellation and of his ultimate outstore from MSNBC, Hassan himself has notably remained very meek and very quiet about the entire episode, never once complaining about MSNBC's restrictions on him.
In fact, to the contrary, to the extent that Hassan has expressed his views about any of this at all, he has heaped praise on the network that, according to his own supporters, have unjustly canceled him.
Both of these episodes say a great deal about the serious constraints that exist inside corporate media outlets, restraints that anyone wishing to work inside of these corporations must obey.
But it also says a lot, and I think this is very positive, about the rising power and influence of independent media and how those who attract their own audience, independent of corporate and legacy branding, are starting to wield more and more power in the media landscape.
We'll examine both stories to highlight what they reveal about the state of both corporate media and independent media.
As viewers of this show know, there are a few causes that I think are more important than building up truly independent media.
Independent media that can both exist independent of the constraints imposed by corporate media, but at the same time can have a great consequence by reaching a larger audience.
One of the prerequisites for that is the preservation of free speech on the internet, which is why that is our top cause.
But there's a lot of interesting developments rapidly unfolding that show the real power and potential of independent media to subvert the orthodoxies and pieties of corporate media.
And I think both of these episodes in different ways illustrate that, so we want to take a look at each.
Before we get to the show, a few program notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
In February of 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies immediately announced that they would treat that war as their own, that they would be responsible for arming and financing and funding.
Ukraine, that they would stand behind Ukraine until victory belonged to that country, until all Russian troops were expelled from Ukrainian soil.
Here we are two years later.
There's almost no chance that any of those war objectives are to be achieved.
But it created a very significant debate in the United States about why it is that the United States should consider a foreign war, even of an ally, which is what Kiev is.
It does the bidding of the United States.
Why the United States should consider these foreign wars to be wars that the United States is duty-bound and obligated to finance, even while their own citizens continue to struggle.
From the very first moment that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, and obviously that was not the beginning of the conflict.
This is a conflict that has been going on for decades.
The United States did exactly the same thing.
It announced that we were going to treat Israel's war as our war.
We were going to fund it and arm it.
And yet there has been far less debate over whether that's a wise policy than the similar policy that Biden announced for Ukraine, especially given that the opposition to the war in Ukraine came primarily from the American right, most of whom have been vehemently and I would say quite intensely supportive of the Biden administration's decision to arm and finance Israel's war, again, despite the fact that millions of Israeli citizens
Have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans.
Americans are being told they have to finance this foreign war, even though Israelis have, in many instances, more benefits, more opportunities, higher standards of living, five years higher life expectancy than American citizens.
And there's not very much debate taking place about that.
That has become particularly urgent now because as was feared and I think even predicted, we interviewed a lot of people at the start of the war who warned of this, the capacity for an escalation of this conflict beyond just Israel and Palestine to include a whole variety of other enemies of Israel in that region was not just theoretically possible but quite high.
And one of the things that the Biden administration did immediately beyond committing to funding Israel's war and to providing the arms for it was it deployed aircraft carriers and other heavy military forces in that region specifically to either deter any further attacks or involvement of the war with Israel by other countries and other parties or to fight against those other parties in the event that they choose to do so.
And that is exactly what has been happening.
The conflict between the Israelis and the enemy of theirs on their northern border with Hezbollah, which is a far more sophisticated fighting force than Hamas.
They have tens of thousands of precision rockets that can reach very specific targets in Tel Aviv.
They are a serious fighting force, Hezbollah is.
That conflict seems to be increasing in terms of its intensity.
The United States has made clear that they very much oppose any Israeli effort to escalate the war to include Hezbollah.
The Israelis have made clear that they don't care what the United States wants, even though the United States is funding the war.
And as a result, Israel is increasingly bombing Hezbollah targets and Hezbollah is bombing targets in northern Israel as well.
They're far from unleashing the full force that they could unleash, but every day it seems to get a little bit more and more serious.
And as is always the problem, anything can go wrong, anything unpredictable can happen, and that's how escalation typically takes place.
And the United States is already in the region, specifically in part, to deter or fight against a Hezbollah faction if it really goes to all-out war with Israel.
So the United States is already exposed to that greater involvement in that region, even though there's been no congressional approval for that.
There's been no congressional authorization to use military force for that purpose.
But probably the most serious effort to engage in combat thus far, and there has been combat, is the effort of the United States to directly confront Yemeni militias.
Yemeni militias specifically composed of the Houthis, who are a militant group inside Yemen that is heavily armed and trained, often by the Iranians.
And remember, the United States spent many years, along with the Saudis, our close friend and ally and partner, even though we lecture the world about how we stand opposed to autocracy and tyranny, and we believe in spreading freedom and democracy.
That was why we said we were in Ukraine.
We are partners with the most savage regimes on the planet, beginning with Saudi Arabia.
And we spent years helping the Saudis bomb into smithereens the country of Yemen and specifically the Houthis.
And finally, within the last year, there has been a detente, a freezing of that conflict.
And yet now the United States is risking a reigniting of it by continuously threatening the Yemenis that the United States will once again bomb Yemen if the Yemenis don't stop their attacks on commercial shipping inside the Red Sea that they believe are connected to Israel and the United States, the two companies they, the countries they hold most responsible for the destruction of Gaza in whose name they're launching these attacks.
Jesus.
So here you see a direct attack on the United States militarily.
Solely because the United States has decided to tie itself at the hip to Israel, and while Yemen may not seem like the most formidable country militarily, they have proven they can do a lot of damage in that region, which is why the Saudis were so eager to bomb them, fail to destroy them, consider The Houthis are a threat to the Saudis.
The Emiratis consider them that as well.
And there's a serious risk of major regional escalation and a much greater degree of conflict involved in the United States military, again, against a country that we are not at war with and that the United States Congress has not authorized military force.
But it shows how many costs we are incurring, how much risk we are willing to undertake in order to, quote, stand with Israel.
And I continue to insist that we examine the question of why that's in the interest of American citizens, which was the question I asked over and over again about Ukraine as well.
Why is it in the interest of American citizens for the United States to spend so much money in spent and depleted stockpiles and risk its soft power in the world in order to stand with Ukraine and fuel that war against Russia?
It's certainly in the interest of the arms industry, whose stock has exploded and continues to explode with this new conflict, but how is it in the interest of American citizens, ordinary American citizens, to risk a major escalation with a war in the Middle East, all to defend or stand with Israel?
Here's the New York Times today giving a sense for what this escalation risk is.
The headline, the U.S.
and the U.K.
shoot down, quote, complex Houthi attack in the Red Sea.
So I'm emphasizing again, this is not a theoretical risk.
This is basically a combat, a war that is already taking place, albeit on a smaller scale, between the Yemenis and the United States.
The United States and its allies are weighing how to shut down attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia against commercial ships in the Red Sea, after American and British officials said on Tuesday that their warships had intercepted one of the largest barrages yet of drones and missiles fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. after American and British officials said on Tuesday that their
The Houthi attacks, in solidarity with Hamas in its war against Israel, have forced the world's largest shipping companies to reroute vessels away from the Red Sea, creating delays and extra costs felt around the world through higher prices for oil and other imported goods.
The Biden administration and a number of international allies said last week that That they would hold the Houthis responsible for the attacks, a warning that suggested the government may be considering retaliatory strikes on Houthi territory in Yemen, military officials said.
Rather than back off, the Houthis appear to have stepped up their attacks.
Now, that is about as clear of a picture as can possibly be painted of the very real possibility that the United States may find itself yet again in a war in the Middle East, the thing that we all agreed we were fighting way too many of.
And in this case, it's all in order to defend the foreign country called Israel.
Apparently, arming them and paying for their war and paying for their military every year is not enough.
We are now required, apparently, to go to war against Israel's enemies in the region as well.
Now, I know that a lot of people got convinced by the horrors of October 7th and the emotional reaction that it provoked.
And I talked about this the first and second week of that October 7th attack, about how horrific it was, how I've watched people who I have in my life and who I've had in my life for many years, who have often been apolitical or indifferent to Israel, even critical of it, overnight become highly radicalized by that attack.
And they became convinced that the Israeli war was noble because the purpose that the Israelis claimed they were pursuing with this war was, quote, to destroy Hamas, the group that perpetrated that attack that so many people found morally reprehensible, including myself.
The problem is, is that, like, so often happens Claims about the objective of a war either morph into something much greater as the war goes on and hatred levels increase, or the objective of the war was simply different from the objective that was presented to the public to make the war more palatable.
And what we have seen over the past month or six weeks, and I believe the reason for this is that the Biden administration has continued to say
That while they're willing to express some concerns about the amount of civilian destruction in Gaza, that they believe the Biden administration does, that the fault for this lies with Hamas, and that there is no circumstance, there is nothing the Israelis can do, that will cause Joe Biden even to consider cutting off U.S.
money and U.S.
weapons that are flowing to Israel.
And obviously, and we've seen this before in so many other contexts, if you tell somebody that you're going to continue to support them, no matter what they do, unconditionally, then obviously they're not going to listen to any grievances that you have, because you've already said, even if they ignore your grievances, the aid that they want is going to continue to flow.
This has been the major mistake of the American left.
The American left has all sorts of grievances and claims against the Democratic Party, and yet the American left, most of it, simultaneously says, at the end of the day, we so fear the Republican Party, we so fear Donald Trump and his movement, that no matter what you do, Democratic Party, we're always going to consider you better than the alternative, and we're always going to continue to vote for you, no matter what you do.
And the Democrats hear that and they say, well, the left is on lockdown.
The left is under control.
We don't need to listen to the left.
They can whine and complain all they want.
They've already told us that we can ignore all their grievances.
They're going to vote for us anyway.
So let's instead pay attention to the concerns and grievances of centrist Democrats or independents who may or may not vote for us.
Those are the people whose grievances we have to care about.
They may actually withhold their support.
The American left already said they would never will.
They're foot soldiers for the Democratic Party.
And then they wonder why they have no power.
That's just basic negotiating.
Prior to my career as a journalist, I was a lawyer and I did litigation.
And as part of litigation, you, of course, try and negotiate the settlement of a lot of lawsuits.
And the first and most basic principle of negotiations is that if you go into a negotiation And you know the other side is unwilling to walk away, that they are desperate for a deal, or they're not willing to walk away no matter what, you have all the power and the leverage.
Because as long as they're not willing to walk away, they just are desperate for a deal.
You can lowball them.
You don't have to give them anything.
And so when the Biden administration and Biden officials say, yeah, sometimes we're pretending to be concerned about some of what you're doing, some of the excesses, like destroying 80% of residential infrastructure and the sewage and the electricity and the hospital system in Gaza that make it uninhabitable.
We have to say we're concerned about that because our voters want to hear that.
But don't worry, we're always going to continue to give you all the money and all the weapons you want.
Obviously, these concerns are going to be ignored.
And it has emboldened the Israelis to become much more honest publicly about what their real intention is with this war.
So often, governments or factions have a certain goal that they cannot achieve because they don't have the necessary pretext, the necessary trigger to make it happen.
All kinds of neocons wanted to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s, but they couldn't find a sufficient justification to do it.
9-11 came along.
They immediately saw the potential to exploit 9-11 in order to make that happen.
And lo and behold, they got their invasion of Iraq, which they justified through 9-11.
This is exactly what has been happening in American domestic politics as well, where the Democratic Party and Biden allies, before January 6th, wanted to find ways to criminalize the Trump movement, to criminalize what they called right-wing extremist groups.
They couldn't do it.
There was no triggering event.
January 6th happened.
They immediately saw the potential.
They exaggerated what it was.
They called it an insurrection.
And then they got to criminalize The movement of Donald Trump's supporters.
That's how censorship works.
Every time there's a crisis, they exploit it to censor more and more, something they want to do prior to the crisis.
And before October 7th, the much more extremist coalition that Benjamin Netanyahu relies upon to govern Israel was very clear.
That they don't care about a two-state solution anymore.
They don't believe in a two-state solution.
They were actually eager to annex Gaza and annex the West Bank and make clear that those lands belong to Israel and not to the Palestinians as the entire world sees it.
But they had to be kind of coy about that because the entire rest of the world opposed it.
October 7th happened, and they realized they now had the justification for bombing Gaza into oblivion.
And at first they said, oh, don't worry, the goal here is just to destroy Hamas.
But as the war went on, it became clearer and clearer that the bombs were not reserved for Hamas, but were intended to destroy civilian life in Gaza, and Israelis are becoming increasingly explicit and honest about the real goal of this war, which is to render Gaza so uninhabitable for civilian life that Gazans are forced
To leave that land, to go to the Sinai in Egypt, to get other countries to accept them on humanitarian grounds.
We're now facing the possibility that 500,000 more Gazans can die of treatable diseases, or even starvation.
That is 25% of the Gazan population.
And that's going to start to place pressure on other governments to say, well, we need to take these people in so they don't all perish.
And the Israelis are saying that's what we want.
We want them gone so we can take that land.
There's so many examples we've been showing you over the last several weeks.
Here today is the Israeli minister of communications.
He's speaking in Hebrew, but there is an English translation, the accuracy of which we confirmed with a fluent Hebrew speaker.
And so I'm just going to show you what the, again, this is not some backbencher in the Israeli parliament.
None of these statements come from those.
They come from the most influential members of the Netanyahu government.
Here's the Israeli Minister of Communication saying on January 9th, what the Israeli goal is in Gaza.
Quote, we certainly need to encourage emigration.
So that there's as little pressure as possible inside the Gaza Strip from people... We need to encourage immigration so there's as little pressure as possible from people inside the Gaza Strip.
They're uninvolved, but they're not exactly lovers of Israel, and they educate their children to embrace terror.
And we'd like to see, and we talked about this in government, there aren't any countries that want to take them in.
No one wants them, even if we pay a lot of money.
Voluntary immigration is important.
It doesn't in any way harm human rights and this war needs to continue and when it continues and then the interviewer asked so despite what we're hearing here from Blinken and remember the US government said we are vehemently opposed to the goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza of
Palestinians and trying to quote encourage them to voluntarily emigrate the interviewer asked him and this is on Israeli television So what we're hearing here from Blinken you're saying we should encourage voluntary migration That's the solution and then he says we should encourage voluntary migration and we should compel Them until they say they want it
Now, what Israeli officials have been promoting is a proverb that they say exists in Israel, which is, you tell someone to do something and they say no, and then you keep punishing them and punishing them and punishing them until they finally say that they want it, and then you call it voluntarily, even though all they're doing is complying with the orders that they were given in the first place.
None of the Palestinians want to leave Gaza.
That's their homeland.
They're fighting for the right to self-governance there.
What the Israelis are saying is we want to force them into quote-unquote voluntary migration by making it impossible for them to stay because we're killing so many of their children.
They face mass starvation and death by mass treatable disease including infections with no antibiotics or operations with no anesthesia.
And here he is admitting that that is the goal.
And the interviewer says, how is that supposed to happen?
And then he says, the war does what it does.
And then the interviewer said, meaning continue to pressure them using force, starvation, difficult conditions.
And he says, pressuring Hamas, not difficult conditions.
We do provide humanitarian aid to uninvolved people.
And then the interviewer says, but the conditions are difficult there.
And he says, yes, difficult conditions.
And they'll continue to be difficult for as long as we don't bring back the hostages and for as long as we haven't defeated Hamas.
So that is the real Israeli gold has nothing to do with destroying Hamas.
It's about driving the civilian population, first killing them and then driving the rest of them out of Hamas so that the Israelis can control that territory.
Now remember, we showed you this last night or the night before, the month before the October 7th attack in Israel by Hamas, The former head of the Mossad, who was chosen to lead the Mossad by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015, said that Israel is now becoming an apartheid state.
The fear of the Israelis is that at some point very shortly,
The Arab population between the river and the sea that the Israelis control, they occupy the West Bank, they blockade Gaza, and then they have Israelis, Arabs inside Israel, that the number of Israelis will outnumber the number of Jews in that region that Israel controls, and then that will be, by definition, apartheid, that a minority will govern and dominate a majority by denying them basic rights, the right to vote, the right to basic liberties,
And one of the ways to avoid that, to becoming an apartheid state, by definition, is to drive enough Arabs outside of that land so that they never become the majority.
That is absolutely part of what the Israeli government is saying it wants to do.
Now, when the U.S.
government, hearing all these statements, I just read one of them, there are countless of them, and again they predate October 7th, When the American government started hearing, oh, actually the real purpose of this war is to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the US government said, well, we don't support that.
We don't want any part of that.
But again, knowing that Joe Biden has said, we're not going to cut off aid no matter what you do, even if your goal is to ethnically cleanse, we may say we're opposed to it, but we're never going to cut off the weapons and money that we're giving you to make it happen.
The Israeli finance minister, Smotric, said on November 9th, American Secretary of State Blinken, welcome to Israel.
We greatly appreciate the U.S.' 's support for Israel, but as far as the existence in our country is concerned, we will always act according to the Israeli interest.
And so we will continue to fight with all our might to destroy Hamas and we will not transfer a shekel to the Palestinian Authority that will go to the families of the Nazis in Gaza and we will work to enable the opening of Gaza's gates for the voluntary immigration of refugees as the international community did toward the refugees from Syria and Ukraine.
How many times now are the Israelis standing up and saying, we know that you, the Americans, are giving us the money for this war, and we know you're giving us the weapons for this war, and we thank you for that, but we're going to do whatever we want even if you tell us it harms American national security.
Why would any American citizen, let alone an American citizen that has claimed that their ideology and foreign policy and about the world is putting America first, Be comfortable accepting that kind of exploitative relationship with a foreign government that says you're going to pay for our wars, you're going to arm our wars, and we're going to do things even if you tell us we shouldn't because it harms you and your national security.
Only Israel could possibly do that and maintain the support of the majority of Americans.
It is an Israel exception to every principle.
Now, again, just to give you a sense of how common this is, here was the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on November 5th, 2023, with the headline, The Israeli Government's Tender Souls Who Call for an Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza.
Do you remember at the start of October 7th and the first couple weeks of October 7th, the American media made a gigantic deal out of some comments by some random street protesters at some pro-Palestinian rally or some statement signed by obscure college students they had to turn to these obscure and powerless people to try and claim
That the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli position was so offensive and extreme?
You don't have to go to obscure street protesters marching in defense of Israel or college students who are supportive of Israel, though you can certainly find these sentiments there.
You go to the top levels of the Israeli government, that's where you find calls for ethnic cleansing and admissions if that's the real sport of the war.
Here's what Haaretz said, quote, the post by Illinois, the minister of heritage of absolutely nothing, began with the pastoral line, quote, the Northern Strip, more beautiful than ever, bombing and flattening everything.
Received much media attention.
The editor in chief of The Economist even mentioned it.
Yes, because a high Israeli government official said the purpose of the war in Gaza was not to destroy Hamas, but was to flatten Gaza.
Quote, the responses were unequivocal and rightly so.
An Israeli cabinet minister called openly for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
The proposal, in short, is to carry out a transfer of all Gaza residents to Sinai.
That is the war that the United States is paying for.
That is the war that the United States is arming.
That is not the war that the American citizenry was told that it was supporting.
But the Israelis have become more and more emboldened by the obvious refusal of the Biden administration to challenge or confront the Israelis in any way.
And not only are we willing to tie ourselves at the hips to the Israelis when it comes to this conflict that the world is increasingly turning against, And even now countries are joining South Africa in the formal complaint before the International Court of Justice, that what the Israelis are doing is war crimes and ethnic cleansing and genocide.
In Gaza, not only are we dealing with all that and incurring all those costs, but we are now facing the likelihood of multiple other Middle East wars, the exact kind that we all agreed, basically, we had to stop fighting, to focus on China to turn to the Asia Pacific, Not to fall further into debt?
Remember when we finally left Afghanistan after 20 years and the Taliban marched right back into power as though nothing had happened?
The Chinese produced a video saying, while you were spending $2 trillion on this war in Afghanistan that accomplished nothing, we spent $800 billion to build this incredibly efficient and impressive high-speed rail, highly modern, that connected all of our cities and enables a level of commerce that is unthinkable for the United States with its collapsing infrastructure.
These are the choices the United States has been making as compared to China, which you may notice isn't funding other countries wars, isn't invading other countries, isn't occupying other countries, isn't bombing other countries.
They're doing things like forging peace deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia and building hospitals and infrastructure in Africa in order to get the world on its side and its global commercial competition with China.
And no matter how many times Americans say, we're tired of all these wars, in abstract, it is incredibly easy, evidently, for the US government and its media allies to convince huge numbers of Americans to support every new war that is presented to them.
They had no trouble getting Americans to support the financing of the war in Ukraine.
And they had even less trouble getting Americans to support all of this.
Now, as we've been endlessly reporting on and emphasizing, the implications of this war are not confined just to the Middle East.
There has been a transformation in American political life, in American free speech, in the level of speech freedom that is permitted on American college campus, because from the beginning there was a claim that was asserted
That while we can scoff at claims from black people that they suffer systemic racism and need protection, and we can scoff at a similar claim from immigrants that they face systemic Bigotry and need protection and we can scoff out the claims from LGBTs that they face similar obstacles and hostility and we can scoff at similar claims from Muslims and Native Americans that they too need special protection against bigotry.
We finally found a group that actually is persecuted in the United States and that really does need special protection that really is endangered.
American Jews.
Who seem to be doing extremely well in the United States if you look at every metric.
Up there with other groups like Indian Americans and Korean Americans and Chinese Americans, but apparently the last three months has decided and discovered that there's only one truly persecuted group in the United States, truly persecuted minority group in the United States, and those are American Jews.
American Jews at Harvard, American Jews at Princeton, at Penn.
These are the truly endangered students, the truly endangered people who need censorship, who need all kinds of special protection.
Two American presidents of major universities have been fired in the name of this crisis.
Of the kind of victimhood narrative and the kind of safety narrative that the American right has spent years keeping scorn on.
And earlier today, the ADL published its second report in the last three months designed to prove that there continues to be rising anti-Semitism in the United States on a incomparable scale.
And the Jewish newspaper, The Forward, that is very supportive of Israel, that is a Jewish-owned newspaper filled with Jewish journalists, to its great credit, took this report from the ADL and analyzed it and discovered that it is deceitful at its core, that it is manipulating the statistics in very flagrant ways in order to reach these conclusions.
Here is the headline in the forward.
ADL counts 3,000 anti-Semitic incidents since October 7th, two-thirds of which were tied to Israel.
Quote, the group changed its criteria from prior tallies to include more anti-Zionist events and rhetoric.
Quote, Jonathan Greenblatt, the group's chief executive, said in an embargoed news release that the count Which the group calculated as 360% higher than the same period in 2022, represented a threat to Jews, quote, unprecedented in modern history.
Can I just stop here and say the following?
I had a fairly conventional Jewish upbringing.
My entire family is Jewish, 100%.
My grandmother was an immigrant from Germany who fled the Holocaust.
My parents grew up in Brooklyn in the Bronx, in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn in the Bronx in the 1940s and 50s.
When I grew up in South Florida, I went to a school that had a very significant Jewish population.
Most of my friends in high school were Jewish.
Most of my lifelong friends in the United States are Jewish, who had very similar Jewish upbringings.
I have never one time in my life, never one time in my life, in the 38 years that I lived in the United States, from the time I was born until the time I moved to Brazil at the age of 37, 37 years, never once experienced a single anti-Semitic incident.
Not a comment, not a offhand remark, let alone any kind of attack.
And not only that, but every single person I know in my family, my friends, all have said the same thing.
The idea that American Jews are an endangered group, or worse, a singularly endangered group, to the point that American Jews now deserve special protection and set-aside job programs and censorship rules to shield them from hearing views that make them feel unsafe, is, and I mean this respectfully because I know a lot of people have been convinced to be scared,
By people who are demagoguing this issue greatly and spreading neurosis and fear is a laughable claim.
Of course there's a lot of anti-Semitism in the United States, there's a lot of anti-black racism in the United States, there's a lot of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, a lot of anti-trans and anti-gay animus in the United States.
But the American right has been correct, in my view, to say that a lot of this has been exaggerated by people with a vested interest in spreading these crises in the name of limiting free speech and demanding special privileges for membership in group-based identity.
And it's no less true of this latest attempt to do so on behalf of American Jews.
Here's what the Forward says about the study, quote, the ADL acknowledged in a statement to the Forward that it significantly broadened its definition of anti-Semitic incidents following the October 7th Hamas attack to include rallies that feature, quote, anti-Zionist chants and slogans, events that appear to account for around 1,300 of the total count.
And here on Twitter, the reporter Arno Rosenstein said the following, quote, it's not clear exactly how much this change in methodology, which was not initially disclosed, boosted the count.
But this is part of a consistent pattern where the ADL offers year over year comparisons that can't reasonably be compared year over year.
Because they have changed the methodology.
Now in other tweets that we don't have, I don't think, he was even clearer.
He said, what has happened is that the ADL is now counting, as an anti-Semitic incident, any protest or rally at which Israel is criticized or the pro-Palestinian cause is defended, even in the absence of any hostility expressed toward the Jewish people.
In other words, they're equating any criticism of Israel, the government of Israel, this foreign country, or a defense of the right of the Palestinians for statehood As inherently anti-semitic, counting that as an anti-semitic act, and that's how they are manipulating these statistics to claim that there's been this gigantic increase in the amount of anti-semitic incidents in the United States.
And all of this is being designed to usher in and justify the kinds of censorship measures we've covered, the set-aside programs that Ron DeSantis has advocated, The announcement by Palantir to set aside 180 jobs exclusively for American Jews.
It's not just an abstract claim, it's designed very specifically in part to scare the population into supporting Israel, but also in part to start to erode free speech rights and create set-aside programs for one group of people in the United States and in protection of one group, one foreign country.
And that's what makes it so pernicious.
This war, I know we've been covering it a lot, but it's interesting, I have not been covering this war any more than I covered the war in Ukraine, the American decision to fund and arm that war in Ukraine.
And I know that war had a lot more opposition, so people were happy that I was covering it so much.
This war is at least as consequential because it has even more domestic implications And a greater risk of escalation.
Obviously, the war in Ukraine has a great risk of escalation.
It's a proxy war against the greatest and the largest nuclear-armed power on the planet, Russia.
But when you're talking about the kind of fanaticism that the Middle East fosters over this conflict, and the propensity of the United States to fight foreign wars in the Middle East over many decades, the dangers are extremely obvious.
And they're already escalating.
And the question continues to be just like the question that I asked over and over for the war in Ukraine is which American citizens specifically are benefiting from having the United States finance and fund and arm Not just the Israeli war, but the Israeli military, which it does every year in the tune of billions of dollars, on top of the $14 billion that the Biden administration has now requested.
These are the kinds of foreign policy adventures and interference in other countries that I thought we were making progress into opposing.
And yet within the last two years, the Biden administration has taken two different wars and easily convinced the public and majorities in both parties to support it.
And while the war in Ukraine seems to be winding down, this war in the Middle East seems to be escalating both in terms of dangers in that region and the dangers for basic freedoms here at home.
All right, so obviously we are interested on this show in the changes that take place in corporate media because we regard the corporate media as one of the most toxic and destructive forces in American political life.
And the project of creating a counterweight to that corporate media is something that is not only important to us in terms of our journalistic focus, but also in terms of the actions that I try to take in terms of my own platform.
That's the reason why I went to Substack when I left The Intercept, because I saw that Substack was becoming a free speech platform designed to give writers the opportunity to earn a living outside of the corporate media without succumbing to the censorship demands from outside forces.
And I particularly saw that with Rumble, which is why I moved from Substack to Rumble to do this show and to do our reporting on Locals.
There's two really interesting controversies over the last week that I think vividly illustrate a lot of these dynamics.
So, as I said at the top of the show, Pat McAfee is a former NFL player who had a great deal of success attracting a huge and young audience through his YouTube program and his other independent media programs that cover the NFL and cover sports.
And as a result, ESPN decided that was the kind of audience they were bleeding.
ESPN can't attract that audience anymore just by being ESPN.
One of the really interesting dynamics is that people are becoming less and less faithful toward and trustworthy in corporate media brands, and instead are placing their faith in specific individuals, including many times, in fact, I would say most times, people who work outside of the corporate media.
Obviously, Joe Rogan is the best example of that, but there's so many others.
That's the growth of independent media.
To me, that's what it means.
And Pat McAfee in the sports world was one major example.
That's why ESPN threw $85 million at him over, I think, five years in order to get him to go to ESPN.
And obviously, Pat McAfee's view was, look, I'm making a ton of money independently.
I can say whatever I want.
So if I'm going to go to ESPN, I'm going to continue to say whatever I want and not be told by corporate bosses at ESPN and Disney, which owns ESPN, what I can and can't say.
Part of the show is that he has on, once a week, the Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who has become a very controversial figure during COVID.
Because he was somebody who was very critical of the vaccine.
He was skeptical of the vaccine.
He was unvaccinated.
He's been very critical of Dr. Fauci.
And he's basically become somebody who has become infatuated with independent media.
I was at an event where I was speaking maybe six months ago or a year ago in Miami.
He was there.
I saw him.
He called me over and told me he watches my show.
And he's obviously feeding on independent media.
And you can see that in a lot of the things he's saying.
And so he's gone on Pat McAfee's show, made very controversial comments in the past on ESPN now, not just on Pat McAfee's independent media show.
And one of the things he recently did was imply, jokingly, that Jimmy Kimmel was eager for the Epstein client list not to come out.
Because when Aaron Rodgers originally called for the Epstein client list to come out, Jimmy Kimmel, the ultimate voice of the liberal establishment, went on his show on ABC and mocked Aaron Rodgers for that.
And that's what Aaron Rodgers was talking about.
So Aaron Rodgers went on Pat McAfee's show on ESPN and made these kinds of comments about Jimmy Kimmel, who works for the same company.
ABC is the parent company, also owned by Disney.
They're both Disney properties, ABC and ESPN.
And here's what Aaron Rodgers said on that program.
Bring it up.
Bring it up, Foxy or somebody back there.
We have Super Bowl 58.
The emblem.
Put it on the screen.
And then bring up 57 and 56.
This has something to do with the Epstein list that came out?
That's supposed to be coming out soon.
That's supposed to be coming out soon.
Look at this guy, he's been waiting in his wine cellar.
I've been waiting in my wine cellar for this.
That's a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, are really hoping that doesn't happen.
Alright, obviously a clip from this particular program was run on Jimmy Kimmel's show whenever Aaron brought up the list and then Jimmy mocked him for it.
Aaron has not forgotten about that.
But here we are, sitting right in front of that nice bottle of scotch.
What do you say?
I'm waiting to celebrate something.
Oh, yeah.
He's been waiting for that.
That's the one.
He's been waiting for that.
Yeah, I'll tell you what, if that list comes out, I definitely will be popping some sort of bottle.
Hey, you've been calling for it for a few years now.
Anyone else notice this?
Oh.
Now, clearly he was referencing, jokingly, the fact that Jimmy Kimmel mocked Aaron Rodgers previously for calling for the release.
He didn't say Jimmy Kimmel was on the client list.
He just mocked the fact that Jimmy Kimmel, being the establishment hack that he is, the ultimate establishment hack, He thinks it's some sort of conspiracy theory.
He doesn't seem to want this list to come out.
And I don't know if you noticed, but as they broadcast this, the entire time there was this message underneath the program saying, warning this program is a collection of stooges talking about happenings in the sports world.
This doesn't represent ESPN or its bosses.
They were obviously being cautious.
As a result of all of this, what basically happened was that ESPN, an executive at ESPN, started leaking that the ratings for Pat McAfee's show wasn't very good.
Pat McAfee then came out and said that he knows who the executive at ESPN is who's trying to sabotage the show.
He called him a rat.
And this is the kind of thing that in the past would have immediately gotten someone fired from ESPN.
The attitude of ESPN always was the real power is the ESPN brand.
People who work for us are dispensable.
They only matter because they work for ESPN.
And obviously Pat McAfee does not think that for good reason.
He built up this gigantic audience on his own without ESPN, an audience that ESPN wanted.
And so he's essentially saying, I'm not here to abide by the rules of ESPN.
I'm going to criticize ESPN when I feel like it, because I know that I have all the leverage in the world, because even if they let me go, I have a very successful platform to return to, and ESPN needs me more than I need ESPN.
Now, this was something that ended up being discussed on CNN.
They brought in their media critic, Oliver Darcy, who, as I pointed out before, seems to have no purpose in life.
Other than to demand that social media platforms and corporations crack down on any kind of dissent from liberal orthodoxy, silence and fire the people who are expressing views that CNN dislikes and the liberal establishment dislikes.
And so here was CNN trying to shame Disney into either firing Pat McAfee or not allowing Aaron Rodgers on the air anymore.
Oliver Kimmel says that he would accept an apology from Rodgers.
He just spoke the quarterback on ESPN.
No apology?
What did he say?
No apology, Boris.
No surprise there either.
Kimmel said he wasn't anticipating one.
Look, Roger said that he understood why Kimmel would be mad if he made the accusation, but insisted he did not make this accusation.
He certainly did signal or suggest that Kimmel might be involved in the Epstein documents that were released over the last several days.
He was not.
What I think Rogers did do is he used his time to go on this anti-vaccine rant assailing Jimmy Kimmel for apparently standing with the medical community and the likes of Dr. Fauci during the pandemic.
Why don't we take a look at that?
He gave a platform to one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation during the COVID times, Dr. Fauci.
So in my opinion, you know, he ripped me about the Vax and that turns out to be an L on many occasions because the Vax was not safe and effective like we were told that it was in the beginning.
There are a lot of injuries now that we've seen related to the vaccine.
So in my opinion, you went after me.
That's fine.
You're a comedian.
Go for it.
Not offended.
But that was an L.
Do you see the premise embedded in all of this?
It's just not true.
The medical community would, of course, say that the vaccine was both safe and effective.
And at some point, do you see the premise embedded in all of this?
That whatever the establishment says is the gospel.
And because the establishment says it, because Dr. Fauci said it, that means it is true.
And anything that deviates from that or questions it is false.
It is, you know, I've talked before about how underappreciated it is, how twisted the situation in the United States is that the leading proponents of censorship are employees of corporate media outlets who call themselves journalists.
Because journalists traditionally have defended very robust protections for free speech and free press and have never advocated for censorship the way legalists.
Little tattletale journalists like Oliver Darcy and people like him do.
People who never break stories.
They just kind of whine this way.
They're like tattletales.
But it's even more remarkable that journalism, which is supposed to be adversarial to establishment power, has, at least in the corporate world, become the ultimate defenders of establishment power.
They genuinely believe, even though they're supposed to be skeptical of establishment pronouncements, That establishment pronouncements, by definition, represent the gospel truth.
And that not only does anyone who deviates from establishment pronouncements automatically is guilty of disinformation, it should not even be permitted.
How can anybody who goes into journalism, who calls themselves a journalist, have this mentality?
And yet this is the prevailing mentality.
In corporate media.
And now here's the coup de grace when he starts to demand that Disney put a stop to this and no longer permit it.
You have to wonder when ESPN and its parent company Disney, when they step in here, you know, Disney is at this point one of the only major media companies outside maybe Fox News that would allow this sort of dangerous anti-vaccine medical misinformation to be aired unchecked on their air.
And this isn't the first time Rogers has done this.
You know, he goes on these extended rants during his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, which is aired on ESPN.
For now, ESPN and Disney, they're staying silent and not commenting.
That's the grievance.
Disney has not intervened and told Pat McAfee that he can no longer permit opinions like this to be aired.
This is what the corporate media does.
This is what they're designed to do.
To enforce establishment orthodoxies, to try and censor any attempts to question it.
The exact opposite of what journalism is supposed to be about.
Now, even the New York Times today took notice of what I do think is a very important reality here.
In their headline, Pat McAfee's on-air slams of ESPN executives show a network power shift.
For decades, the biggest star at ESPN was ESPN.
That's changing as it transitions from cable dominance to a much less certain streaming future.
And it goes on to describe how basically Pat McAfee has an audience that neither ESPN or obviously CNN has anywhere close to having.
And this has changed the power dynamics where the individuals at the public trusts are actually the people who the audience places their faith in, no longer the corporate brand.
And that is a major indicia of progress in my view.
That these corporate brands have lost the trust and faith of the public to the point where they need to rely on people who the public has decided are actually trustworthy.
Now, it turned out, at least here, that apparently Disney did pressure Pat McAfee to announce that Aaron Rodgers will no longer be a guest on the show.
And there was some success there.
But in general, the balance of power has been in favor of Pat McAfee, and I think that really does represent the rising power of independent media as opposed to corporate media.
Now, and we've seen this many, many times.
There's so many people in independent media who are infinitely more influential, have a far greater audience size than people who work on these cable networks or even for digital outlets or for other corporate sites that the public simply no longer trusts.
Now here is a somewhat different story with a different outcome.
So as I mentioned, Mehdi Hassan had his show canceled by MSNBC.
And while it was true that Mehdi Hassan's ratings were pathetic, I mean, I would watch them.
I would look at MSNBC's ratings where Mehdi Hassan's show is on the air.
And he would have something like 30,000 people, 30,000.
Watching his show under the age of 55, which are the only recognizable audience members, that's the only one that networks can monetize, which is barely the size of a mid-sized YouTube program.
For the debate that we broadcast on Saturday night on January 6, without much promotion, We had an excess of 40,000 people watching, more than anyone who tuned in to MSNBC on Saturday night during Mehdi Hassan's show.
That's how much we're on Rumble, which is a platform still unknown to at least 50% of Americans.
And then you had that same debate streamed on many other outlets where the audience size was infinitely greater than any show Mehdi Hassan has done.
At the same time, though, it is true that Low ratings, pathetic ratings are the norm for MSNBC, especially their weekend shows and their shows on Peacock.
Nobody is watching any of these shows.
And so the question is, why was Mehdi Hassan removed from having a show?
And why was he ultimately forced out?
And the assumption of most of his defenders was that The reason is because he was constrained from speaking too harshly about Israel, something he did anyway, and as a result was taken off the air for it.
Now, if you look at the circumstantial evidence, you can certainly conclude that that's a plausible scenario.
But what's so interesting here is that Mehdi Hassan has not actually said that.
Many Hassan could easily go and start his own independent media platform at Substack or on YouTube or at Rumble and make a lot more money than he was making at MSNBC.
That's for sure.
Especially if he accompanied it by the admission that he was in a way censored.
And yet the reason Mehdi Hassan refuses to do that is because unlike so many people who have finally come to realize that you can be much more influential outside of corporate media, in fact, in a lot of ways, leaving corporate media is a prerequisite to building an audience that trusts you.
When I left The Intercept, the number of people reading my articles, the number of people who watch my show, the number of people who just in general across the political spectrum decided that I was trustworthy doubled and then tripled and then quadrupled and even more and hasn't stopped because when you're independent, when people understand that you're no longer subjected to the constraints of corporate media, Only then can you be trustworthy.
Only then can you really build a massive audience and have a lot of influence.
And yet, it really is still true that for some people, what they value most is the kind of artificial prestige that still does come from being able to be on television with these networks, even if nobody's watching.
One of the things we found on this show, we have heard from so many other people who have independent media outlet shows that have large audiences, as large as if not bigger than a lot of cable shows, is that very few politicians will come on your show to be interviewed if they know that you're going to interview them adversarially.
They'll come on your show if you want to interview them about something where you agree with them, but if it's a topic they know they're going to be grilled on, They generally won't go on those shows, but if CNN or MSNBC calls a Republican politician, a Republican politician will often go on MSNBC or CNN, even though they know they're going to be treated unfairly, because there's a prestige where they get to call their family and say, I'm going to be on CNN, I'm going to be on MSNBC, watch me.
There's still this kind of like reflexive craving for the approval of these corporate brands and it seems very obvious that Mehdi Hassan craves more than anything access to mainstream journalism and that's the reason why he's so unwilling even to claim or say that that was the reason he lost his job was because he went too far in Israel.
I mean if Mehdi Hassan is a journalist and that was part of why he lost his show, he certainly has an obligation to say that.
To say that a major corporation like NBC has within it major constraints on what people can say who are journalists about a major war that's taking place.
But he's too afraid to say it because he doesn't want to lose his access to the possibility to keep a mainstream job, which is cowardly and pathetic.
But that is still part of the dynamic, even as independent media grows and grows.
And here's the point I want to conclude on with this whole episode about Mehdi Hassan and Pat McAfee, which is, I have heard so many journalists say that they strongly believe, in fact, barely question it, That the reason that Mehdi Hassan lost his job at MSNBC was because he crossed the line that you're not allowed to cross in criticizing Israel too harshly.
And he was very adversarial in how he interviewed Israeli officials.
I've known Mehdi for a long time.
I played a major role in recruiting him to come to The Intercept.
I know that Mehdi's dream in life was to host an MSNBC show.
He was willing to do or say anything in order to make that happen.
He became a rabid partisan to the Democratic Party, which is the requirement to be there.
And yet he went over one line, which was Israel, and now he's not only had his show taken away, but he's out of MSNBC.
And I think what it's so interesting is that so many journalists, corporate journalists, are saying that Meti lost his job because he went too far in criticizing Israel without realizing what they're saying about how deeply corrupt corporate media is.
What they're essentially saying, which I believe 100%, based on everything I've seen, having one foot in corporate media over my career and one foot out, is that the only way You can stay in corporate media and work for them.
A condition for thriving in corporate media is that you have to stay within the lines, ideologically and politically, that they set.
And the minute you go outside of that line, no matter what, no matter how good your ratings are, you will lose your job, which is why Tucker Carlson is no longer on Fox News.
Because Tucker Carlson was becoming too much of a nuisance, in fact a threat, To Republican orthodoxy.
That's why when Tucker Carlson lost his job, so many cowardly Republican establishment members of Congress came forward and said how much easier their lives will be now that he's no longer on the air because he was too much of a dissident on things like Ukraine, and now we're seeing what he's saying on Israel.
And Tucker Carlson's job, just like every person's job in corporate media, is dependent upon their willingness to stay within very rigidly constructed lines about what people can and cannot say.
And they're essentially admitting that by saying about Mehdi Hassan that he lost his job for crossing that line in Israel, without realizing what he's saying about themselves.
The level of subservience to which they're willing to subject themselves to keep these jobs inside corporate media.
And I think more than anything, the reason why corporate media has lost the trust and faith in the public is because people know they're propaganda machines.
That they're heavily regimented.
Now when you say that, and I've heard many people hear that critique who work in corporate media, the thing they will always say is, look, that's a conspiracy theory.
Nobody has ever told me what to say.
I can say whatever I want.
And the person who has best responded to that and refuted it and explained why that is an irrelevant claim in terms of understanding how rigid the constraints are within corporate media politically and ideologically, how narrow the views are that you're permitted to express in order to keep your job there.
Was Noam Chomsky, who I know has become very controversial in recent years among many factions for comments he made on COVID.
But the reality is, in my view, Noam Chomsky is the most incisive critic of modern mass media, probably in the history of mass media.
His book, Manufacturing Consent, and the film on which it was based, I think, was the most important work for understanding the extreme constraints of pre-cable
Network News and how it's designed to promote propaganda and he was interviewed in 1996 by a BBC journalist who was scandalized by Noam Chomsky's suggestion that he is under all sorts of extreme ideologically and political constraints about what he's allowed to say in order to keep his job.
And this BBC journalist said to Noam Chomsky, you're crazy.
I have never been told.
I have to say things I don't believe.
And I want you to listen to how this exchange went, because to me, there's no more important or illuminating exchange that shows the reality of why corporate media is so corrupted, of why the only way you can work there and succeed within it Is if you turn yourself into a pro-establishment automaton the way that people like Oliver Darcy has become, who equates establishment decrees with truth.
Here's what Noam Chomsky tried to get this BBC reporter to understand and what I regard as a classic interview about how corporate media works.
It's a censoring organization.
Tell me how that works.
You're not suggesting that proprietors phone one another up or that many journalists get their copies spiked, as we say.
It's actually Orwell, you may recall, has an essay called Literary Censorship in England, which was supposed to be the introduction to animal form, except that it never appeared, in which he points out, "Look, I'm writing about a totalitarian society, but in free democratic England it's not all that different." And then he says, unpopular ideas can be silenced without any force.
He gives a two-sentence response, which is not very profound, but captures it.
He says two reasons.
First, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain things appear.
But second, the whole educational system, from the beginning on through, just gets you to understand that there are certain things you just don't say.
Well, spelling these things out, that's perfectly correct.
I mean, it's the first sentence is what we expand on.
This is what I don't get, because it suggests that, I mean, I'm a joke, people like me are self-censoring.
No, not self-centering.
There's a filtering system that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through.
It doesn't work 100%, but it's pretty effective.
It selects for obedience and subordination.
So stroppy people won't make it to positions of influence?
There'll be behaviour problems.
If you read applications to a graduate school, you'll see that people will tell you he doesn't get along too well with his colleagues.
You know how to interpret those things.
I'm just interested in this because I was brought up like a lot of people.
Probably post the Watergate film and so on, to believe that journalism was a crusading craft and that there were a lot of disputatious, stroppy, difficult people in journalism.
And I have to say, I think I know some of them.
Well, I know some of the best and best known investigative reporters in the United States.
I won't mention names, but whose attitude toward the media is much more cynical than mine.
In fact, they regard the media as a sham and they know and they consciously talk about how they try to Play it like a violin.
If they see a little opening, they'll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn't make it through.
And it's perfectly true that I'm sure you're speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained, have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power, a very self-serving view.
On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgment, but the better journalists, and in fact, the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture, and I think a very realistic one.
- How can you know that I'm self-sensory?
How can you know that journalists-- - I don't say you're self-sensory.
I'm sure you believe everything you're saying.
But what I'm saying is if you believe something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting. - So that last exchange is the point.
This journalist is saying, I don't say anything I don't believe.
I never get forced to say things that my corporate bosses tell me to say that I don't want to say.
I believe what I'm saying.
And Chomsky said, oh, I have no doubt that you believe everything you're saying.
My point is, if you didn't believe all these things, all these pro-establishment, pro-mides, you wouldn't be sitting in that chair.
They only hire unpurposed people who have a very subservient, pro-establishment, obedient personality.
That's especially true since journalism became corporatized and large corporations value, more than anything, an obedient, authoritarian personality.
And as long as people are willing to disbelieve things like what Oliver Darcy was saying, oh, once Dr. Fauci says something, that's the unvarnished truth and nobody can question it.
And the FBI and the CIA tell the truth.
And the words that we fight are noble.
They do believe that.
That's because they're the kinds of people who have been, as he said, groomed from childhood to have this very sort of establishment subservient mentality.
And these are the people media corporations deliberately hire.
Occasionally they get it wrong or somebody changes.
Tucker Carlson becomes much more radicalized in his views because of the things that he's saying.
And he goes from career TV person who went from CNN to MSNBC to Fox to somebody who can no longer be accommodated within the corporate media system because now his views are outside of those lines.
Unlike Mehdi Hassan, Tucker Carlson has been freely talking about the kinds of things he thinks he was doing and saying that caused him to get out of Fox because he doesn't have that desperation to stay within mainstream media outlets the way Mehdi Hassan does.
But every one of these stories and everything about corporate media and everything about independent media now illustrates this central fact that what corporate media exists to do is to promote establishment ideology, to defend establishment power.
There's nothing adversarial about it.
That's a fairy tale and a myth that they like to promote.
And you see all the time that their primary targets are people who are outside of the establishment system.
And more than anything, I believe that's the reason faith and trust has been lost in corporate media and that's the reason for the rise of the independent media and people who, inside independent media, are actually dissidents, are actually people questioning and challenging these establishment orthodoxies that are shielded and protected within corporate media and the good news about it
Is that while corporate media has not lost all of its influence, the trend is clearly that it's losing its influence while independent media and the dissent it permits within it are continuing to increase in power and influence as an alternative.
And ultimately, the only thing that can stop that, in my view, is the elimination of free speech on the Internet, which is why that is their primary tactic.
And I believe that anyone who believes in the right of dissent, the right to challenge establishment orthodoxy, has to have as their primary goal the preservation of free speech so that this independent media can continue to thrive.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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