Why Is Alexei Navalny's Death Being Depicted as So Vital for Americans—As Assange Faces Final “Life or Death” Extradition Appeal?
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Death Exploited for War (7:02)
Assange’s Last Chance (53:50)
Ending (1:18:16)
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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.
We took a week off, are very rested, and happy to be back with new live shows, and tonight, By far the biggest story of the last year, the last week rather, in the corporate media is the death of Alexei Navalny in a prison in Russia.
There's no question about that.
Almost every political leader in both parties and every corporate media outlet spoke of this event at great length with extreme emotional intensity, all in agreement that it was a historic event of immense proportion and gravity.
But it is worth asking, why was it depicted in this way?
What is it about Navalny's death exactly that makes it such a momentous moment in the United States and in American political and media discourse generally?
It is, after all, hardly news that Russia is authoritarian and intolerant of dissent, nor is it news or uncommon for political dissidents to die in prison or to be killed in gruesome ways by authoritarian governments.
Such events happen with great regularity.
Not just in countries that are enemies of the United States, but in some of the countries to which the United States is closest, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
When was the last time you heard any American media mention of the deaths of Egyptian dissidents or Saudi dissidents in those countries?
Let alone day after day after day of intense media coverage.
Even more notably, actual American citizens, the citizens of our country, are killed with frequency by other countries.
And one would think, wouldn't one, that the death of Americans would attract at least as much indignation and attention by our political leaders and media outlets as the death of Russian dissidents?
Ukraine, the country which has received more American money than any other country by far over the last two years, twice arrested the American citizen, Gonzalo Lira, explicitly for the crime of criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and questioning the U.S.
native narrative about that war, what the Ukrainians call the crime of spreading Russian disinformation.
And then, exactly as Lira predicted would happen, he ended up dying in a Ukrainian prison of pneumonia at the age of 55, something his father told me in an interview last week was extremely unlikely for this previously healthy, relatively young man.
How much of American media indignation or political concern or anger did we hear about the death of Gonzalo Lira in a Ukrainian prison?
Israel has twice killed American citizens under extremely suspicious circumstances.
Last month, the IDF shot and killed a U.S.
teenager, the Louisiana-born Tafik Ajak.
The year before, the Israelis shot and killed the American Shereen Abu-Akhaleh in Gaza, first denying they did it, then admitting they did it but saying it was accidental, only for an independent investigation to conclude that the killing was intentional.
I'd bet anything you don't remember the names of either of those American citizens because the media attention paid to the killing of our own citizens by allied countries such as Ukraine or Israel has no political or propagandistic value and is thus basically ignored.
Then there's the case of Julian Assange who has been effectively in prison since 2012 when he received political asylum from Ecuador explicitly against U.S.
persecution.
And he has been actually in prison since 2018 in a high security prison in the U.K.
known as the British Guantanamo.
The only reason he's in prison is because the U.S.
government seeks to extradite him and try him on espionage charges for the crime of reporting on the secret crimes of the American government.
This week, Assange will face his final attempt to convince a British court not to extradite him to the United States.
While the US media and political class obsesses on civil liberties in Russia, they ignore, when they're not cheering it, what all civil liberties and press freedom groups agree is the gravest threat to press freedom in the West, namely the attempt to put Assange in an American person for life where he will almost certainly die.
We'll tell you the latest on this story and we'll dig into the context of why this obsessive focus on Navalny has real propagandistic value.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
When virtually the entire American corporate media unites with the political leaders of both political parties in every branch of government, and they all read from the same exact script, making the same exact point with the same amount of intensity, you should be asking yourself why that is.
especially if the topic that they're all talking about day after day after day that they want you to think is the most important topic that you can possibly get angry about or possibly focus your emotions on, where it's not immediately obvious why it's the most important thing.
Such was the case for the last week, this incessant, highly emotional coverage that we heard about the death of the Russian citizen Alexei Navalny in a prison in Russia.
The Russian government claims that the Russian dissident was guilty of all sorts of corruption and the like, and the West claims that he was imprisoned by virtue of his criticism of Vladimir Putin and his leading the opposition to the Russian leadership.
The U.S.
government, Joe Biden, has claimed that Vladimir Putin personally is responsible for and ordered the killing of Nalbani in this prison.
Evidence for that is so far non-existent, but we can do the show and just accept the claims of the US government is true just for the sake of argument and then ask ourselves why it is that the repression and the practices of the Russian government in terms of how it treats a Russian citizen is supposed to be the story that American citizens, all the way on the other side of the world,
are supposed to focus all of their attention and their emotional energy and their anger and their rage to seemingly the exclusion of everything else that affects their lives, including things that their own government is doing, things are supposed to focus all of their attention and their emotional energy and their anger and their rage to Other governments that are allied with the U.S.
government are doing to their own dissidents, including sometimes even to American citizens, things that our government is doing to its own dissidents.
We're supposed to forget about all of that and for some reason focus on something that we've been told is true for the last nine decades as Americans, namely that the government in Russia is authoritarian and intolerant of dissent.
Why is this the most important story that we are supposed to focus on?
Why is it that people in both political parties who over and over were told can't agree on anything Suddenly you're reading from exactly the same script.
Hillary Clinton sounds exactly like Marco Rubio.
Nancy Pelosi sounds exactly like Nikki Haley.
As is true in so many instances, it's almost impossible to find any member of the establishment wings of either party and all of their media allies who have any even minuscule amount of dissent on this question.
And they all want you to just keep focusing on it day after day after day.
It's been the lead story in the New York Times every day.
It's been the lead story on American media outlets, on television.
Why is that?
Let's begin with the fact that the U.S.
government is currently attempting to send another $60 billion of American money to Ukraine in order to keep that war going, the war against Russia.
Now, we have covered almost every event on this show, step by step by step, beginning with the request of the Biden administration for the $60 billion, which took place last year in October.
It's now five months later.
And amazingly, that package has not been approved, nor has the $17 billion for Israel been approved either by the Congress.
And the reason for that is that the Republicans took the position when they elected their new speaker, Mike Johnson, that they would refuse to approve any new spending packages, especially spending packages that would go to another country unless one of two things happened.
First, either the U.S. government simultaneously or first secured the American border before it spent billions of dollars securing the Ukrainian border.
And secondly, offset those increased spending costs with spending cuts so that $60 billion going to Ukraine doesn't add to the national debt and the national deficit because there would be $60 billion in corresponding cuts to already existing spending.
The effort to secure the border failed when the bipartisan bill sponsored by Mitch McConnell and his allies in the Senate and agreed to by the Biden White House and Chuck Schumer was revealed.
And almost every member of the Republican base who cares about immigration said this is a preposterous bill.
It doesn't do anything to secure the border.
It was dead on arrival in the House.
And now they've given up the pretense entirely.
of pretending to do anything about the American border before they help Ukraine and Israel and a bunch of other countries in their war.
They've just given up that pretense.
Mitch McConnell admitted to the New York Times he never really cared about border security.
He just knew that he had to try and show American citizens that, well, we're going to spend a little bit of money on your lives at the same time that we authorize another $100 billion to send to fuel the wars of other countries, including many countries whose standard of living is higher than Americans.
So that's where we are.
Right now, the Senate, with the help of 20 Republican Senators and every Democrat, passed this bill to send $60 billion to Ukraine, $17 billion to Israel, more money for Taiwan, more money to bomb Yemen.
There's definitely a majority between Democrats.
Every Democrat will vote yes on this bill to send all that money to fuel these wars.
It's amazing there's not one Democrat in the House of Representatives willing to vote no now on a bill to send billions and billions and billions of dollars to the arms industry.
There may be some in the House now willing to vote no because of the Israel part of it, but the vast majority of Democrats are ready to vote yes.
They've always voted unanimously yes for Ukraine spending.
And there's more than enough Republicans to join the Democrats to form a majority because in Washington the military-industrial complex always wins.
And there's one thing and one thing only standing in the way of getting this $60 billion for Ukraine authorized, and that is the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson's refusal to bring this bill to the floor, in part because he promised he wouldn't put up any vote to give money to Ukraine unless the American border was secured first, and because there are members of the Republican caucus to avow that they will remove him as speaker if he brings this bill to the floor.
Remember, the margin that he works with is extremely small.
You'll need about four or five members of the Republican caucus to decide they want Mike Johnson out of that job, and he will be out of that job.
And people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others have said, one dollar goes to Ukraine, Mike Johnson's speakership ends.
So the pressure that is being applied on Mike Johnson is almost impossible to overstate.
Every time I've talked about this issue, what I've always said is that it seems like this money is imperiled, but I've been paying a lot of attention to politics in Washington when it comes to war spending and military-industrial complex bills.
I have never seen the military-industrial complex lose in Washington on something they really cared about, like they really care about keeping this war going in Ukraine.
$60 million is a lot of money.
It's going to go into a lot of pockets.
And suddenly, out of the blue, a lot of things start happening to make everybody enrage with Russia.
Beginning with the fact that Alexei Navalny just died in a Russian prison and we're all now being told this is the most significant And the most morally reprehensible thing that's taking place on the planet.
It's dominated our political discourse for reasons that don't quite make immediate or intuitive sense.
Here is the current state of the Biden spending request for Ukraine from the New York Times on February 13th.
Headline, Ukraine aid bill faces hurdles in the House amid Republican opposition.
Quote, Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated he won't put the Senate legislation to a vote in the House, leaving proponents scrambling to find a path to passage.
Look at how desperate they get in Washington when they really want to pass something.
When have they ever done this for any kind of a bill that would actually improve the lives of American citizens?
Work this hard, this tirelessly.
Try and find their way around the refusal of a speaker to bring a vote to the floor for a House vote.
This is clearly their top priority, is more money for Ukraine.
Ukraine.
Now here is the reality of the situation, which is right now you have Western leaders and Kamala Harris meeting in Munich for the Munich Security Conference.
And there's a panic there over the fact that the Americans may not be able to give $60 billion to Ukraine.
The Russians just obtained the biggest, most significant victory in the last year in the war in Ukraine.
Where they seized a city that has great strategic value to being able to cut off Ukrainian supply lines.
It's the biggest change in the front line that's happened in the last year.
For a long time we were hearing that there's a stalemate in this war but Russia just seized a very important city from Ukraine.
And there's panic in Europe over the fact that Their sugar daddy, Washington, won't come up with the money to fuel the war.
And Ukraine, why can't Europe pay?
Europeans live very, very well.
Europeans live a lot better than tens of millions of Americans.
If the Europeans really find this war to be so important, why can't they pay for it?
Here from Politico, this was yesterday, there's only plan A. Defense leaders fear failure in Ukraine.
Attendees at the Munich Security Conference were worried about Ukrainian prospects against Russia and the American commitment to Kiev.
Quote, four American senators recounted a story Ukrainian officials told them at the Munich Security Conference.
A soldier in a muddy trench with Russian artillery exploding nearby, scrolling on his phone for signs the U.S.
House would approve military aid.
You're about to see a bombardment of propaganda unlike anything you've ever seen before from every direction.
Politico went on, quote, Many politicians and officials used the moment to press that Ukraine would lose the war without the $60 billion war and U.S.
military aid currently awaiting a vote in the House.
But they also sounded far from certain about what a victory would look like for Ukraine, even with that boost.
Ukraine is low on ammunition and infantry.
The decade's stronghold of Advika, the city that I was just referring to, fell to the Russians over the weekend, giving the Kremlin its first major conquest since May.
Before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky changed leadership at the top of his country's military, generals insisted the president had to mobilize 500,000 more troops to keep pace with a larger, still stronger Russian force that appears willing to take massive casualties to gain just a few yards of ground.
Now, everybody who we've been interviewing on this show, the people who were the dissidents from the start about the lack of wisdom of having the U.S.
try and encourage the Ukrainians to fight the Russians, have warned from the start that there's no way Ukraine can beat Russia.
For so many reasons, including the fact, beginning with the fact, That Russia is just a much bigger country and has way more men to send to fight over and over and over.
And Ukraine doesn't.
Ukraine is now reduced to pulling 45 and 50 year olds off buses and drafting people with chronic conditions.
There's no way Ukraine can win this war no matter how much the United States spends to fuel the war.
It's just impossible.
And it's gotten increasingly obvious and visible.
Russia has been able to produce far more military equipment and artillery shells than all of NATO combined, leaving Ukraine at a huge artillery disadvantage.
We've spent over $120 billion.
The Europeans have spent tens of billions of dollars more.
And Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine.
And the chances are far more likely than not that Russia will continue to occupy more and more of Ukraine, even if we do spend the $60 billion.
What is the $60 billion really for when everybody acknowledges that the chances that the Ukrainians are going to expel Russia out of all of those provinces of eastern Ukraine that they're now completely dug in?
Let alone they're going to expel Russian troops from Crimea.
The chances of that, which is what the victory defined by the Americans and the Western and Europeans were from the start, is basically zero.
Where is this money going?
What is its real purpose?
Now, beyond all these stories about Ukrainians in trenches, out of ammunition, and desperately scrolling on their phones, hoping beyond hope that Mike Johnson finally brings this bill to the floor of the House to allow the $60 billion to be voted on, we are now being deluged, bombarded, drowned to the exclusion of almost every other story that affects our lives as Americans
With the day after day after day hagiography of Alexei Navalny.
From AP yesterday, the death of Kremlin foe Alexei Navalny provokes Western outrage but few concrete actions to stop Putin.
Quote, now Vani's death shows Putin's, quote, complete ruthlessness and disdain from both Western and international opinions, said Nigel Gould Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus and senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Russia announced now Vani's death on Friday, just as Western leaders gathered at a security conference in Munich.
Isn't that odd timing, by the way?
Joe Biden said that it was Vladimir Putin who was personally responsible for the death of Alexei Navalny.
Alexei Navalny has been in prison for almost three years.
A prison near the Arctic.
Completely out of sight.
The Russians, because of this war, and basically the unity of NATO in fighting Russia, have, just like it happens in war, united behind their leadership.
Alexei Navalny is not some popular leader in Russia.
He doesn't have 50% or 30% or even 10% of the country behind him.
or even 10% of the country behind him.
He has maybe 2% to 3%.
Why would Putin, right as the United States looks to be blocking $60 billion to Ukraine, right as the Western Europeans are meeting in Munich with Kamala Harris, why would he order Alexei Navalny's death?
Now again, we've been shown no evidence of this.
We're all supposed to take this on faith.
And I'm willing to concede for purposes of the argument that Putin for some reason picked up the phone and said, I want Alexei Navalny dead.
But the question would be, given the timing, what would be the motive?
All he's doing is fueling this propaganda in the West, getting people to hate Russia more and more at exactly the time they're trying to convince Americans to send that $60 billion to Ukraine.
And that's what they're using the Minute Conference to do.
Quote, Putin is, quote, throwing down a gauntlet to the West, Gould Davies says, as we come up to the second anniversary of the Ukraine war, he is again testing Western resolve.
Navalny's dash serve as a wake-up call to US Republicans opposing aid for Ukraine in Congress and also encourage European NATO allies to bolster their assistance to Ukraine, Gould Davies said.
So that's the narrative that they're using.
What is the United States supposed to do about the fact that Russia allowed Alexei Navalny to die in prison or that they killed Alexei Navalny?
Are we supposed to go to war with Moscow over it?
Are we supposed to send US troops to Russia and arrest Vladimir Putin?
What is the purpose of all of this?
What is the conclusion from this that we're supposed to draw?
Before Nalvani's death, one of the members of the Republican caucus in the House, who's an adamant supporter of funding the war in Ukraine, Mike Turner, and he's not just an adamant supporter of that, but he also remembered the renewal of the authorities that allow the NSA and the FBI to spy on American citizens, the FISA Act 702, that's been coming up for renewal as well.
And the There's bipartisan opposition to renewing these FISA authorities until there's reform because of how often the FBI has gotten caught abusing their spying power.
They don't want to just renew the spying power.
That's something else that's happening in Congress.
And so Congress Mike Turner, who's like an old-school Republican pro-war hawk from the War on Terror and the Bush-Cheney era, favors not only U.S.
funding eternally and limitlessly of Warren Ukraine, he's on Joe Biden's side with that.
He also, just like Joe Biden and the Biden White House, wants a renewal of this FISA authority that allows the NSA and the FBI broad, virtually unlimited, unchecked spying powers against American citizens.
So he came out with this bizarre story claiming that there's scary, frightening intelligence that the world must know about what the Russians are doing.
He went to meet the press and this is what happened.
Well, I guess the big question now is what happens next?
President Biden has said he's considering his response.
What do you think the consequences should be?
I think that as a result of Navalny's death, that we should even be that more strong in funding Ukraine and passing this in the House and the Senate and dedicated Navalny's legacy, sending a message to Putin.
I mean, they're just so explicit about it.
This was the same congressman who created this huge brouhaha claiming that there was secret intelligence about Putin's dastardly plans to put nuclear weapons into space.
I think it has been discussed forever because Washington's trying to do that as well.
He acted as though it was some new development that required the United States to fund Ukraine.
I don't know how that's not a non sequitur.
The Russian government is trying to put nuclear weapons in space before we need to keep funding the war in Ukraine.
But here he was just extremely explicit.
I'm going to play this again because this is why there's so much focus on Nalvany.
He's telling you the reason.
He's saying, Nalvany died, therefore we need to send $60 billion more to Ukraine.
Well, I guess the big question now is what happens next?
President Biden has said he's considering his response.
What do you think the consequences should be?
I think that as a result of Navalny's death that we should even be that more strong in funding Ukraine and passing this in the House and the Senate and dedicated Navalny in his legacy sending a message to Putin.
Wow, what a coincidence.
He's wanted $60 billion to Ukraine for months, and now it turns out because Alexei Navalny is dead, we need to send a message to Putin, a symbolic heralding of Alexei Navalny's legacy that just happens to be putting $60 billion into the arms industry that funds both political parties.
Here's Amy Klobuchar.
She's in a different political party.
She's a Democrat.
Senator from Minnesota.
And we're of course always told that Republicans and Democrats agree on nothing.
It's a big problem for our country.
They're completely at loggerheads.
They're just in different universities, Republicans and Democrats.
They just are completely radically apart.
It shows how free we are as a country that we have these two political parties that agree on nothing and you get to go every four years and choose which one is going to govern.
It's so exciting given how wildly apart they are.
You get to choose which worldview prevails, which ideology prevails.
Here's Amy Klobuchar asked about this question.
See if you think there's any difference between her and the Republican Mike Turner.
Our job right now, if you talk about avenging the death of the Kiro Navalny, if you talk about anything for our democracy and actually for our economic partners across the world, it is to get this security package over the line.
And so, extreme Republicans are stopping it right now.
The president is standing up for it.
The Senate is standing up.
Twenty-two Republicans in the U.S.
Senate voted for it, including the lead Republicans on armed services and foreign relations.
It's time for them to get the job done.
I mean, they're so blatant about it.
That is what political propaganda is.
The hero Nelvani, the hero Nelvani, the hero Nelvani has died.
The prophet, the saint.
And now we owe it to him, to his legacy, to send $60 billion more to Ukraine for this futile, bloody war that will just destroy more and more and more of Ukraine.
And you know it's going to happen once this war finally ends.
We're going to be told that it is now our responsibility to go and rebuild Ukraine.
And you have all these vultures, like JP Morgan and BlackRock, ready to invest with Zelensky.
He's already encouraging them to do that.
We're touting how much profit opportunity there will be when it comes time to rebuild Ukraine.
This is what runs Washington.
And the propaganda is not even hidden here.
Here's Bill Kristol.
Who ten years ago, every liberal was calling a Nazi a racist, a neocon warmongering scumbag, and now he is a Democrat.
He fits perfectly into the Democratic Party, sounds exactly like almost every other member of the establishment of both parties, Hillary Clinton, and Tom Cotton, they just all sound exactly alike.
Here's Bill Kristol.
The murder of Alexei Navalny by Putin reminds us of what is at stake in the struggle between free men and women and those who would crush them.
Who would crush us?
And who have allies here in the United States who take the side of dictatorship against freedom?
He had another tweet saying that basically everything in American political life now is between the patriots and the people who believe in democracy on the one hand, meaning the establishment wings of both political parties, and those who love Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on the other.
That's the binary moralistic play that they're selling you.
Now, it'd be one thing if Alexei Nalvany were some sort of gigantic figure in Russia.
The only reason you know the name Alexei Nalvany is because the West has turned him into this mythological figure.
There was a documentary made about him.
It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2022.
All of Hollywood stood and cheered for this documentary about the hero Nalvany.
In Russia he's a minuscule figure.
He's not some giant of the Russian political stage.
He is useful to the West for propagandistic purposes and that is why you have this incredibly inflated imagery of what he is.
Here's Reuters on February 21st of 2018.
Putin nemesis Navalny barred from the election tries political siege.
Remember when the proof of Russia's totalitarianism was that the opposition leader was barred from the ballot and then imprisoned?
Isn't that a situation similar to what we have in the United States?
Isn't it the case that the primary political opponent of the current government in Washington is in the process of being stricken from the ballot as a result of judges and Democratic Party leaders bringing cases to have them stricken from the ballot and is in the process of being criminally prosecuted by Democratic partisan prosecutors like Fannie Willis in Georgia and Alvin Bragg in New York and the Obama DOJ.
Why is it that when we hear that Russia is banning from the ballot The primary political opponent of Vladimir Putin, and then trying to imprison him.
We make one conclusion, but then we hear in the United States that the exact same thing is happening.
But an actual significant political figure, not like Navalny, but Donald Trump, who was actually the president already, narrowly lost in 2020, is leading almost every opinion poll up for 2024, when he
And I know a lot of people just intuitively believe this is what propaganda does, this is what tribalism does, is that we just inherently believe that when it seems like the two things are the same, the fact that one is happening in the United States and the other is happening in Russia means they're completely different.
Question, though, whether or not that's what you believe because you're an American, because you were born in the United States, because you've been told from childhood that that's how you should see the world.
Here is Reuters.
Now, this is not RT, this is not Sputnik, this is not Tucker Carlson, whoever you want to dismiss as some sort of pro-Russian source.
This is Reuters in 2018, which said the following, quote, opinion polls put Navalny's support at less than 2%.
And many Russians who still get much of their news from state TV say they do not even know who he is.
He's incredibly more famous and more notable and more popular in Western political capitals than he is in Russia.
The idea that he's a threat to Vladimir Putin in any way is laughable.
Let's try and remember as well a couple of things about who Alexei Nalvani is, the new hero of Western liberals.
From Yahoo News in February of this year, actually yesterday, Alexei Nalvani's quote far-right racist past brought back in spotlight after Putin critic's death.
As world leaders pay tribute to Russian opposition leader Alex Nalbani, some have drawn attention to some inconvenient aspects of his past.
Really, what's inconvenient?
Quote, as Western politicians pay their respects, some more uncomfortable aspects of Nalbani's career have been brought back to the surface.
Quote, Nalbani took part in the Russian March, an annual demonstration that draws ultra-nationalists, including some who adopt swastika-like symbols.
Oh my, that is uncomfortable.
Quote, he has never apologized for his earlier xenophobic videos or his decision to attend the Russian march.
Raman appeared to be referring to a notorious video from 2007 in which Navalny appears to compare Muslim immigrants in Russia to cockroaches as he advocated for gun ownership.
In another video, he is dressed as a dentist and appears to compare migrants in Moscow to tooth cavities.
Radio Free Europe reports.
He says, quote, I recommend full sanitization.
Everything in our way should be carefully but decisively removed through deportation.
Shortly before releasing both clips, Navalny was expelled by the liberal Yabloko party over his, quote, nationalist activities.
Having participated in the Russian march, an annual rally associated with ultra-nationalist far-right groups chanting slogans such as Russia for ethnic Russians.
Now, Anyone in the United States who has a past like that, who called immigrants cockroaches, who advocated gun control, handing out guns as a way to exterminate them, as cockroaches should be exterminated, who attended an actual neo-Nazi march, I don't think they would be described as having an inconvenient or uncomfortable past.
And yet it is amazing, just like we find in Ukraine, with all the neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine that the American liberals love and want to arm, that if you're somebody who doesn't love the Democratic Party in the United States, you will get called a Nazi and a fascist and a white nationalist.
And American liberals and Western liberals will try to have you barred from the internet and fired from your job and basically expelled from decent society in every way.
Hello.
Today we're going to talk about the fight against insects.
People with actual neo-Nazi ideology, with actual overt ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups, and they want to embrace them, they want to arm them.
The hero Nalvani.
Here's the hero Nalvani in 2007.
So just for the people listening, I'm going to just read the screen.
It says, background left, Alexei Navalny, Certified Specialist.
Hello, today we have to talk about insect control.
No house is safe from cockroach infestation.
Ooh, or a fly gets in through an open window.
And there's all kinds of demons being shown as he says this.
We all know the cure against flies, a fly swatter, a slipper against a roach.
But what to do if cockroaches are too big and flies too aggressive?
In such cases, I recommend a handgun, as he shows a handgun.
Yes to allowing firearms.
Now anybody involved in an ad like that in the United States would be deemed a Nazi for the rest of his life.
The Western media looks at this and because of his propagandistic value they turn him into some kind of like civil liberties leader.
And of course the same exact thing has been happening for the last two years in Ukraine.
For the last decade in the Western press, every time the Azov Battalion has been referenced, it has been described as a neo-Nazi group, as a group with Nazi ideology.
And to this day, you see Azov Battalions, and their leaders, and their soldiers, and they have all kinds of neo-Nazi insignia on them.
Here's how the New York Times tried to grapple with this in June of 2023.
Quote, Do you love these words?
Oh, uncomfortable, inconvenient, thorny when they're talking about actual neo-Nazis?
Quote, the troops' use of patches as bearing Nazi emblems risk fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.
So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war.
It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists, and advocacy groups in a difficult position.
Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda, saying nothing allows it to spread.
Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent.
Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points.
Now, that is how the New York Times has grappled with the fact that we are arming actual neo-Nazi militia groups in Ukraine.
Now, as I said at the start, there is a similar case to Navalny dying in prison.
Although this is a case where the person who died in prison was an American citizen.
His name is Gonzalo Lira.
We covered this case on last week's show when we interviewed his father.
And you may recall that Gonzalo Lira was in Ukraine.
He married a Ukrainian woman in 2016.
And he was an outspoken opponent of President Zelensky and of the war.
And because of that he was twice arrested.
The U.S.
government never once uttered a word of protest about this American citizen being arrested, even though he posted a video pleading for the government to help, and he warned that if he were arrested a second time, he would die in a Ukrainian prison.
And he did die in a Ukrainian prison, just as he predicted, at the age of 55.
And he was in prison solely because he criticized President Zelensky and the NATO-U.S.
narrative about the war.
That when it happens to an American citizen who dies in a Ukrainian prison after criticizing President Zelensky, that all these people who are so deeply concerned with civil liberties in Russia might have something to say about that.
After all, this is not a Russian citizen, this is an American citizen.
And it's not done at the hands of a foreign government on the other side of the world who is our enemy, but an allied state that we are funding and financing.
And they killed an American citizen.
For the crime of speaking out against the war.
And there's barely any media coverage of this.
It happened just last month.
Because that has anti-propagandistic value.
Because it shows what a joke it is to claim that Ukraine is a democratic state.
One of the very few outlets that covered the death of Gonzalo Liro in prison was the liberal tabloid Daily Beast.
And they ran this article in January of 2024, and there you see the headline.
It's a repulsive, repugnant headline designed to justify Gonzalo Lira's death.
Quote, the U.S.
finally confirms that the American dating coach turned Kremlin shill died in Ukraine.
Quote, Gonzalo Lira, a blogger who pushed Kremlin propaganda in Ukraine, died after apparently coming down with pneumonia.
Lear was arrested in Ukraine's Kharkov region in May of 2023 and charged with spreading Russian propaganda by posting videos that cheered on the Kremlin's active aggression against Ukraine.
After being released on house arrest, he was jailed again in July after fleeing while out on bail, though he claimed in hysterical tweets to followers at the time that it was all part of an attempt by Ukrainian authorities to, quote, disappear him.
Right-wing pundits back home in the U.S.
soon seized on his unfounded claims to criticize the Biden administration's support for Ukraine, holding Lear up as a, quote, journalist they said had been unfairly persecuted by authorities in Kiev.
In other words, Gonzal Lear deserved to die in a Russian prison, in a Ukrainian prison, because he had the wrong views about the war in Ukraine.
He was a pro-Russian propagandist.
And therefore he deserved to die.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, even though I just showed you this repulsive daily beast headline that was obviously designed to stir up hatred and contempt for Gonzalo Lira, here is Mark Thiessen, who used to work in the Bush White House and is now a columnist for the Washington Post.
Classic warmongering neocon.
The kind that cheered the Iraq War and the War on Terror and every single war since.
You know that type.
He was one of the few people in the media who actually acknowledged the Gonzalez-Lehrer case.
And this is what he said to distinguish it from what happened in Russia.
Quote, Gonzalez-Lehrer was not a journalist.
He was a pro-Putin propagandist who was spreading Russian disinformation inside Ukraine during wartime, praising the Russian invasion and denying the Bukha massacre.
No country which has been invaded would allow that in its territory.
He was arrested and released on bail and then re-arrested after violating his bail.
He was not killed in jail.
He died of pneumonia.
There is no comparison to Nalvany.
None.
How is it that the people who pretend to be so upset, so angry, so enraged, By the fact that Vladimir Putin imprisoned somebody for their political views, and then allowed them to die in prison, can turn around and justify the same exact thing when done by Ukraine, but this time to an American citizen.
He's essentially saying, Consolidator deserved to die in prison because during wartime he criticized the government.
That's exactly what Vladimir Putin's view of Malvani is.
We're in wartime and we're not going to allow people to criticize the government or war effort.
After all, says Mark Beeson, no country could possibly allow during wartime any free speech.
These people do not care in the slightest about civil liberties.
They don't care about that at all.
It is a pretext, a tool to bludgeon foreign countries that we want to demonize to continue wars against.
And the way you know that it's a pretense, that there's no sincerity or authenticity to the belief, is that they will turn around and justify the same exact acts by the United States government or our allies as I just showed you.
They'll say, they'll either ignore it because they don't care about it, Or they'll say Gonzalez deserved to die because he had the wrong views.
Exactly what Vladimir Putin says about Alexei Navalny.
And they'll be so gullible.
Oh, he didn't get killed.
He died of pneumonia in prison.
A 55-year-old man, previously very healthy, who just suddenly dies of pneumonia in prison.
But we're supposed to believe, based on no evidence, that Alexei Navalny was murdered?
Do you see the propagandistic double standard?
And the way in which it's so cynically exploited.
Now, there have been killings of American citizens by other allies as well.
Just last month, there was a murder of an American teenager in the West Bank.
There you see a witness says the fatal shooting of an American Palestinian teen in the occupied West Bank was unprovoked.
So here you have a killing, a murder by an Israeli citizen of an American teenager who was killed by a government that we fund and that we finance and there's been almost no Anger about that.
Why is there so much anger, more anger, about a Russian citizen being killed than our own citizens being killed by governments that we fund?
Now, just this week, uh, and here's another, uh, case where last year an American journalist, Shereen Abulakla, had a vest on that said, Why was there so little indignation about Israel killing American citizens?
her, and at first the Israelis denied that they shot her, and then they admitted that they shot her, but said they did it accidentally, and then an investigation concluded that the Israelis killed her deliberately, knowing that she was depressed and that they shot her on purpose.
Why was there so little indignation about Israel killing American citizens?
You would think a country would be more concerned when an American dissident dies in prison and is in prison in the first place because of his views When our allies kill our own citizens.
But this has no propagandistic value for the U.S.
security state or for the media that serves it.
So these cases get buried.
Or they'll even go and justify these killings.
These people have no different mentality than Vladimir Putin.
None!
This is false indignation.
Fake indignation designed to advance a very particular political agenda.
Now, if you are an American citizen, You're in this bizarre position where you pay for the war in Ukraine and then with great regularity the Ukrainian government turns around and releases blacklists of American journalists and American commentators and American analysts that they claim are Russian agents or Russian propagandists by virtue of the fact that we as Americans exercise our free speech rights to say that our government shouldn't be funding that war in Ukraine.
Here from The media outlet, The Voxcheck Team, is a report on the network of Russian propaganda, what connects Western experts promoting narratives beneficial to Russia.
It's an official release of the Ukrainian government.
And here you see a chart of people who are allegedly Russian propagandists.
And you have people like Russell Brand, and Tucker Carlson, and Professor John Mearsheimer.
Tons of people have been on our show, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Here I am on the list, and it's so funny to have a V, and this V, if it's by your name, it means that you've actually visited Moscow.
I have a V by my name because I went and visited Edward Snowden in Moscow, Max Blumenthal.
There's this non-stop propagandistic effort by Ukraine, by its allies in the United States, to suggest that anyone who uses our free speech rights in the United States to question the American war effort in Ukraine is a Russian propagandist, is somehow loyal to the Kremlin.
The tactic has been used for decades by the U.S.
security state to try and smear the reputation of anyone questioning the narrative.
But if you are somebody who is being deluged with this propaganda about Alexei Navalny, you should be asking yourself why that is.
Why is it that everyone from Hillary Clinton and Mitch McConnell and everyone in between and the American media has told you day after day after day after day about this case and tried to provoke your greatest indignation?
When at the same time there's all these other cases of this being done by the American government or to American citizens, by our allied government, and those cases are ignored when they're not cheered and justified.
And of course, one of those cases is one that we're going to tell you about after the break, which is the ongoing effort by the US government.
To keep the person that I would argue is the most consequential and pioneering journalist of our generation, Julian Assange, imprisoned for life, trying to extradite him to the United States, where he almost certainly will die in an American prison.
And the very same people feigning such outrage over the death of Aleksandr Navalny at the hands of the Russian government, they say, Have almost nothing to say about the U.S.
government doing everything in its power to destroy physically and mentally, if not kill Julian Assange.
We'll tell you the latest right after this.
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So one of the cases that obviously gives the lie to all of the feigned in the nation over what's happening in Russia with Alex Nalvani is the case of Julian Assange.
Julian Assange, for those of you who don't recall, is the founder of WikiLeaks, which, in my view, pioneered journalism by becoming the first outlet to realize the future of journalism in the digital age would come in large part by large-scale leaks.
That would be a real vulnerability.
to the most powerful institutions that want to shield what they're doing from the public, and the ability to leak large amounts of digital information and do so anonymously, which is what Wikileaks enabled, ended up leading to some of the most important stories in the last 15 to 20 years in journalism.
Some of the biggest, most consequential stories have come from Wikileaks and then enabled by this Wikileaks model, where other journalists were able to report using sources who followed the similar That's exactly what makes Julian Assange an enemy of the state.
And the Obama administration was eager and desperate.
Led by Hillary Clinton, especially, to try and find a way to prosecute Julian Assange because of his 2010 release of huge amounts of documents proving U.S.
war crimes in the Iraq and Afghanistan war, and also the release of diplomatic cables that showed corruption on the part of U.S.
allies throughout the Middle East, and all kinds of deceit and corruption.
It revolutionized how people thought about their governments in many places around the world.
They convened a grand jury and what they concluded the Obama administration did was that there was no way to prosecute Julian Assange for publishing that information unless it would also prosecute the New York Times and The Guardian for publishing that information as well.
Media outlets publish classified information all the time.
It's crucial to your job as a journalist.
Obviously, if the government doesn't want you to know something about crimes they're committing or deceit they're engaging in, they're going to make those secrets, those documents that prove their lies and crimes, secret.
They're going to make it illegal to disclose them.
Sometimes those secrecy designations are valid as a way of protecting U.S.
security from things that shouldn't be public, but often what they're protecting is not American security, but their own reputations, their own ability to commit crimes and lie to the public.
That's what journalism is for.
And the Obama administration was desperate to find a way to say that Julian Assange did something other than what media outlets do, namely receive classified information.
And they tried and they tried and tried and ultimately concluded that there was no way to prosecute Julian Assange without essentially ending press freedom in the United States, without creating theories that would justify criminalizing any journalism.
What happened was when Donald Trump was elected, one of the worst mistakes he made was empowering Mike Pompeo, first as the director of the CIA and then as Secretary of State.
And Mike Pompeo gave a speech very early on in the Trump administration where he said one of the top goals of his CIA was going to be to destroy WikiLeaks and destroy Julian Assange and particularly put an end to their ability to claim free speech in a free press.
And good to his word, the Trump Justice Department, one of the worst acts of the Trump administration, actually indicted Julian Assange under a theory that if it's accepted, Would end up giving the power to the state to imprison essentially all forms of investigative journalism for reasons I'm about to show you.
And the Biden Justice Department, once Joe Biden, assumed office in 2021.
They were encouraged and urged by every civil liberties and press freedom group, literally in the West, to drop this prosecution on the grounds that it is the gravest threat to press freedom in years.
And they ignored it and they've continued for three years over even the objections of the Australian government, the country of which Assange is a citizen, and has said, no, we want to bring him to the United States.
He's already been in prison for five years in the UK.
The only crime of which he was ever convicted was bail jumping.
Which they said he did when he sought asylum from the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012.
He served an 11-month sentence for bail jumping.
That is long ago served, that term.
The only reason he continues to be in a U.S.
jail, and it is a maximum security, tough prison, that the BBC has called the British Guantanamo.
It has terror suspects there, very high-level criminals.
Is because the U.S.
has demanded his extradition to the U.S.
and the British government refuses to release him on bail pending this extradition.
He's in prison for almost five years without being convicted of any crime beyond bail jumping.
Now he has tried over and over in the British courts to fight his extradition to the United States because he knows that if he's transferred to the United States If you have a third-grade civics understanding of the United States, you may think, oh, he's going to get a fair trial, he'll have a lawyer, and he can prove his innocence to the court and then walk free.
None of that is going to happen.
He's being charged under a law, the Espionage Act of 1917, one of the most draconian laws ever enacted.
The purpose of it was to criminalize dissidents under the Woodrow Wilson administration to opponents of having the U.S.
get involved in World War I, and they prosecuted people under espionage laws as spies.
For doing nothing other than opposing Woodrow Wilson's policy of involving the United States in World War I. It's one of the oldest and most repressive acts.
And he's going to be transferred to Northern Virginia, tried in a Northern Virginia court, which is the home of every military contractor and CIA operative and the entire U.S.
security state with its base in Northern Virginia.
That's why they try these national security cases in Northern Virginia.
And his conviction is basically guaranteed and he will be put in an American prison, a harsh American prison for national security crimes.
And Julian Assange's doctors and independent mental health and physical physicians have already said that he is at the verge of and has often almost collapsed into full mental destruction.
And he's very physically fragile as well and the argument is that there's no way for him to survive transfer to and then standing trial in the United States and then being put in American prison and under British law that's supposed to be a basis for refusing extradition.
He won on that argument in the first instance of his judicial process, and then every other court since has refused to entertain that argument, has rejected it.
This week, starting tomorrow and the day after, he's going to have his appeal heard in Britain's highest court.
It's his last chance in the British judicial system to avoid extradition.
We're going to be reporting live or Based on our ability to get the hearings, to listen to the hearings, we're going to be telling you and reporting on what's happening as this last-ditch effort to avoid imprisonment in the United States begins.
Here from the AP today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may be near the end of his long fight to stay out of the U.S.
Quote, Assange faces what could be his final court hearing in London starting Tuesday as he tries to stop his extradition to the United States.
The high court has scheduled two days of arguments Assange 52, an Australian computer expert, has been indicted in the U.S.
on 18 charges over WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010.
across the Atlantic.
Assange, 52, an Australian computer expert, has been indicted in the U.S. on 18 charges over WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010.
Among the files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
A judge in London initially blocked Assange's transfer to the U.S.
on the grounds that he was likely to kill himself if held in harsh American prison conditions.
But subsequent courts cleared the way for the move after U.S.
authorities provided assurances he wouldn't experience the severe treatment that his lawyer said would put his physical and mental health at risk.
Stella Assange and her husband's supporters have criticized his assurances as being meaningless because they are conditional.
Lawyers for Assange plan to argue he can't get a fair trial in the U.S., that a U.S.-UK treaty prohibits extradition for political offenses, and that the crime of espionage was not meant to apply to publishers.
If Julian Assange stands trial for these crimes, he will be the first ever publisher of information To be imprisoned by the United States, got papers case, and this would be the first ever prosecution of a journalist, of a publisher, for publishing classified information, rather than just the person who passed it to him.
Now, to say that there were huge stories in the WikiLeaks release in 2010 is to understate the case.
One of the reasons why so many journalists hate Julian Assange is because he has broken more big stories than all of them combined.
And he's done so without ever working within the confines of corporate media.
They don't consider him one of them, even though he's infinitely more of a journalist than they could ever be.
One of the reasons they hate him is because he shines a light on who they really are.
They don't break stories like this ever.
They have no interest in breaking stories like this, because they're spokespeople and propagandists for U.S.
power centers, not journalists adversarial to them.
And Assange is living proof of what they are, and they hate him for it.
And that's why they're so upset about Alexei Navalny and perfectly content to watch Julian Assange die in prison at the hands of their own government.
Here is an article I wrote back in 2010 at Salon Magazine, where I was writing back then, The War on WikiLeaks and Why It Matters.
The U.S.
government escalates its campaign to harass and destroy a key whistleblowing site.
And I went through all kinds of articles, all kinds of stories, one after the next of stories that were broken, major stories that were broken from these WikiLeaks publications, which was the reason the US government was so enraged by what WikiLeaks did.
He basically did 10 years worth of actual journalism all at once.
Now, I've told the story many times of what has happened in the Julian Assange case.
And if you want to get all the details, you can read the Substack article that I published in December of 2021, entitled The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange and How It Exposes U.S.
Myths About Freedom and Tyranny.
And the main point I tried to make there is that the real measure of how free a society is, is not how its mainstream, well-behaved, ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents.
And that's where you could actually make the case that Alexei Navalny was doing something that dissidents do, which was criticizing his own government.
And that's the reason why Russians should be angry at their own government for allowing someone like that to die.
We have a similar case, many similar cases, but one major one where our own government is attempting to extradite somebody to the United States whose only crime was receiving information in the public interest.
They worked with major media outlets like the New York Times and The Guardian in order to publish these stories.
And the United States government wants to imprison this person who's already been just destroyed in so many ways.
He's been in a prison for five years, but for seven years prior to that, he had asylum in Ecuador.
Remember what happened was, in 2012, while the US government was desperate to get their hands on him, two women in Sweden suddenly claimed that they were the victims of sexual assault victimized by Julian Assange.
And Julian Assange was more than willing to go to Sweden to confront those accusations.
And the only thing he and his lawyers wanted was an assurance from the Swedish government that they wouldn't use his presence on Swedish soil to turn Assange over to the United States.
Sweden is a small country, is dependent on the United States, has a history of doing what the United States tells it to do.
And he was more comfortable in the UK, where he thought there's at least some judicial independence, and he was very scared that going to Sweden would be, was just a pretext to get him into custody and have the Swedish turn him over to the Americans.
And that was the reason the Ecuadorian government gave him asylum, was to protect him by persecution from the United States, which at the time people said, oh, it's a conspiracy theory that the United States is trying to get their hands on Assange.
That's just his excuse to avoid going to Sweden.
But the Ecuadorian government told the Swedish government, we will withdraw our asylum immediately.
He will get on the next plane to Stockholm as long as you give him assurances that you won't extradite him to the United States.
And it was because they refused to do that that Ecuador concluded that his political rights were endangered, and they therefore not only had the right but the duty to give him asylum, which they gave him.
And that was why he was in the Ecuadorian embassy for all those years.
I visited Julian Assange in 2018 in London or 2017 in London.
It's basically a one-room apartment in the middle of a high-rise in London.
No outdoor space.
He couldn't leave the embassy if he did.
The London police were outside waiting the entire time to arrest him.
That was seven years of not getting any sunlight, of not seeing the light of day.
You could watch him physically deteriorating.
And obviously going to a high-security prison in the UK, where his doctors have said that his physical health and his mental health are in severe danger, has made it all the worse.
If you care about civil liberties, what you're talking about is not what the Russian government is doing, but what your own government is doing.
Now, I just want to make the point this way about why this is so dangerous.
Because the theory that they're using is they're saying, look, Assange did something That media outlets that he worked with didn't do.
They just received the information passively, whereas he worked with his source Chelsea Manning and actually encouraged her to get more information and also helped her to hide by doing things like telling her how to crack a password that she wasn't able to crack to hide her tracks.
And that once he did that, once he worked with his source, didn't just passively receive information, but encouraged her to get more, and tried to help her avoid detection, that he then became a conspirator in her crimes.
That's what he's being charged with.
And in 2019, when the indictment was released, I wrote this op-ed in the Washington Post, And the headline of it was, the indictment of Julian Assange is a blueprint for making journalists into felons.
And the subheadline was, the First Amendment is meaningless if it only protects people the government recognizes as journalists.
And the argument I was trying to make there, that I did make in this Washington Post article, was that What Julian Assange is accused of doing is something that all investigative journalists do.
If you're an investigative journalist and you get a source who comes to you and says, here's information that I think you should have, no investigative journalist of any worth Is this going to possibly take that information and then walk away?
They're going to say, oh, this is really interesting.
Is it possible for you to get this also and for you to get this also?
That would really complete the story.
Every investigative journalist actively works with their source that way.
And it's not only the right, but the duty of an investigative journalist when working with their source to encourage them to use protective measures to avoid getting caught.
So if a source calls you, for example, on an open phone line and you're a journalist, And says, oh, hi, I'm with the NSA.
I have a bunch of classified documents I want.
You're going to interrupt and say, don't call me on an open phone line.
Use an encrypted platform.
Go to Signal.
Talk to me on Signal.
Let's use encryption so that you don't get caught.
If you go to the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other major news outlet, they will have information on how sources can contact them and do so without getting detected by the government.
They'll help their sources avoid detection, which is what Julian Assange is accused of doing.
And so if the government succeeds in prosecuting Julian Assange under an espionage act, which is my argument in the Washington Post, for doing things that every investigative journalist does, it will give the government the power to criminalize investigative journalists everywhere.
That's what makes it so dangerous.
And what's so amazing about this op-ed that I wrote, I wrote it in May of 2018.
In June of 2018, In 2018, I was contacted by a source in Brazil who gave me a major archive of hacked messages between top prosecutors in Brazil that enabled me to I was contacted by a source in Brazil who gave me a major archive of hacked messages between top prosecutors in Brazil that That enabled me to do groundbreaking reporting that changed the course of Brazil and its political dynamic.
It proved that the prosecution of Lula da Silva, the former president, the now current president, who was in prison at the time, was actually corrupt.
It undid a lot of prosecutions.
It released Lula from prison.
And at the end of our reporting, Brazilian prosecutors loyal to the justice minister Brought felony charges, not only against my source, but also against me.
They charged me with something like 18 felony counts.
That would have put me in prison for something like 214 years had I been convicted.
And the theory that they used about why they could not only charge my sources, but also me, even though I played no role in the obtaining of this information, all the information was obtained by the time they came to me.
I had no idea it was being done.
I didn't participate in any way other than receive the information to report on it.
The theory they used to try and prosecute me was exactly the one the U.S.
government is using to try and turn Julian Assange into a criminal, namely that they had a transcript of my conversation with the source in which I told the source.
The source said to me, oh, do you want me to throw away all of the conversations we're having or do you want me to keep them?
And I said, oh, it doesn't matter.
You can throw them away if you want because we're keeping all of the copies.
And the British prosecutors interpreted that as my encouraging my source to get rid of information that could have incriminated him or me and that by doing so I became a co-conspirator.
And they also tried to claim that I asked the source for more information than they gave me and by doing that I became part of the conspiracy.
Now in my case, Western media outlets, every last one of them, denounced the attempt to prosecute me, claiming that they would criminalize my journalism, the New York Times editorialized in my favor.
Every major media outlet in the West did, probably because, at the time, Brazil was governed by Jair Bolsonaro, right-wing president, and the Western media hated Bolsonaro, even though Bolsonaro wasn't really responsible for my prosecution.
It was more, prosecutors loyal to his Justice Minister.
So it was amazing.
I wrote this warning in the Washington Post, and then the next month, I found myself in exactly that position, which every investigative reporter finds themselves in when you're doing a big story, where you encourage your source to get more information.
And that's what investigative journalists do every day.
And if they can prosecute Julian Assange for that, they will obtain the power to criminalize investigative journalism itself.
And that is what makes this Story so important, and yet here are people in the American media.
Here is Julia Yaffe.
Julia Yaffe, who is a hardcore anti-Russian fanatic, and here she is exploiting Nalbani's death.
Quote, this is what Nalbani brought to Russia, a ray of optimism and humor to a dark and cruel place, reminding Russians they can be good, better.
Here's the same person.
Responding to her own government's repression of a journalist who is a thousand times the journalist that she will ever be, even if she lives to be 10,000 years old.
How appropriate that after years in the Ecuadorian embassy, Julian Assange has come to look like an old Russian man.
If you trust these people that they're being authentic and sincere when they tell you, That they care about freedom of speech and the freedom to dissent in Russia, and that's the reason why we need to go to war with Russia, and that's the reason why we need to finance the war with Ukraine.
All you have to do is look at what their reaction is when allied governments in the United States kill dissidents, or kill Americans, or allow people like Gonzalez to die in prison, or try and prosecute and destroy and kill Julian Assange.
They laugh about it.
They don't care about it.
If anything, you would think American journalists would care more about the repressive acts of their own government, since they can actually do something about that, than they would about the acts of a country on the other side of the world in which they have no influence.
You would think at least it would be equal, and yet they don't care at all, at all, if there's no propagandistic value to it.
This is why The Alex and Albani story is so important, and the other aspect of it I just want to say before concluding is that there's kind of a psychological aspect to moments like these where we're all, as human beings, very tribal creatures.
We evolved with tribes, we needed tribes in order to survive.
That's the reason why societal scorn and societal exclusion can be such a
powerful motivator because we're built in our DNA to avoid being expelled from our tribe that used to mean death and we evolved as tribal creatures and moments like this where we all get to unite as a tribe as Americans and point over to the other side of the world and say look at that bad country look at how terrible they are look at how evil they are how repressive they are implicit within that Is a claim that we're good, we're better.
It's a crucial propagandistic moment to keep people happy with their own government, with their own system of power under which they live.
And you can see that, how important it is, how angry people get if you object to it or challenge it because it's such a moment of tribalistic affirmation.
And it would be one thing if there was authenticity to it, if this was being done as a way of saying we shouldn't copy Putin.
We shouldn't repress our own dissidents.
We shouldn't allow our allied states to kill our own citizens for political ends.
But the fact that there's none of that shows the fraud of all of this.
And even if you think that what Vladimir Putin did to Alexei Navalny is exactly what the US government claimed, and even if you think it's an immoral act, it's still crucial that you understand the reason that's being shoved down your throat.
And the uses to which it's being put to make you forget about or justify the very similar acts done not only by our allied governments, but by our own government as well.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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