Media Coverage Restricted as DNC Kicks-Off in Chicago; Michael Tracey joins from the DNC; PLUS: Censorship Regime Keeps Escalating in the West
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Pro-Dem Content Creators (7:17)
Michael Tracey at DNC
Interview with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) [38:38]
Interview with Rep. Al Green (D-TX) [44:14]
Interview with Cornel West, Independent Presidential Candidate [48:44]
Censorship Regime Escalation (54:01)
Outro (1:23:16)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the Democratic National Convention is set to begin in Chicago, and it will culminate with the acceptance speech of Kamala Harris on Thursday night.
She's the person who has somehow become the Democratic nominee without having to campaign for or obtain a single vote and without having sat for a single debate or a single interview with any journalist with barely more than two months to go before the election begins.
Now, the strategy of Kamala and her operatives could not be clearer at this point.
Indeed, many of them are saying it explicitly.
They're trying to avoid ever having to speak, have her speak without a script or teleprompter, and they're giving as few interviews as possible, if she gives any, so that nobody knows anything about what she actually thinks, and instead there's some sort of inchoate cultural excitement that instead will lead her to the presidency in lieu of any actual substantive beliefs.
Democrats' convention, unsurprisingly, perfectly reflects this strategy of substancelessness.
Substancelessness.
While our program received press credentials with ease to attend the Republican National Convention, we were unable to obtain credentials to enter the Democratic Convention Hall.
That was true of so many journalists and independent media who had failed to demonstrate complete fealty to the Democratic Party and or to Congress.
It was almost impossible for people who had been critical of the party to get into the hall with credentials.
Now, in lieu of actual journalists, they have handed out their credentials instead to hundreds of painfully vapid, empty-headed, partisan TikTok youth who have chosen to spend their early 20s not involved in any radical political or subversive and transgressive cultural projects or the point of being young. partisan TikTok youth who have chosen to spend their early
But instead, they have formed their identity based on blind but very excited loyalty to the Democratic Party and its leaders, to the establishment dogma that party represents, and to do so in the most brainless and embarrassing establishment-revering ethos possible.
Now, despite not being credentialed, we have once again sent our roving independent reporter Michael Tracy to the convention to report on as much as he can, along with our producer Megan O'Rourke.
That duo teamed up for a lot of great interviews in Milwaukee when the Republicans had their convention.
They have already conducted some provocative and enlightening interviews with Democratic officials, which we will show you throughout the week, including some tonight.
But they have also amply documented the dreary, vacuous spirit of joy.
Joy that is achieved by thinking about nothing that permeates this political party and their grand gala in Chicago this week.
And then finally, Elon Musk over the weekend announced that he was closing all of X's physical offices in Brazil, the planet's fifth most populous country, as a result not only of endless censorship demands from its Supreme Court, but also explicit threats that Twitter executives would be imprisoned
If the platform did not immediately censor the accounts of multiple elected officials and journalists all ordered banned with no trial or due process of any kind, Musk and Axe have been thus far resisting.
That banning and the response from the Supreme Court and specifically the Supreme Court judging has become notorious around the world for his authoritarian censorship scheme is that you either immediately silence these people who have been charged with nothing And no reasons are provided as to why you have to silence them.
You either do it instantly off your platform, or we will not only impose massive fines on your company, but we will arrest the executives of Axe who are in Brazil.
Now, all of that comes as the censorship regimes that we have been reporting on for two years around the world are now asserting themselves more visibly and more menacingly than ever.
The EU, for instance, continues to flex its censorship muscles by issuing endless threats to Musk for his failure, in their view, to censor more.
The UK is on what can only be described as a completely mad binge of criminalizing speech, even going so far as to explicitly threaten to x-ray people from other countries around the world, x-ray them to the UK.
To stand trial on the ground that posts that they posted to social media of an anti-immigrant nature helped inflame and incite that country's recent riots.
And the reaction to our ongoing reporting in Brazil.
We published a news story pretty much every day since we began last week on the front page of Folio Sao Paulo, the country's largest newspaper that comes from a gigantic archive of six gigabytes from the chambers of that censorship judge, has really provoked an extraordinary reaction from that judge and his supporters.
In fact, given that he is now in charge and has been in charge of what is called the body of anti-disinformation, the body that he has often used to persecute political dissidents and to silence people from the Internet, he has used that same language saying essentially that our reporting is not only disinformation, but aimed he has used that same language saying essentially that our reporting is not only disinformation, but aimed at You can really see in all of this just how vividly the dangers are when you allow these frameworks to take hold.
We've been reporting on these dangers for a long time and they are finally now coming to manifest very, Uh, expressively and without much limits in many parts of the democratic world, or at least what is the democratic world for now.
Now, before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Democratic National Convention promises extremely exciting speakers and events all throughout this week, culminating on Thursday night when Kamala Harris ascends to the stage, and she will become the second-ever woman to accept a...
Presidential nominee of a major party.
She will be the first woman of color, the first person of African-American descent or who is black, as well as the first South Asian candidate.
So that's all incredibly exciting in and of itself.
But before we even get to that, there's a lot of other very, very exciting things happening tonight.
For example, the current sitting president, in theory and name, Joe Biden, is going to appear where he will symbolically pass the torch to Kamala Harris, as well as speeches by people like AOC and the Golden State Warriors basketball coach Steve Kerr.
An incredibly exciting lineup of people who are going to teach us and tell us about what the Democratic Party represents, all the different views that they have, at least on cultural issues, not necessarily about things like war or foreign policy or economic policy or immigration.
And there's a lot going on that obviously can be pretty inspiring, pretty important, pretty consequential.
There is, however, a few odd aspects of this convention that we wanted to draw your attention to, in particular because it's so consistent with the genuinely bizarre ethos that has come to define Kamala Harris's presidency.
As we said at the top of the show, It's always pretty customary for us to be able to get credentials, press credentials, to any party's convention, given my long history in journalism, the fact that we are affiliated with a large platform, have a large audience, it makes it, obviously, these press credentials are exactly for shows like this, for people like myself, and we had no trouble getting the credentials for the Republican National Convention.
A lot of independent journalists who have been very critical of the Republican Party or Donald Trump also got press credentials since that's what they're for.
They're designed to let people go to the convention, ask questions of members of Congress, supporters of Trump, influential figures in one way or another, and let them convey their message to the American people through the press, both the corporate press and the independent media.
The Democratic National Convention, however, has been a completely different story, not just in terms of our inability to get credentials, despite trying every different route that we can, but also the inability of many, many journalists, including independent journalists, who have not been able to get credentials at all, despite having far larger audiences than a lot of people who have been given these credentials.
And that's because the Democratic National Committee has decided to give hundreds, major percentage of their press credentials not to actual journalists, But to TikTok influencers, and specifically not just the biggest TikTok influencers, but the TikTok influencers who are the most loyal, the most devoted, the most giddy, the most excited about Kamala Harris and coconuts and all the themes surrounding her campaign.
You can barely go anywhere at the Democratic National Convention or hear about it without having These, uh, we'll just show you.
I'll leave the adjectives out for the moment.
I'll let you see a couple other videos itself.
Here are a few of the 200 TikTok devotees of the Democratic Party who received press credentials to enter the convention hall in lieu of sending actual journalists.
Guys, we're going to the Harris Bullets rally.
Woo!
Yeah!
I can see you.
Don't fall from the tree.
Because I've been looking at you.
So long.
I'm not listening.
I'm going to throw me up.
I'm going to put into the sky.
This is the Astral Valley.
I'm standing so I just want to drive.
I need you.
- Okay, so I understand very well that I am not in the demographic group targeted by this sort of dreck.
I understand that perfectly well.
There's no reason why I should like this or connect to it or understand it.
It's not directed for me.
It's not made for me.
That's not who they're trying to target with this sort of thing.
But I nonetheless feel repelled by it and disgusted by it, not because it's offensive, but because of how inoffensive it is.
If you think about the generational cultural conflict that typically dominates the United States, it's often the case that people who are older, of older generations, who are the parents of teenagers or people becoming young adults, are horrified by the culture that That new generation has embraced.
That's completely common.
But usually the reason they're horrified by it is because they think it's menacing or dangerous or edgy or, in some other way, toxic and destructive.
I mean, you look at the 1950s where teenagers and young adults were discovering things like Elvis Presley and rock and roll and that whole generation of parents.
We're horrified by it.
They thought it was morally decadent and degenerate.
They thought the whole sort of culture was offensive.
And that was the generational conflict.
And then, of course, you move into the 60s, where the predominant cultural movement of the 1960s was a countercultural movement, an anti-establishment movement.
People becoming hippies, taking acid and dropping out, marching against the Vietnam War.
That was supported by both political parties.
It actually was so organized and powerful that it actually drove Lyndon Johnson from office.
And it had almost no support among older generations who found this countercultural behavior, the culture that it ushered in, the music, the politics of it, very subversive, very threatening, very radical.
And that has always been the conflict of older generations, how they look at younger generations' political ideology and culture.
That has been true throughout the 1980s and 1990s when I was growing up and becoming a young adult.
It was the idea that younger people were so radical, there was all kinds of AIDS activism, lots of anti-establishment behavior.
What amazes me about all this, all this, This is the opposite of all those things.
There's nothing countercultural about this.
There's nothing anti-establishment about it.
There's nothing threatening about it.
There's nothing menacing about it.
There's nothing subversive about it.
There's nothing even creative about it.
This is like drone behavior.
It's like a friend of mine, someone who occasionally weighs in on how we're preparing the show, is saying that these buses look like they're filled with the most homework-eager students on the planet.
Like the kind of people who not only do all their homework the minute the teacher says it, but does it with great eagerness and gratitude.
I just can't imagine being 20.
I'll imagine all the latitude that gives you to explore and embrace dissent and creativity and ideas that are offensive and instead basing your entire cultural movement, your entire political identity, your entire identity as a person on fealty to the Democratic Party.
The most establishment organ in arguably all of the world?
And to its political leaders?
Relating to political leaders?
Establishment political leaders as parents?
Talking about Kamala and Tim Walz being some sort of paternal and maternal figures?
This is pathetic.
This is not somebody looking down at the youth and saying, oh, they're so dangerous, and they're so reckless, and people in our generation were so much more responsible.
It's the opposite.
It's shocking just how conformist they all are, how unthreatening they all are.
The Democratic Party, that's the ground zero.
That's the centerpiece for your identity as a human being.
And the people that you idolize most, that you venerate most, are Political leaders in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it excites you and animates you to that extent?
Why?
They don't even believe in anything.
I would also just add the irony of all this energy being centralized on TikTok, given that it was Joe Biden who demanded the bill that eventually passed that he signed to either ban TikTok in the United States or force a sale of TikTok to a company that the US security state can better manipulate and control.
We've been over that bill many times and the idea was supposed to be, oh, there was a political cost to it because all these young people who love TikTok, TikTok, all these tens and hundreds of millions of people who use TikTok in the United States are going to be angry at whoever it is who sponsors and favors and brings into play this TikTok ban.
And yet that was Joe Biden.
It was the Biden-Harris administration that did that.
It originated with Republicans based on fears of China, but it lingered forever without being able to be passed.
And as we've documented many times, after October 7th, it immediately got a large bipartisan majority, where huge numbers of Democrats began to support it, as did the Biden White House, on the grounds that there was too much free speech on TikTok, they were permitting too much speech that was critical of Israel.
That's why they decided they had to shut it down.
And so all these people who love TikTok, whose work depends on TikTok, whose sense of community and identity depends on TikTok, to watch them swoon In admiration and love and worship for the politicians who actually shut down their app.
is itself just kind of indicative of how substanceless this all is.
It's like a very tepid cultural moment that has been created through just a really unholy mix of a lot of really harmless and vacuous cultural beliefs of young people who identify as liberals about LGBT issues and abortion and identity politics and they really never move beyond any of that.
They don't understand or ask any of those questions even to the point where they're willing to cheer for the people who are banning the app on which their primary social connections and even work depend.
Now here is an article from CNBC noting the rather unprecedented and somewhat bizarre decision by the Democratic National Committee to give their press credentials to people who obviously have no Connection to the press have no interest in playing any sort of journalistic role.
They're here from CNBC earlier today quote Democrats grant special convention access to more than 200 content creators.
The decision to formally elevate a dedicated group of creators is a first for the Democratic nomination nominating convention.
It is also a window into the priorities driving the innovative media strategy.
That Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign is executed in its first month.
Now, let me just stop there because, in a way, Kamala Harris' presidential campaign is innovative.
It's not innovative because of cringey attempts to speak to the nation's youth.
I remember very well that Hillary Clinton did multiple interviews around the country with the actress Lena Dunham because they were convinced that Lena Dunham was the spokesperson for the young people and that by having Lena Dunham constantly say good things about Hillary, that was going to excite the young people and bring them to the polls.
So it's not innovative in the sense that they're trying to use social media to make their campaign hip for young people on social media.
What's innovative about it is that it's a campaign based on absolutely nothing.
Just a complete refusal of any willingness to sit down and answer questions about anything they think or believe.
In fact, a celebration of that refusal.
And for a media outlet, again, to talk about that quote-unquote strategy and anything other Then terms of denunciation, calling it an innovative strategy, obviously being kind of giddy about it, is such an abdication of the journalistic role.
The only thing journalists should be doing right at this moment is cajoling and harassing and badgering the Democratic Party about making Kamala Harris sit down and actually answer questions without a script.
The article goes on, quote, about one-third of adults under age 30 say they regularly get their news on TikTok, according to Pew Research Center.
These younger adults are a crucial demographic for Democratic candidates, helping the party to offset the GOP's typical dominance among voters over 65.
In 2020, President Joe Biden carried voters under 30 by a whopping 24 percentage points.
The convention committee is providing these creators with exclusive access to the week's events and guests.
It will also have full-time staff working closely with the creators to help facilitate their engagement with the Harris campaign and the DNC's digital partisan team.
The DNC has even built a raised platform on the convention floor so that creators will have a dedicated space to engage with the events.
Similar to traditional television network platforms, this one is specifically for creators to produce content.
Take selfies and interview attendees.
The Biden White House has also tapped influencers to help share its accomplishments on social media.
Last week, Biden hosted 100 digital content creators at the White House for the first-ever Creator Economy Conference.
Quote, you are the new possibilities, Biden told the creators.
You are the breakthrough in how we communicate.
Now, again, I have no problem at all with The Democrats catering their message to young voters, to wanting people who have influence on various social media platforms, including TikTok, to be able to come to the convention, create content.
The issue, though, is that this is all being done in lieu of any actual adversarial questioning of any kind for Kamala Harris.
She's just surrounded constantly by teleprompters or people who swoon With love and adoration for her, it's an extremely unhealthy way to run a presidential campaign.
And had she gone through the normal process of getting nominated, which would have meant she had to debate, she had to give speeches, she had to sit down for interviews, she had to convince people to vote for her by saying what she thinks, she skipped over all that part.
That whole thing about democracy part.
She was chosen three months before the election by a secret room of a handful of Democratic elites, which meant she never has had to do any of that.
And as we've gone over many times, the only thing we know about anything she thinks, other than a couple of poll-tested, not really policies, just sort of ideas that she's been advocating, like getting rid of corporate price gouging, the only thing we really know about her is that all of the planks on which she ran in 2019 and 2020 when she had her failed presidential campaign are things that she's now renounced.
Because now she's not running for the Democratic nomination anymore, she already got that.
Somehow, and therefore hasn't really had to sit down and answer a single question.
And in case you have any doubt about whether that's intentional, about whether the people around her are encouraging that, here is a quote from Ben Domenich, who noted on August 19th this hair surrogate who appeared on ABC News, Kaivin Shroff.
This is what he said when asked about the lack of interviews.
He said, quote, the more details you share, the more your policies get picked apart.
But what Kamala is saying is she trusts journalists to explain these policies and our values to folks.
When that happens, it will be successful for Democrats.
I mean, that's a very short quote, but it's packed with so many revealing insights.
Mainly that their view is that they don't have to and are not going to explain any policy positions They're going to leave that up to journalists to do that for them, to basically tell the public, oh, these are the things Kamala Harris stands for, even though she hasn't ever taken any policy positions or answered questions about them.
Because Democrats know, as he said, that when they let journalists speak for the campaign, that works out well for Democrats for incredibly obvious reasons.
There is finally some sort of a campaign platform, a party platform, that has been unveiled for the convention.
Every party has to have that.
And usually they don't mean very much.
They're policies that the party intends to run on, which obviously are extremely different than the policies they intend to pursue once they're in power.
But at least it's something.
At least it's something concrete about things that they say they believe about issues beyond One of the issues that they have finally addressed in the platform, and it's bizarre because a lot of the paragraphs are Erroneously written.
They were obviously written for Biden.
They forgot to edit parts out where they said, President Biden in his second term will do this.
So they just edited it to say Kamala Harris, but neglected a few parts.
So it's very clear that it was the platform intended for Joe Biden, but you don't have to edit anything except change Biden to Harris because, of course, Kamala Harris has no differences with Joe Biden, including on an issue that a lot of people on the left, a lot of left liberals have been spending the last month lying in an attempt to try and a lot of left liberals have been spending the last month lying in an attempt to try and convince young people and leftists to vote for Kamala Harris by telling them, based on absolutely nothing, as we've gone over many times before, that somehow she
When it comes to the war in Israel and Gaza, that she's more open to confronting Israel.
She's more empathetic to the Palestinians.
She would even consider imposing an arms embargo on Israel if this war continues with no regard for human rights.
And even though Kamala's campaign had to come out and say she doesn't support anything like an arms embargo, why are people saying that?
She believes the United States' supreme duty is to stand by and defend Israel.
They continue to lie and say, no, no, she secretly, you can tell by the tone, She's deep down in some sort of part in her belly.
She just likes Palestinians better than Biden, and so there's a lot more hope with her.
And today the DNC released its party planks, including on that war, and Ryan Grimm, my former colleague at The Intercept, Noted the following, quote, It's pretty incredible, he said, though totally believable, that the final DNC platform has a one-sided condemnation of sexual violence and it's aimed at Hamas, even as the Knesset engages in a full-throated debate as to whether the acknowledged rape of Palestinian detainees is okay or not.
Obviously, we've got all sorts of Reports over the last month, we had a representative from B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, on our show about their new report documenting the use of sexual assault and other forms of abuse by the Israeli soldiers on helpless Palestinian detainees, including ones who had nothing to do with Hamas or October 7th.
Everyone in Israel admits that that happened.
There was rectal rape to the point that they sent a detainee to the hospital with serious anal injuries.
There's no debate in Israel about whether that happened.
Everyone admits it did.
The debate is about whether it's acceptable morally and ethically to use anal rape as a weapon of war on prisoners.
That's the debate that they're having in Israel.
And we've endured nine months or ten months of all these sanctimonious lectures about how it's everyone's duty to condemn sexual assault when used as a weapon of war.
That's the worst thing that you could possibly do.
And that's what makes Hamas like ISIS.
We were told, and yet, as Ryan Grimm notes, There's not a syllable about condemning the sexual assault that even the Israelis admits that they perpetrated, even though there's a section on sexual assault directed only at Hamas.
Here's what the part of the platform says.
It says it's titled response to the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and next steps to a lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians.
Quote, President Biden and Vice President Harris, So they have the same belief.
Both of them believe, quote, a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States.
Their commitment to Israel's security, its qualitative military edge, and its right to defend itself, and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is ironclad.
President Biden and Vice President Harris recognize the worth of every innocent life, whether Israeli or Palestinian.
President Biden and Vice President Harris have unequivocally denounced Hamas' brutal attack on Israel on October 7th, condemning the gruesome violence, including conflict-related sexual violence demonstrated by Hamas, and made clear that the United States wants to see Hamas defeated.
President Biden traveled to Israel the first U.S. president to do so at the time of war in the days after October 7th to demonstrate that the United States stands with Israel in its quest for peace and security.
He has also defended Israel at the UN against one-sided efforts to condemn Israel.
The administration worked with congressional leaders to pass a historic aid package.
Now it is, I think, as clear as it can be that the Democratic Party platform is telling you that there are no differences between Joe Biden's policy on Israel and Kamala Harris's policy on Israel.
And it was so obvious from the start that of course there wouldn't be.
Kamala Harris didn't materialize out of nowhere, although you'd be forgiven for thinking so.
To become the Democratic presidential nominee, she got to the Senate in 2016 and one of the very first things she did, in fact the first resolution she sponsored, was to condemn a vote of the Security Council that Barack Obama allowed to happen by abstaining instead of using the U.S.
veto that declared Israeli settlements in the Left Bank to be illegal.
Kamala Harris, in a bipartisan bill, co-sponsored a bill to condemn that vote against Israel at the U.N.
She's spoken to AIPAC, she's received massive amounts of pro-Israel money.
The idea that Kamala Harris, of all people who has never once in her entire life demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice an iota of political self-interest for principle, was somehow going to come in and confront the Israelis and impose an arms embargo or be any different than Joe Biden was a complete and stupid pipe dream and illusion from the start.
But a lot of people who pretended for nine months to care so deeply about the Palestinians and to care so much about the war in Gaza, so predictably, I mean, I predicted it, lots of people predicted it, as the election approached, decided, okay, we're kind of done with this war in Gaza, even though the Israelis aren't done with it.
They're still killing Gazans in huge numbers, destroying much of their civilian infrastructure, bombing schools and hospitals, wiping out entire families and journalists and doctors.
Even though they're not done with it, said these left liberal influencers, we are.
We profited a lot from it.
We got a lot of traffic.
We got a lot of attention.
We kind of branded ourselves as radical critics of the Democratic Party.
But now there's an election to win.
Can't be talking about that anymore.
We've got to elect Democrats, the people who have armed and funded the war.
And in order to do that and to try and justify, well, how could we do that?
They started lying, just outright lying to the public and to leftist voters to try and deceive them into voting for Kamala Harris by telling them that Kamala Harris has a different view of Palestine, of Gaza, of Israel than Joe Biden does.
That she would have a greater willingness to confront the Israelis, even though there was never a single ground for believing that.
And there was all the reason in the world to know that it wouldn't have happened.
Now here's the Democratic Party plank sounding exactly like Joe Biden and every other Democrat when it comes to Israel.
Namely that our prime duty is to provide the arms and money to Israel to make sure they maintain a qualitative advantage in the region.
And we're going to do everything possible to secure Israel's national security and safety, even if it means going to war for them, as we're about to do in the Middle East, in order to secure it.
And it made very clear President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris have the same views on that.
Now, in lieu of talking about that or caring about that, we're getting instead more TikTok videos.
These are the ones that are dominating the convention that the Harris campaign is pushing.
I don't know how many more I need to show you.
I think the point has been made.
But since I saw these two, I'm going to force you to see them as well.
I think they're, just each one is worse than the other.
Here's this one.
The caption on the screen is, this is your POV, your point of view, when you are one of the first content creators in history to cover the DNC.
And here's what they're doing to celebrate.
Hi.
I love the cameo of AOC because you barely realize that she's not one of the TikTok creators since she looks and speaks and contorts her body exactly like them.
But this is, again, this is just pathetic.
Here's another one from one of the people who got press credentials.
Yo, what's up everybody?
This is Jeremy Jacobowitz, Johnny Pomodesto, Ana Costa, Lindsey of Arch, Zachary Kirk, Parker Square, Jeffrey Meyers, Brian Baez, Lindy Lee, and I have some exciting, exciting news.
For the first time ever, the Democratic National Convention is credentialing content creators.
And guess what?
Now I'm one of them.
In August, I'll be in Chicago covering the convention, inside the United Center, and all over the city, reading the stories of America.
No, again, if it were just a question of political cringe, I wouldn't comment on it.
Every campaign has a certain level of political cringe.
Stay tuned to watch Democracy in Action.
You're in Chicago.
You know, again, if it were just a question of political cringe, I wouldn't comment on it.
Every campaign has a certain level of political cringe.
I thought the RNC's last night with Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan, that was not for me either, to put that mildly.
But these are the people who are being given the spots and the credentials that actual journalists are supposed to have in order to cover a major political event in some way other than by swooning and giggling in adoration.
One more.
This is Showpipe.
She's getting ready to go to one of the events of the convention.
You see how I'm dressed for the first day of the DNC?
Very mindful.
Very cutesy.
Very demure.
I'm headed to the Congressional Black Caucus brunch because what?
I'm mindful.
With my Kamala clutch.
Very demutesy.
Okay?
Thanks.
Incredibly innovative media strategy, as CNBC said.
Now, one of the people who is included in this group, very understandably and unsurprisingly, is the Twitch streamer Hassan Piker, who is every bit as much of a geekly loyalist of the Democratic Party as all of them.
Here you see he's announcing very excitingly that he has touched down in Chicago.
And he had to re-download Twitter on his phone for the occasion.
And he's saying, in case you didn't realize, he's at the DNC and he has this very ironic, very edgy graphic, I'm writing in Biden.
And there's a little hint.
And that's doing that to mask the fact that he's, like every other Democratic hack, even though he's built up quite a profile over the last nine months, pretending that his main issue is anger at the Democratic Party's support for the war in Gaza, something that he's completely forgotten on purpose and therefore was rewarded with one of these press credentials.
Now, just to underscore the point about what the Democrats are doing, this kind of propagandist bubble that they've been creating around Kamala Harris and are using the convention to do again, here's Chris Polofsky, the CEO of Rumble.
And you can say whatever you want about Rumble, but it's one of the largest platforms on the internet.
Certainly when it comes to political content, millions and millions of people watch it.
And he said, quote, Rumble reached out numerous times to the DNC to have a presence at the Chicago Convention, just like we did at the RNC.
We finally received a response.
The DNC wouldn't let us stream, but instead offered to sell us two convention tickets for $200,000.
We declined.
$200,000, we declined.
So this will be an effective political strategy if the media doesn't complain, if the media continues to do what they're doing, which is covering it as something positive, as something savvy, as something wise, instead of, since they're the ones who are being told no.
Going on the air every day and banging their fist on the table and saying it's an affront to democracy and to the American voting public to try and install a person in the Oval Office who never campaigned for that job, who never got a single vote for it, who never participated in the debate, and who never has had to answer a single question from any Journalists, even the most friendly journalists, because our strategy is to do the opposite.
Now, even though we didn't get credentials to go to the convention, we did send Michael Tracy along with the producer and our social media manager, Megan O'Rourke, who those two did a great job at the Republican convention.
And we're going to show you a couple of excerpts from some of the interviews they were able to do.
Like I said, we're going to put the entire interview On locals, for our locals members, if you want to see those, you can join that community.
But Michael's a very, I would say, good interviewer and somebody, more importantly, who asks questions from a direction that Democrats aren't used to hearing questions.
He did the same thing for Republicans.
And as a result, they can't rely on talking points because they're being asked questions from a kind of different angle about things like foreign policy in Israel and Ukraine, as well as the attempt on democratically to install Kamala as the candidate.
And so these interviews end up being quite, quite entertaining, but quite illuminating as well.
We're going to have them throughout the week.
Hopefully we can get a lot more.
Here is the first one with the Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California.
And this is part of what we will show you.
Okay, so we're here in Chicago.
There could be another also imminent cataclysm in the Middle East.
It seems like the Biden administration, the Biden-Harris administration, wants to try to forge some sort of ceasefire settlement with Gaza for political reasons, understandably, but also for strategic reasons, for a variety of reasons.
You did vote against the Israel supplemental funding portion in that bill.
How do you conceptually distinguish those expenditures that would cause you to vote against the Israel portion and for the Ukraine portion?
Ukraine is a country that was attacked by Russia, and standing for its self-defense was just.
I condemned the brutal Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7th, and I said Israel had the right to self-defense, and they engaged in the destruction and degradation of a lot of the Hamas battalions.
But post-Thanksgiving, after there was the initial deal that Qatar helped facilitate with the release of hostages, I thought, that we need to continue around diplomacy to get the release of the hostages, that Hamas had been sufficiently degraded, that there is no solution that's going to fully eradicate Hamas, and that continuing to provide Netanyahu with offensive weapons, when, by the way, they already have the Iron Dome and other supplementals by the way, they already have the Iron Dome and other supplementals from past years, and so this is money that's actually two
It's not needed in the current defense.
We're sending Netanyahu the wrong message in terms of trying to bring a permanent ceasefire and release of the hostages.
Now, how do, if at all, Biden and Harris differentiate themselves, or are they at all different on the question of Israel?
There's been talk about how Harris has a different tone, possibly.
Obviously, Biden has longstanding involvement with Israel.
He even calls himself a Zionist.
We haven't heard that quite the same rhetoric from Kamala Harris.
But if voters want to know, would a Kamala Harris I think she's going to lay that out.
I mean, look, all Zionism means is that the Jewish people have self-determination.
I believe the Palestinian people should have self-determination.
That was the initial flaw of the Balfour Declaration.
You should have a Palestinian state, you should have a secure Israel state, and the United States should push towards that.
I look forward to hearing what the vice president's policy is going to be. - Well, shouldn't we know before she gets nominated to be the nominee of the Democratic Party?
I mean, it seems like we're, it's a bit premature with her not having to express any policy views before becoming nominee. - Well, the default is that she's the Biden-Harris policies on a lot of these things.
I've been critical of those policies and hope that there will be a change.
And I do think she has a chance to pivot and she's only been the nominee for a few weeks.
And I do think that she's going to have to give a major speech on the Middle East and some point and will.
OK, final question.
So I recall you were in New Hampshire.
Okay so you can watch the rest of that and there's a whole section on Ukraine as well that came before that where Michael pressed him endlessly on what the objective is now that the front lines are disintegrating and that's what I mean when I say that Michael kind of asks questions from this direction that they're not accustomed to hearing.
I think every single Democrat should be repeatedly badgered about what does Kamala Harris think and how do you know, since she hasn't actually said anything about it.
And he's like, "I think the default would be that she believes in the policies of the Biden-Harris administration, but why should we even have to use, I think the default position is this." Now, of course, as we showed you from the plank, Kamala Harris is not going to have any differences with Joe Biden on the war in Gaza or support for Israel anyway.
We're going to continue to finance Israel's military.
We're going to continue to fund all of its wars and arm all of its wars.
We're going to continue to isolate ourselves at the U.N.
from the rest of the world in order to, quote unquote, stand by Israel.
So none of that is going to change at all.
Which makes it rather odd that the people who have been screaming genocide, genocide for the last nine months have no problem flying to Chicago like Hassan Piker and all these other people to do everything they can to encourage as many votes as possible for the people that they've been saying have implemented a genocide.
It's very strange behavior, I think.
Unless you want to say, well, Trump would have done worse genocide, I guess.
Also, I think, just as a side note, the strange thing there when Michael asked about the term Zionist and Ro Khanna said, oh, all Zionism means is you should have a state Where the Jews have self-determination.
That basically is an ethnostate.
It's saying we should have one state over here where the Jews always are in the majority and always get to run everything.
And then over here we should have another state where the Arabs are always in control and always get to run anything.
These are ethnostates.
And generally when people advocate ethnostates for the West, it's considered deeply racist, deeply offensive, white nationalist, whatever.
And yet, It doesn't even occur to him that there may be something odd about the ideology of Zionism, which was only created 100 years ago, 100 plus years ago.
And as we've had on our show before, a lot of religious Jews find it offensive as a violation of Judaism.
Here is another interview Michael conducted with a member of Congress, Al Green, who is a Democrat from Texas.
Let's show part of that.
Final question, a number of your Democratic colleagues who represent more of the progressive wing have lost primaries recently including Jamal Bowman in New York, Cori Bush in Missouri, and their opposition in those races came in large part from pro-Israel donors through AIPAC and other organizations where the AIPAC Do you think there ought to be some new regulation considered for the money that those groups can spend in those races?
supporting President Biden on the infrastructure bill or something benign like that that didn't really have anything to do with Israel.
So they weren't really upfront about why they were spending all those millions of dollars on those races.
Do you think there ought to be some new regulation considered for the money that those groups can spend in those races?
And what does it tell you about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby where they've done something that's very unusual, as you know, which is defeat two incumbents in Democratic primaries?
I think that there is too much money concentrated into the hands of a few people that they can use to remove people from office.
I I do believe we have to have some means by which we can prevent $25 million from being spent in a congressional race.
Now, if it wasn't 25, it was 24.
If it wasn't 24, it was 23.
But it was an inordinate amount of money to be spent in a congressional race.
And yes, I'm opposed to what happened to him.
It's not so much about what he said as it is about how they took him out of office You mean Jamal Bowman?
Jamal Bowman.
They took Bowman out of office because they had the money to do it.
They had the money to do it.
It was the most expensive primary race in history.
Ever in the history of the United States.
All right, so again, those are the kinds of things that should be asked a lot more.
A discussion with a Democratic member of Congress about the extraordinary and almost unlimited ability of AIPAC to just remove Democratic members of Congress for insufficient Support for Israel all while they run ads pretending that they're criticizing that member of Congress for being insufficiently loyal to President Biden's agenda when in fact the real reason is of course is that they don't prioritize Israel above the needs of the people in their district.
are hesitant to send tens of billions of dollars over to Israel every year when people in their district, at home, Americans, people that are elected to represent the American Congress are suffering.
That's the real reason.
So that kind of an interview, I think, can produce a lot of tander from members of Congress who otherwise would prefer to stay quiet on the question for obvious reasons.
All right, we have other interviews including with the head of Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, who always is just so tireless in her anti-war activism.
We have Tamara Erickson, who is one of the delegates for the ceasefire from the state of Washington, as well as a member of the City Council in Minneapolis, Jeremiah Ellison, who's Part of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
And he is, as you might recall as well, the son of former Minnesota Attorney General and member of Congress Keith Ellison, who is also present there.
So those are all going to be on Locals.
You can check those all out.
Those are all equally interesting and provocative.
We're just going to show you an excerpt from one more interview that we conducted today that was with the independent presidential candidate, Cornel West, who originally was going to run with the Green Party.
And could have really made a big difference because the Green Party has the partisan infrastructure to ensure ballot access to almost all 50 states and running as a black left-wing critic of Israel and a left-wing critic of the Democratic Party.
Cornel West could have made a very significant impact.
in drawing left-wing votes away from the Democratic Party.
Instead he left the Green Party with all sorts of petty grievances between them and became sort of an independent candidate, created a new party.
I think he's going to be on the ballot maybe four or five states, something like that.
Very, very few.
So unfortunately his candidacy, which when we had him on our show we Examine why it could be such an interesting and important alternative And Jill Stein is now instead the head of the Green Party.
We had her on our show once a couple of months ago We'll probably have her on again before the election, but here is the discussion that was had with Cornel West earlier today in Chicago Alright, we're with Cornel West, presidential candidate.
What's your ballot access status at this point?
Sorry to preempt with a... They're coming at it strong though.
We've got a number of legal suits coming against us at Michigan and Arizona and Georgia and so forth.
So we're fighting.
But we're strong.
We're strong.
You know, we keep fighting.
We keep bearing witness.
So, one of the strange themes of Kamala Harris rising to the Democratic nomination is that she's claimed to be perceived to have a different tone, quote-unquote, on the Israel-Palestine question than Joe Biden.
Now, that doesn't necessarily bear on any substantive difference, but the New York Times and others are heralding her as, you know, being more willing to, quote, listen to activists and this sort of thing, but it doesn't correlate to any discernible policy difference.
What is your assessment of that?
Oh, no, no.
When you're talking about genocide, talking about ethnic cleansing, you're talking about apartheid.
That's already a red line in the sand.
There's no lower bar that can be met.
You either acknowledge the genocide and you stop it, you acknowledge ethnic cleansing and you bring it to a close.
And that begins by not just ceasefire, it begins by defunding Israel, pulling back the money, pulling back the support, and letting them know that international law is something that needs to be taken seriously, but most importantly, It means that a Palestinian life has the same value as a Jewish life, a Russian life, an Ethiopian life, a black life, your life or mine.
All right, so that could have been a good message, or at least a consequential message, that a lot of people would have heard had he run with the Green Party.
Instead, as you heard in his answer when he was asked how many states are you on the ballot for, he instead mentioned the ones where they were fighting to get on, meaning they weren't on yet.
I don't think he mentioned a single one where they were confirmed to be on.
I do think they're going to be on a couple, three, four.
But had he run with the Green Party, that's the message that could have made a big impact in the race.
And I think on some level, that's precisely why Cornel West decided not to do it.
He didn't want to be blamed the way Jill Stein was or Ralph Nader was in the event that the Democrats lost to Trump again.
In any event, we will continue to report both on the speeches, the ongoing protests outside the convention.
I expect those to escalate, especially with the release of this plank, but also just the codification of the Democrat strategy for running a campaign that is as bereft of substantive views as any presidential campaign I've seen by far in my lifetime.
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Certainly one of the two or three topics on which we have reported and focused most frequently pretty much since the show began, and I would say since I entered independent journalism in earnest when I left the intercept and I would say since I entered independent journalism in earnest when I left the intercept and first went to Substack and then came here, is the ongoing attempt to formalize mechanisms to allow governments and other power centers
In almost every country in the democratic world, there has been a movement to try and implement legal mechanisms to allow the government to simply censor dissent, to punish dissent, to force big tech companies to censor for them.
Even in the United States, where there's, in theory, a First Amendment, the Biden administration got caught.
Coercing and cajoling and threatening Big Tech over many years to remove all sorts of dissent from the internet that it regarded as threatening, including dissent on COVID, dissent on the war in Ukraine.
to the point where many federal judges who looked at it concluded it was a grave threat to the First Amendment and free speech, one of the greatest in decades.
And even though the Supreme Court threw the case out on procedural rounds, the substantive findings are still there and the threat is still there as well.
And then there are far worse developments in countries where there's no First Amendment, We've reported often on the new law in the EU called the Digital Services Act that empowers the EU bureaucrats in Brussels to force big tech companies to censor upon the threat of massive fines, percentages of their gross revenue, or even being blocked in various countries.
In the UK, which is not part of the EU, they have the Online Safety Act that's intended to do the same.
In Canada, there are various laws that are both implemented and still pending to fortify that even more.
And then in Brazil, which we've reported on extensively and have been living through to some extent, the censorship scheme has progressed beyond all those others and is now being used as kind of a laboratory to understand how far censorship can go without the public Prevailing, and of course the key is to make sure that you only censor dissidents, people who actually dissent from prevailing establishment ideology.
It's never the case, including in the most tyrannical countries, that people who cheer the government, who support the government, who embrace ideological orthodoxies and pieties of those in power, those people are never bothered.
They're not the ones imprisoned or censored or punished.
For dissent, because they don't dissent at all.
The people who are in danger with these laws are the people who actually want to criticize the government, who want to question its dogmas, who want to offer an alternative way of thinking about things, or to disprove the claims that are being made.
And the strategy here is as long as you keep the majority of people in conformity, quiet and quiescent, and you only focus instead on the people who actually pose a threat to your power, the dissent that poses a threat to your power, the bet will be is that most people won't care.
In fact, will support the center of dissent simply by convincing people that dissent itself is a danger.
That it's some sort of crime like hate speech or disinformation, you just reclassify it as something that seems menacing enough to warrant punishment.
That has been the strategy really since 2016, when you had the dual traumas in the liberal democratic world of Brexit being approved, forcing the UK out of the EU, and then the cataclysmic election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
I just actually watched An hour or so of coverage from NBC News last night at the 2016 election and watching the realization set in that Clinton was going to lose and Trump was going to win.
And the way they started confronting that and the genuine trauma that they were experiencing, the emotional turmoil, and that led them to conclude that they could no longer allow people to be free to speak freely, to hear freely.
They had to control the flow of information that they wanted to be able to control.
The outcomes of Nominally democratic elections and it's been going on and going on and we've been reporting on the progressive steps that are being taken and now we're starting to see the full manifestation of it or at least a much greater manifestation of it Than before.
Here is the official Twitter account of the Global Government Affairs part of AXE.
They deal with foreign governments and they are the organ of AXE that communicates both with and about foreign governments.
And they posted the following on Saturday night.
Quote, last night, Alexander de Moraes, which is the censorship judge on the Supreme Court of Brazil, threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest.
If we do not comply with his censorship orders.
He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions.
Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard, the Brazilian public not being informed about these orders, and our Brazilian staff having no responsibility or control over whether content is blocked on our platform, Judge Moraes has chosen to threaten our staff in Brazil rather than respect the law or due process.
As a result, to protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil effective immediately.
The X service remains available to the people of Brazil.
We are deeply saddened that we have been forced to make this decision.
The responsibility lies solely with Alexandre de Marais.
His actions are incompatible with democratic government.
The people of Brazil have a choice to make, democracy or Alexandre de Marais.
And they attach the order in Portuguese that says exactly this.
We've been reporting on this for a long time.
Remember, Rumble is also not available in Brazil.
If I'm in Brazil and I want to watch my own show or look at Rumble, I have to use a VPN to pretend I'm not in Brazil to trick the platform into believing I'm not in Brazil just in order to access it because Rumble decided that the avalanche of censorship orders that they were receiving almost every day to ban not just random extremists but elected officials of the Brazilian Senate and the Brazilian Congress
And journalists and activists who just simply criticize Alexandre Moraes that it wasn't worth it to them.
They'd rather remove themselves from the Brazilian market, even though it's a very big and profitable market.
And now we're on the verge of having X unavailable in Brazil as well, of X, because of its refusal to censor.
And as we've gone over before, these censorship boarders are done with no due process.
They're done in secret.
The people who are targeted with the censorship are not notified.
They're not given any explanation.
They have no opportunity to contest.
The banning, it's all done by a single judge with full censorship, unlimited censorship powers centralized in his hands.
And if you don't think this is the model that's coming to the EU and Canada and the US, then you are sadly mistaken.
This is exactly where the road that all of those other countries have deliberately traversed.
This is where it all ends.
Now, just to give you a sense for what is happening in other places as well, The chief censor in the EU is a Frenchman named Thierry Breton, and he has exactly the sort of same authoritarian mentality as Alexandre de Moraes.
Any statement or opinion that Thierry Breton thinks is wrong or threatening to his dogma, he views that as a crime.
He views that as not dissent, but as legal disinformation that is against the law.
And he then threatens these big tech platforms that they will be banned from the EU or fined hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, if they don't censor in accordance with the EU.
In fact, the law in the EU requires that big tech censor in advance and on their own or else face these huge fines.
These huge fines.
So here is a post that he posted to Twitter last week, quote, with great audience comes greater responsibility.
Hashtag DSA.
That's the Digital Services Act, the censorship law that the EU assigned to itself.
As there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful conduct in the EU in connection with major events with major audiences around the world, I sent this letter to Elon Musk.
And then the letter goes on to say that in the context of a bunch of events in the United Kingdom and retaliation to the planned broadcast on your platform of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, meaning Donald Trump, that will be accessible to EU users, meaning Elon Musk's attempt to have a conversation with one of the presidential candidates of the United States on X because it will be heard in the EU is somehow illegal.
Given that Trump will say things that are illegal in the EU, there's a whole variety of threats set forth in this letter, punishments and other forms of recrimination that the EU says that it will pursue unless they turn over all sorts of information and give guarantees and promises that they will more effectively censor in the first place.
Now it turns out that even for Europe, censorship of Europe, this is an outlier just so extremist to the point where the EU even distanced themselves a little bit from how excessive His threats were, but this gives you the kind of insight into the mentality of these people.
I'm going to get to Alessandro Di Medeiros in a second, just in terms of his mentality and what he's been doing over the last couple weeks, including in response to our reporting, just to give you a taste for what these people are like and what they're capable of doing and will do once these anti-disinformation and hate speech censorship powers are in their hand.
Hear from Euronews.
The day following Breton's letter, the EU Commission is not drawn on Musk's insults against Breton.
Quote, when asked how that might impact the commission's relationship with X, which is already under investigation for compliance with the Digital Services Act, a spokesperson for the EU executive said that the institution, quote, does not comment on comments.
When asked if Breton coordinated his letter within the commission, the spokesman said today, quote, the commissioner represented a general concern Basically trying to say he was a little bit out on his own, but what he's doing under this law is exactly what the law provides.
quote, the timing and wording were not coordinated with the president and not with the college.
Basically trying to say he was a little bit out on his own, but what he's doing under this law is exactly what the law provides.
Simply for having a conversation with Donald Trump and allowing Donald Trump to be heard in the EU, major social media companies can be banned in the EU, including what they're trying to do with X, to force Elon Musk to censor as the prior pre-Musk regime did to force Elon Musk to censor as the prior pre-Musk regime did or be banned from all of Remember, Rumble, aside from being inaccessible in Brazil, is also inaccessible in France.
Because at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the EU made it illegal, illegal, for any platform to platform Russian state media.
So if European adults want to hear from RT, want to hear from Sputnik, hear the other side of the story about the war, the EU has decided they're not allowed to hear that.
It's a crime to platform Those Russian state media outlets and Google immediately kicked off those sites from those news organizations from YouTube so in order to be compliant in compliance with the law but Rumble refused and so RT and Sputnik continued to be available on Rumble and when France discovered this they sent a letter to Rumble saying you either remove RT and Sputnik immediately we're going to cut you off at the IP level in France.
And Rumble said, we're not going to take censorship orders from some people in France.
We're not a company in France.
There's no democratic accountability over the people in France.
We're not going to be dictated to about who we can allow on our platform and who we can't by the French government.
And as a result, Rumble is not available in France either.
Now the EU, or rather the UK, is in an even more extremist mentality of censorship, and that's because there were some contained and limited riots, some ugly riots, but contained and limited, in the UK.
And what has been happening in the history of censorship in the West over the last two, three years, or even longer, is that every time there's a crisis of any kind, a crisis, an actual crisis, or a perceived crisis, it's immediately exploited To augment and justify the increase of censorship powers.
They did that with COVID.
Oh, it's a global pandemic.
We can't afford to have people questioning masks and questioning the vaccines.
Those people have to be banned from Twitter.
They did it in response to January 6 of the 2020 election.
Remember, Donald Trump, when he was the sitting president of the United States, was banned from Twitter and Facebook.
They did it in connection with the 2020 election when they banned reporting on the Biden family in China and Ukraine by lying and saying it was Russian disinformation and preventing those stories from being seen.
They did it with the war in Ukraine, with the war in Israel, where there's all kinds of censorship that has been implemented, and now with these riots in the UK.
Every single Social conflict, every single perceived crisis, instantly gets exploited by these governments to say, do you see, this is why we need even more censorship power to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
And that's exactly what the UK government has been saying in a very unprecedented way.
Here from Reuters on August 9th, the UK revisits its social media regulations after far-right riots.
Quote, the British government is considering changes to the Online Safety Act designed to regulate social media companies following a week of racist rioting driven by false information online.
The act passed in October but not set to be enforced until early next year.
So remember, this law was only passed last October.
It hasn't even been Implemented yet, and they're already looking to change it in the wake of these riots, in the name of these riots, to make it even stronger.
That act allows the government to fine social media companies up to 10% of global turnover if they are found in breach.
At present, companies would only face a fine if they failed to police illegal content, such as incitement to violence or hate speech.
But proposed changes could see Ofcom, that's the agency that implements the law in the UK, sanction companies If they allow, quote, legal but harmful content such as misinformation to force.
Let me say that again.
What they want to do is allow the UK government to massively punish social media companies, not only for allowing disinformation and hate speech, but also for legal speech that they call, quote, legal but harmful speech.
What kind of criticism of the UK government would the UK government not consider harmful?
When has a politician ever regarded criticism of them or their policies as anything other than harmful?
That's the argument of tyrants in the most extremist tyrannies you can find on the planet.
Not just now, but throughout history.
They don't say, oh, we're censoring because we're malicious, because we don't believe in freedom.
They say we're censoring because these views are too dangerous to allow to thrive.
They're too dangerous to the security of the state, to the security of the society.
That's always the rationale.
Everywhere censorship has been found.
And now, before the law is even passed, they want to intensify it even more by exploiting these riots to do so.
Quote, on Friday, pollster YouGov published a survey of more than 2,000 adults, which found two-thirds, 66%, Believe social media companies should be held responsible for posts inciting criminal behavior.
A further 70% of respondents said social media companies were not strongly regulated enough and 71% said they did not do enough to counter misinformation while the riots were ongoing.
Saadi Khan, the mayor of London, told The Guardian on Thursday that the Online Safety Act needed to be amended in the wake of the riots.
Quote, I think what the government should do very quickly is check if it is fit for purpose.
I think it's not fit for purpose, he told the newspaper, meaning it's insufficient In terms of the central power, it's a grant and it needs even more.
Because there was about three days of anti-immigrant rioting in the country.
Here from the Telegraph, also a UK newspaper on August 9th, quote, tech giants will be forced to ban fake news under the Labour Party plans.
The Labour Party is the government that was just elected to become the Prime Minister and to have a majority in the UK Parliament.
Firms could be required to suppress posts even if they are not illegal.
Quote, the Telegraph understands that British ministers are looking at introducing a duty on social media companies to restrict, quote, "legal but harmful content." I just find that phrase so incredibly Orwellian and disturbing.
Legal but harmful.
When could you ever criticize a government in a way that they don't regard it as harmful?
Never!
Quote, it could mean that firms are required to remove or suppress posts spreading fake news about asylum seekers or other topics such as self-harm, even if they do not meet the threshold for illegality.
However, critics have said the proposals expose, quote, the sinister and authoritarian side of Sir Keir's Labour Party, driving, quote, a coach and horses through the principle of free speech.
The plans come after a row between Elon Musk, who owns X, and the Prime Minister over his handling of the riots.
Police said they would expect to keep making arrests for months in the wake of the riots, with more people jailed on Friday.
People who encouraged the riots on social media have been jailed as part of the swift response by the Justice System to the disorder, a woman who has been arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred and false communications.
The latter is a crime under the Online Safety Act.
Now, just to give you a sense for how this censorship mindset becomes very inebriating, very intoxicating, the people who hold it in their hands are drunk by it.
They don't recognize any powers.
Here's what Sir Mark Raleigh, who heads the UK Met Police Commissioner, said about the people whom the British police are targeting for arrest and prosecution as a result of these riots.
So we'll throw the full force of the law at offenders, whether that's charging people with assaults, violent disorder, riot, and if terrorism offences are appropriate, I know the Director of Public Prosecutions has said he's prepared to consider that.
We will throw the full force of the law at people.
And whether you're in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.
Talk to me about that, because we have seen some high-profile figures whipping up the hatred.
You talked about it in there with the officers, in fact, about this being added to by online commentary.
I mean, I'm even thinking of the likes of Elon Musk getting involved.
What are you considering when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behaviour from behind a keyboard, maybe in a different country?
Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.
You can be guilty of offences of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred.
There are numerous terrorist offences regarding the publishing of material.
All of those offences are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets and we'll come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the obvs who are causing the problems for communities.
Now, obviously all of these terms are deliberately vague in terms of what is meant by incitement.
You could easily imagine people going online and posting very common sentiments about immigration, even if you don't share them.
They're very common grievances about immigration that people in countless countries in the democratic world have.
Oh, these immigrants are a threat to our culture.
They're dangerous.
They commit crimes.
Donald Trump says this all the time.
Lots of people, millions of them, believe that in places like the U.S.
and the U.K.
and Germany and France, Italy.
And you could easily see how the government would say that's inciting violence against immigrants because you're speaking in a derogatory way about immigrants.
And how quickly that can escalate into simply banning dissent of any kind of immigration.
And if you look at how censorship has been applied in the West over the last four or five years, that is not far-fetched at all.
In fact, it's virtually inevitable.
Here is the Crown Prosecution Service, which is the prosecution service of the UK, which made an announcement earlier this week or, yeah, last week actually, about someone who had been arrested.
There you see the headline, man jailed for offensive social media posts in wake of the recent disorder.
Comes from the announcement of the prosecutors.
Quote, Lee Dunn, 51, reposted, retweeted three images with captions which were grossly offensive and which risked worsening community tensions during his police interview.
Dunn admitted distributing the images and captions on social media.
He claimed that he was just following the herd, but when he saw the comments under what he posted, he knew it was a mistake and posted an apology, deleting the previous messages.
He pleaded guilty to sending a grossly offensive message.
at Carlisle Magistrate's Court on 12 August, 24, and was jailed for eight weeks.
James Potter, the Deputy Chief of the Crown Prosecutor, said, quote, This conviction should be a stark reminder to so-called keyboard warriors, online actions have consequences.
The Crown Prosecution Service has worked around the clock to ensure those involved in any way in the current disorder are hauled before the courts as quickly as possible.
That basically covers any speech, as we've gone over many times, any speech is capable of inciting hatred.
If you say you think abortion is murder, it's very possible that someone who hears you will want to go and kill an abortion doctor or a murderer.
If you say that you think Donald Trump is a fascist and a threat to democracy and the Republican Party are Russian agents who want to impose fascism in the United States, it's very easy to see how somebody hearing that might go to a softball field and shoot up as many Republican congressmen as they can, as happened in 2017 when a fan of Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders did exactly that.
But the minute you start banning not only speech that basically plans a crime, like, hey, go to this hotel at this address where immigrants are staying and burn it down, and you're the one who provides that information with the intent to get that mob that's already assembled to go there.
Other than that, any attempt to say the police are going to come to your house if you post offensive social media messages that the government, even if it's legal regards, is harmful, You're already living in an authoritarian if not tyrannical society where the government now has the power to criminalize and to imprison you, to punish you through the force of the law for the expression of your political opinions over the internet.
And then it's the question of how much faith and trust you're going to have in the government to try and restrain itself.
And if you know anything about human nature and human history, no such faith would be well placed.
Now just to underscore the point, I said I was going to tell you about the latest in Brazil, so I just want to make this one point about the dangers of these schemes.
Wednesday night, I talked about the stories that we were publishing.
It comes from this massive archive of chats and audios and documents and messages that come right from the heart of the chambers of this Brazilian censorship judge, Alexandre Moraes.
It involves conversations and planning and plotting and actions by his top top aides and the various offices he was controlling.
We've been able to report on a lot of the wrongdoing that those messages exposed.
And we're doing it.
I'm doing it.
I'm working with Folio of Sao Paulo, which is the country's largest newspaper.
And they're doing a very good job of allowing the reporting to go as it should.
On Wednesday night, that was the second day of our reporting, when I came on here and told you about what was going on.
Every single day since then, Thursday, Friday, and again today, we have published new material, new articles, new revelations.
And on that very first day, when we published the very first article, and it was clear that there was a six gigabyte archive that we had in our hands that came right from his office of secret conversations and the like he went to the the the uh chambers of the supreme court and spoke in his defense a couple members of the supreme court also defended him because they've been allowing it to happen
and what he said was so striking after he explained why everything he did was completely justified and one of his main excuses for why it was justified we were able to disprove its truth through subsequent publications that came from the archive.
But what he said at the end was...
That this kind of reporting, this reporting that we're doing, is the exact type of disinformation and fake news that Brazil needs to do a lot more to use the criminal law to combat.
In fact, this is not just fake news and disinformation.
It's designed, he said, to undermine the legitimacy of the state and therefore weaken Brazilian democracy.
In other words, if you criticize him in any way, if you question him in any way, let alone defy him, You're basically guilty of some kind of treason.
And the reason that is allowed, what enables him to do that is this concept of disinformation, that he and he alone dictates truth.
Just sitting by himself, he looks at things and reads things and he says, this is true, this is false, this is disinformation.
And he always sits as a judge in his own case, so he reads articles that are about him.
And of course he says that's fake news, that's disinformation.
When have you ever heard a politician, in the face of reporting in a newspaper that's critical of them or incriminating of them, ever say, oh yeah, that article is totally true?
They always think it's fake news or disinformation.
And it's fine to say that, but it's a whole other thing entirely when that politician is then armed with the power To punish you criminally for the publication of what they regard as fake news and disinformation.
And that is what this entire concoction of disinformation has been intended from the start to do.
To arm the state, all throughout the democratic world, with the power to criminally punish people who express views online that the state, even if those views are legal, regards as harmful, or regards as inaccurate or false.
And it doesn't even require explanation why the inevitable consequence of that is to shield and immunize them from any further critique, either because people will be afraid to do so because they know what will happen if they do.
People in Brazil have seen all kinds of people go, not just get banned from the internet, but go to prison for harshly criticizing this judge in a way that he deems to be excessive or fake news or whatever.
It's designed not only to immunize them through scaring people, although that is a major way, but also to those people who aren't scared, you can then punish them.
You can silence them, you can remove them from the internet, and you have control now of the only real flow of information that people use to get the news and their impressions about the world and the government, which is the internet.
And that is why we spent so much time on this, because this is beyond pernicious, but it is not a case of censorship here, a little excessive reaction here.
This is a coordinated legislative scheme.
And countries are watching one another, and that's why I say it matters what's going on in Brazil, not just because of the size of the country or its geostrategic importance, but because the more Brazil goes forward, the more the EU goes forward, the more the EU goes forward, the more the UK goes forward, and Canada and the US.
It's only one Internet, and it's all being censored in the same way.
And even though some countries are a little bit behind the others in terms of where they already progressed to, The framework, the underlying principle, the authoritarianism is exactly the same.
And if you see other countries that are a little bit ahead of where you are, don't celebrate that, but understand that it's just a question of time before your country and your society gets there.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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