Journalists Shield Kamala From Interviews; The Media Changed Its Rules For Hacked Materials in 2020: So What Now?; Major Leak About Brazil's Notorious Censorship Judge
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
No Interviews (7:13)
Media’s Hacked Materials Rule Faces Test (44:14)
Reporting on Brazil’s Alexandre de Moraes (1:12:07)
Outro (1:27:47)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the single most bizarre aspect of the 2024 election is not that Kamala Harris somehow became the Democratic nominee without campaigning for or receiving a single vote, although that is beyond bizarre.
Instead, it is that her campaign has clearly decided On what is now a long term strategy of saying absolutely nothing of substance, not expressing a single policy view beyond culture war type, and just completely refusing to sit with any journalist for an unscripted interview at all where she just answers basic questions let alone do so with one who is minimally adversarial.
We've devoted several shows over the last month to examining the anti-democratic arrogance And utter contempt for the voter that drives that choice just refuse to say what you believe while running for president.
But if you want to debate what is actually the single most bizarre aspect of this election, it may no longer be that Kamala is choosing to remain a completely blank slate, refusing to express a single view about any policy position, including the pending crisis in the Middle East.
Instead, many in the media, not all but many, and especially the so-called liberal or progressive media, are now actively and explicitly defending Kamala's refusal to speak to journalists or answer basic questions about little things like what she believes, what her policies would be, how she would handle domestic and foreign policy, little what her policies would be, how she would handle domestic and foreign policy, Now, that takes some real devotion to partisanship.
To call yourself a journalist and then justify a presidential candidate's choice to take no questions, but that's exactly what we're witnessing.
Then, one of the most overtly corrupt things I've seen in American corporate journalism, and I know that's obviously saying a great deal since I've seen a lot of overtly corrupt things there, took place in the lead up to the 2020 election.
I'm not talking about how the media united with the CIA to spread the blatant lie that reporting based on the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, although that indeed does rank very high on my list.
Instead, it happened when media outlets, led by the Washington Post and then others followed, announced that they were going to change and even abandon one of the longest standing and most central rules of journalism, namely that you publish anything and everything that is one, authentic, and two, in the public interest.
And what they did was they said, from now on, even if material that we get meets those criteria, even if we know it's authentic and it's in the public interest, we still won't publish those materials, even if they shed critical light on a presidential candidate, if we find out that the material came from a foreign source even if they shed critical light on a presidential candidate, if we find out that the material Now, that remarkable and radical change was instituted, needless to say, in 2020 to protect Joe Biden.
The media wanted to avoid being forced to do their jobs they sort of did in 2016 when they reported on the revelations about Hillary Clinton from the DNC emails that many people now say came from Russian hackers.
And they wanted to say, oh, if this happens again, And even if we get a huge trove of documents we know are authentic, we're still not going to publish them if they came from a foreign source trying to influence our election.
And now, by all reports, they have created a huge dilemma for themselves, as they seem to have genuinely received massive amounts of hacked emails from the Trump campaign.
which you know they're so eager to publish, yet now they have to find a way to work around the rule they created in 2020 to protect Democrats that was the most radical departure, explicit radical departure I've seen from the most basic precepts of journalism.
We'll tell you about that.
And finally, we have repeatedly reported on Brazil's authoritarian judge, the authoritarian judge on the Supreme Court, who oversees Brazil's censorship regime and harshly punishes dissent with criminal investigation and even prison, not just censorship.
His name is Alexandre de Moraes, and even the New York Times, before the 2022 election in Brazil, when they were obviously eager to make sure Lula would beat Bolsonaro, warned twice of how menacing this judge's behavior has become to basic democracy and core civil liberties.
Yesterday, working with Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, I began publishing what would be a very lengthy series of reports revealing much of what actually happened inside the chambers of that judge.
That's because we obtained...
A huge archive of documents from his chambers, more than six gigabytes.
And I want to explain a little bit about what is happening there in terms of this reporting and the reaction, because as we have said many times before, many countries in the West, including the US, use Brazil as a laboratory to see how far they can go with online censorship regimes and other forms of repression.
That was one of the major reasons Elon Musk, a few months ago, So vocally denounce this judge.
It's why this platform, Rumble, is not available any longer in Brazil because of the avalanche of censorship orders.
And what is happening in Brazil is being seen by the EU and therefore the U.S. as an important laboratory for censorship.
And we'll tell you all about that.
Before we get to that, a few quick programming notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works on your smart TV, but also on your telephone.
And then if you download the app, you can follow the programs on this platform you most like to watch.
And then once you're done with doing that, you can activate notifications, which we hope you will, that will enable you to Anytime any of those shows that you watch and like to follow are broadcasting live on the platform, the minute they go live on the platform, you'll be immediately notified by link or email, text, however you want.
So you can just click on that link and begin watching the show live.
You don't have to wait around.
If some of those other shows that we hear sometimes start late, actually start late, you don't have to waste your time with that.
If shows go live outside of their normal time because of a breaking news event, you'll be notified of it.
That way it really helps the live viewing numbers of every program and therefore Rumble itself.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow and listen to every episode of System Update 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble community, where we have our live interactive after show.
That After Show is available only for members of our Locals community, so if you want to join and we take your questions there, we respond to your feedback and critiques, we hear your suggestions for future shows, As well as a multitude of other interactive features.
It's the place we first publish our original written journalism.
It is the place where every night we publish written, professionalized transcripts of every show we broadcast.
And most of all, it's the community on which we rely to do the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
I realize I talked about this before, and I'm not going to repeat myself tonight, but I just want to note one more time before I proceed to the other point that I think is new and bears a lot of emphasis. but I just want to note one more time before success.
It is just, it is beyond what I can express in words to observe the fact that a Presidential nominee for one of the two major parties in the United States, three months out of the election, has yet to express a single, substantive view about anything, anything that's happening in the world right now, anything that will likely be happening if and when she wins the presidential race and she becomes president.
If she does, we have no idea what she says she will do, what she believes in.
Obviously, we have a long record of things she said before, but many of those things she's renounced.
In fact, much of the core of her 2020 presidential campaign inside the Democratic Party, a failed bid she dropped out before even a single vote in the primary was cast, She is renounced and repudiated, and her campaign said she no longer believes in any of it.
She was advocating things like single-payer health care, a ban on frocking, all sorts of other policy issues that were important to progressives.
She now says she doesn't believe in any of those things anymore.
So we know that, I guess, that she doesn't believe in those things, but we don't really know anything other than a few, like, cliches about abortion and LGBTs, which she's in favor of.
That she believes in it all.
And the reason we don't know is because she has not sat for a single interview or any unscripted event ever since Joe Biden was forced Out of the race, the sitting president overthrown by Democratic Party elites within his own party and replaced with Kamala Harris, not through any democratic process but by backroom secretive meetings of Democratic Party elites who decreed that it shall be Kamala Harris replacing him and then announced the decision.
This is the party that is the only way to save democracy.
Ever since that day, She's essentially not appeared in a single public unscripted event.
She's appeared all over the place, reading speeches from a teleprompter.
But she just she hasn't answered any questions of any kind, essentially.
And there's a lot going on.
There's things like the war.
There's a very serious national security crisis in the Middle East.
We've interviewed several guests, including Professor Mearsheimer last week about the danger of that situation.
Kamala Harris hasn't uttered a single word about it, which is incredible given that she's not only the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party for an election taking place in three months, she's also the sitting vice president.
And you just go down the list.
And obviously, again, we have some record of things she believed in in 2004 when she ran for the Senate from California in 2016, what she said she believed in in the Senate, and then when she Was running for president, but this was five years ago and she's obviously been very willing to say she's jettisoning all those previous views.
That's why we keep hearing about the reintroduction of Kamala Harris.
We're constantly getting a new version of Kamala Harris where she's being reintroduced to us.
The old Kamala Harris or the old versions of Kamala Harris no longer exist.
It's just that we haven't been told what this new version is and it's purposeful.
Now you would think The media would refuse to cheer for her campaign, to publish propaganda about her and her campaign, unless and until she actually engaged with journalists substantively.
I mean, you would think that if there were actual journalism inside media corporations in the United States, and of course there's not.
I'm just saying in a world of basic journalism, You would think this is all journalists would be doing.
We're not going to put campaign spokespeople on our show where they just say your propaganda and can't answer for you.
We're not going to write articles about how great and wonderful and successful your campaign is.
You need to sit down with us and answer questions about the substance of what your belief system is.
Obviously, that's not what virtually any of these media outlets are doing.
You do have a few notings.
Sometimes it seems kind of odd that she hasn't sat for a single interview, but they're more than willing as she refuses, as she defies them, as she tells them, I don't care what you want.
I'm not sitting down with you and answering questions.
They continue to air her propaganda, often uninterrupted.
Here on CNN from August 12th is a segment where Dana Bash, who that same day had interviewed Vance in a very adversarial manner.
I have no problem with how she interviewed him.
He's a candidate for Vice President.
He handled himself perfectly well.
He answered questions she interrupted.
She presented counter-arguments.
That's how democracies are supposed to function.
You have a politician and a journalist sitting across from each other.
Ask and answer questions and present each other with arguments against what they've said.
That's how it's supposed to work.
So she's willing to do that with J.D.
Vance.
And yet, despite the fact that Kamala Harris will not sit down with her or apparently any other journalist, at least as of now, she invited on a spokesperson for Kamala Harris' Gen Z social media campaign.
And I want you to watch what CNN allowed this person to do, even though Kamala Harris has refused to give CNN a single substantive explanation about anything she thinks.
Watch this.
If the weeks-old Harris campaign is known for anything yet, it's the viral presence online, thanks to TikTok videos like these.
She said, I just have to repeat that, if Kamala Harris's campaign is known for anything, It's for the viral TikTok videos online.
Isn't that kind of strange?
That what that campaign for President of the United States three months outside of an election is most known for is not her domestic policy agenda, is not her views on war, is not her views on foreign policy or immigration.
It's not her ideology in general.
It's not her agenda for the first 100 days.
None of that is known.
In some sense, what Dana Bash said there is kind of true.
What it's most known for are viral TikTok videos online.
It's just that that should be kind of outrageous to any person calling himself a journalist.
That should produce indignation.
Giggling joy, as it clearly does for Dana Bass, as you're about to see.
Here are some of the online viral TikTok videos for which the Kamala Harris presidential campaign is most well known.
No sleep.
Bus.
Club.
Gotta play that again.
he does not walk it like he talks it.
No sleep.
Bus.
Club.
You got to play that again.
By the way, this is all to say nothing of the fact that it was the Biden administration that demanded, even though a lot of conservatives support them, but it was the Biden administration that demanded, advocated, and then actually implemented and voted for a bill to ban TikTok on the grounds that it's some sort and then actually implemented and voted for a bill to ban TikTok on the grounds that it's some sort of Chinese propaganda machine, and yet they're using TikTok very aggressively as It is.
As my friend Quavo would say, he does not walk it like he talks it.
No sleep.
Bus.
Club.
Another club.
Another club.
Plane.
Next place.
Hey Kamala, what are we going to say to Donald Trump in November?
Bye bye bye.
Okay, now, I understand that I'm not the target audience for TikTok videos.
Like, you know, usually what happens is, like, older generations look at what younger generations like culturally, and they think, oh my god, this is shocking, this is so subversive, this is so offensive.
I remember stories like when my parents were growing up, when I was growing up, my parents would tell me about how their parents were so angry and horrified that they liked Elvis Presley or like the 1960s music.
Their parents were scandalized by that.
There's nothing scandalous about this.
This is like so cringe and embarrassing.
It's so childlike and just simple minded.
And anyway, did you see how Kamala Harris talked when she talked about her friend Quavo?
just want to play this as well. - Like these. - As my friend Quavo would say, he does not walk it like he talks it. - Have you ever in your entire life heard Kamala Harris talk that way?
I mean, it's so offensive.
She just, like, changes how she speaks, not in a smooth or effective way, but in a really cringe way.
Here's the end of this video, the TikTok video, and then we'll hear what the CNN segment is about.
For those of us who are not Gen Z, thank you for including that NSYNC cameo.
My colleagues have terrific new reporting on the Gen Z operation that is powering Harris' rise on social media.
CNN's Betsy Klein is- Her colleagues, her CNN colleagues, have extremely excellent reporting Inside the Gen Z operation powering Harris's online remix.
Now look, I've seen a lot of journalistic courage in my life.
People go to war zones.
People confront the most powerful factions of their society.
They publish their secrets.
In the third segment, I'm going to talk about some recent reporting that we're doing now that we just started yesterday here in Brazil along those lines, but this is this is what journalism is for her colleagues and how many people are on this byline one two three four separate reporters byline the story inside the gen z operation powering harris's online remix and there she is with the coconuts and she's smiling because as they constantly tell us is the campaign of joy it's the politics of joy
No, this is what I mean.
I wouldn't have a problem if some news site wants to write about the Gen Z operation of Kamala Harris' campaign if we knew all the other things about her presidential campaign.
All the things we're supposed to know, like what she believes, what she intends to do, what she thinks about current crises.
But we don't know any of that.
And that's what makes this so, so just self-degrading.
To do.
But the worst hasn't even come yet.
This is when she invites on the head of that Gen Z operation.
I just want you to see how she treats her and how she lets this person speak for minutes at a time, uninterrupted, in contrast with not only how they treat every Republican who comes on the show or member of the Trump campaign, but in the context of not knowing a single thing about Kamala Harris.
CBS, CNN's Betsy Cline is a part of the team behind this terrific piece.
So, Betsy, one of the things that I have been kind of obsessed with, and I was talking about it with some of our colleagues over the weekend, is... You know what?
I have to just correct myself.
This is not even a member of the Gen Z team.
This is one of the reporters, Betsy Klein, who did this incredibly courageous and in-depth reporting on the Gen Z operation.
And you're going to see how happy they are when they talk about this and just how Propagandistic this is.
This team, and I was affirmed by your reporting, that is doing all of this, it's the same team that worked for Joe Biden.
That's just totally different.
Why are they getting such different results now?
It's absolutely right.
I mean, it's the same 175 digital staffers at the campaign.
It is the same digital strategy.
But the difference here is that the campaign believes that they have captured a cool factor.
That is that they believe it is cool to talk about Kamala Harris on the Internet right now.
And the Biden campaign always believed they were going to need to meet voters where they are.
And so they built this robust digital strategy on social media across.
So for those of you listening to the show and who have the great fortune of not having to see the video, while the CNN reporter is talking the entire time, they have a bunch of TikTok videos of Kamala where she's dancing, ones that are coconut themed, ones that are brat themed.
And it's all playing at the same time on like 80 percent of the screen while the CNN reporter keeps uninterrupted praise on Kamala's social media operation.
platforms to reach voters on non-traditional platforms who get their news maybe on TikTok or on Instagram or Facebook.
And really, this moment, they've been able to be nimble.
They communicate and over Slack and text with this pitching process in place and are able to really quickly have minimal approval chains and get that content out fast.
And Vice President Harris, for her part, she spent years really meeting with young voters, influencers, these grassroots organizations.
She's She's sought to build relationships in those areas.
But now it's all led to this moment.
The campaign's job is right now to harness that enthusiasm and translate that into votes this November.
Yeah, and that really is the key question and that people are looking at this amazed.
Obviously, the Trump campaign, it's caught their attention too.
The question is, how is that going to happen?
How do you translate this online phenomenon?
All right.
I mean, do you hear the tenor of this?
I don't have the clip.
I'm sure you've seen it.
It's been circulating for several days now all over the place.
But a CNN primetime host, Caitlin Collins, went on Stephen Colbert's show because Stephen Colbert's show is a liberal show.
I don't think it even makes any bones about that at this point.
It's bizarre to have late night TV comedy be so overtly partisan.
But it's basically a kind of extended MSNBC.
And Caitlin Collins went on there.
And Stephen Colbert was saying to her, look, as a preface to asking her what she and CNN thinks about certain things said, I know you're CNN and you don't have any opinions.
You guys are apolitical.
You're objective.
And when he said that, the entire audience, his audience, this liberal audience in New York, interrupted and just started laughing hysterically at the idea that CNN is apolitical, or that they just do objective news.
And obviously, both Stephen Colbert and Caitlin Collins were humiliated, because that wasn't Stephen Colbert's intention.
But everybody, even Stephen Colbert's liberal audience, Thinks it's just hilarious to hear CNN being described in this way, and these are the reasons why.
Now, here's Time Magazine, which I understand is not the Time Magazine of, say, the 1950s or the 1980s.
But nonetheless, it still has, I think, 20 million followers on Twitter.
It has probably close to 100 million, if not more, followers across various social media platforms.
It's a recognizable brand.
This is the cover art for Time Magazine.
This week, there you see her, Kamala Harris, kind of a very iconographic photo.
It has these sort of Democratic Party banners with Kamala signed.
It's very much like the Obama Hope sign of 2008.
It's on the cover of Time Magazine, though.
It's not intended to be a campaign material, and the only printed text is her moment.
By Charlotte Adler.
I mean, you couldn't.
I don't think Kamala Harris's campaign publishes hagiography this explicit, this blatant.
And the amazing thing about this Time Magazine article, this cover story, is that in the article it says this, quote, Kamala Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts.
Her campaign denied a request for an interview for this story.
Now, if you're Time Magazine and you want to write a profile on Kamala Harris and she tells you, I'm not answering a single question, I'm not talking to you, why would you nonetheless then go and just publish this sort of creepy hagiography about her?
This is hero worship of the kind you see in the countries we associate that with.
I mean, look at that picture.
And it's obviously intended to glorify her, to honor her, to elevate her image.
It's her moment, her moment, by Charlotte Hutler.
That's Time Magazine.
And again, she won't talk to any of these journalists or media outlets.
And not only aren't they at all bothered by that, they continue, the more she refuses to talk to them, it's like the more subservient and worshipful they become.
Here's an article in the New York Times on how Kamala Harris isn't giving any interviews.
None.
Headline, Kamala Harris isn't giving interviews.
Any questions?
Quote, in the nearly three weeks since President Biden, and this is actually August 8th, so we're now a week and a half later, in the nearly four and a half weeks since President Biden withdrew his candidacy, catapulting Ms.
Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket, The Vice President has shown little eagerness to meet journalists in unscripted settings.
She has not granted an interview or held a news conference.
On Thursday, after a rally in Michigan, she held her first, quote, gaggle, an impromptu Q&A session with reporters covering her campaign.
It lasted 70 whole seconds.
She gave them 70 seconds.
Some political strategists say Ms.
Harris is doing exactly what she should be doing.
Quote, where is it written that you have to sit down for a press interview, said James Carville, former President Bill Clinton's longtime messaging guru.
They've had to pick a vice president, plan a convention, move around, do this, do that, and she's already agreed to do a debate, Carville said.
He said that Ms.
Harris was wisely managing her time given the extraordinary task of embarking on a presidential campaign three months before election day.
Apparently she's just too busy.
To say anything she believes, to talk about any policy views she has, to talk about what she wouldn't do if she were elected president, to answer any questions.
There's a lot of other things going on far more important than that.
Quote, he imagined a plea from a reporter.
Quote, come talk to me for 45 minutes and then offer how the campaign might respond.
Quote, oh shut up.
Mr. Trump has granted several interviews in recent weeks.
Albeit to a heap of highly sympathetic media outlets, including the live stream of an internet celebrity who presented him with a gold Rolex and a sit-in Friends in the Morning, a Trump-friendly New York drive-time radio show.
I was about to say there's a pretty huge exception to that.
And they go on to say, quote, Mr. Trump faced tougher questions when he appeared at last week's convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and again at Thursday's news conference, which stretched for 65 minutes.
Do you see what they tried to do there?
Kind of equate what Trump is doing to what Kamala Harris is doing, even though she refuses to give a single interview or answer a single question by saying, oh, Trump does, but only when he sits down with friendly outlets.
Except for the time when he physically, personally appeared at the National Black Journalists Association and was treated exactly how he would expect to be and how everyone would know he would be.
And then that other time when he held a 65-minute press conference where he answered every question that journalists had on television.
In contrast to Kamala doing none of that.
Quote, aides to Ms.
Harris argue that in a fractured media landscape where trust in traditional news outlets have fallen, their most effective voter outreach comes from alternative venues like TikTok and their own social media platforms.
Quote, the vice president's top priority is earning the support of the voters who will decide the election.
Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Ms.
Harris said on Thursday, adding that the campaign was being strategic, creative, and expeditious in using TV ads.
I'm not even saying that you have to sit down with the New York Times or ABC News, any of those places.
target voters.
He did not say when such an interview might take place.
I'm not even saying that you have to sit down with the New York Times or ABC News, any of those places.
Feel free to, it's true, to say no one trusts you, no one listens to you.
But at some point you have to sit down with someone credible, someone who isn't your admirer.
She hasn't even done that, by the way.
She has not sat down, even with an admirer, to speak in an impromptu or spontaneous way.
Nothing extemporaneous, all reading right from a teleprompter.
Now, on CNN on August 13th, is that, I'm sorry, I've just been immersed in this, Brazil reporting so I don't even know what the date is.
Can someone tell me the date?
So this was yesterday.
At least this CNN host, who knows his name because really who cares, he's a CNN host, seemed to, I don't know, I wouldn't say irritated, but just slightly perturbed that she's running such an empty, vacuous campaign deliberately.
Here's what he said when talking to a Kamala spokesperson.
What's on the Vice President's schedule today?
Well, she's traveling and talking to voters and getting her message out there to the American people, something that she's been doing from the very start of this campaign.
So he said, what's your schedule today?
And he said, oh, she's traveling, she's talking to voters, and then this happened.
She certainly did when she was President Biden's running mate as Vice President.
But look, you just mentioned the speech she's going to be giving in New York.
I was asking about today, and I don't think she's got any campaign events on the schedule today, does she?
Well, she and Governor Walz have been traveling across the country.
They hit nearly every battleground state last week.
On the campaign trail, they raised $36 million within the first 24 hours of Governor Walz joining the ticket.
And what she's going to be doing Friday is taking her economic message directly to the voters in North Carolina.
I certainly don't want to get in front of exactly what she's going to say, but she's going to talk a little bit about how she's going to make sure that she's putting consumers first as part of her economic plan.
Okay, so...
We got a little teeny glimpse of what Kamala Harris believes, what her economic agenda is at least.
She's going to put consumers first.
She's going to put consumers first.
So that's part of what she's going to unveil.
is going to take on corporate price gougers.
She's going to take on junk fees.
And that's something that, you know, John, she did when she was attorney general of California, something she continued to do as the United States Senator of California.
So she's going to be taking that message out to voters.
And I look forward to seeing what she more of what she's going to say on Friday.
I think we all do.
And I'll ask you more about that in just a second.
The reason I was asking about today is because it seems like she has time if she wanted to do an interview with a member of the media or do a news conference, correct?
There does appear to be that time if she wanted.
Well, look, she has said on the campaign trail that she would be doing an interview at some point.
She's going to be doing an interview at some point.
She's going to be She said that, I think, last week during a rope line or when she was talking to reporters.
But look, what is important here, John, is that she is taking her message directly to the American people.
She hit a number of battleground states.
She's taking her message to the American people by reading from a teleprompter.
Now, I also find it notable that they don't even—a good excuse could have been, Oh look, one of the reasons why she has no public events scheduled but still doesn't have time to talk to media is because remember she's the sitting vice president and presumably is in like all kinds of super important like foreign policy meetings, meeting with world leaders, but no one, even her campaign, can't say that with a straight face.
No one believes that Kamala Harris is doing anything from the moment she wakes up in the morning until the time she goes to sleep other than focusing on how she can ascend to power.
But you see, they're not really even making much of an excuse or an apology for the fact that she just isn't going to answer any questions.
It's not even that she won't sit down with the media, it's that she won't speak extemporaneously.
Here is someone who I believe is a professor of journalism.
Yeah, he is.
Jeff Jarvis.
And this professor of journalism Defends Kamala Harris this way, quote, Kamala Harris doesn't need the press.
The press needs her for access and validation.
Given how the press has treated her administration with Biden, she is right to make them wait.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are in direct discourse with the people who matter, citizens.
Imagine studying journalism, being a journalism professor, teaching journalism to journalism students.
And then telling them that journalists have no right to ask questions to a politician.
A politician has no duty to answer questions to the media or to anybody else.
It's totally fine for them to do nothing but read from a teleprompter.
Whoever thinks that about anybody, Should be.
Banned from ever having the word journalism near their name.
Now here is an interview that Amy Klobuchar did this week on the Democratic Senator from Minnesota with John Carl on ABC News where, to his credit, he also asked about this lack of interview and listened to what she said.
Kamala Harris has yet to hold a press conference.
She's been in this now 21 days.
She has yet to do a single interview.
Why is that?
And is that going to change?
Okay.
It's only been three weeks, she said.
It's really about four now.
president.
Before that, she did tons of interviews.
She's done interviews with you.
She's done interviews.
I'm sure she's going to do interviews.
Okay.
It's only been three weeks, she said.
It's really about four now, but it's not like that's some rare, strange thing for a politician to do.
It's what they do and are expected to do all the time.
Trump did them constantly.
Does them constantly.
But one of the reasons why she's not actually being in any way required to do that is because there are so many people who are standing and explicitly defending the fact that she shouldn't have to.
Here's former Obama ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who said this, I find this such a revealing tweet, quote, the paramount objective for Kamala Harris is to win this election.
If a press conference helps her win, she should do it.
If not, she shouldn't do it.
It's just that simple.
She has no moral obligation to talk to the press.
Tone it down, folks.
There's such a revealing tweet about how the ruling class reasons.
What he's saying is what they all think, which is the only thing that matters is our own empowerment.
We should do only that which forwards our empowerment, advances our empowerment, and we should do nothing that might undermine it.
We have no obligation to speak to the people, to answer their questions, to tell them what we believe about anything.
Even when we're telling them to vote for us, we don't have to respond to questions.
We're not going to lower ourselves to do that.
We're just working to win.
That's all we care about.
That's all we want to do.
Now, I could spend the rest of the show showing you where, in other contexts, the same exact Michael McFaul was demanding that all sorts of people, including Trump, be more transparent and do more press conferences and interviews with reporters.
Here is what he said in October of 2019.
He cited this Russian reporter, former, I think she's Ukrainian actually, Elena Cherchenko, and she said, good question from her to Edward Snowden.
People who believe in truth and transparency should not be afraid of the press.
And then here's the question that he was responding to where she wrote, is it true that you don't want to talk to Russian journalists, Edward Snowden?
If yes, why?
So apparently, The people who have an obligation to talk to the media and answer questions and be held accountable are whistleblowers who are being prosecuted on multiple felony charges by the United States government by virtue of having done that whistleblowing.
They have an obligation to speak to the press.
They have no reason to hide from the press, even though Snowden has done.
Hundreds of interviews, literally, since 2013 when he came forward with journalists around the world, answered every single conceivable question, wrote a book, made speeches.
Michael McFaul thinks Snowden is somehow acting immorally or unethically by not doing more interviews, but Kamala Harris, who's running for president in three months outside the election, she has no obligation to do that whatsoever.
She shouldn't do it.
Unless it's necessary to help her win.
Here's David Rothkopf from the Daily Beast, another journalist who was also a long-time paid lobbyist for the United Arab Emirates, that very democratic and noble country in the Persian Gulf, quote, The argument that Kamala Harris is somehow not speaking enough to the press is ridiculous on several levels.
One, she actually does speak to the press.
When did she do that?
Two, she has been visible constantly since she became the candidate.
That's true.
Everywhere she goes and reads from the teleprompter, she's been visible.
And three, she has been clear and detailed about all her policy goals.
Let me say that again.
I gotta let that run through my body.
She has been clear and detailed about all of her policy goals.
Can somebody just tell me one syllable that Kamala Harris has uttered about what the role of the United States should be in the event, in the very highly possible event that a regional war and escalation erupts in the Middle East as a result of Iran's vow to retaliate against Israel and Hezbollah's too.
We've been told that the Secretary of Defense who is not elected, is not the Commander-in-Chief has deployed massive military assets to that region and has vowed that we will participate in any war in order to defend Israel.
But what does Kamala Harris think about that?
Does she agree with that?
Is that what she would do?
Does she have any disagreements with how Biden has handled the Israeli war in Gaza?
Are there any circumstances under which she would cut off arms or funding of Israel?
For the war in Gaza, if they continue to cross more red lines that the United States proclaims, if there's a ceasefire that can be done and Israel rejects it, are there any circumstances under which she would cut off arms?
What does she plan to do about the war in Ukraine now that the Ukrainian front line is disintegrating?
What's the solution for that?
What does she think is going to end up happening?
How much money is she willing to commit for the United States to fuel that war?
What is her policy on immigration?
Does she want a wall built up?
Does she want to force people to wait in Mexico?
Does she want to eliminate asylum?
Does she believe in deportation of any kinds of people who enter the country illegally?
Just, you can go on and on.
We don't know a single thing about any of that.
As I said, the only previous views he staked out when running for president are views he's now explicitly renounced.
But you, I mean, the desperation each time, 2016, 2020, and 2014, 2024, to make sure the Democrats win and Trump loses, it escalates.
Like, the desperation intensifies the way in which they're willing to debase themselves for this goal, including people who call themselves journalists.
No media outlet should even put on a campaign spokesperson of Kamala Harris, let alone do propaganda for her about how wonderful and delightful her Gen Z TikTok videos are.
Unless she answers these basic questions, these media outlets have leverage if they wanted to use it, but that's not what they want to do.
They want to ensure Kamala Harris wins, and one of the ways they're doing that is by running cover for the remarkable, extraordinary fact, you have to admit this, no matter what your politics are, that there's a person running for president who very well might be elected in less than three months, who has somehow gotten away, not just
Never campaigning for a single vote, or receiving a single vote, or participating in any debates to become the nominee, but even since she's become the nominee, completely avoiding a single substantive statement about anything, let alone actually answering any questions.
And I guess the last thing I should say is that Donald Trump just, on Monday night, sat down with Elon Musk and spoke to him about every conceivable policy issue for more than two hours.
Now, I'm not going to suggest it was an adversarial interview.
It wasn't anything close to that.
Elon Musk is a supporter of Donald Trump, and he specifically said ahead of time, I'm not a journalist.
I'm not trying to be a journalist.
I don't even call this an interview.
I call it a conversation.
Nonetheless, Trump spoke in that stream of consciousness way that he has about pretty much every issue and detail About Israel and Gaza, about the Middle East, about Iran, about Ukraine, about nuclear war, about the proliferation, the possibility of nuclear weapons proliferating, what he would do about those wars, what he wants to do about immigration, what he wants to do about inflation.
You can go listen to it.
I'm not saying, you don't have to love it, but he just spoke without a script.
And said exactly what he thinks, in great detail, about every single one of those issues.
Kamala Harris has not gotten even in the same universe as that.
I'm not complimenting Trump.
That's what candidates have always done, since as long as I've been alive at least.
What's remarkable is not what Trump did, but what Kamala Harris refuses to do and the way in which so many people, including who call themselves journalists, are willing to defend her for it.
Lots of people, when they think about studying or college or learning about new topics, often think about their kids who are 18 or 20 and go away to college.
And I know it sounds like a cliché but the reality is there's never a point in life when we should stop learning, when we have to stop learning.
We have the capacity to learn new things throughout our entire lives and there's a lot of things that I think people Should know about, yet don't, that would really fortify our politics and our country and our culture.
Things like studying the Constitution, understanding how it was created, what the purpose was, what the debates were that led to it, things about American history, things about European history or Russian or Chinese history, a whole history of religion.
You could go on learning languages.
There's a whole endless array of things that one could benefit from turning the internet off for a while that requires a very short attention span and just taking the time to try and expand your brain no matter how old you are no matter where you are in life.
That's why I've always been so excited that Hillside College is a sponsor of our show and they're offering more than 40 free online courses in many of the most important and enduring subjects.
You can learn, for example, about the works of William Shakespeare, the meaning of the U.S.
Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, theological debates throughout history, all with Hildale's College online courses, all of which are available for free.
That's right, for free.
I personally recommend the class entitled Constitution 101, The Meaning and History of the U.S. Constitution.
It's a 12-leksure course where you'll explore the design and purpose of the Constitution, the challenges it faced during the Civil War, and how it has been undermined for more than a century into the present by all sorts of authoritarian sentiments.
The course is self-paced so that you can start whenever you want and wherever you want, go at your own pace and your own progress.
Just enroll now in Constitution 101 or any other courses that interest you.
Our country really does need more Americans who understand the history of the country, the history of other countries, the Constitution, all these ideas and studies and fields of discipline that continue to govern every aspect of our life if you go right now to hillsdale.edu slash glenn to enroll there's no cost it's easy to get started that hills that's hillsdale.edu slash glenn to register back in 2020
one of the things that i was actually kind of amazed by and again i have as you know an an extremely low level of expectations for the corporate media.
It is extremely hard for them to do anything that surprises me.
The Hunter Biden lies before the 2020 election, to this day, enrage me, but they didn't surprise me.
I have watched the media lie many times, shamelessly, deliberately.
And even though it was so flagrant and I knew they were doing it, of course I got the intercept, because they were doing it as well and they wouldn't let me publish stories about that archive based on the false claim it was Russian disinformation that came from the CIA, that didn't really surprise me.
That wasn't really out of the ordinary.
But one of the things they did in the lead up to the 2020 election did actually amaze me.
Because it's such a radical violation of the most foundational principles of journalism.
What they said was, we're not going to repeat the mistakes of 2016.
And when they said the mistakes of 2016, what they meant was, that time they did journalism.
When Wikileaks began publishing all of his emails from the John Podesta email inbox and the DNC email inbox and began analyzing what it showed about Hillary Clinton and what they were saying in private, it showed things like how the DNC cheated overtly to ensure Hillary won over Bernie.
It forced the resignation of the top five Officials of the DNC, including the DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, right before their convention, it was obviously in the public interest to know about what Hillary Clinton, a person who very well might have become president in just a few months, was doing.
That's basic journalism.
Of course, if you get a big archive in your hands of emails and other documents that you can authenticate that are about Hillary Clinton or any presidential candidate, of course you'd report on them.
And that's what WikiLeaks did.
They published them and then media outlets, including The Intercept, including myself and lots of others, reported on them.
And I think a lot of them doing that did so only because they never expected Hillary to lose.
They assumed Hillary would win and that was why they felt comfortable doing it.
And then when Hillary lost and Trump won, all these liberals inside these media outlets were horrified at the idea that they may have played some role in helping Hillary lose by doing what?
By doing their job as journalists, by reporting.
The profession that they decided they wanted to enter, journalism, requires them to report relevant information about any candidate, even if they want them to win.
And that's what they did, and then afterwards they regretted it.
I've talked before about that night when Trump won in 2016, and not only was there crying inside the Intercept Slack channel, which, as probably you know, is a platform that a lot of companies media outlets, is a platform that a lot of companies media outlets, but a lot of others too, as well, used because people these days are spread all over the place.
Physically, it's a place where you virtually meet.
People are crying.
Journalists inside The Intercept that night.
And also what they were saying was, we need to apologize.
And some of us were like, for what?
Why would we apologize?
What did we do wrong?
And they said, we reported way too much on these emails.
This was misogynistic.
Anyway, that's how I knew that everything had changed inside media.
And as the 2020 campaign began approaching, And all of these institutions and establishment sectors were desperate to ensure Trump didn't win his second term and that Biden won instead.
They did something that is now screwing them.
And they deserve it so much because what they did was so corrupt.
What they did was they announced that from now on, even if we get into our hands material that we know is authentic, documents that we can confirm and verify are true, And even if they're of great public interest, even if they shed enormous light on one of the two presidential candidates, even if, and traditionally that's all that's needed as a journalist to publish something.
That's all you care about.
Is the material authentic?
Is it in the public interest?
And the answer to those two questions is yes.
You publish it.
You don't care about who the source is or what motivated the source.
It doesn't matter at all.
All that matters is, as a journalist, you have to report documents that are true and in the public interest.
And they said, for the first time I've ever heard media outlets say this publicly, even if it is verifiable and in the public interest, they won't publish it if they believe it comes from a foreign country and it's designed to influence our elections.
This is the first time I have ever heard corporate media outlets say explicitly That if documents are authentic and in the public interest, they still might not publish them.
They created not only a brand new rule because they were so worried that heading into the 2020 election, there was going to be a repeat where in their minds, Russia again was going to hack Biden's campaign or things about Biden, and they were going to be forced to publish it and therefore undermine Biden's chances.
That's what they were afraid of.
So they radically revised the most basic rule of journalism.
And what's so funny about it is that now, by all accounts, major media outlets, CNN, the New York Times, I believe the Washington Post, have all received a huge archive of what by all appearances are hacked emails from the Trump campaign.
And according to the Trump campaign, they were hacked by Iran.
And now these media outlets are faced with a choice, which is either they have to conceal this information about the Trump campaign, on the grounds that it was hacked and came from a foreign country according to the rules that they announced in 2020, the brand new rules, or they have to show what complete hacks they are by jettisoning their own rules that they implemented and announced in 2020 because this time it was all about Trump.
Now, let me just underscore for you.
I know it may not, if you haven't worked in journalism, if you didn't decide to go into journalism, if you don't think about journalism a lot, I know that it can be, it may sound odd to say how foundational these rules are.
We can, but there's a incident, I want to play some audio for you about this.
I want to just set this up though.
In 2016, as you might recall, so many liberals, so many Democrats, people in the media were desperate to get their hands on Trump's tax returns.
Because they were convinced that if they got Trump's tax returns, there was going to be like an item there, you know, $87 million received from Vladimir Putin.
They were convinced that getting Trump's tax returns were the key to showing that he was financially indebted to and controlled by the Russians.
But under the law, tax returns are private.
In fact, it's a crime to disclose anyone else's tax return without their consent.
And one day, somebody who somehow got their hands on part of Trump's tax returns, nobody knows how, nobody knows if they committed a crime, nobody knows if they're from a foreign government, somehow they got their hands on Trump's tax returns, part of them, and dropped it in the mail to the New York Times newsroom in New York.
It just came by U.S.
Postal Service, by physical mail.
And the New York Times reporters got it and they opened it and they saw what it was and once they had verified that it was authentic, which they could do through a whole bunch of different means, they reported on it without even knowing who the source was, let alone what was their motive.
And the lead reporter on that story was David Barstow, who I have a lot of respect for.
He's one of the great investigative journalists in the country.
He's won two Pulitzer Prizes, including one that he did a great exposé on in 2008 about how the Pentagon was placing retired generals on every television network to read from the same script that was coming from the Pentagon, and nobody knew this.
He's a real reporter.
And he went on NPR, and they asked him, Well, you publish the story, you don't even know who your source is.
How can you do that?
How can you publish a story when you don't know the sources and therefore don't know what motivates them?
And here's what he said.
And by the way, what he's saying here, there's nothing radical about this.
So foundational.
Before 2020, every journalist would have said exactly the same thing.
At least people who understand journalism when asked this question.
You know, it's funny, people often, when there are conversations about whistleblowers, the conversation's often framed around, did they have noble intentions or did they have some, you know, was it score settling or some less than noble motive?
I, from the years of doing this, I've found that sometimes whistleblowers with terrible motives come forward with incredible documents, and I've also had times when whistleblowers with just the most perfect, pristine motives You hear what he just said?
He says, I don't care at all about sources.
I don't care who they are.
is is this information real and if so is it newsworthy one of the most important whistle you hear what he just said he says i don't care at all about sources i don't care who they are i don't care what their motives are many of the sources with the most pristine motives have nothing Many of the sources who have enabled journalists to break the best stories, the most important stories, have terrible motives, like petty grievances or vengeance.
Maybe they were even maliciously motivated.
But he said, as a journalist, I don't care about any of that.
All I care about is are the documents verifiable and are they in the public interest?
That's it.
And the answers to those questions are yes.
You publish.
You report on them.
That's it.
You don't think about which side it helps or hurts.
Obviously, when he says it's in the public interest, what that means is not, oh, you just publish if people are interested.
Obviously, you have to weigh the harm versus the benefit.
Somebody, for example, could send me emails that are real.
Say between a major politician and someone who is their girlfriend and they might be exchanging all sorts of emails of a sexual nature and then I get them, they're real and they're in the public interest because they're a very powerful politician.
Anything about a powerful politician is in the public interest.
That doesn't mean you would publish them because it might end up harming people, including the girlfriend.
Maybe they're talking about things in the email about other people and you would conceal them for that reason.
If the harm outweighs the cost, you don't have to publish them.
But that doesn't mean, oh, I have to figure out which party it's going to help and weigh that into account.
That has no bearing on anything.
And he went on and said this.
There's a man named Merrill Williams.
He worked for the tobacco industry.
The first time I met him many years ago, his first words to me, I remember, were, you know, I'm a born liar.
This is a man with multiple marriages, bankruptcy.
He was a drunk.
He was this.
But what he was also was he was a paralegal at Brown and Williamson.
And his job was to go through tobacco industry documents.
And filter out documents that might be handed over in litigation that would get the tobacco industry in trouble.
And instead what he did, is every day, when he found really bad documents, he'd stuff them into a rubber girdle, and he would take them out on his lunch break, and he would go to a Kinko's, he'd make copies, and ultimately he amassed the largest trove of internal tobacco industry documents.
His motives were as bad as they get.
He wanted to cash in.
He wanted money.
His documents changed the history of smoking in America.
And, you know, you can go through so many examples like that.
People love the Watergate reporting.
I know some of that has been revisited, but we know who Deep Throat is now.
It was Mark Felt who was the acting He was the Deputy Director of the FBI, he wanted to become FBI Director, and then Nixon did not appoint him to that.
He was angry at Nixon for that, and that was a major part of his motive for leaking information and documents to the Washington Post.
Who cares?
Who cares what his motives are?
As long as the information is real, and obviously in the public interest, you publish it and that's the end of the story.
That always used to be, you didn't have to point that out.
In journalism, that was just, I mean, that's like journalism 101.
And that was why it was so infuriating and so corrupting in 2020 to watch, for the first time I think ever, them explicitly, I'm not saying every journalist is always comported with that, but that's always been the ethos, the rule, the principle.
And in 2020, the first time ever major journalistic outlets started explicitly renouncing that function.
Here from Vanity Fair, September of 2020, just before the election in 2020.
Quote, connect the dots.
Marty Baron warns Washington Post staff about covering hacked materials.
He warned the staff, Marty Baron did, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, about covering hacked materials.
Quote, nearly four years since the Podesta email dump blew up the 2016 race, the Post top editor urges his newsroom to slow down in handling leaks and beware of echoing propaganda.
Marty Baron said, quote, If a decision is made to publish a story about hacked or leaked information, our coverage should emphasize what we know or don't know about the source of the information and how that may fit into a foreign or domestic influence operation.
Our story should prominently explain what we know about the full context of the information we are presenting, including the origins and motivations of the source, including whether it appears to be an effort to distract from another development.
Headlines need to be carefully vetted to make sure they do not echo propaganda.
We should avoid linking to hacked material or potential disinformation, which could amplify such material online without context.
Also, while such material may be authentic, it may be part of a release that also includes doctored or falsified material, and last but not least, connect the dots.
Our ongoing coverage should help readers understand how political lines of attack fit into disinformation operations.
If a candidate amplifies a critique of an opponent that is also being promoted by foreign actors or domestic conspiracy theorists, we should make that clear in our stories.
But what if The quote-unquote propaganda from a foreign country about our leaders, what if it's true?
What if Russia or China, Iran, any of those bad countries say that Joe Biden is corrupt or Donald Trump is a liar or Kamala Harris is running a campaign based on nothing?
Are these media outlets really going to refrain from saying those things because it's also being said by foreign governments?
Here in Vox, the liberal outlet, in July of 2018, so this is two years, they're anticipating what should be done.
Quote, the case for not publishing hacked emails.
Quote, Russia is poised to hack again.
Here's how the media should respond.
And then it wasn't just media outlets who were preparing for this eventuality.
Politico in July of 2020, quote, Google announces steps to counter the spread of hacked materials before the election.
The changes will go into effect on September 1st.
Quote, Google will penalize websites that distribute hacked materials.
And advertisers who take part in coordinated misinformation campaigns.
The search and advertising giant announced Friday in an effort to crack down on deception in the months ahead of the November U.S.
election.
But what if the hacked materials are highly, completely true and accurate and important?
The New York Times linked to Trump's tax returns.
They showed excerpts of it.
Rachel Maddow got her hands on a couple of Trump's tax returns and showed it as part of a 30-minute endless segment that concluded with nothing, but she showed these tax returns.
What if those were hacked?
Does that mean that MSNBC and the New York Times would be punished by Google for linking to hacked information?
Politico goes on, quote, had the policies been in place in 2016, advertisers would not have been able to include screenshots of emails.
From the massive Russian-sponsored hacks of the Democratic Party and then presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Do you see what that's saying?
It's saying that those emails, which were vital, they talked about DNC cheating, they talked about a bunch of things Hillary Clinton was saying, oh, we're going to say this in private, but we're going to say the opposite in public, things that of course the public has the right to know.
Under Google's new policy in advance of the 2016 election, no advertiser would have been able to include screenshots of those emails.
Otherwise, they would have been severely crippled and punished by Google.
Same with news sites.
This is a complete subversion of journalism.
It's a gutting of journalism with the intention of protecting the Democratic Party from hacks.
Quote, the new policy would allow the company to shut down networks of linked accounts.
Shut down network of linked accounts.
Google has sought to prevent foreign interference on its ad network, but the change seeks to address domestic attempts at coordinated deceptive advertising.
And then, of course, here's the Washington Post on October 15th, 2020.
As we all know, Facebook and Twitter take the unusual step to prevent the spread of the New York Post story.
And one of their big arguments was, well, we're not going to allow this consistent with our policy that We're going to start to suppress information and reporting that came from a foreign government.
And since the CIA and the media said that that reporting came from Russia, that it was Russian disinformation based on the laptop, Facebook and Twitter said, we're not going to allow it.
Remember, Twitter blocked it.
Facebook suppressed it.
I just want to emphasize to you how pervasive and systematic this attempt was heading the 2020 election to implement a whole series of new rules, not just media outlets, but the big tech.
To preclude journalists from doing what journalists are supposed to do.
If we had gotten an archive filled with information that was highly incriminating of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, when we know of course it was aimed at hacks that were designed to undermine Joe Biden, there would have been all kinds of impediments in media outlets to publishing it and all sorts of punishments from Google and Facebook.
If you tried and that wasn't just a theory it wasn't just didn't happen theoretically we saw what happened when there was an attempt to publish reporting based on that Hunter Biden laptop based on the lie that it was all Russian disinformation.
Now let's fast forward to 2024.
Here is Politico just yesterday.
There you see the headline on the screen.
Sorry, this is CNN from yesterday.
News outlets were sent leaked Trump campaign files.
They chose not to publish them.
And Democrats are furious about this.
Saying, oh, well you published the Hillary Clinton emails in 2016, why won't you publish emails from the Trump campaign?
And the reason is because Democrats succeeded in convincing media outlets to change their policy.
To say right before an election, we're not going to report on hacked materials that come from a foreign country.
Quote, despite receiving the sensitive campaign files, the three outlets opted not to publish reporting on the trove they'd been handed.
Even as this person, this person who was using a pseudonym, I think his name, he called himself David or something, Robert, sorry, Robert, obviously intended to be his generic publicist, was like, hi, I'm Robert, here's this Big archive from the Trump emails.
By all accounts, too, the way they got that is very similar to how the DNC was hacked when John Podesta got a phishing email that basically said, like, here, put your email in here.
We need you to confirm your email account for us.
We're Google.
And he entered his password, and it was one, two, password was something like one, password, one, one, or something.
Vesta won.
And he fell for the most primitive phishing scheme possible because these are all people running these campaigns.
They have no idea what they're doing.
And apparently Roger Stone fell for something very similar.
I don't think this is confirmed fully, but everything I understand suggests that that's how they made their way into the Trump email database.
And the source here, nobody knows who Robert is.
It could be an Iranian representative of the Iranian government.
It could be a cutout.
It could be part of the Venezuelan government.
Who knows?
Thank you.
They were given this trove that they've been handed and they won't publish it, quote, even as the person suggested they still had a variety of additional documents, quote, from Trump's legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions, quote, Politico's editor made a judgment based on the circumstances that our journalists understood them at the time that the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents, Politico spokesperson Brad Dayspring told CNN in his statement.
Instead, the first public sign of any release of private information came Saturday when the Trump campaign went public with its announcement that it had been hacked, pointing the finger at Iranian operatives.
Quote, these documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process, Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chung said.
Now, let me just make clear here that I Personally, obviously, believe fully in the, not just justifiability, but the necessity of media outlets having published those emails from the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign back in 2016.
And for the exact same reasons, if these materials contain relevant information about Donald Trump or the Trump campaign or J.D.
Vance or whomever, those should also be reported on Regardless of whether they came from Iran or what the intentions were for the reasons I've just laid out.
The problem for these media outlets is they made such a spectacle of themselves in 2020 saying they wouldn't do this and now they're stuck.
Either having to completely violate their new rules so blatantly because it's about Trump not the Democrat.
Or stick to their completely unjournalistic, corrupted standards that they promulgated to great applause in 2020.
The CNN report goes on, quote, on Monday, CNN reported that the FBI and other investigators were probing the apparent security breach, which sources said involved compromising the personal email account of longtime Republican and Trump operative Roger Stone.
The decision underscored the challenges news organizations face when presented with information potentially obtained by nefarious means and the shifting publishing standard of newsrooms in the wake of the 2016 election.
Do you see how CNN is even describing it?
There's now a challenge that news organizations face when presented with information simply because it was obtained by nefarious means?
According to the US government, The Pentagon papers were obtained by nefarious means.
They prosecuted Daniel Ellsberg for it.
Obviously, the Snowden reporting, according to the government, was also obtained by nefarious means.
They prosecuted Edward Snowden for it.
The very idea that media outlets would refuse to publish accurate, verifiable, authentic, relevant documents because of the nefariousness of how they were obtained is one of the most unjournalistic things I've ever heard.
But that's exactly what they did, as CNN says.
They did it in the wake of the 2016 election, during which Russian disinformation efforts were seen as playing a key role in Trump's victory.
Do you see that's exactly what they were determined to prevent?
Doing any reporting that might help Donald Trump win the election, as they believe they did in 2016.
And so they changed the rules of journalism.
To ensure that they didn't have to do that again.
It was astonishing to watch at the time, and it's so funny to watch them now have to live with that.
Quote, in the run-up to the 2020 election, newsrooms were presented with another conundrum.
There was another conundrum in the run-up to the 2020 election, says CNN, when the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were shopped to news organizations, with most refusing to publish them.
Quote, and by the way, this was exactly a big reason why these news outlets refused to publish the Hunter Biden laptop because their new guidelines said, if it smells like Russian disinformation, if it smells like it came from Russia, you don't publish it no matter how relevant it is.
And I knew from the start that it was a lie to call this Russian disinformation, but even if it had come from Russia, The idea that you don't report on it is preposterous if it contains, as it did, highly relevant information about the integrity of Joe Biden and the willingness of his family to trade on his name for profit in Ukraine and China.
Quote, as with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials and the motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish, a Washington Post spokesperson told CNN on Tuesday.
Do you see this new?
Criterion they inserted into journalism that never previously existed, as you just heard the New York Times' David Barstow explain.
They take into account the motives of the source.
This is a radical change to how journalism functions that they implemented in the wake of, in the lead up to the 2020 election that gave them an excuse, or would give them an excuse not to have to report on anything that might be incriminating of Joe Biden.
And they used it!
They used this new rule to refuse to report on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Remember, I was not allowed at my own media outlet, the media outlet I created, to report on those materials because I was told that they came from Russia.
It was so offensive to me that I laughed.
I mean, this is as gutting of the journalistic function as it gets.
The media did it in 2020, and now they're faced with a idiotic dilemma of their own making because they thought that those rule changes would shield Joe Biden or the Democrat, and now it turns out It may shield Donald Trump, and that's because liberals insisted on those new rules, as I showed you from Box and other places.
Liberals got what they want, and now it's backfiring on them completely.
So I just want to spend a few minutes, nothing hugely in-depth, but a few minutes talking about what is becoming an extremely dramatic and consequential leak that I'm participating in, in terms of reporting in Brazil.
As you probably know, we've reported many times on the, I would say, incomparably repressive censorship regime that Brazil has implemented in the last two years.
At least incomparable when compared to other ostensibly democratic countries.
Obviously, lots of other countries have followed suit, in part by using Brazil.
The EU has an incredibly, since pro-censorship laws, so does the UK, so does Canada, so does Australia.
And obviously, there's a lot of different attempts to bring it to the US, so that there's that First Amendment barrier, thankfully, that makes it difficult, but not impossible.
The EU had Brazilians come all the time to conferences on free speech and explain how they are censoring and what the justification was for the framework and how it worked.
And it was all implemented by, not by Congress.
Congress never voted for this power.
They tried to get Congress to give the courts the power to censor the internet in the name of combating fake news and disinformation, all the usual rationale for allowing governments to censor dissent online, but the Congress failed to.
Implement it.
And so the Supreme Court just said, I don't care, we're going to do it anyway.
And they just invented powers that allowed them to censor the internet.
And they were said at the time, don't worry, this is only for the election, the 2022 election.
We have to guard against fake news for the upcoming 2022 election where Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro, who the Brazilian establishment hates, was trying to be re-elected against Lula da Silva, who in the past the Brazilian establishment has also hated, but in this case they let him out of jail as a result in part of our reporting in 2019 because they knew that he was the only person who could beat Bolsonaro, which he did by a very small margin in 2022.
And the Supreme Court used these censorship powers all throughout that election To censor pretty much anything derogatory being said about Lula.
You weren't allowed to call him a thief, even though he had previously been convicted of corruption, a conviction that was nullified.
But, you know, you're allowed to say, oh, I think there's evidence that this politician stole.
Pretty much anything that you wanted to say about Lula, the Supreme Court would intervene and say, we demand this be removed from the Internet.
They would force public social media platforms to block some of the most largest and influential social media accounts, including members of Congress who were supporting Bolsonaro.
It was just a massive censorship scheme.
And they said, oh, but don't worry.
The minute the election is over, the day after the election is over, this power is going to disappear.
And yet it didn't.
It's continuing to this very day.
We've reported on how the Secret Orders function.
This one judge, Alessandro de Moraes on the Supreme Court, he'll send an order to Twitter, and Facebook, and Google, and TikTok, and Telegram, and Rumble, and he'll say, you are hereby required within the next 48 hours, I'm sorry, within the next two hours, he gives them two hours, To ban all accounts of the following people.
And he says, this order is secret and you're required to keep it a secret.
We were able to get a hold of one of these secret orders in the beginning of 2023.
We reported it on the show.
It was unbelievable.
It just had lists and lists of people who were required to be banned.
None of them were charged with any crimes.
None of them were notified even of the issuance of this order.
None of them had any due process to contest it.
We reported all of that.
And from there, he's become a much more controversial figure.
He has imprisoned a lot of Bolsonaro's associates.
In fact, we just did a major story where one of Bolsonaro's, his top foreign policy advisor, Felipe Martins is his name, was part of an investigation.
But he's never been charged with any crime, let alone convicted of one.
And Alexander Dimarais ordered him imprisoned in March of this year before any trial, before any indictment or accusation.
And his argument for why he was ordering him in prison preventatively before trial was based on a complete falsehood, namely a reporter very friendly to the court Falsely claim that Felipe Martins had left Brazil on a presidential plane with Bolsonaro and never came back.
There was records of him entering the U.S., but no records of him leaving the U.S.
and re-entering Brazil, and therefore that proved that he somehow evaporated, and that proved that he was a flight risk, and he was imprisoned in a very harsh prison condition for more than six months.
And we wrote an article about it about two weeks ago detailing all, there was a mountain of evidence showing that Felipe Martins never left Brazil, that he wasn't on the presidential plane, that he was in Brazil the entire time, to the point where even the prosecutor asked for his release.
And this judge kept him in prison based on nothing, unjustly, for more than six months, in part because there was an attempt to force him to sign a plea deal accusing a bunch of other people of things regardless of whether or not it was true.
And then he finally got out of jail last week and this is these are the kinds of abuses that have been taking place repeatedly all in the name of all in the hands of this one judge.
This was the same judge that Elon Musk began denouncing vehemently and saying that his censorship orders were so excessive and extreme that Twitter would refuse to abide by them, and as a result, Brazil, that judge opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk, threatened to imprison him, and eventually Twitter said, well, we're going to comply with these censorship orders.
Rumble, on the other hand, Which has received so many censorship orders from this judge.
And again, no reason stated for why these people are being banned.
No process.
No accusations.
No evidence.
Nothing.
Just the say-so of this judge in secret.
Rumble was so drowning in and inundated by these censorship orders that they finally said, you know what, we're going to just sue.
We can't keep censoring people and we don't want to at the behest of this judge.
And as a result, Rumble is no longer available in Brazil.
My show is not available in Brazil.
Unless you use a VPN.
If you try and go to a normal platform, you'll see a big sign that says, this platform, Rumble, is not available in Brazil due to censorship orders.
That's how extreme things have got, how repressive things have become.
About a month ago or so, or maybe a little bit longer than that, we were able to obtain a gigantic archive of messages, audios, documents, texts, all kinds of conversations that came right from the heart of the chambers of this judge.
All from his top advisors saying, the judge wants this, the judge wants that, the judge wants this, and we've been working for, I don't know, maybe, I would say actually two months now.
All things considered, to break down what this archive shows, and yesterday we began doing the reporting.
We published this headline article on the front page of Folio of Sao Paulo, which is the country's largest newspaper.
They're a very mainstream newspaper, but I've worked with them before.
I actually write a column for them.
I've done reporting with We've done before and since then we've published two more stories based on this archive just in the last 24 hours about behavior that Alessandra de Moraes has engaged in that is now being very intensely debated about its propriety and legality.
Basically, in order to serve as judge and at the same time investigator of the charge of the police, so he would instruct the police arms of the court to go and investigate and he would tell these police arms, don't make it look like I'm the one who asked for this investigation or I'm the one who said that these people should be investigated.
You write a report saying they should be investigated and then give it to me so it makes it seem as though I'm not the one initiating this.
I'm the one just receiving passively these requests from some other organ.
And they talked about how it was designed to create this pretext, this appearance of propriety.
These are just the first stories.
And there's all sorts of other parts of these stories already about how inside his chambers They were kind of telling these dark jokes about how disturbing this all was.
Sometimes they would say, go and find crimes that this news site is doing.
And the guy would come back and say, I couldn't find anything.
And they would say, look, he wants evidence of criminality.
Be creative.
And obviously, I can't go into great detail about all the different intricacies of this reporting so far.
But suffice to say, it's causing a huge impact.
And it's only at the beginning.
We're going to continue to do this reporting.
And today, This is day two.
Basically, we started the recording yesterday.
This judge went to the Supreme Court and defended himself.
And not only did he say, of course, I've done nothing wrong.
Absolutely everything I did was totally justifiable.
He also said, this is the sort of fake news and dangerous disinformation that is an attack on this court's legitimacy and therefore an attack on Brazilian democracy.
Basically using the language that he always uses whenever He wants to criminalize criticism of him whenever he wants to turn dissent into a crime.
He says, no, that's not dissent.
That's an attack on me and the court and an attack on Brazilian democracy, and that's against the law.
And of course, he first calls it disinformation.
Any criticism of him he regards as false.
He calls it disinformation.
And then, as today, he starts strongly implying that it's criminal, although oftentimes overtly he'll say it's a crime.
Obviously, it's going to be harder when I'm working with the largest newspaper in Brazil, sort of the New York Times of Brazil, to prosecute the reporting and criminalize it, but he made very clear today that's how he sees it and would like to.
And, as I always say when I talk about Brazil and this judge, It's not just that Brazil is a very influential country in the hemisphere, the second largest country in the hemisphere after the United States, the country with major oil reserves and geostrategic importance and the most important environmental asset on the planet, which is the Amazon.
It's also that Brazil is still part of the democratic world and what it does really influences other countries.
And I also think it's very important to see the kind of Quickness and ease with which true oppression can take hold.
Kind of go from something that is authoritarian, but you still feel like you can fight it, to increasing levels of intensity where even the attempt to fight it becomes criminal.
And the major reason that this is happening is because the Brazilian left, which five years ago when or six years ago when Alessandro de Moraes was being appointed to the Supreme Court by a sort of centrist president who took over when Kula's party, the Workers' Party, was impeached, when Dilma Rousseff, the successor to Lula, was impeached, and they considered that a coup the successor to Lula, was impeached, and they considered that a coup government, an illegitimate
The president, Michel Temer, who helped overthrow Dilma Rousseff, when he appointed Alessandro de Moraes, the entire left united and said he is a grave threat to democracy.
They called him a racist, a fascist, a white supremacist, a coup monger.
The entire left was united against him.
He's always been a person of the sort of center-right, the kind of establishment right, the kind of faction in the United States that hates Donald Trump and that has done so many authoritarian things to stop the Trump movement in the name of saving democracy.
They've dismantled and destroyed it.
And that's exactly what's happening here.
And so once Alexandre Moraes was the enemy of the left, the left called him all the names they always call everybody they dislike, including fascists and racists.
Once he got onto the court and Bolsonaro was president, he began censoring the political enemies of the left.
He began criminally investigating them.
He drove many of them into exile.
Many of them are hiding in the United States or elsewhere for very valid fear of imprisonment.
And some of them are in prison, oftentimes for Criticizing him for speaking harshly of him or the court for questioning the integrity of the election in a way that he alone has decreed criminal.
And the power that is centralized in his hand is remarkable and the reason it happens is because he's only basically exercising these repressive powers against the political enemies of the left and it's so amazing to watch how When repression and tyranny and authoritarianism is exercised for the benefit of one political group, the blind reverence that group will then have for that person is unlimited.
Not only do they defend every single thing that Alexandre Barreiros does, they don't care if it's criminal, they don't care if it's an abuse of the Constitution, they don't care at all.
They don't care if it's based on falsehoods like that case I explained where they imprisoned Bolsonaro's top foreign policy advisor.
They'll defend every single thing he does and more than that, they believe that any reporting on him, any questioning of him, any criticism of him is criminal.
It's like treason.
It's like an attack on Brazilian democracy and he believes that too.
So we'll see where this reporting goes.
This is obviously not the first time I've done reporting based on major leaks, but...
You know, each one brings certain, I think, crucial journalistic benefits and benefits to democracy.
But obviously, if you are doing this sort of thing against powerful factions, there's also risks that come with it.
And it's always a question of where this will go.
But at the end of the day, this is reporting that obviously has to be done and should be done.
It sheds a lot of light on what he's doing.
There's international security issues involved in it.
The argument is just that by anything that puts him in a negative light, Sort of like how Anthony Fauci said, I am the science.
So if you criticize Anthony Fauci or question Anthony Fauci or criticizing and questioning science itself, he believes he is Brazilian democracy itself.
And any questioning of him or speaking at all critically of him is an attack, by definition, a criminal attack on the legitimacy of the state and therefore democracy itself.
And it's Obviously, there's a lot of authoritarian trends in the United States that we report on all the time that are very real.
But to watch it go beyond those steps into sort of a full-fledged mentality and framework is, among other, it's a lot of things.
But among other things, it is very eliminating about how that could so easily happen elsewhere, including places where you think it can't.
So we will definitely keep you updated on the reporting as it goes along.
I'm sure there will be lots of twists and turns to come.
There's a lot more reporting to do.
We've only just begun.
So we will keep you filled in as everything progresses.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode of System Update 12 hours after they first appear live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our show there, it really helps spread the visibility of our program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble community where we have our live interactive after show where we take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques and hear your suggestions for future shows and guests.
The After Show is available only for members of our Localist community, so if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those After Shows, but to a wide range of interactive features we have there.
It's the place we first publish our original written journalism.
It's where we publish written transcripts, professionalized transcripts of every show we broadcast here.
And most of all, it is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we're doing here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that community.
For those who have been watching this show, we are of course very appreciative, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
