Russia Gains in Ukraine as Another Media Hoax is Revealed, PLUS: The Media's WH Pageant & Latest in Speech Crackdowns
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Another Russia Hoax Debunked (6:23)
Rotten DC Media Class (42:09)
Columbia Students Protests (1:01:42)
Outro (1:15:06)
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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.
It's actually April 29th, not April 19th.
Now, tonight, when Russian activist Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison in February, it was asserted over and over by the U.S.
media and U.S.
politicians that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered him murdered.
They did not mean that metaphorically, that because Putin presides over a country where dissidents are in prison, unlike the United States, it meant that he bore ultimate moral responsibility for Nalvany's death.
No, they meant it literally.
They were claiming, asserting, that Nalvany died because Putin ordered his murder.
As we reviewed at the time, none of those claims made sense.
Nalvany died just days after Putin was interviewed by Tucker Carlson in his first interview with a Western journalist in more than two years.
And Alvani's death happened right as the $60 billion package that Biden had requested for Ukraine appeared to be permanently stalled in the Republican-led House.
Why would Vladimir Putin, in the midst of all of that, order election Alvani killed while he was already incognito or incommunicado in a prison?
And why would he then hand the West a major propaganda weapon to use against him?
But none of those questions mattered.
In fact, it was claimed that only Kremlin propagandists would even ask them.
As we have seen ever since Russia became public enemy number one in the United States when Democrats blamed that country for Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss, the U.S.
government and its corporate media servants assert anything and everything about Putin without the slightest regard for whether it's true.
And even more so, regardless of whether the claim even makes basic sense.
That's because, again, nobody can question any claims about that country, the world's largest nuclear power, without instantly being maligned as a Kremlin apologist or a Kremlin asset.
That Putin ordered Nalvani's murder was treated as unquestionable fact by the U.S.
corporate media.
Now, as it turns out, this claim was completely fabricated.
The Wall Street Journal reported late last week that even the U.S.
intelligence community now admits there is no evidence of Putin's involvement in Albani's death.
This hoax, just the latest in a long line designed to manipulate the American public into drowning in anti-Russia animus and even wanting war with them.
Was exposed as Ukraine continues to retreat and Russia continues to expand its control of that country in that war that is still ongoing.
Now thanks to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spent years claiming he was opposed to more aid to Ukraine until he completely changed his mind and united with the Biden White House like he did on several other issues, the U.S.
is now sending another $60 billion to a war that even Ukrainians are increasingly recognizing is futile and are thus refusing to fight in it.
The propaganda served its purpose, though, of having the U.S.
prolong this war, but the steep price being paid by Ukraine and by the American people continues to grow.
Then each year the White House Press Corps gets dressed up in gowns and other finery to attend a gaudy, sleazy, ostentatious gala at the White House that would embarrass Marie Antoinette.
And there they embarrassingly hobnob and pose with celebrities and with the White House, including the President, the person who they supposedly cover so adversarial, all while they shower themselves with praise and various awards.
The primary function of this spectacle is that it reveals the true role of the U.S.
Press Corps.
They are eager members of the royal court, courtiers of it.
This year was no different, and we will show you the lowlights that were particularly revealing about our current press corps.
Then, we have an update on our show from last Thursday night, the report we did last Thursday night regarding the nationwide crackdown on free speech and political protest all over college campuses in the United States, all to shield Israel from criticism and activism against its war.
Columbia University today warned students that unless they immediately cease protesting the war in Gaza at the encampment that they created, They will be formally suspended from the schools starting today and subject to arrest by the New York Police Department.
All this despite there being no reports of any physical violence or physical assault that emanate from that campus.
We will tell you about the latest and analyze the implications.
Before we get to all that, A few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Although nobody talks about it much anymore, the war in Ukraine is still dragging on.
It is continuing to destroy Ukraine and we all know who will end up paying for its reconstruction.
The firms like BlackRock and JP Morgan that are waiting like vultures to profiteer off of the reconstruction that will be funded by the American taxpayer and to some lesser extent people in Europe.
There are huge numbers of young Ukrainian men increasingly unwilling to fight who are losing their lives on a front line that has barely moved since more than a year ago.
And to the extent it has moved at all, it has not moved in the direction of Ukraine expelling Russian troops, but quite the contrary, has moved in the other direction of Russia continuously expanding the control of territory that they have in Ukraine.
In fact, Ukraine just retreated from several significant cities within the last two weeks, showing that the momentum and the strength continues to be with the much larger country.
Now, the way in which the American public has been convinced to continue to finance this war, even as Ukrainians themselves recognize it as futile, is by a never-ending series of propagandistic claims about Russia and Putin and the Kremlin.
when Designed to not only demonize the Russian state in the eyes of the American public, but to gin up so much hatred toward them, to depict them as some unique and unprecedented tyranny, so much worse than our good friends Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
Oppression of the kind in Russia just doesn't exist anywhere, we're told.
And oftentimes the claims that are advanced in order to convince Americans of that through the media end up being completely false.
In February when Alexei Navalny died, a very odd hero for the West given his long-standing views that were basically what in any other context the American media would call white nationalists, similar to the way Americans have decided to worship Ukrainian fighters even though so many of them are continuously revealed to be neo-Nazis.
When he died in February, it was definitively asserted over and over by the U.S.
media and by U.S.
politicians that the reason he died was because Vladimir Putin, for some reason that we weren't told, just suddenly woke up one day and decided to order his murder.
There was never any evidence presented for it.
As I said at the top of the show, it never made any strategic sense or any rational sense.
But there's never any questioning permitted in the U.S.
corporate media about claims made about Russia.
Russia is so evil, so uniquely menacing and threatening to the American way of life, that any questioning of it instantly exposes you as a Kremlin asset or a Kremlin loyalist.
After all, who else would ever dare question claims made about Russia?
You can say, look, I don't like Russia, I don't have any affection for the Russian government, but I think it's dangerous to continuously prop up tensions between the United States and Russia because it leads to things like the U.S.
getting heavily involved in a proxy war in Ukraine for almost two and a half years now.
But none of that is recognized.
You either hate Putin with all your heart or you're a Kremlin agent and there's nothing in between.
As it turns out, unsurprisingly, Me claims that Vladimir Putin ordered Nelvani to be murdered ended up being a complete fiction.
A falsehood.
Just disinformation disseminated by the very U.S.
corporate media outlets that constantly claim to combat disinformation.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal on April 27th published an article with this headline.
Quote, Putin didn't directly order Alexei Nelvani's February death.
U.S.
spy agencies find.
The finding, which doesn't absolve the Russian leader of ultimate responsibility, deepens the mystery surrounding the dissident's death at an Arctic Gulag.
Now obviously the U.S.
intelligence community is not to be unquestionably believed, but in this case, they are the ones who have done the most to ensure that American citizens hate Russia and want to confront it and go to war with it as much as possible.
That's where Russiagate came from.
That's where almost every lie about Russia, that Russia put bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
That the Hunter Biden laptop and the reporting from it was Russian disinformation and even the whole attempt to blame Donald Trump's presidency on Russia that has all emanated from the U.S.
security state.
So when they of all people are willing to admit that there's no evidence, despite all their efforts and all the surveillance under which they have the Kremlin and Russian leaders to support the accusation that Putin ordered Navalny's death, That is what the law calls a statement against interests.
It's not a case where they're making claims that promote their agenda, they're making confessions that undermine their agenda, and those kind of statements are always far more credible.
Here's what the Wall Street Journal said, quote, Alexei Navalny's February death at an Arctic penal colony prompted a new wave of sanctions targeting Russia's economy, upended delegate negotiations to exchange prisoners between Russia and the West, and left Russia's limited opposition in disarray.
Russian President Vladimir Putin might not have planned for it to happen when it did.
U.S.
intelligence agencies have determined that Putin likely didn't order Nalbani to be killed at the notoriously brutal prison camp in February.
Let's just emphasize that again because this is the key statement.
U.S.
intelligence agencies have determined that Putin likely did not order Nalbani to be killed.
Now we're going to show you how definitive U.S.
media personalities were in claiming that exactly this happened.
I'm sure you all remember it was by far the biggest story for days if not a week in the West and central to the claim was this evidence-free assertion that Putin had ordered Navalny murdered.
There's this accompanying idea that Russia is such a totalitarian state, even though it's gigantic and filled with hundreds of millions of people, that nothing happens without the personal sign-off and approval of Vladimir Putin as though he's some kind of mafia boss running some neighborhood in Queens.
The idea that a country that large and that complex, nothing happens in it without the personal, explicit direction of a single person is that Russia is even capable of being totalitarian is preposterous.
And at the very least, there should be evidence accompanying those claims, although as I said, there's a prohibition on even asking for evidence with claims about Russia, or you'll be immediately accused of being a Russian agent.
And as it turns out, even U.S.
intelligence agencies now admit that Putin likely did not order Nelvani to be killed, directly contrary to what we were told in the most definitive and unquestioning terms over and over and over and over back in February when Nelvani died.
The Wall Street Journal goes on.
The finding is broadly accepted within the intelligence community and shared by several agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department's Intelligence Unit, the people said.
President Biden and other world leaders have held Putin ultimately at fault based on years of the Kremlin's targeting Navalny, including by allegedly attempting to assassinate him in 2020 and sending him to a remote gulag.
Quote, make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Nalvani's death, Biden said after the world learned of the death.
Nelvani's allies insist that his death was orchestrated by the Kremlin, and a statement Leonid Volkov, a longtime Nelvani ally, rejected the U.S.
intelligence community's assessment as naive.
Those who assert that Putin was not aware clearly do not understand anything about how modern-day Russia works.
The idea of Putin not being informed and not approving killing Nelvani is ridiculous.
Now this is always what happens is these people who are the dissidents from some country, like for example in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the U.S.
media, the U.S.
government relied on constant claims from the people who most wanted the U.S.
to go and invade Iraq and remove the regime of Saddam Hussein and they lied constantly.
In order to manipulate American public opinion against Saddam Hussein to try and depict him as some grave threat, telling Americans that he still had an active nuclear and biological weapons program, that he was in an alliance with Al Qaeda.
That's where it all came from.
And these people who want the U.S.
government to go take down leaders for their own benefit so that they can then assert power in that country are always the most unreliable sources.
But the Wall Street Journal says, quote, the U.S.
assessment is based on a range of information, including some classified information and an analysis of public facts, including the timing of his death and how it overshadowed Putin's reelection, some of the people said.
Now, again, you could analyze that on your own at the time that it happened, but there's a taboo on even mentioning or questioning those things.
And we're always told That US intelligence has the Kremlin under such a tight surveillance net.
We know everything Putin does.
We know everything that he says.
That's how we constantly are hearing such definitive claims about what Putin supposedly did.
We were told that Putin personally ordered The hacking of the DNC's emails and the emails of John Podesta, as though Vladimir Putin, while running this gigantic complex country with interest all over the world, is personally approving hacking targets.
To hear the US media tell it, he's a person who has about 70 or 80 hours per day, given how much that is attributed to him.
He's controlling Great Britain, he's controlling their elections, he's controlling American elections.
He's destabilizing Africa.
He's propping up the Assad regime.
He's destroying Ukraine.
He's like some kind of ubiquitous Superman.
And in fact, there were articles early on at Russiagate, when the media was still a little bit open to some dissent, of anti-Putin liberals in Russia complaining That this image, this like superhero image that the U.S.
media was concocting about Putin actually helped Putin.
It was consistent with how he wants to be perceived as this omnipotent figure who can do anything and personally controls every component of Russian life.
So is this yet another example of what we were told in order to be manipulated against the Russian government.
Now, here from NBC News on February 19th of 2024, it just aired unquestioningly.
This article, Nalvani's widow accuses the Kremlin of hiding opposition leader's body to cover up killing him.
Yulia Nalvani said authorities were waiting for traces of the nerve agent Novichok to leave her husband's body and vowed to continue his fight against Vladimir Putin.
So, that claim was that Putin had ordered him poisoned, killed him with poison, was hiding the body in order to prevent detection of how he was actually murdered.
Here's The Guardian on February 26, quote, Putin had Nalvani killed to thwart prisoner swap allies claim.
Do you see how false claims just roll constantly over the population from these media outlets that claim that they are singularly devoted to combating disinformation?
Quote, the Russian leader accused of ordering Nalvani's death to stop him from being exchanged for FSB hitmen serving a life sentence in Germany.
So that was the other theory.
Now, here is the former ambassador under President Obama to Russia, Michael McFaul, who has been so fanatically obsessed with having the U.S.
government try and topple the regime in Moscow.
A fanatical supporter of the war in Ukraine, he had to apologize because he went on MSNBC once and strongly suggested That not even Hitler was as bad as Putin?
Because, according to him, at least Hitler never killed his own people the way Putin is doing?
Very strange claim to make, given the most basic, minimal understanding of 20th century history, but that's how fanatical he became, and he is.
And here is what he said on February 16th when he went on MSNBC to talk about Navalny's death.
Let's bring in former U.S.
Ambassador to Russia, now Director of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford, and an NBC News international affairs analyst, Michael McFaul.
Ambassador, thanks for being with us.
I mentioned a few minutes ago on this show your reaction on Twitter.
I'd like to hear more from you here, and also what more you're hearing about this from your contacts inside Russia.
Guys, I don't know what to say.
I'm going to try to be analytic, but I want you to know Alexei Navalny was my friend.
I was with his wife last night.
I'm here in Munich talking to her.
His daughter Dasha goes to school at Stanford, so this is a pretty emotional time for me.
Putin killed Navalny.
Let's be crystal clear about that.
I don't care about any negotiation, you know, investigation.
I don't care about any investigation.
I don't care about any evidence.
We're just going to assert that Putin had Navalny murdered.
He put him in solitary confinement.
He has put him in a cell which was designed.
And today he is dead.
Putin killed Navalny.
And why did he?
Because Putin is weak.
You don't kill people if you're strong.
Putin killed Navalny because Navalny was the one opposition leader in Russia that Putin feared the most.
So this is a really tragic day for me, and it should be a tragic day for anybody who cares about them.
The idea that Navalny was some wildly popular leader in Russia has also been a complete Western delusion.
He is somebody who, if anything, is more extreme than Putin ever was in terms of nationalistic defense of Russia.
They took a version of Nalvani that never existed and then tried to prop him up as some grave threat to Putin as though there were hundreds of millions of Russians behind Nalvani wanting him to be president, ready to go and vote for him.
And that's why Putin put him in prison.
And then there you said, I don't care about investigations, I don't care about evidence, let's just all agree that Putin had nalbandi murder.
Now, obviously, and this is one of the things we analyzed at the time, is you would think American journalists would be interested in the way in which dissidents are treated by the American government, the government they supposedly exist to hold accountable and to adversarially report on.
But it never occurs to them that we often do the same thing.
Julian Assange being a perfect example of somebody who is clearly being held in a high security prison, being virtually killed, crushed physically and mentally for years for the crime of exposing American secrets and criticizing the American government as one of the most effective dissidents in decades.
And then we watched the Ukrainian government take an American journalist, Gonzalo Lira, and put him in a prison until he was dead.
Something that his family warned was going to happen, something that he warned would happen.
And of course, none of these people have the slightest concern for the plight of Gonzalo Lear because these are, as we're going to show you when we cover the gala that they just threw for themselves at the White House, hugging and kissing President Obama, these are royal court spokespeople.
They're not there to ever criticize or expose the wrongful acts of the U.S.
government.
Even though you would think that that was what the corporate media would be principally devoted to.
That's what American journalism is supposed to be about.
It's incredibly easy to criticize foreign countries thousands of miles away.
It takes no courage to do it.
The U.S.
government wants the press to do that.
They give them a list of the countries that we're all supposed to hate.
Obviously, there are countries far more repressive than Russia, but because they're close U.S.
allies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt, nobody ever goes on the air and indignantly condemns those countries or how they treat dissidents because those are U.S.-friendly dictatorships.
They get their marching orders to propagandize against the countries that disobey us.
That's why they're so concerned about human rights violations in Russia and Iran, but deeply unconcerned about human rights violations far more egregious in US allies and even less concerned about abuses by the United States government.
But the fact that in this case, it turned out to be completely false, Makes it even more disgraceful than it otherwise would be.
Now, as I said, this is far from the first time this has happened.
Obviously, all of Russiagate was this, was a complete fabrication that came from the bowels of the U.S.
security state.
They picked the prosecutor they wanted, they gave him unlimited resources, and the supposed dream team of prosecutors, including Dan Goldman, who now, thanks to the New York Times and his family's friendship with the Sulzbergers, represents Manhattan in the U.S.
Congress.
He was also on the Mueller team.
And they were unleashed for 18 months.
And they came back and said, we cannot find evidence that establishes the conspiracy theory that the U.S.
media has been doubting for almost two full years now, going back to the 2016 campaign.
And there was no sense of accountability at all because they lie for a cause.
When they lie for a good cause, they feel noble in doing it.
And this has happened so many times when it's come to Russia.
In 2019 and then into 2020, in President Trump's last year running for re-election, the New York Times published a story claiming that Russia had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers.
They were paying the Taliban for every American soldier that the Taliban killed.
Now, even if this were true, obviously it's exactly what the United States does.
We are doing everything we can possibly do to help the Ukrainians kill Russian troops in Ukraine.
But the idea of this story was supposed to be Trump was briefed on this but did nothing because he's captive to Vladimir Putin.
He even allows Putin, the story implied, to put bounties on the heads of American soldiers.
Constant propaganda about why you shouldn't only hate Vladimir Putin but regard him as a threat to American security.
It's been a decade-long propaganda campaign, primarily coming from Democrats and their media allies.
Here from Axios in June of 2020 was a report on how top Republicans were demanding answers from the White House because it turned out that even the U.S.
Intelligence Committee admitted, or the U.S.
Intelligence Committee admitted, that this story never had any evidence.
From the BBC as well on April 16th of 2021, Afghanistan war U.S.
spies doubt reports of Russian bounties for troops.
The White House has acknowledged there was little evidence that Russia had offered Taliban militants bounties to kill U.S.
soldiers in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for President Joe Biden said the claim had quote low to moderate confidence from U.S.
spy chiefs.
Russia has denied paying the bounties in last year's U.S.
election.
Mr. Biden heavily criticized Donald Trump for not confronting Russia over the claim, a claim that turned out to be fabricated just like this one.
And yet the political benefit was exactly that, to imply that Trump was so captive to Russia that he would not even confront Russia when it turned out that they had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers.
And the other political benefit from it was that that claim by the New York Times was made right as the Congress was debating President Trump's efforts to leave Afghanistan.
And they were pending various amendments to cut off funding for the war in Afghanistan.
And Liz Cheney was working with the Democrats to make sure that didn't happen.
And they were gifted from the New York Times and the CIA this complete fairy tale.
How can we leave Afghanistan when the Russians are putting heads on, bounties on the heads of American soldiers?
And they use that claim over and over to justify staying in Afghanistan.
Yet another Russia claim that turned out to be completely false.
Do you see the level of propaganda, the relentlessness of it, the complete lack of accountability for it, the way in which it's being weaponized and politicized?
One of the reasons it was so important, obviously, to claim that Putin ordered Navalny's murder was because the Biden administration was desperate to try and get $60 billion more for Ukraine and it was held up in the Republican House and obviously the anger and rage that they were able to generate by falsely claiming that Putin had ordered Navalny murdered made it more difficult to resist getting $60 billion more for Ukraine because obviously they were being accused, the House Republicans were,
of helping Vladimir Putin, this murderer who just got done murdering a hero, the white nationalist, Alexei Navalny.
And that was what it was used for.
Meanwhile, that war that we are now funding with another $60 billion continues to go exactly the way it was so predictable it would go, and that all kinds of specialists like Professor Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearshlammer, who we've had on our show many times to describe it and predict this long before the media started admitting it, was that Ukraine has no chance to win this war.
The US cannot supply it with the artillery it needs to compete with the Russians on the battlefield.
And there's no way Ukraine can have enough fighting forces to go and challenge a country that's many times larger than it.
And now that's exactly what's happening.
Hear from the New York Times.
Wait last week.
Quote, Ukraine retreats from villages on the Eastern Front as it awaits U.S.
aid.
Quote, Ukraine's top commander said his outgunned troops were facing a dire situation as Russia tried to push its advantage before the first batch of an American military package arrives.
Quote, the situation at the front has worsened.
General Alexander Sirsky, Ukraine's top commander, said in a statement on Sunday in which he announced that his troops had retreated from two villages west of Valdika, a Ukrainian stronghold in the east that Russia seized earlier this year, and another village further south.
After Russia captured Avdivka, Ukrainian forces fell back to a new defensive line about three miles to the west, along a series of small villages, but that line has also now been overrun by Russian forces.
General Sirsky said on Saturday that his troops had withdrawn to the last two villages in that area that were not yet fully under Russian control.
Further complicating the situation, Russian forces have managed to break through the northern part of this defensive line by exploiting a gap in Ukrainian positions.
During a visit to Kiev on Monday, Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, said the many months it took Congress to approve new military assistance to Ukraine and Europe's failure to deliver ammunition on time had led to, quote, serious consequences on the battlefield.
Quote, it's about life and death, Mr. Stoltenberg said during a news conference.
When we are not delivering as we should, then Ukrainians are paying the price.
They're just delusional.
Every time the U.S.
loses wars in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in Iraq, the claim always is that, oh, had we just had another year, had we just had another three years of greater and greater funding and commitment, we would have won.
They always blame war opponents for the reason they didn't win.
We were in Vietnam for almost 15 years.
But the claim is, oh, we lost because war protesters prevented us from staying longer or spending more.
Or the claim in Afghanistan, oh, we left and the Taliban marched right back in because we were so limited in what we were permitted to do.
That's always the claim.
So what is happening, which is inevitable, namely that Russia is dominating the much smaller Ukrainians, is now being blamed by Westerners who can't admit they were wrong on the fact that the U.S.
didn't immediately send another $60 billion, that the Europeans are being too slow in getting more weapons to Ukraine.
This is a delusion, a fairy tale.
They cannot admit that the promises they made to their populations, the predictions that they made, were yet again proven false.
And so they're just throwing good money after bad money and continuing to destroy Ukraine because the West will tell you they don't really care since no Western troops are dying, only Ukrainian troops are dying.
Here from CNN yesterday, Russia is making daily tactical gains in eastern Ukraine, as concerns swirl around the Ukrainian military.
Vladimir Putin's forces have made further gains in at least three locations along the eastern front in Ukraine, including for the first time in several months an advance in the northern Kharkiv region, highlighting again Kiev's need for ammunition and weapons from the United States and other allies.
Russia's tactical advances are now daily.
And reflect the new tempo on the battlefield since the fall of the industrial town of Advika in February.
The United States and Europe already proved that they don't have the industrial capacity to supply the Ukrainians with artillery to keep up with the Russians.
The Russians have put themselves on complete war footing.
Just like the U.S.
did during World War II.
And their industrial bases churning out enormous amounts of artillery that the West could not compete with.
Especially since the West already has its own shortfall of artillery because that's not the kind of war for which the West has been preparing.
We're sending enormous amounts of aid now to Israel and weapons to Israel, which obviously is distracting from the Ukrainian cause as well.
And between that artillery shortage that Ukraine cannot make up and the lack of soldiers that they are increasingly confronting, their loss is just a matter of time.
Even if that loss isn't acknowledged in the West.
It is being recognized within Ukraine, in particular among the people who are being told to fight.
The Economist this week, in fact yesterday, became just the latest Western outlet to admit that Ukrainian men are increasingly resisting the war to the point that the Ukrainians are having to be very aggressive in rounding up Ukrainian men and sending them to the front line as cannon fodder.
There you see the headline, Ukraine's draft dodgers are living in fear, even more conscripts are needed against Russia's offensive.
Quote, for a generation of young men in Odessa, life has been postponed indefinitely.
Choices are not black and white.
Of those not already fighting, more and more are hiding from Odessa's conscription officers, who have a reputation for ruthlessness.
Men in green uniforms conduct regular sweeps of the city's buses, gyms, and train stations, often dragging their targets off by force.
The recent lowering of the minimum mobilization age from 27 to 25 is a further challenge.
Their entire generation of young men is being decimated.
They're trying to keep the younger ones from not having to go to the front line just so they have some men left.
Parliament took months to pass the new law, which comes into effect on May 1st.
It was an urgent necessity for the military, which is struggling to hold the front lines.
Perhaps its most significant provision is a requirement that all draft eligible men register in a new online database, increasing their vulnerability to draft officers.
Ruslan Horbenko, an MP who is deputy head of the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee, said draft officers have an unenviable task.
Most of the forcible detentions they make concern not draft dodgers, he says, but deserters.
In some brigades, as many as 10% of the soldiers are believed to have fled.
Along with Western regions, Odessa is one of the prime destinations, he says.
Soldiers who have stayed on the front lines feel, quote, abandoned by those who flee, and recruitment officers take it out on the deserters they catch.
Here from the New York Times, similar report.
In Ukraine's west, the draft dodgers run and swim to avoid the war.
There's the headline.
With Russia seizing the initiative on the battlefield in recent months, Ukraine's ability to defend itself hinges on replenishing its arsenal of weaponry and mobilizing troops.
Quote, the rolling water can be treacherous, the banks are steep and slick with mud, and the riverbed is covered in jagged hidden boulders.
Yet Ukrainian border guards often find their quarry, men seeking to escape the military draft swimming in these hazardous conditions.
Trying to cross the Tisa River where it forms the border with Romania that thousands of Ukrainian men have chosen to risk the swim rather than face the dangers as soldiers on the Eastern Front highlights the challenges for President Zelensky as he seeks to mobilize new troops after more than two years of bruising bloody trench warfare with Russia.
Ukraine's shortage of soldiers has become acute, generals say.
In a speech in parliament on Thursday, the commander of Ukrainian forces in the east said Russians in certain sectors of the front outnumber Ukrainians by more than 7 to 1.
The Romanian authorities say more than 6,000 men have turned up on their side of the Taisa River since Russia's invasion.
Not everyone makes it.
The bodies of 22 men have washed up on both banks.
Said a spokeswoman for the Mukachevo Border Guard Unit.
So the men in Ukraine are increasingly understanding that this war is futile.
They don't want to go to the front lines where they're going to die, be outnumbered and outgunned by superior Russian forces.
And yet we in the West don't care at all about that, at all about Ukrainians.
The war was supposedly being fought in the name of defending Ukrainians.
The West couldn't care less about Ukrainians.
Their lives are of zero value.
They're just weapons to send to go get gunned down to keep Russia caught up in Ukraine for as long as possible.
Here is a video that a very well-informed professor in Canada, Ivan Kachanovsky, he was the one who broke the story about the neo-Nazi who was applauded by the Canadian Parliament, who says Odessa's regional military draft office and Ukrainian media confirm that this is a real attempt of forced mobilization in Odessa, but they blame the men for dodging the mobilization of the military draft.
Here is the video.
We don't have the video actually so here is the video of recruitment officers who are taking Ukrainian soldiers and stuffing them to a van against their will and sending them to a front line and of course here are soldiers that continue to have Nazi insignia on their uniform and this has been the war in Ukraine from the very beginning.
A completely futile and ultimately sociopathic effort to keep a country engaged in a war that it can never win, that will result in its destruction, that will result in the obliteration of an entire generation of its young men, so that Western pundits and Western politicians can walk around feeling purposeful and strong and give speeches about the nobility of confronting the Russians, but the West isn't confronting the Russians.
The West is forcing its populations to pay for that, And the people who are paying the steepest price are...
Young Ukrainian soldiers who continue to die in massive numbers when they're not dying, when they're trying to flee.
And this is a war that the United States and NATO have committed themselves to until the very end.
They've trapped themselves into it.
Yet again, our foreign policy geniuses have gotten us into a war that has no exit and no benefit at all, except for the tiny sliver of the American population and the intelligence community and the arms industry that continues to benefit.
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Every year for as long as I can remember, the White House press corps throws a very gaudy, sleazy, klutzy party for itself. the White House press corps throws a very gaudy, sleazy, And they throw it for themselves at the White House.
And it's traditionally attended by the president, by all the top members of the administration.
Donald Trump refused to attend one of the years, to his credit, but it's a tradition in Washington and every year that goes by it gets gaudier and more ostentatious and sleazier.
It's designed essentially to allow these journalists These media personalities to get to pretend that they're celebrities attending their Oscars, the Washington version of Oscars they have.
B-list and C-list celebrities who come, they pose with them on the red carpet.
And their massive corporations pay for tables and they now start having after parties.
They have the Axios party and the Politico after party.
Just like the Oscars, it's all designed to enable these people To feel like they are integrated, elevated members of the royal court.
Getting to dress up in their finery, having the New York Times write about the outfits that they're wearing.
I was watching a documentary over the weekend about the journalist at the local newspaper Newsday, which is located on Long Island.
It's been a great local paper for a long time.
They have I think something like 20 Pulitzers over the last 30 years for just doing the kind of shoelace reporting that local newspapers have always been known for.
And they featured this one journalist in particular who was obsessed with documenting the mafia and the gangsters who ran the mafia in places like Ozone Park in Queens and various neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
And he's now deceased, but they showed pictures of him and video of him.
And he was this very overweight guy.
He wore these very unkempt clothes.
He couldn't even close the neck on his collar.
He was very unkempt.
He just worked in the newsroom and he was just this outsider guy, this working class guy.
It was a working class profession.
They relied on guilds and unions in order to secure their benefits.
And the people who went into journalism for the most part, the ethos of journalism, was that they were working class people who wanted to take American elites down as many notches as they could.
It was an actual adversarial relationship between the press and the government.
Now, I don't want to romanticize that.
There's been a long time of great deference from the national media toward government, but the ethos of journalism was that these people were supposed to be outsiders.
And one of the things that changed most in American journalism is that these newspapers and news outlets went from being locally owned by families who considered it almost like a public trust to everything becoming corporatized.
So the major networks, the major cable outlets, all started being eaten up by these major corporate conglomerates.
And so ABC and CNN and CBS And MSNBC, and the New York Times, and the Washington Post, these all became just units in corporate conglomerates, like any other unit.
Like the insurance unit, or the financing unit, just the entertainment unit.
And it was all run the same way, through the same mindset.
And the people who thrive in corporations, in major corporations, are radically different than the people who thrive in local newspapers.
You're not outsiders at all.
The ethos of a corporation is to meld as much as possible into the corporate machinery.
And because these corporations have so much business with the government, the last thing they want is any real animosity between their media outlets and The relationship with the government is one of servitude.
People who thrive and who get attracted to these positions on the national level and who are hired from them are now all graduates of Harvard and Yale.
They're not graduates of community college or working class people at all.
They're the kinds of people who could easily be working for the government.
They just chose instead to work in the media department of this machine, of which they're very much a part.
And the relationship with the government is one of servitude.
We were just demonstrating how willingly they lie.
How often they disseminate this information that advances the interest of the American government.
And so this festival, this pageant, this disgusting spectacle that they have every year, Where they dress up and go to the White House and pose on red carpets and give speeches heralding themselves and the President stands up and talks about how much he loves the media because of course he would, why wouldn't he?
And he hugs all the people who get awards from all these media outlets that serve his agenda.
As nauseating as it is to watch, and it is nauseating.
It also has a great value, which is it's very revealing of the actual relationship between these servants of the of the royal court.
That's really what it looks like.
It's the White House and Washington is a royal court run by the members of political royalty.
And they invite in, behind the walls of Versailles, whoever serves the interests of the king.
And that is their propagandists, their spokespeople who get to go and dress up and be treated like honored guests of the king because they are part of the royal court and they're so proud of that, they're so fulfilled by it, that they're embraced by the very people they're supposed to be impeding.
The New York Times covered this event as exactly what it was intended to be, as some kind of chic event where people dressed up and they You had to talk about which designers were putting the costumes on which journalists.
And here's what the New York Times said on April 27th, quote, it hasn't been the nerd prom for a while.
That's what they used to very self-effacingly call it.
Oh, it's the nerd prom.
But the New York Times says it hasn't been the nerd prompt for a while.
Once a popular target of jokes about bad fashion, and not just from the evening's featured comedian host, the White House Correspondents Association dinner has morphed in recent years into a less campy, more staid prelude to the Met Gala, which take place only days later.
It's only fitting, really, given the subtext of journalists being jailed around the world Somehow the fact that journalists are being jailed around the world means that American corporate journalists with their pedicures and their manicures have to dress up in Armani tuxedos and Versace gowns and go pose at the red carpet with celebrities while they hug the president and are so grateful to see Karine Jean-Pierre and the White House Chief of Staff.
Quote, still, the bar for serious style has been raised by the mix of media, political, and Hollywood figures that populate the guest list.
Not that it's just the celebs off eight with stylists and designer brands who are working the entrances.
This year's headliner, President Biden, has such a propensity for aviators that his accessories have practically become part of his political platform.
He even turned them into material for his standup routine at last year's dinner.
Hello, dark Brandon.
I don't know if we have the, here is a photo, one of the photos that the New York Times featured in an article entitled, Who Had the Best Red Carpet Appearances?
But here is Vice President Kamala Harris and she is wearing Celine.
Let's pull this up.
So that's Vice President Kamala Harris.
She's wearing Celine.
And then this person next to her, his name is Eugene Daniels.
He's a White House correspondent for Politico.
And there you see him in his little finery as well.
This is the relationship between the press corps and the top officials in the Biden White House.
Now, here is the Head of the White House Correspondence Center, Kelly O'Donnell, who is a senior correspondent with NBC News, and she decided to pay tribute to important journalists around the world who are being unjustly detained.
And just like the Press Corps is so angry at Russia's treatment of its dissidents, but will never mention the imprisonment of Julian Assange, so too will the Press Corps
Pay tribute to the journalist being detained by the bad countries, the official enemies of the United States, without ever once mentioning a journalist infinitely more consequential than every person in that room combined, who's being imprisoned and killed by Joe Biden.
They can't mention him because they cannot displease the king, otherwise they will lose their access to the royal court.
So listen to them and their self-importance, acting like they're courageous because they're denouncing foreign governments on the other side of the world that the U.S.
government has told them to hate.
At the Wall Street Journal, they are counting for Moscow correspondent Evan Grishkovich.
396 days since he was jailed in Russia.
The U.S.
government has designated Evan as wrongfully detained.
And Evan's parents and his family are with us tonight.
And we are with you always. - Could you even remotely conceive of the very possibility
That sitting in front of, standing next to Joe Biden, who's just a few feet away on the dais, that they would mention the journalist who Joe Biden himself is prosecuting and killing, Julian Assange.
It's inconceivable that they would even mention Julian Assange or Gonzalo Lira, let alone stand and applause and pay tribute to the injustice of the imprisonment of that journalist.
Even though Julian Assange, as I said, is responsible for more major stories over the last 15 years than all of these royal court servants combined.
But they are servants of the U.S.
government, so of course the last thing they're going to do is mention a journalist who's being imprisoned, not one of the bad countries.
Oh, we're going to so bravely stand and denounce Vladimir Putin and next we're going to so bravely stand and denounce Bashar al-Assad in Syria, but we would never, ever utter a word about the persecution by the U.S.
government of our own dissidents.
We remember Austin Tice.
4,276 days, nearly 12 years since he was kidnapped in Syria.
His mother Deborah is with us, and Mrs. Tice, we are with you.
And Mr. President, again, we humbly ask that you do everything you can to bring them home.
Oh yeah, we humbly ask you, Mr. President, to do everything you can to bring them home, but what about the journalist who is actually being prosecuted by that same person?
Why aren't you humbly asking that Joe Biden end his prosecution and release him from prison, as even our allies in Australia are demanding?
These people are complete cowards.
Everything about them, their branding, everything are completely fraudulent.
There's not an iota of adversarial energy between these people and these government leaders and that's why they can all go and dress up at a gala inside the White House where President Biden is appearing and feel grateful for it.
I mean, I couldn't imagine going to something like this and then having to look at myself in the mirror afterward.
Then I got dressed up and gussied up to go as an invited guest in the White House where I embrace and greet and hug White House officials, the people I'm supposedly supposed to be such adversaries of, and then call yourself a journalist?
Here's the rest of this.
Our profession can be perilous.
Since October, about 100 journalists have been killed, most of those deaths in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Around the world, more than 320 reporters imprisoned as of December, including an American with dual Russian citizenship, Alsu Kremyshev, who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty.
She has been jailed in Russia since October.
I mean, do you see?
They say things that are authorized by the U.S.
government to say you are free to denounce foreign governments as long as those governments are enemies of the United States.
Here is the award that they gave out.
They put Lester Holt up there, the very distinguished baritone from NBC, the NBC anchor, to give out the award for greatest, best, whatever, White House correspondent.
And here's who they chose.
Each year, a panel of independent judges reviews dozens of entries for the five major WHCA journalism awards.
It's my honor to announce this year's winners.
The Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, named for a former association president, the late Chicago Tribune correspondent Aldo Beckman goes to Barack Ravid of Axios.
The judges said Barack Ravid's reporting displayed deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the United States and abroad that produced stories closely aligned to the events that subsequently transpired.
His stories put the reader into the room as decisions were being made in the tumultuous aftermath of the October 7th Hamas-led raids on Israel.
Ladies and gentlemen, the WHCA is pleased to give the Aldo Beckman Award to Barack Ravid.
Barack Ravid He is an Israeli, not an American.
He was born in Israel.
He's a citizen of Israel.
He served in the Israeli Defense Forces.
In fact, he was in the reserves of the Israeli Defense Forces as recently as a year ago.
Here, in fact, is a tweet where he announced that in protest of the decision by the Netanyahu government to eliminate The right of judicial review by the Supreme Court, quote, I have just notified my commanders that after the events of tonight, I will be not reporting to reserve service anymore.
So as of a year ago, he was a member of the Israeli Defense Forces.
And basically all that he's done since October 7th is write down and report what the Israeli government and the U.S.
government have told him to say.
Which is why they say, oh, he brings you into the room, into the room of the US and Israeli governments.
Because he's obviously trusted by the Israeli government, he was in the IDF as recently as last year, as a reserve, and the Biden White House loves him as well, and so chooses him to bring forth their messaging.
And that's what he's been doing since October 7th.
It's been incredibly blatant.
The year before, or two years earlier, they gave this award, the best White House correspondent, to Matt Visor of the Washington Post, who wrote one article after the next about how gentle of a man Joe Biden is, about the role of ice cream in his life.
He would write, like, Hallmark cards about Joe Biden and the Washington Post, and that's who ended up winning.
The best correspondent dinner because this is an award for the best servant of the royal court.
This is what this is.
It's a, it's a Versailles party run by Marie Antoinette, where they get to come into the wall and basically be embraced by the government for their good service.
And the person who wins the award, let's put that video back up there.
The person who wins the award is the person who does the greatest service to For the government.
Now, here's what happens when Baruch Ravid comes out, like some Oscar winner, all giggly and all giddy.
And watch what happens when he goes over to President Obama, the government official whom he serves.
Look at that, they're sharing a private moment.
They're continuing to clasp hands.
Of course Joe Biden loves bureaucracy.
He loves everybody in this room.
They work for him.
That's why they're invited there.
And just watch how prolonged this affectionate exchange is.
Joe Biden.
He did a little gesture because he didn't know that he was supposed to turn and face the cameras and for some reason they found that uproariously funny and they all began laughing together at this incredibly affectionate scene.
Now here he is with Kamala who also is heaping praise on him while she sits next to that Politico reporter dressed in his little blue Star Trek suit.
I mean, this is sleaze of the highest order.
And obviously the more they do these things, the more the public sees what they are and who they are, and the more the public hates them, despises them.
Like the people of Paris despise the people of Versailles for walling themselves off and giving them all kinds of prizes, themselves prizes and awards and heralding their greatness and dressing up in the finest finery.
While the rabble were kept outside.
That's exactly what this is.
But the fact that these are journalists whose branding is that they have an adversarial relationship with these people, that they are there to expose their secrets, to hold them accountable, is an absolute repugnant is an absolute repugnant joke.
We want to update the story that we covered last Thursday night where we interviewed two of the student leaders of the protest movement at Columbia, which has been accused of essentially every conceivable moral crime that there is.
Obviously, because they're criticizing the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, they are constantly being smeared as anti-Semites.
We covered all of that.
We interviewed those two students.
You can hear for yourselves.
What they actually believe and who they actually are, rather than hearing the media and social media smear campaign against them.
And we delved into all the ways in which free speech and the right of protest are being systemically attacked by both parties that are operating in defense of Israel to ensure that the Israeli government is free from anti-Israel criticism and anti-Israel activism against its war.
Huge donors have been demanding this from the beginning.
They've been threatening to blacklist anybody who criticizes Israel and who marches against Israel.
They have had their faces put up on buses and driven around and doxing them with their names and their faces called anti-Semite underneath.
They've had their student groups banned and now they're being threatened with suspension and then expulsion from their schools that they continue to demonstrate.
Here the New York Times today reported on the Note sent from Columbia University administrators to the demonstrators, the demonstrators who are there for the pro-Palestinian cause, and in the encampment on Campus University, Columbia University, they received a notice from administrators today stating that negotiations with student protests or leaders were at an impasse.
Those in the encampment were urged to clear out voluntarily and were warned that they would be suspended from Columbia if they did not leave before a 2pm deadline.
And here's part of what the note said, quote, "As you probably are aware, the dialogue between the university and the student leaders of the encampment is regrettably at an impasse.
The current unauthorized encampment and disruption on Columbia University's campus is creating an unwelcoming environment.
For members of our community, external actors have also contributed to this environment, especially around our gates, causing safety concerns, including for our neighbors.
Please promptly gather your belongings and leave the encampment.
If you voluntarily leave by 2pm, identify yourself to a university official and sign the provided form.
We want to do all that we can to allow our graduating students to finish their studies.
date of the conferral of your degree, whichever is earlier, you'll be eligible to complete the semester in good standing and will not be placed on suspension as long as you adhere to that commitment.
We want to do all that we can to allow our graduating students to finish their studies.
Now obviously, if a student engages in violence against another student or threatens violence against another student or attacks another student, that obviously is a violation of That should not be tolerated.
And I would even say that if students are impeding the ingress and egress of students who are trying to get the classes that they paid for, that too should be a violation of campus rules.
But if you're sitting in an encampment that you're there to demonstrate your commitment to a cause, namely pressuring the university to divest from Israel by In order not to use the students' funds to support a war that they regard as immoral and genocidal, that is obviously peaceful protest of the kind that we've seen for decades on American campuses.
That goes directly to the heart of the First Amendment and its rights, not just to speak freely in a way that's ineffective, but to speak in a way that would be heard to gather in protest and express grievances, which is exactly what these students are doing.
Earlier today, a group of 20 or so Democrats in Congress, people like Congressman Joth Gottheimer of New Jersey and Congressman Dan Goldman of Manhattan, the Levi Strauss heir, organized a letter, as Michael Tracy reported, to Columbia demanding the quote, anti-Jewish protest be disbanded immediately due to quote, hate speech.
They said the time for negotiation is over, they warned.
These people are absolute menaces to the First Amendment.
Now, here's the letter.
It's written on official congressional stationery to the administrators of Columbia University.
And we've seen now for ever since October 7th.
Congress routinely trying to dictate to administrations and colleges what the limits of acceptable expression and speech are on these campuses, along with billionaires doing the same.
Seems like a very unhealthy environment to me when the government is trying to dictate the outer limits of speech.
It's not the role of the government to do that, to put that mildly.
And yet you have Democratic Party leaders, as I'm about to show you, embracing the longtime theories that they've had that once speech goes into what they call hate speech, once it starts to make others feel uncomfortable and unsafe, it means that that speech has to be banned.
No hate speech as they define it, and no ideas that make others unsafe.
Now this is the view that has been mocked mercilessly by most of the American right As an attack on free speech because oftentimes that theory has been used to target conservative students and conservative speech.
And so they've been objecting on free speech grounds.
Except this time, many on the right agree with these Democrats.
Because the views that are being targeted are views that many on the right hate.
They're fanatical supporters of Israel.
Not all, but many.
And the way you know a free speech fraud are people who claim that they believe in free speech but only invoke it when it comes to protecting ideas that they agree with and that are on their side.
The true test of a free speech advocate, of a genuine earnest believer in that principle, in that right, is whether they stand for the free speech rights of people who are expressing the views they most hate.
And so many people on the American right have failed that test.
Which is why, again, not all, there have been people standing up and objecting who are influential in the conservative movement, but many who prioritize this foreign country, Israel, over every value that they claim to believe in, including free speech, is completely supportive of what these Democratic members of Congress are doing.
People like Lois Frankel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Richie Torres.
The most devoted pro-Israel members of the Democratic Party.
This is what they wrote.
Quote, for the past week, this encampment has been the breeding ground for anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish students, including hate speech, harassment, intimidation, and even threats of violence.
Last week, a student held up a sign pointing to pro-Israel students that said Al-Qassam's next target, referring to the military arm of Hamas, and for holding hostage The terrorist organization responsible for October 7th, etc., including holding hostages in brutal captivity.
One of the protest leaders has previously declared, quote, Zionists.
They are Nazis.
They're Nazis.
They're fascists.
They're supporters of genocide.
Why would we want supporters of people who are supporters of genocide to live?
And students routinely chanted, quote, from the river to the sea, which is a cry to eliminate Israel and all Jews within its borders.
They then cite what the White House said, that while every American has the right to peacefully protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students are unconscionable and dangerous.
They have no place on any college campus.
They went on to say that the Columbia administration tacitly acknowledged that the encampment has created an impermissibly hostile and unsafe environment for Jewish students.
So using traditional safe space and safetyism language that Democrats have been using for many years in order to justify censorship on college campuses.
Now, as I said, the reason we interviewed those two protest leaders is that you could hear from yourself what they actually believe.
You can go to any protest and find the most extreme signs.
You can go to an anti-immigration protest, any single one of them that exists in this country, and you will find racist signs.
Obviously that doesn't mean that every person who is a supporter of immigration restrictions is doing so for racist reasons, nor does it mean that the vast majority of the movement, let alone the movement itself, is inherently racist.
It just means that in any group of people, for any cause, you can find the most extreme people.
If you go to a pro-Israel rally, any pro-Israel rally, you will hear from people who are saying, turn Gaza into a parking lot, kill all Arabs.
I can show you hundreds of videos of Israelis and pro-Israel supporters saying that.
That doesn't mean that every Israel supporter believes in genocide or wants to kill every Palestinian, but you can definitely find protesters, every protest, who believe that, who say that.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, this is how they often tried to discredit protest movements against the invasion of Iraq.
They would find two signs of some Marxist group or some Trotskyite group and claim that, oh, this is a communist march, even though there were hundreds of thousands, millions of people marching around the world, not for a communist revolution, but to stop the invasion of Iraq, just like most of these students are protesting with the cause of stopping the Israeli war in Gaza.
And this tactic is just the standard sleazy tactic of trying to find the worst individuals within some broad movement as a way of discrediting the movement.
You can do that to every movement.
The reality is, and that's why we interviewed those two people who we didn't know before we interviewed them.
We had no idea what they were going to say.
They were incredibly reasonable.
I bet you anything that they are representative of the vast majority of students who are there protesting the war in Gaza.
But even if they weren't, even if they were motivated by anti-Semitism, even if this was hate speech, Hate speech is part of free speech.
Hate speech is not an exception to the First Amendment.
You're allowed to express hatred for other people and for other groups in the United States.
That is foundational to free speech.
You are allowed to protest.
Now, as I said, you don't have the right to physically attack other people or to threaten physical attack on other people.
Students who do that should be removed.
The student leader who was quoted here, who said, You know, Zionists have no right to live, was suspended from school.
But the protests themselves have not, contrary to the attempt to create a moral hysteria over bigotry and racism on college campuses, often led by the right and pro-Israel supporters on the right, but often in tandem with Democrats, has not contained physical violence or physical assault, except in the rarest and most isolated of cases.
This is obviously an attempt To limit and suppress speech and activism that is opposed to the orthodoxies and pieties of both political parties.
Both political parties voted overwhelmingly and continue to vote overwhelmingly to finance the Israeli military to pay for and arm the Israeli war in Gaza.
They are drowning in AIPAC money and this is a direct attack on free speech and the right to protest on American college campuses.
It would be bad enough If this were being done to shield American leaders and the American government from being criticized, obviously if this were a group of conservative students who were in an encampment to protest the policy of allowing trans women to participate in college sports, or if this were a protest movement against the border crisis, And the police came in and arrested students and expelled them for this protest.
Obviously, every single person on the right would be screaming censorship and attack on free speech, and they would be right.
This isn't even an attempt to shield the United States government and United States leaders from criticism.
It's an attempt to shield a foreign government and foreign leaders from criticism and activism.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who's the president of a foreign, the prime minister of a foreign country, Israel, Demanded that colleges stop these protests as though he has the right as the Israeli leader to dictate the scope of free speech rights and civil liberties on American college campuses.
And that's exactly what's being done.
There are precedents now being endorsed by both political parties about hate speech and safetyism.
All in the name of shielding a foreign country whose wars we're paying for, whose military we're paying for, meaning Americans have the right even more so to protest that country's actions if they oppose them.
But it's an attempt to shut down free speech in the name of shielding a foreign country from criticism.
And it's hard to imagine anything more directly assaultive of the First Amendment than that.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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For those of you who've been watching this show, we are, as always, very thankful.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
