“Ukraine Will Join NATO,” Vows Anthony Blinken. LEAKED: How Israel Calculates Value of Civilian Life. PLUS: The #TwitterFiles Brazil, w/ Michael Shellenberger
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Blinken: “Ukraine Will Join NATO” (5:33)
Disregard for Civilian Life (29:56)
Interview with Michael Shellenberger (46:58)
Outro (1:11:32)
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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, although it's rarely talked about, the U.S.
and NATO-funded war in Ukraine is, in fact, still plodding along.
Earlier today, U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood next to the Ukrainian foreign minister at the foreign minister's meeting of a NATO summit and proclaimed, quote, Ukraine will become a member of NATO.
That all Russians, not just Vladimir Putin, view NATO membership in Ukraine as an existential threat has been recognized for decades at the highest levels of the U.S.
government.
In fact, the current CIA director, William Burns, stridently warned senior Bush officials in a 2008 memo that even threatening expansion of NATO, to include Ukraine, would force the Russians to attack eastern Ukraine and annex Crimea.
And yet, despite knowing that, the U.S. foreign policy community continued to threaten Russia with exactly that and now has definitively stated that Ukraine's membership in NATO is inevitable, meaning that American citizens and citizens of other NATO countries would be obligated to fight and die in a war meaning that American citizens and citizens of other NATO countries would be obligated to fight We'll examine all of the implications of this announcement.
Then, the fallout from Israel's fatal attack on a convoy of aid workers with the World Health Kitchen continues to escalate.
A document recently obtained by the Israeli journal 972 Magazine reveals highly unusual and extremely disturbing calculations by the Israelis about how many civilians they're willing to kill each time they kill just a single Hamas operative.
Now we'll examine this revelation and what it says about the ongoing war in Gaza and the U.S.
role there.
yet another conflict financed and armed by the U.S. government.
Finally, though largely ignored by most of the media, the Twitter files continues to produce highly relevant and deeply alarming revelations.
Yesterday, the independent journalist Michael Schellenberger released a mountain of previously unknown documents showing how extreme the censorship regime in Brazil has become and how it is led by a single judge, a single member of the Supreme Court, Alexandre de Mareche, on whom we have reported Alexandre de Mareche, on whom we have reported many times and who we often have warned about, who issues his silencing decrees with no due process or limits of any kind
And this gives a vivid look into how he pressures big tech companies to silence critics.
Now, as always, it's important to point out that what happens in a large and ostensibly democratic country like Brazil, is important unto itself.
Just the fact that it's such a big and important country is reason enough to report on it.
But it's also vital for Americans to watch because it's so often a harbinger, a laboratory, for how free speech will be infringed inside the United States for Americans as well.
So we will speak to Michael Schellenberger tonight about all of his findings and what they mean.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
From the very start of the war in Ukraine, when the United States decided not just to get involved, but to take primary responsibility for arming the Ukrainians and funded our question, the primary question has always been the same.
In what conceivable way does the war in Ukraine or its outcome Namely the question of who governs various provinces in eastern Ukraine.
What conceivable way does that affect the life of American citizens, either positively or negatively?
Financing the war obviously negatively affects Americans' lives.
It means there's less money available for Americans and their lives at home.
It's more debt for the United States that the United States has to assume.
There's greater risk of escalation.
So what's the benefit to American citizens from being so heavily involved in this war?
And of course, the other question has always been, why is it that Russia decided to attack Ukraine?
Did they just attack out of the blue?
Did Vladimir Putin just overnight, after hearing for 20 years from American presidents, starting with Bill Clinton, through George Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump, hearing over and over that he's a very rational, Trustworthy strategic leader?
Did he just turn overnight into a psychopath or a Hitler figure who just suddenly decided he wanted to march throughout all of Western Europe by attacking one country after the next?
Even attack NATO countries?
So that was a question as well?
Or was there some actual reason that the Russians felt threatened by what was happening in Ukraine?
Things like the 2014 change in government?
Where the elected president of Ukraine was removed from office prior to the constitutionally ending of his mandate with the support of the United States government to replace him with a much more pro-Western, pro-NATO, pro-US government.
Was it the constant providing of lethal arms by the United States and by NATO to Ukraine right over the border of Russia?
Was it the insistence that one day NATO would expand up to the Russian border to include Ukraine, the most sensitive part of the Russian border, which already NATO has expanded up to the Russian border, but now to expand up to the part of the Russian border that basically for both world wars in the 20th century played a critical role in how Russia was attacked?
Whatever those answers are, and we've examined them a lot, We heard from more supporters, oh, well, the idea that Ukraine is going to join NATO is just a figment of the Russian imagination.
There's no reason they would have to worry about that.
There's absolutely no possibility that would happen.
That was a made up fabrication and a pretext for the invasion, we were told.
Even though the Russians asked, as a means of resolving the conflict diplomatically, that the United States and NATO agree that Ukraine would never join NATO, would instead be a neutral country, a buffer country between Russia and the West.
We were told that this was all a figment of the Russians imagination.
And yet today, Antony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, who has obviously been an ardent supporter of the US financing and arming of the war in Ukraine from the start, was at a summit of NATO foreign ministers and he stood up and sat and stood next to the Ukrainian foreign minister and this is what he said.
Ukraine, the determination of every country represented here at NATO remains rock solid.
We will do everything we can.
Allies will do everything that they can to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to continue to deal with Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine, an aggression that gets worse Ukraine will become a member of NATO.
Not that we're making preparations for the possibility that one day Ukraine might join NATO.
It's an inevitability.
It is happening.
He very affirmatively and declaratively decreed That Ukraine will be a NATO member.
He didn't give a timetable, but he certainly made clear that it is not something being considered, but something that has been decided.
And then he went on to say this.
purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for for ukraine moving forward so of course we believe that ukraine deserves to be a member of nato and that this should happen sooner rather sooner sooner rather than later now of course every country for the most part would love to be part of nato
because if you're part of nato it means that all native mem nato members including the united states are duty-bound to treat any attack on your country as an attack on their own and are required by article 5 of the nato treaty to treat that
attack the way they would treat any attack on their own soil meaning that they would be required to go to war against whoever fought against or whoever attacked or was responsible for attacking Ukraine.
After 9-11, the Article 5 obligation was invoked, and that was why NATO members felt obliged to go to Afghanistan and fight alongside the United States against the Taliban, which had been accused of harboring al Qaeda and permitting the 9-11 attack to be planned and launched from Afghanistan, even though the vast majority of those involved were Saudis.
It was Afghanistan that was initially blamed and Article 5 was invoked.
And as a result, the members of NATO were legally bound by their domestic laws and by treaty convention to go to war with the United States.
So that would mean that if Ukraine joined the United States, every American citizen A fighting age would be liable to be forced in order to go fight in Ukraine, to fight and die in order to defend Ukraine.
If there's a border dispute between Russia and the Ukrainians in the future over who should govern Crimea or parts of eastern Ukraine.
It means that the Americans would be obliged not just to pay for the war and to arm it as we're doing now, but to deploy combat troops to Ukraine or against whatever country Ukraine is fighting in order to go fight and die in it.
Now, as I said earlier, the idea that NATO membership for Ukraine would almost inevitably prompt A attack by Russia is something that has been known and stated at the highest levels of the U.S.
government for a long time, for decades.
It was really back in the Bush administration when you had people like Condoleezza Rice, and guess who was the U.S.
ambassador to NATO then?
None other than Victoria Nuland.
When NATO expansion to include Ukraine began to be affirmatively discussed in a way that deeply alarmed the Russians.
And at the time, William Burns, who is currently the director of the CIA for Joe Biden, was in the intelligence community, was working in the Bush administration, and he wrote a cable, a memo, that ultimately ended up being published by WikiLeaks, which is how we know about it.
Where he warned that few things are more provocative and more likely to lead to war involving Russia than promising NATO membership to Ukraine.
Here is what he wrote in February of 2008.
At the top you see net means net.
Russia's NATO enlargement red line.
Quote, Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.
Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests.
Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split involving violence or, at worst, civil war.
Consequences of a premature MAP offer, especially to Ukraine, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just for Putin.
Let me just read that again.
This is something that the current director of the CIA under Joe Biden, so he was the director of the CIA when the Russian invasion happened.
He was the director of the CIA when Kamala Harris went to that region and started speaking openly about not just heavy military assistance of the United States to Ukraine, but NATO membership several months before the invasion.
He was the director of the CIA.
And this is what he said back in 2008, quote, Consequences of a premature offer to Ukraine is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin.
The brightest of all red lines.
Meaning there is nothing that you could do to provoke the Russians more, to make them feel more insecure and more threatened and more eager to go to war, more obliged to go to war, than offering NATO membership to Ukraine.
This is something that has been known forever.
He went on, in my more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players from knuckle draggers and the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
So I think that, were there Poland got, I know it got mis-transcribed, it's Putin.
So what he's saying is, I spent two and a half years talking to Russians.
And he pretty much talked to everybody, what he called knuckle draggers and the dark recesses of the Kremlin, and even Putin's sharpest liberal critics.
So it's not just Putin and his supporters who think this, he's saying that every faction in Russian political life understands and agrees that Ukrainian membership in NATO is nothing other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
This is how the Russians have perceived threatened membership in NATO for Ukraine going back to at least 2008, when the Bush administration began talking about including Ukraine in NATO.
NATO began expanding under the Clinton administration, moving east toward Russia in a way that Gorbachev was promised when he agreed to the reunification of Germany when the Soviet Union fell would never happen.
Obviously, NATO expanding eastward up to the Russian border was a major concern of the Russians.
The major concern.
NATO had been their devoted enemy for decades during the Cold War and the last thing they wanted was NATO coming up to their border.
And the promise that was extracted, and many people have said this who were there firsthand, in exchange for the Russians agreeing to the reunification of NATO, of Germany, was that NATO would not expand even one inch eastward beyond what was then unified Germany, including East Germany, which had been part of the Warsaw Pact.
And if you know even the most basic facts of 20th century history, you understand why there was nothing more threatening at the time than a unified Germany, a reunified Germany.
There was a reason why Germany after World War II was no longer unified and was split into East and West.
A reunified Germany is Russia's worst nightmare.
They lost tens of millions of their citizens in the 20th century as a result of war with Germany.
And so the idea of unifying Germany was extremely alarming to them, but they agreed to it in exchange for this commitment that the West immediately began to violate.
By expanding NATO east, more east, more east, including up to the Russian border.
And this began with Bill Clinton, but then it was the Bush administration that really explicitly talked for the first time about including Ukraine in it.
And this was Bill Burns's warning.
He went on.
At this stage, a map offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road to membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet.
Today's Russia will respond.
Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze, with Moscow likely to contemplate economic measures ranging from an immediate increase in gas prices to world market levels to clamp down on Ukrainian workers coming to Russia.
It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
So I just want to highlight this because this shows that Washington, at the highest levels of the U.S.
government, has known for at least The last 15 years that any kind of and and what he's saying here is it's not just putting Ukraine in NATO it's just talking about it seriously putting them on the path to NATO membership as Blinken did today in the most definitive and unambiguous way yet just that alone he said
Would almost ensure that Russia would start meddling in Crimea and of course Russia has subsequently annexed Crimea and eastern Ukraine where the Russians were arming Russian ethnic citizens of Ukraine since 2014 in a low scale civil war against Kiev and now of course ended up invading and now currently occupy a substantial portion of eastern Ukraine.
So the Americans knew that what their behavior was going to lead to was an invasion or at least serious risk of war with Russia and Ukraine.
And they did it, I want to say despite that, but potentially because of it.
They did it knowing what the results would be.
He went on, quote, there'd be much chest-thumping about repositioning military assets closer to the Ukrainian border and threats of nuclear retargeting.
The NATO-Russia Council could go on life support or expire altogether.
In Georgia, the combination of Kosovo independence and a map offer would likely lead to recognition of Asbakiya, however counterproductive that might be to Russia's own long-term interest in the Caucasus.
The prospect of subsequent Russia and Georgia armed conflict would be high.
And that's exactly what happened.
Map means a, I mean, colloquially means a map to Ukrainian membership, but it really just, the actual acronym, bureaucratically, is a membership action plan.
And what he predicted with regard to Georgia Ended up happening.
The Russians did invade Georgia and did declare Uzbekistan and South Ossetia to be independent provinces and then ultimately part of Russia.
They issued Russian passports to the Russian-speaking people in those provinces who made clear that they were more loyal to the government of Moscow than to Georgia.
And then he warned that the exact same thing would happen with the Russians entering Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
None of this came as a surprise.
So imagine now what the Russians are already thinking and what they're thinking now, now that Blinken stood up next to the Ukrainian foreign minister and declared unambiguously and inevitably that Ukraine will be part of NATO.
And think about the obligations that imposes on every American or every American family in terms of having to go fight and die for Ukraine.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who has been on our show many times, wrote about these issues in September of last year in an article entitled, NATO Chief Admits That NATO Expansion Was Key to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
This is what Professor Sachs wrote, quote, The continuing U.S.
obsession with NATO enlargement is profoundly irresponsible and hypocritical, and now Ukrainians are paying a terrible price.
He went on, In testimony to the European Union Parliament, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made clear that it was America's relentless push to enlarge NATO to Ukraine That was the real cause of the war and why it continues today.
Here are Stoltenberg's revealing words.
Quote, the background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021 and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement.
That was what he sent us and was a precondition to not invade Ukraine.
Of course, we didn't sign that.
The opposite happened.
He wanted us to sign that promise never to enlarge NATO.
He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure and all allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe.
We should remove NATO from that part of our alliance, including some kind of B or second class membership.
We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO close to his borders.
He has got the exact opposite.
End quote.
As Professor Sachs says to repeat he Putin went to war to prevent NATO more NATO close to his borders.
And our response to that is to say.
Now we're going to, for sure.
Before the war, our position was, we're not going to agree that NATO can't join NATO, that Ukraine can't join NATO because we have an unprincipled, open-door policy.
We're not going to shut it.
But the Americans were trying to say, it's not really likely that Ukraine is going to join.
You don't have to really worry about that.
And now the position is, the policy of the Biden administration is, Ukrainian membership in NATO is inevitable.
And obviously they have no interest in stopping the war in Ukraine.
The last thing you would do if you wanted to stop the war in Ukraine or negotiate a peace would be to proclaim the inevitability of NATO membership for Ukraine.
Now Americans have already made very clear with their actions that they have no interest in going to fight and die for Ukraine.
At the very start of the war in February of 2022, Zelensky knew that one of the major reasons Ukraine was likely to lose to Russia is because they simply didn't have enough fighters.
It's a much, much smaller country than Russia, so they just don't have as many men as Russia does that they can just replenish the front lines with.
That's a huge factor in a war.
Professor Maria Stramer, who was on our show on Tuesday, and has been on our show many times over the last two years, kept warning that this is a major reason why Ukraine would ultimately lose, and that Russia would ultimately win, simply the number of soldiers that each side has that often determines who wins.
To say nothing of the artillery advantage, and that's why, as you see here from The Guardian, Ukraine begged Westerners who say they support the Ukrainian cause, not just to put Ukrainian flags in their social media bios, but to actually come to Ukraine and help them fight Russia.
They needed soldiers.
Quote, President Zelensky issues a call to arms to foreign nationals in battle against, quote, Russian war criminals.
And very, very few Americans heeded that call.
Very, very few.
A vanishingly small number of Americans.
went to Ukraine to help them fight the Russians, because obviously most Americans, including those who keep talking about the crucial battles in Ukraine, obviously do not think, as they're making clear with their actions, that it's worth their lives to go defend Ukraine from Russia.
And yet, putting Ukraine in NATO would require Americans to do exactly that.
Ukraine is so desperate, Zelensky is so desperate for more soldiers that, as the New York Times reported this week, they're now lowering the Ukrainian draft age, risking a major political backlash.
Quote, the idea of requiring more men to join the fight against Russia's invasion has become toxic, but Russia is not relenting in its assault.
Professor Mearsheimer as well talked about the grave political dangers to Zelensky by expanding the number of Ukrainian men who are already angry and don't want to go fight on the front lines that can be drafted, lowering the recruitment age, eliminating medical exemptions.
That's how desperate they are because, in part, Very, very few Westerners heeded that call to go there because Westerners, for all their rhetoric, don't actually think their lives should be given to defend Ukraine or to fight over whether Russians or Ukrainians govern the Donbass.
But of course, as always, the foreign policy community of the United States doesn't care at all about the lives of Americans or their views or their wishes, and so Knowing how provocative it is to the Russians, how likely it is to ensure this work goes on and on and on, which is what the Americans obviously want.
Blinken stood up today and did exactly what Washington has known for two decades would guarantee a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is very, very definitively state that Ukrainian membership in NATO is inevitable.
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Few events have soured Western opinion on Israel more than the horrific attack on a three-car convoy of aid workers with the World Food Kitchen that we reported on on Monday, where even the IDF's own version of events makes clear how reprehensible this is.
Even if you believe everything the IDF says...
What they said is that we knew this convoy of aid workers was traveling on exactly this route.
We could see their cars that were marked with the drones that we have, and yet we attacked each of those cars one after the other to ensure that everyone in that convoy was dead for one reason.
We thought, mistakenly as it turns out, that there was one armed militant accompanying them.
And because of that, they decided it was justified to exterminate the entire convoy of aid workers, which is exactly what they proceeded to do, killing seven people, including American and British nationals.
Now, the reality is there's absolutely nothing different about what the Israelis did here that they've been doing in Gaza for not only the last six months, but the last several decades.
Just bombing and killing with very little to no regard for human life.
The only difference is that the organization that was targeted here is headed by a very popular Spanish chef, Jose Andres.
And as a result of that and the fact that it wasn't Palestinians who were killed this time, but Americans and British and other Westerners.
There was a lot of pressure obviously on the governments of those citizens, the American government, the British government, to defend the lives of their citizens and therefore they denounced it in vitriolic terms, extremely uncommon when the Americans and the British are talking about Israel.
After all, it's the Americans and the British who are arming Israel and paying for their bombs and providing them with the bombs that they're dropping in Gaza.
But there was reporting this week from the Israeli magazine Plus 972 that shows exactly how extreme the Israeli defense forces have become in terms of their disregard for civilian life.
We keep hearing they're the most moral army in the world.
They're only doing what every other country does in war.
And therefore, the only reason why anybody would object is because you have some unique desire to attack Israel, probably because you hate Jews and are bigoted and racist and anti-Semitic.
And yet, what the Israelis are doing is anything but normal.
The destruction of civilian life is unlike anything seen in any 21st century war, and you even have to go back to many decades in the 20th century to find things that are comparable in terms of civilian destruction, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the civilian life.
But also, the IDF has authorized a formula for determining how many civilians they're willing to kill on each strike in exchange for killing just one Hamas member.
They just made the calculation that they were willing to kill seven aid workers to get one Hamas operative.
And he turned out not to be there, but even if he had been, would anyone have accepted that justification?
Oh yeah, we wiped out seven aid workers because they were accompanied by one armed militant.
7 to 1 as a ratio and yet that's exactly what the Israelis are willing to do.
In fact, double that according to their own documents and internal memos from Yuval Abraham in a widely cited article
From this week, quote, Lavender, the AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza, quote, the Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination using an AI targeting system with a little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, plus 972 and local call reveal.
Formerly, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets.
The sources told Plus 972 and Local call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants and their homes for possible airstrikes.
During the early stages of the war, the Army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender's kill list with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence on which they were based.
One source stated that human personnel often served only as a quote rubber stamp for the machine's decisions, adding that normally they would personally devote only about 20 seconds to each target before authorizing a bombing just to make sure the lavender mark target is male.
Now, let me just interrupt here and say that I would not actually describe this as unusual in terms of comparing it to what the Americans were doing during the war on terror.
In fact, One of the...the very first story that I did...
When we created The Intercept and I was still in the middle of the Snowden reporting is one that I did with my then colleague Jeremy Scahill who came to Brazil and we worked together on these documents.
He had sources inside the military and I had the Snowden documents and we were able to join those together and report how the U.S.
was picking assassination targets by drone under President Obama using algorithms.
So various people would be assigned certain points by an algorithm based on a variety of factors, such as where they went, how much in proximity they were to suspected terrorists, how often they talked to suspected terrorists.
And they would get a point system, a point value assigned.
And based on that point value, that's who they would then go kill.
And one of the things we were able to show is that some of the people on the top of the list were journalists.
who were talking to quote unquote terrorists, meaning members of the Taliban, because that's what if you're a reporter in Afghanistan or Pakistan, you of course are going to do is report on what the Taliban is doing, what Al Qaeda is doing by going and interviewing them.
But because of they had conversations, they were classified as terrorists by this algorithm, even though there was no human assessment of whether or not they really were.
And we know now from other reporting as well, including reporting we did at The Intercept in the drone papers, a mountain of secret documents we got about the drone program, that when the United States would kill people, in 9 out of 10 instances that they killed someone, they had no idea what the identity of the person was that had been killed.
They would just call them terrorists because President Obama and the Obama administration redefined what a militant was to mean any male That was of fighting age, meaning 18 to 54.
They were presumptively classified as terrorists unless someone could prove otherwise.
And so they would just kill 14 people in a drone strike.
They would release a press release saying we killed 14 militants or terrorists.
Media outlets would just mindlessly publish that even though they had no idea who they killed.
But here's the part that is extremely Alarming and unusual, to put it mildly.
Quote, moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes, usually at night while their whole families were present, rather than during the course of military activity.
According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their homes.
Additional automated systems, including one called, quote, Where's Daddy?
Where's Daddy is what they named it.
Also revealed here for the first time are used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family's residences.
In an unprecedented move, according to the two of the sources, the Army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, and this is the IDF's calculation, numerical ratio, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, So if the AI system targeted what they thought was a junior Hamas operative, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.
So you have a large family of 15 and 20 people, including young children, and you think that One of the males in the house is a junior Hamas operative under IDF rules of engagement.
For one low-level Hamas operative, they were authorized to co-op to 15 or 20 civilians, a ratio of 15 or 20 civilians for every one militant.
In the past, they said, the military did not authorize any collateral damage during assassinations of low-ranking militants.
The sources added that in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than a hundred civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
This is not a battlefield war where you have two armies fighting one another.
This is a country with one of the world's most sophisticated Militaries, financed and armed by the most powerful country on the planet, the United States, against a population that's overwhelmingly civilian, 50% are under the age of 18, overwhelmingly women and children, and innocent men.
And so, on many occasions, the Israelis, according to this reporting, and it's a very credible magazine, Plus 972, composed of Israelis, Authorized, knowingly killed 100 civilians in order to get one senior Hamas commander.
Not the head of Hamas, just somebody at the battalion commander level or above.
Who's willing to kill 100 innocent people to get one?
Or even 15 or 20 to get one?
Now, if you're somebody who thinks that's morally justified, then my question to you would be, what objection do you have to what Hamas did in Israel on October 7th.
My condemnation of Hamas was based on the fact that I believe targeting civilians of any kind or number is always wrong.
But look at the ratio of civilians to military members that died in Israel on October 7th.
It was nowhere near 15 to 20 to 1, let alone 100 to 1.
Here's the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in November of 2023, how we are counting the Israeli deaths on October 7.
Quote, and they were talking about all the different sources they use.
The English newspaper's list currently bears 1,219 names of civilians and members of Israeli security forces who died on October 7.
And in the subsequent Israel-Hamas war, every name has been authenticated and cleared for publication either by victims' families or the Israeli Defense Forces.
So, originally, the Israelis said that 1,400 people died on October 7th.
They then lowered the number to 1,200.
But according to this, Where they're counting not just the people who died in Israel on October 7th, but also the Israelis who have died in Gaza from October 7th to November 23rd.
The number is 1,200, which means something less than 1,100, then something less than 1,200 people, roughly 1,100, 1,150 died on October 7th in Israel.
Quote, of the total number of fatalities on our current list, 851 are civilians.
Including 59 from the police force and 13 from the emergency services.
And 368 are IDF soldiers.
Of these, 1,105 died on October 7th.
So that's the ratio of October 7th.
1,105 people died on October 7th.
Let's call that 1,105 Israelis.
105 died on October 7th.
So that's the ratio of October 7th.
1,105 people died on October 7th.
Let's call that 1,105 Israelis.
851 of those are civilians.
Which means that 350, at least, more than that, 380, are IDF soldiers and if you add police, active police, you're talking about another above 400.
So it's basically a ratio of 2 to 1.
In other words, Hamas attacked police stations, they had military targets, and they killed 400 security agents, IDF soldiers 368, another 75 or so people in the police and emergency services.
And that's about half of the number of civilians who died, which is around 800.
So two to one.
And we were told this was the worst atrocity ever committed since the Holocaust.
And yet the Israeli ratio is not 2 to 1.
They've had strikes where they were purposely willing to kill 100 civilians to get one person.
For low-level ones, 10 to 15 civilians for everyone.
And we just saw in this attack on this convoy that they were willing to kill seven aid workers to get one low-level armed Hamas militant.
So if you're going to justify this, it's certainly not ordinary for a military to knowingly authorize the killing of up to 100 civilians at a time to get one person, or even 10 to 15.
But if you think that's justified, you're going to have a very hard time finding a way to condemn what Hamas did on October 7th, given that their ratio of civilians killed to soldiers was 2 to 1, not 15 to 1 or 100 to 1.
Here today, according to the reporting by Barak Ravid, who's an Israeli, I believe he's American, but he's an Israeli-American reporter who is at Axios, and he gets a lot of leaks from the Israeli government, from the U.S.
government, kind of just publishes them.
He reported the following, quote, the Israeli security cabinet approved the opening of the Erez crossing with the Gaza Strip for the first time since October 7th in order to allow more humanitarian aid to go in, Israeli officials said.
Now, obviously, this is something Israel wants to promote.
The Biden administration wants to promote this as a way of saying, oh, look, we're getting Israel to stop blocking humanitarian aid into the into Gaza.
And yet what we heard for months is that Israel is not blocking Humanitarian aid from going to Gaza, even though the Israeli Defense Minister said days after October 7th, our strategy in this war will be to starve the Gazans to prevent any food or water from going in.
And yet, obviously, the only reason the Israelis can say that they're going to take steps to allow more humanitarian aid in is because they've been keeping crossings blocked in order to keep aid out, exactly as they promised at the start of the war.
There's obviously a lot of pressure on the Biden administration to do something about the fact that American citizens were killed in this attack on the aid convoy.
It's not the first time Israel has killed American citizens and yet the Biden administration continues to be steadfast.
That it has no policy changes of any kind.
It will keep financing and arming Israel's war.
And that's why we always say, no matter what you think about what Israel is doing in Gaza, it has to be understood not just as an Israeli war, but as an American war as well, as a war of the Biden administration.
Michael Schellenberger is an independent journalist who is the founder of the Newsite Public, a great news site which now resides on Substack.
He has been one of the leading journalists from the very start in reporting on the Twitter files, and we've covered the Twitter files at length.
We've had Michael on before to talk about some of his reporting.
He's the best-selling author of the 2021 book San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities, and has become a leading advocate of free speech and basic press freedom rights.
With his reporting yesterday he released what he called the Brazil Twitter files, the documents from the Twitter files that pertain to the way in which Brazil has been not only pressuring big tech companies but imposing censorship on them to the point that this platform, Rumble, is no longer available in Brazil because of the avalanche of censorship orders it has been getting.
Obviously, this has been widely debated in Brazil.
We've reported it many times, but these new documents shed a lot of light on just how extreme and out of control this censorship regime is.
And we are delighted to welcome Michael Schellenberger to our show once again to talk to him.
Michael, it's great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
Great to be with you, Glenn.
All right.
So let's start, first of all, before we get to some of the substantive revelations with the question of why did you choose to report on Brazil and why should Americans care about what's happening in Brazil?
Thank you.
Well, first, I should say I feel a little bad that it took us this long.
You may remember that the first Twitter files came out in December 2022, about a month after Elon Musk took over the company.
We've had these files for a long time.
There's just been a lot of material to go through.
And as you know, you've done some good reporting on it.
There's a worldwide crackdown right now on free speech in so many countries.
Ireland, Scotland, the European Union, Britain, Canada, the United States.
So I feel a little guilty about this.
Brazil's a country I care a lot about.
I lived here 30 years ago.
I was invited back this week.
I'm actually in Brazil right now at a conference on freedom issues, on free speech issues, of course.
So I felt this obligation to look through the files again and look a little harder, honestly.
And what we discovered really shocked us.
It's really a growing demand for censorship, both from the Sao Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil's prosecutor's office, from members of Congress.
And then finally, from this very powerful Supreme Court judge, who you've covered in the past, of course, there's Alessandro Giumorais.
And he is this incredible, I mean, it's shocking his power.
But basically, just to cut to the kind of the big punchline, they were demanding things that we had not seen anybody ever demand of Twitter before.
So extreme that even the Twitter staff, which was going along with a lot of censorship demands, was pushing back.
One of them, just to give an example of it, they wanted to read the private direct messages of people who had simply retweeted particular hashtags.
They wanted to read their private messages.
They also, this is the Supreme Court Justice, but also the Sao Paulo Prosecutor's Office.
They wanted to read the, they wanted the private personal information from people who had anonymous accounts.
These are such kind of radical violations of privacy that Twitter pushed back.
And then they put, in response, the government sought to criminally prosecute the top attorney in Brazil for Twitter.
So I mean, it was just kind of one shocking thing after another building from early 2021.
I'm sorry, early from early 2020 to 2022.
It covers that period.
And that's the first set of Twitter files Brazil that you that you're that you're highlighting on the screen.
Yeah, I want to read that for people in a second, but I do want to say, and by the way, I saw an interview that you gave with the Brazilian news outlet, and we were all admiring your Portuguese just right before we came on the air, so congratulations on that.
Oh gosh, so awful.
I was so embarrassed.
It's not easy to give interviews in what is not your first language.
Trust me, I am well aware of that.
So let me, you know, one of the things we've, as you said, we've reported a lot on the censorship regime in Brazil because I think it matters to Americans.
And one of the things we try and emphasize is just how extreme it is.
As a way of saying, as bad as what's going on in the United States, it can get a lot worse and probably will.
And Brazil is an example.
It's a democratic country, ostensibly, and yet it has this extreme censorship regime.
So you mentioned one of the documents where The even the Twitter officials obviously accustomed to complying with censorship orders were kind of shocked and they said, if we could put that back on the screen.
Quote, we are going to push back.
And he said, Brazil's high electoral court, which Alexandre de Moraes controls, that's the Supreme Court justice who has been in charge of the censorship regime for the start, also demanded that Twitter reveal the identities of users.
On October 25th, 2021, Twitter's senior legal counsel, Rafael Batista, emailed his colleagues to let them know that the court was, quote, compelling us to track down and The TSE's request was a legal note of Bautista, and so Twitter would resist the court's order.
He said that Twitter was, quote, going to push back because there was, quote, no evidence of illegality in the use of the hashtags and because the TSE was demanding, quote, mass and indiscriminate disclosure of private user data, which characterizes a violation of privacy and other constitutional rights.
So, I know in some of these cases Twitter did in fact push back because of how extreme these censorship orders were, even for Twitter that was seeing a lot from the U.S.
and elsewhere.
Did they win in every one of these cases or what was the outcome?
Well, no, mostly I think they had, it was ruled against them.
And of course, I think it's just worth pointing out that, you know, we don't have the data after 2022.
So we're not sure what has happened since then.
But mostly it's a story.
There were some cases that they did win, but then they would, you know, be right back in it.
I mean, there was actually multiple waves of demands.
Both from members of Congress, from the Sao Paulo prosecutor's office, until finally you get to this character, the Supreme Court Justice Alessandro G. Moraes.
You know, and as you said, look, I mean, very few people have been a bigger critic of Twitter than, Twitter pre-Elon Musk than me.
They went along with a lot of censorious demands.
The case in the United States was that they were really outsourcing.
The U.S. government was outsourcing censorship to Stanford Internet Observatory and other groups.
But here in Brazil, it was coming right from the Supreme Court justice.
Of course, the context here is that they had disallowed the former president, Bolsonaro, from running for president again for another eight years.
Whatever you think of the guy, if you can't vote for the candidate of your choice, that's an undermine of democracy.
Well, here you see, and I've been here now for just a couple of days, Glenn, and I talked to journalists and they're scared of what they say.
It's had a direct impact.
It's had a chilling effect on them.
And the other thing I would note from the files that was so fascinating is that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and these other big tech platforms went along with these demands of providing personal private user data to the Brazilian government.
I don't think that had been reported yet.
We've got right of reply emails to those big tech companies But I think this is a case where, you know, Twitter looked like it was actually fighting the censorship more than anybody else.
And I think it's just a testament to how censorious Brazil has become so quickly.
I mean, I mean, I spoke to a law professor here, you know, privately, who's also very alarmed by this.
And he said, I'm more than surprised.
I'm absolutely shocked.
The country is slipping into totalitarianism so rapidly, I don't even think Brazilians have quite figured out how much closer they are to dictatorship and away from democracy over just the last two or three years.
Yeah, you and I had a chance to chat briefly about your coming on the show, and I mentioned to you that I've done a lot of reporting in my career that had a lot of risk to it, including reporting we did in Brazil and the Snowden reporting and my work with WikiLeaks.
And a lot of those risks resulted in attempts to prosecute or investigate.
But I've never had any time in my life when I was genuinely worried about what the consequences might be of criticizing any public official until I decided that I was going to use my platform to speak out locally and continuously and strongly against the Supreme court judge Alessandro Demarese, because there are people who have done that, who have gone There are people in exile in Brazil who, if they come back to Brazil from the United States, will be put into jail.
Well, immediately, this is a judge who has seized a kind of power I've never really seen before in the hands of a single political official.
And a lot of people talk about their countries being tyrannical.
But ultimately, the real test is, do you have a well-founded fear of what might happen if you actually speak out against somebody?
In the United States, we're scared of other things, getting fired or censored.
But there's not really a sense that we're going to actually be arrested just for dissent.
But in Brazil, That is a very well-founded fear.
And so I guess my question for you is, having looked at these documents, and I do want to say, you know, one other thing, which is having worked with big archives for a long time, I think sometimes people don't realize how much work it can take to put the documents together, to do independent reporting.
It can take a long time to come out with stories like this, given how much work it has.
But given that you've now spent a good amount of time with these documents, you're here in Brazil, you're talking to journalists, political officials, to specialists and the like, How much on the path of Brazil do you think the United States is?
Yeah, it's a really interesting question.
And also, I would just sort of say, how do you rank, you know, Brazil compared to all these other countries?
I mean, you know, the situation in Scotland is in a similar place where the author J.K.
Rowling has been pushing back against a very subjective definition of hate.
hate speech, which has just been ostensibly criminalized.
And I wanted to say one other thing before I answer your question, which is also I'm so struck by often the pettiness of the demands.
And the Supreme Court Justice Jim Morris is very petty.
So often they're going after people that have said mean things about them online.
But also we saw members of Congress demanding censorship of people.
There's like kind of a thin skinnedness that suggests a kind of narcissism, which, of course, is very common among politicians.
But then to see it weaponized in this way in the United States, the politicians know that there's this thing called the First Amendment, which prevents them from persecuting their political opponents and shutting them down.
Yes.
Obviously, in Brazil, they don't have that strong personal protection.
So I would just say, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, we're very bothered by the censorship laundering through the censorship industrial complex in the United States.
That's what was so scary.
They were engaged in mass censorship involving these supposedly non-governmental organizations, but have been funded by the U.S. government to provide lists of posts that they wanted censored.
They were targeting whole narratives.
You know, here in Brazil, like you were saying, I mean, we're talking about prison.
I mean, you're talking about putting people in jail for the things that they say or massive fines that lead up to a stint in jail.
So the chilling effect on speech is the thing that I'm coming away from my visit here most struck by is that even people that are very strong and that are big believers in free speech and really are people that you would normally count on to speak what they want to say, they're watching what they say, they're careful what they put online, and understandably so.
And so I think to see this descend in this way to this kind of totalitarianism I think it should be a wake-up call to everybody in Western countries that has seen some amount of censorship, but we should look at Brazil and go, this is a country that's been a democratic country since the mid-1990s.
It obviously had a dictatorship for 30 years before that.
To see it happening here is just really sad and discouraging, and it makes me angry, and I hope it angers other people enough that they demand that the Brazilian Senate in particular stand up to this thuggish Supreme Court justice who's really trampling on their rights.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things it shows is that you can still have a country that still holds elections and yet still find ways to radically abridge rights.
You know, Michael, one of the things that strikes me about the similarity between Brazil and the United States is that so much of this is justified, including by major media outlets, based on the argument that's
Very similar to the one that justifies much of this in the United States about Trump, but it's about Bolsonaro, namely that Bolsonaro is this unprecedented menace, that he is an anti-democratic fascist, that he wants to overthrow Brazilian democracy even though he was president for four years, lost in an election, and left.
There was an event similar to January 6th on January 8th when a protest against the election and the integrity of it turned into kind of a, not even as violent as what happened on January 6th, but they invaded government buildings and broke things and it got pretty, the kind of thing you don't want to see, but you know they turned that into, oh we face a coup, we face a threat to democracy and so we can't even allow free speech anymore.
And as I said, The media has been leading the way, as they do in the United States, in justifying a lot of this through that narrative.
You've been in Brazil now since you did this groundbreaking reporting, and it was just 24 hours.
But when I've seen you on Brazilian media and being interviewed by Brazilian media, it's typically been right-wing media.
I'm wondering whether you've gotten a lot of coverage about your reporting or requests to interview you from sort of the big globo-type mainstream in corporate media.
Well, I am happy to report that I just heard from Globo, and they are going to do an interview with me tomorrow.
Globo, of course, being, I guess, I don't know how you would say it, it's like one of the big networks here, maybe the biggest media conglomerate.
I also had a chance to speak with about 30 journalists, mostly young, around 30 years old, young journalists, promising, good journalists.
Brazilian journalists here in Brazil, but they kept asking me, you know, what do you think should be done about all the misinformation?
And I just kept responding, well, you should do what I do and what other people do, which is that you correct it.
I've written two books that are basically criticisms of misinformation.
One, misinformation on the environment.
Another, misinformation on homelessness.
That's the right response to misinformation And hate speech is free speech.
It's accurate speech.
It's loving speech.
It's speech that pushes back.
And that's just, I think, something that was more understood by people of more of our age, Glenn.
You know, Gen Xers, baby boomers, people that grew up with these amazing Supreme Court rulings that allowed the neo-Nazis to march through neighborhoods.
That seems like a really foreign thing for a lot of young folks.
They don't seem to appreciate that all the peril, the tyrannical danger of allowing a committee of a small group of people to decide what you can and cannot say online.
I think there's something really wrong with us or wrong with people that hear things they disagree with or they consider misinformation and their response is to want censorship.
I mean, I disagree with almost everything I hear all the time.
I mean, I mostly disagree with what I see on social media or on the news.
I agree with a smaller part of it, and yet I would never imagine that the right response is to have a secret committee of journalists or government officials whose job it is to decide what the truth is in advance and shut down those alternative voices.
A big part of getting stories right and getting issues right, and even changing our own minds, is being able to have that free expression.
So once again, Glenn, I find myself in this really strange position that I've been in many times over the year and five months since the Twitter files first broke, which is actually having to make the basic case for free speech, including to professionals whose job it is, whose jobs depend on free speech.
Some of that may just be economics, that these are journalists who feel threatened by the rise of social media and the decline of traditional media.
But I just think another part of it is cultural, where these are folks that have grown up in sheltered environments and they have a really naive view of the truth of the world.
I try to always ask people, Can you give me an example of a time where you said something that you think the government should have censored?
And the short answer is basically no one has an answer to that question.
The people that are demanding censorship are not imagining that they themselves are the ones that are censored.
So I do think it's those sorts of interventions that are required.
You know, and it's the same, like you were saying, in that part, the cultural response from journalists in the United States and in Brazil and in Europe, it's basically the same.
They just keep going, we can't allow all this misinformation and the answer to that is of course you can and you can respond with the truth and the accurate information as you see fit.
Yeah, you know, there's such a hubris required, I think, to believe, you know, like you said, I mean, I have a ton of very passionately held political views, and I have never once in my life entertained the idea that there should be some government body or some group of Elevated experts who have the power to silence the people who disagree with my passionately held views.
It would never occur to me to be so impressed with my own wisdom that I would think that people should be banned with the force of law from disagreeing with me.
And yet, I think you probably have seen this in Brazil, even more so than the United States, There, because there's no First Amendment, because the idea of absolute free speech is considered almost this kind of exotic or extremist or even fascist doctrine, it's just so ironic because every fascist regime doesn't implement absolute free speech.
They implement censorship that looks a lot like the regime that you just reported on, but they nonetheless believe free speech is this kind of absolutist thing.
And the one question I always have for them is, Look, maybe it would be great to live in a world where all false statements were banned and all hate speech was eliminated, but the question always is, who do you trust to decide that?
You know, right now there's a prominent left-wing journalist in Brazil.
He's Jewish, but he's a harsh critic of Israel who's being prosecuted and sued under these hate speech laws for inciting hatred against Jews and being anti-Semitic because of his criticisms of Israel.
And I don't see how the left has any grounds to object other than by saying, well, the law is being abused and Okay, if the law is being abused, doesn't that show you that that's a pretty big danger to the kind of system that you're advocating?
Let me just ask you as the last question.
I want to just put this email on the screen.
This is from a...this is one of the documents you reported.
It's from Diego de Lima Gualda, who's an official with Twitter.
And this is in 2021 in August, where he wrote, All just an update.
Our request to postpone the on-site meeting with the Superior Electoral Court was denied and the meeting will take place tomorrow at 11 30 Brazilian time.
There is a strong political component with this investigation and the court is trying to put pressure for compliance and the decision denying the postponement the court has clarified.
Twitter is not expected to provide any information and so you see this kind of constant warning by Twitter that this is not just an attempt to purge the internet of disinformation, that there is a very strong political component to the way in which they're choosing the information that ought to be deleted.
What light can you shed on the kind of political motives driving a lot of these pressures?
Yeah, I'm really glad you raised that because definitely it's not like just random.
It's definitely aimed at populist movements in Brazil, particularly supporters of former right-wing populist President Bolsonaro.
This fits the pattern that we're seeing around the world.
It's really after Brexit and Trump elections in 2016, Bolsonaro is 2018.
You see a response from governments in general.
And as well as the intelligence community in particular, often explicitly, but other times hiding behind what you might call cutouts or front groups that intelligence communities generally operate through.
But it's definitely one directional.
It's aimed at populist movements.
Sometimes those are left wing populist movements, but because it's been the populist movements of recent years have tended to be right wing, tends to be aimed at those groups.
And I say this just like you, someone that came from the left and came out of a tradition of left wing populism, not right wing populism, but very familiar, that it just appears to be, and we see evidence of coordination.
I mean, we reported on the FBI coming to Brazil to advise Brazilian government on how to supposedly fight disinformation.
We also see similar funding.
George Soros, Piramidiar, funding NGOs demanding censorship of misinformation, so-called misinformation and hate speech.
I will say, too, Glenn, to your point about the demands for censorship often from the right of critics of Israel, part of my reaction to that, of course, was horror that that's going on.
Another part of me was like, well, I hope that that helps to wake up some folks on the left, because when Matt Taibbi and I testified before Congress a year ago, Matt said at the time, he goes, you put in place a censorship regime And you think it's going to work for you, but it will be turned against you.
At the time, I remember thinking, I don't know if anybody's going to believe that.
I don't know if any Democrats are going to believe that.
But boy, they should believe it now, because we've seen that happen in the United States.
And it sounds like you're saying it's happening here in Brazil, too.
We start to see conservatives demanding censorship of voices critical of Israel.
And I think that is hopefully a chance to have a kind of what you might call a teachable moment, where we're reminded of how sacred free speech is, that it's something that we want to defend on principle, not just when it benefits our side.
We do not want to be on the side of censorship.
I do think...
You know, when you talk to people about this, even, you know, even scholars, intellectuals are supposed to think about it.
The fact of the matter is they just don't ever think that they're going to be censored.
They've got a very, you know, I would think kind of egocentric view of this, that somehow they're not the, you know, they're not the baddies.
They're not the ones that are spreading all this hate or misinformation.
Often they're just strangers to themselves and they're blind.
To their own misinformation and frankly their own hatred of the masses who now have voice through social media.
So I do hope there's that chance for a waker call.
I haven't seen as much of it as I would have liked from the left, but I do feel like, you know, again, we keep coming out with this information.
We keep pointing to the signs of government involvement, particularly the intelligence community.
That's incipient totalitarianism.
It should be raising alarms and red flags all around the world from people that cherish their freedom and I haven't really seen it tested like this, you know, in 75 years, I would say.
So I do hope the Twitter Files Brazil becomes another moment for, you know, kind of, you know, freedom-loving people on left and right just to remind ourselves of the importance of free speed.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
Congratulations on this latest installment of what has been a series of really consequential reporting.
I know there's a lot of people in the U.S.
media who instructed everyone to ignore this reporting on the ground that it was a, quote, nothing burger, a term they It was great to be with you, Glenn.
Definitely not somebody who thinks that I think this reporting has been vital for shedding a light on exactly how this censorship regime has been working.
So thank you for doing that work for so long in the story, for keeping at it and making sure we see every relevant document.
I also appreciate your taking the time to talk to us about it tonight.
It was great to be with you, Glenn.
Thank you so much.
Absolutely.
Keep up with the great work.
Good night.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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