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| Good evening, it's Wednesday, September 11th. | |
| 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, as we presaged last night, today is an extremely solemn day in America and in American history. | |
| It's the 23rd anniversary of the 2001 attack that happened on September 11th, which resulted in the death of roughly 3,000 Americans. | |
| The collapse of both of the twin towers that had composed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the destruction of a small part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the downing of a passenger jet plane over Pennsylvania. | |
| The 9-11 attacks also unleashed radical transformations of American democracy and executive power, the massive strengthening of the U.S. | |
| security state, two full-scale invasions of sovereign countries, and the bombing of a dozen or so Muslim countries over the next 20 years. | |
| When the 9-11 attack occurred, Americans were largely united in their rage and their quest for vengeance, but they also, quite understandably, had one question for which they really needed and wanted an answer. | |
| Namely, why do the people who did this, who perpetrated this attack, and those like them, hate us enough To want to kill as many of us as possible. | |
| The U.S. | |
| government instantly recognized the need to provide an answer that would satisfy Americans, to make them feel elevated, and most importantly, leave them willing to sacrifice their own rights and endorse all sorts of previously taboo acts that the U.S. | |
| government planned on doing in the name of avenging the 9-11 attacks. | |
| And thus was born the narrative that the reason they hate us is because they hate our freedoms. | |
| That's why they attacked us. | |
| We were told that these are radical Muslims who are so enraged by our free culture that women were allowed to wear bathing suits on our beaches and gay clubs were permitted to exist in our cities and that we're permitted to have freedom of religion. | |
| They saw this from the other side of the world. | |
| They were so enraged by these freedoms. | |
| That their religious extremism simply could not tolerate the existence of our liberties and they attacked us and wanted to kill as many of us as possible in response to their rage over our freedoms. | |
| Now, as a result, and it stood to reason, Americans decided when they heard that, that literally anything and everything was justified in the name of protecting that freedom and our way of life from these hordes of Islamic radicals wanting to end it. | |
| Amazingly, that continues to be, that simple-minded narrative continues to be the predominant narrative 23 years later. | |
| Every year on this date, we are subject to seemingly earnest and moving commemorations of that time in September of 2001 when we were attacked because we are free. | |
| And that everything that ensued thereafter was, by definition, nothing more and nothing less than simply a war against the terrorists, the war on terror, the people who sought to destroy us and our way of life simply because they could not abide that other people are That has been the dominant narrative today as well, not merely because of its importance as historical lore and national mythology, but also because of the need, continuous need to embrace these beliefs to justify what we still do today. | |
| And that is why it is so worth revisiting and reexamining what actually caused the 9-11 attack to see maybe whether there are other things besides our precious freedoms that caused it. | |
| So that's what we're going to do. | |
| And then Brendan Carr is a former communications lawyer and now serves as a Trump-appointed commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, which is the federal agency charged with regulating media and communications. | |
| Quite unusually for an FCC commissioner, he has been quite outspoken about his opposition to things like big tech censorship, the censorship imposed specifically around the COVID debate, and most recently, he has spoken out against Brazil's banning of Axe as a result of the social media company's failure to comply with a mountain of censorship orders. | |
| He also, however, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the U.S. banning of TikTok. | |
| And we want to explore with him his worldview, how those things can be reconciled, and the role that the FCC plays in it. | |
| If nothing else, he's a very thoughtful commentator on these issues where he actually plays a direct role in regulating. | |
| And then finally, our intrepid, ruggedly independent, on-the-road reporter, Michael Tracy, was, along with our show's producer, Megan O'Rourke, he was in the so-called spin room after last night's presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. | |
| They were able to interview numerous Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as various operative and pundit types who populate these events, and we have edited many of the most entertaining and illuminating highlights that we will show you. | |
| Before we get to all that, a few programming notes. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. | |
| I was in Manhattan on 9/11. | |
| That's where I lived and worked, and so I remember that day quite vividly. | |
| But I also remember every single September 11th thereafter, all 23 of them have been instantly used and exploited to deliver whatever message various political figures or journalists or pundits want to exploit 9-11 in order to convey. | |
| And oftentimes, from the very beginning, The message that was chosen was that the reason we were attacked is because we are free in contrast to Islamic radicals, extremist Islamists who hate freedom and attacked us simply because they wanted to destroy our freedom. | |
| One of the people who Said that today, unsurprisingly, because she said it before, is my friend Tulsi Gabbard, who is also serving now as an advisor to the Trump campaign. | |
| This is what she put on X earlier today about this solemn day. | |
| Quote, as we remember and honor those who were killed in the Islamist attacks on 9-11 and the first responders who put their lives on the line to save others, it's important to remember that the radical Islamist ideology that motivated this tragic attack remains the greatest short- and long-term threat to our country and world. | |
| And it's the same ideology that motivates Islamist terrorists, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, and more. | |
| We need a president who understands this threat and is committed to defeating it in order to defend our freedom and keep the American people safe. | |
| So apparently all these different groups, like you might've thought Hamas's motivation was that they're governing Gaza, a place that has been blockaded by the Israelis for 20 years, that expanding settlements have prevented a You might have thought that's the reason why Hamas fights against Israel. | |
| and Gaza forming Palestinian state, that the Israelis have bombed Gaza almost every year, not quite as much as they have done over the last 11 months, but oftentimes with great numbers of innocent people dead. | |
| You might have thought that's the reason why Hamas fights against Israel. | |
| No. | |
| No, that's not the reason. | |
| It's because they're radical Islamists. | |
| They have the same demented religious ideologies, says Tulsi Gabbard, as Al-Qaeda and all of these other groups. | |
| Just like Al-Qaeda attacked 9-11, she says, on 9-11, attacked the United States on 9-11, simply because they're radical Islamists too. | |
| And this is what radical Islamists do. | |
| They attack free people. | |
| They hate free people. | |
| They hate freedom so much. | |
| That's why they attacked us on 9-11, and that's the thing we have to remember every September 11. | |
| Now, it's not just prominent American figures, and I could have shown you 20 other examples besides Tulsi Gabbard, very prominent people saying the same thing. | |
| I'm sure you've seen them yourself. | |
| It's not just prominent US figures who exploit 9-11 for various causes. | |
| It's also foreign leaders. | |
| Here was Ukrainian president, apparently for life, or at least indefinitely since there's no elections, Vladimir Zelensky, who said the following today, quote, On behalf of the Ukrainian people, on behalf of the Ukrainians, I extend our heartfelt condolences to the families and close loved ones of 9-11 victims. | |
| We join our key ally, the United States, and the entire American people in today's commemoration of those who perished as a result of this heinous crime. | |
| We honor all of those who work tirelessly in the aftermath of the attack to help others, often sacrificing their lives to do so. | |
| We mourn alongside you, our American friends. | |
| We Ukrainians are all too familiar with the pain and grief of families who have lost loved ones as a result of terror. | |
| We are determined to defend our common values against terror and aggression. | |
| Every peace-loving nation and every family deserves to live in safety. | |
| We must and will stand together with our allies to ensure this. | |
| Terror must never go unpunished. | |
| So, it's not as if the Ukrainians empathize with us. | |
| They have their own 9-11. | |
| And they're basically saying like, remember how upset you were and angry you were and sad you were about what happened? | |
| Yeah, we know that too. | |
| We have our own 9-11 and that's the reason we need to keep financing our war and paying for our wars and giving us all the arms that we asked for to the point where you deplete your own stockpiles because we're basically fighting against the equivalent of Al Qaeda, which is Russia. | |
| Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is basically an expert at exploiting 9-11 for his own purposes, also trying to constantly equate the various words that Israel repeatedly has with its neighbors to the way in which the United States was attacked on September 11th by saying, our common enemy are these hordes of Islamists. | |
| And in fact, Prime Minister Netanyahu now says that what happened on 9-11 was nothing compared to what happened on October 7th. | |
| Yes, 9-11 was bad, but nothing like what happened to October 7th. | |
| Here's what he told the US Congress, or at least the part of it that attended, when he spoke to it in July of this year. | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, like December 7th, 1941, and September 11th, 2001, October 7th is a day that will forever live in infamy. | |
| It began as a perfect day, not a cloud in the sky. | |
| And suddenly, at 6.29 a.m., 3,000 Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel. | |
| They butchered 1,200 people from 41 countries, including 39 Americans. | |
| Proportionately, Okay, so we had one 9-11, but Israel had 29 11s in the same day. | |
| How many 9-11s, by the way, has Gaza had? | |
| If you count the number of people who have been killed there, civilians who have been killed there, versus their overall population, it's a lot more than 29 11s. | |
| But here he is telling the U.S. | |
| Congress, you had a 9-11, we had 20 times worse than that happen. | |
| On October 7th, nobody came to the United States Congress to say... Now, we've been over many times. | |
| The bet is a blatant lie. | |
| There was a grand total of one baby who was killed on 9-11, who was killed in crossfire between the IDF and the Hamas attackers. | |
| There were no babies who were burned alive. | |
| There were no babies cut out of wombs. | |
| There were no babies beheaded. | |
| Joe Biden in November of 2023 actually said that he went to Israel and he saw the pictures of the countless beheaded babies at Hamas's hands on October 7th. | |
| Either someone showed him fake pictures or he was hallucinating or lying. | |
| Because again, there was a grand total of one baby killed on October 7th. | |
| This is a fact. | |
| You don't have to adjust how you think about October 7th if you don't want, but those facts actually matter. | |
| None of these things that he's saying here are truthful. | |
| But I know it's Israel, so who cares? | |
| They killed parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents. | |
| They dragged 255 people, both living and dead. | |
| into the dark dungeons of Gaza. | |
| Israel has already brought home 135 of these hostages, including seven who were freed in daring rescue operations. | |
| In any event, they're all standing, as they always do whenever he finishes the sentence. | |
| It's their moral obligation as representatives of the American people to stand up and cheer when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, speaks. | |
| We all know that. | |
| And the whole speech was based on this premise that what happened to Israel was infinitely worse than what happened to the United States on 9-11. | |
| He even compared it to Pearl Harbor, the attack on Pearl Harbor that provoked the U.S. | |
| participation in World War II. | |
| Now, that's the narrative that has always been pushed and affirmed, and it never gets more exploited, more than on these anniversary dates of September 11th. | |
| And you can understand why. | |
| It's a very advantageous narrative to tell people that, oh look, it's not just you Americans who have been targeted with 9-11. | |
| We the Ukrainians, we the Israelis, we have our own 9-11s, and we're all in this together, so keep paying for our wars and arming us and devoting everything possible to ensure that our wars can continue because we're fighting your enemies as well. | |
| So it's a very useful narrative, not only domestically but also internationally. | |
| And you see that's why people like Netanyahu and Zelensky pay for it. | |
| Now, very interestingly, I had the occasion last year, maybe earlier this year, I don't recall, but I visited the-- it was earlier this year-- I visited the official 9/11 museum or memorial. | |
| And to be honest, I was kind of dreading going. | |
| I wanted to see what was in there, but I was dreading going because I assumed it was going to be just an endless | |
| Stream of deceitful and manipulative propaganda and it's actually not that there's a little bit of that but far less than at least I expected it's it's really a kind of just straightforward memorial that Sort of just describes the day in very factual and neutral ways Has a little bit of commentary even that usually doesn't allow its head to appear including people questioning why 9-11 actually happened and I was surprised pleasantly surprised by how | |
| It's just a matter of fact that a museum is, because obviously enormous numbers of people visit New York City and go there, and it's an opportunity that for whatever reason they did not take to manipulate people's emotions into this propaganda. | |
| And the 9-11 Memorial website has a very interesting document called the 9-11 Primer, which definitely provides a version of history that is obviously intended to make the United States look as good as possible, but it also doesn't quite Embrace the primary narrative that we're told about why 9-11 happened. | |
| Here's what the site says, quote, 9-11 primer. | |
| The 9-11 primer provides educators and online learners with foundational information about the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers, the 9-11 attacks and their aftermath, and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. | |
| And then it goes on to say, antecedents of 9-11. | |
| Who was responsible for the 9-11 attack and why did they attack the United States? | |
| That's obviously a question you would want answered. | |
| Not just at the time, but historically, you would want to understand, like, why did that happen? | |
| What was the motive of it? | |
| And here's what they say, quote, the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9-11 attacks. | |
| Their aim has been to overthrow governments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. | |
| Which does not, I think that should be, which do not, but whatever. | |
| Which does not, I'm criticizing not anyone on my staff, but the grammar of the 9-11 site, but who cares? | |
| Which does not strictly enforce a narrow fundamentalist version of Islam. | |
| U.S. | |
| support for these governments was viewed by Al-Qaeda as a major obstacle to this goal. | |
| And they hoped these attacks would weaken American support for these governments. | |
| Al-Qaeda represents only a tiny fraction of the world's Muslim community. | |
| Now why I find that so interesting is they're not, the official version of 9-11 from the 9-11 memorial website does not say that they hate us for our freedoms, that they hate the fact that American women are allowed to go out showing some of their skin, that gay bars can exist, none of that. | |
| They're saying it's because of our actions in that region, our policies in that region. | |
| Although they prettify it by saying that, oh, we support governments that don't adhere to a fundamentalist Islamic view of the world, they are saying that part of Al Qaeda's motive, which is undoubtedly true, which is a big part of why there's so much intense anti-Americanism in that region, is because we have a long history of imposing governments | |
| on those countries that are dictatorial, tyrannical, and designed to constrain the will of the people who live in those countries. | |
| And absolutely a huge part of their anger is that we impose people like General Assisi on Egypt. | |
| Even though the Egyptians had an election and elected somebody from the Muslim Brotherhood, that's who they wanted, and we couldn't abide the will of the people of Egypt being able to be expressed democratically, so we helped overthrow that government and impose General Sisi, who continues to be a close U.S. | |
| ally to this day, one of the most tyrannical, savage dictators on the planet. | |
| We do the same in Saudi Arabia, which it's kind of odd to say that the U.S. | |
| only imposes governments that Don't adhere to a fundamentalist view of Islam when our biggest ally in the region, the one that we support most, is Saudi Arabia. | |
| But you go down the line, Jordan and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait. | |
| We tried to do it with Iraq, obviously, as well. | |
| We impose governments on these people in that region for our own interests, and it destroys their ability to be free. | |
| That's the irony, is that we were told that they attacked us for our freedom, when in reality, part of the attack, as the official 9-11 memorial site suggests quite strongly, their perception is that we are attacking their freedom. | |
| By imposing governments on them that put dissidents in jail, that don't allow any kind of free speech or free assembly, because we want those populations controlled with an iron fist for our own interest. | |
| And even though a lot of people in the United States didn't understand that, because if they did, they wouldn't have asked, why are they angry at us? | |
| Why would they want to kill us? | |
| That's something that you barely ever hear in domestic discussion. | |
| Everyone knows that in the Middle East. | |
| It's very common knowledge. | |
| I mean, it's the history of the region. | |
| It's their country. | |
| That most of their governments that they despise have been imposed on them, obviously not democratically, have been imposed on them and propped up and funded by the United States. | |
| One of the earliest examples was the Iranian government that was democratically elected that we disliked and overthrew in 1954 and imposed on them for the next several decades the rule by the Shah of Iran, an absolutely vicious tyrant, but he was pro-Western and pro-US and pro-Israel, so we liked him. | |
| And then finally, the people of Iran rose up and overthrew that US-supported dictator and now have the government that, at least at the time, most of them wanted. | |
| You can debate about what they want now. | |
| But that's what happens if you impose dictatorships on other countries. | |
| They're going to be pretty angry at you for doing so. | |
| And the 9-11 site itself in explaining why 9-11 happened, although again, they do it in the most pro-American way possible, are not even attempting to suggest that it had to do with their hatred for our freedoms, but instead anger over the way in which we've deprived theirs all throughout those decades leading up to 9-11. | |
| I think the first time that this narrative was unveiled was when George W. Bush, the president at the time, addressed a joint sessions of Congress on September 20th, 2001, so nine days after the 9-11 attack. | |
| And I think it's worth remembering what a traumatizing time that was. | |
| People were angry. | |
| People were bewildered. | |
| It was shocking. | |
| To watch the World Trade Center fall, collapse completely on top of 3,000 Americans, or to see a plane being flown into the Pentagon, it was obviously very destabilizing to American sense of security. | |
| Very shortly thereafter, there were the anthrax attacks that we were told, obviously falsely, that Iraq was behind, which we now know was actually coming from an American scientist who worked at a military facility in Frederick, Maryland. | |
| But in any event, that was the atmosphere. | |
| And so to hear the president speak basically for the first time in a formal setting about all of these events, the anthrax attacks hadn't happened yet. | |
| They were about to happen in mid-October. | |
| But still, it was obviously Americans wanted to hear from our president. | |
| And David Frum was George Bush's speechwriter, and he took this opportunity and used it to its maximum advantage. | |
| And here's part of what he said. | |
| Americans are asking, why do they hate us? | |
| They hate what they see right here in this chamber. | |
| A democratically elected government. | |
| Their leaders are self-appointed. | |
| They hate our freedoms. | |
| Our freedom of religion. | |
| Our freedom of speech. | |
| Our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. | |
| No, I absolutely understand why that had an emotional punch. | |
| It was something very pleasing to Americans. | |
| Nobody wanted to hear, oh, they attacked you because you've been doing a lot of things to their countries for a long time, your government has been bombing them and propping up dictators, overthrowing their democratically elected governments. | |
| Having military bases in Saudi Arabia, which they consider sacred and heretical under their religion, supporting the Israelis as much as we do now against the Palestinians, and all the rest of our policies in the Middle East that provoke this level of anti-American rage. | |
| But here was George Bush saying exactly the opposite. | |
| No, they hate us because they hate democracy. | |
| They resent the fact that we get to decide our own fate. | |
| When in reality, that's what they wanted for themselves. | |
| That was part of their rage at the United States, was that they were living under dictatorships that had nothing to do with their choices. | |
| And it's just so ironic that a president can stand up, in the most Orwellian way, say the exact opposite of the truth. | |
| That we are beacons of democracy, that they hate what we have. | |
| and attacked us because we get to have a Congress and free speech and freedom of religion? | |
| Why would they care what's happening on the other side of the world? | |
| They cared about what was happening in their part of the world. | |
| A world in which the United States played a very significant role and continues to for the obvious dual reasons of wanting access to the oil, making sure the oil flows to our favor, and also wanting to protect Israel. | |
| Here was the White House daily briefing at the time the White House Press Secretary was Ari Fleischer. | |
| And every single year he posts this very detailed, endless account of what he saw happen on September 11th from the perspective of working in the White House, how George Bush learned about it, what they did after. | |
| You may recall that George Bush actually flew around in a circle for hours because they didn't know where they wanted to put him. | |
| He finally went to, I think, to Nebraska. | |
| I don't know if he did it this year, I purposely didn't look, but every year he publishes the same account, so it's an important day for Ari Fleischer as well. | |
| Here's what he said on October 10th, just a little bit short of one month after the September 11th attack, when giving a White House daily briefing. | |
| Discussions of what else we have with the networks about their coverage? | |
| Dr. Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, this morning called a group of network executives to raise their awareness about national security concerns of airing pre-recorded, pre-taped messages from Osama bin Laden that could be a signal to terrorists to incite attacks. | |
| It was a very collegial conversation. | |
| At best, Osama bin Laden's message is propaganda, calling on people to kill Americans. | |
| At worst, he could be issuing orders to his followers to initiate such attacks. | |
| Dr. Rice asked the networks to exercise judgment about how these pre-recorded, pre-taped messages will air. | |
| She stressed that she was making a request and that editorial decisions can only be made by the media. | |
| Do you have a sense for what it is? | |
| Whether this is propaganda, or do you have suspicions that they may in fact be trying to convey something? | |
| Well, people are analyzing that now. | |
| There are no easy conclusions to reach, but it's rather plain to have these thoughts, these suspicions about what it could include. | |
| That's why, as Dr. Rice indicated, at best, it's pre-taped, pre-recorded propaganda. | |
| I think it's so important to remember that that happened. | |
| The U.S. | |
| government convinced the major television networks not to air any interviews or statements from the person they had accused of having perpetrated the 9-11 attack was Osama bin Laden. | |
| And the excuse that they use was he might be using some sort of code like blinking with his eyes or some secret phrase that might activate a sleeper cell in the United States. | |
| Obviously, what he said there was at best is propaganda. | |
| In other words, we don't want Americans hearing the other side. | |
| It's the same kind of Impulse that led the EU to ban Russian state media, any social media company from platforming Russian state media because they didn't want to hear, they didn't want Europeans hearing the Russian side of the story because they didn't want them to be able to compare. | |
| They wanted a closed information system where the only narrative that prevailed was the European one. | |
| And that was exactly what happened after 9-11. | |
| They knew Americans wanted to hear from the people accused of attacking us about why they hate the United States. | |
| And the U.S. | |
| government was petrified that they were going to hear what bin Laden ended up saying, which were the real reasons the U.S. | |
| attacked, that there was so much anti-American hatred in the region. | |
| And so they wanted to monopolize the propaganda and they persuaded media outlets to engage in censorship by refusing any interviews with Osama bin Laden either prior or since. | |
| And the media outlets, of course, complied. | |
| Weren't we all so angry about this over the last three years when we were hearing about how the Biden administration was pressuring big tech companies to remove certain types of dissent on the grounds that it was false or propagandistic or harmful? | |
| That's not what the government of the United States is supposed to do. | |
| We just heard George Bush on September 20th say they hate us because of our free speech. | |
| We allow ideas and dissent and debates to flourish. | |
| And yet the Bush White House told media outlets, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, not to air any of this. | |
| Here from the New York Times on October 11th, a nation challenged the coverage. | |
| Quote, networks agree to the US request to edit future Bin Laden tapes. | |
| Quote, the five major television news organizations reached a joint agreement yesterday to follow the suggestion of the White House. | |
| ...and abridge any future videotape statements from Osama bin Laden or his followers to remove language the government considers inflammatory. | |
| Such as, look, the reason why this happened isn't because we hate your freedoms, it's because we hate how you're bombing our countries, overthrowing our governments, imposing dictators on us, putting military bases in our most sacred land, supporting the Israelis in their repression of the Palestinians, their violent, brutal, bloody repression of the Palestinians who are Arabs and Muslim. | |
| That is what they didn't want Americans to hear. | |
| Quote, the decision the first time in memory that the networks had agreed to a joint agreement to limit their prospective news coverage. | |
| Again, that's so important. | |
| This was the first time in memory that the networks had agreed to a joint agreement to limit their prospective news coverage. | |
| That was described by one network executive as, quote, a patriotic decision that grew out of a conference call between the nation's top television news executives and the White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice yesterday morning. | |
| Quote, this is a new situation, a new war, and a new kind of enemy, said Andrew Hayward, the president of CBS News. | |
| Quote, given the historic events we're enmeshed in, it is appropriate to explore new ways of fulfilling our responsibilities to the public by censoring. | |
| Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, said, quote, it was very useful to hear their information and their thinking. | |
| He added, quote, after hearing Dr. Rice, we're not going to step on the landmine that she was talking about. | |
| Now, sometimes people will try and justify the things that happened in the weeks or a couple months immediately following 9-11 as the byproduct of a sort of extraordinary climate. | |
| Now, we've been through wars before. | |
| We used to hear from the North Vietnamese all the time during the Vietnam War. | |
| We heard from our enemies in the Korean War. | |
| We heard from the Japanese Emperor and even Hitler during World War II. | |
| But even if you want to say, OK, we're going to give a pass to people and how they acted in mid and late September and into October, because it was just such an emotional time. | |
| No one knew what they should do. | |
| They were open to doing things they never would have thought Uh, were possible previously, like having networks enter an agreement with the White House to censor information that was both true and relevant to the public interest. | |
| You can make that case, but the reality is that same kind of censorship, that exact same kind of censorship continues to this very day 23 years later, 22, 23 years later. | |
| Let's remember this extremely important event that actually continues to shock me whenever I think about it. | |
| It was from NBC News, November 17, 2023. | |
| TikTok removes the hashtag for Osama bin Laden's letter to America after viral videos circulate. | |
| The Guardian also pulled the text of the Al Qaeda founder's letter from its website after people cited it on TikTok and X. | |
| Throughout the week, TikTok users have been sharing the link to the Guardian's transcript of Bin Laden's letter, which was written about a year after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. | |
| The Guardian took the letter down from its website Wednesday. | |
| In the letter, Bin Laden addressed the American people and sought to answer the following questions, quote, why are we fighting and opposing you? | |
| And quote, what are we calling you to? | |
| And what do we want from you? | |
| The letter includes anti-Semitic language and homophobic rhetoric. | |
| Ooh. | |
| Better suppress that letter. | |
| There's no other anti-semitism or homophobia that one might hear. | |
| Get rid of that. | |
| Now, what happened here is actually fascinating, which is that this was in the wake of young people becoming aware for the first time of the close relationship between the United States and Israel, how the U.S. | |
| funds and arms Israel's attacks on its neighbors, including defenseless Palestinians in Gaza. | |
| And as part of that attempt to understand history, which of course is what you want young Americans to do, to question what they've been told, to question the narratives they've been fed. | |
| They found for the first time a letter that they had no idea existed, which was the letter that Osama bin Laden wrote a year after the 9-11 attack, where he attempted to answer the question that the United States government had already provided the answer to for a full year and censored any questioning or dissent to it by preventing him from being heard. | |
| And they read the letter and they were shocked because the letter doesn't say we hate you because you allow gay bars and women to appear in bathing suits and you get to have a congress and free speech. | |
| There were references to our decadent culture in their view that contained some of those criticisms. | |
| But the point of the letter was the reason we hate you, the reason we want to attack you, the reason we will continue to try to attack you is because you've been attacking us for decades. | |
| Through your interference in our countries, through your bombing of our civilians and killing of our children, through your funding of Israel and arming of Israel. | |
| And obviously you don't have to agree with that. | |
| You don't have to agree, obviously, that those grievances justify the 9-11 attack. | |
| You don't even have to agree that that's the real reason that Osama bin Laden was motivated to hate the United States. | |
| But it's absolutely, unquestionably true. | |
| No doubt about it at all. | |
| Not even disputable. | |
| that a significant part of the anti-Americanism in 9/11, in that region, was motivated by those things. | |
| And so when young people found this letter and they began to say, wow, part of why 9/11 happened wasn't because they hate our freedoms as we were already told, but instead it was because we were bombing their countries and imposing dictatorships on them and overthrowing their democratic elected governments and because of their supporting of Israel. | |
| Look at what happened. | |
| The government and most of establishment society demanded that that be censored, that those young people no longer be allowed to see that letter, to talk about that letter, to discuss with each other what that letter says, what it means, what it revealed to them. | |
| And so The Guardian, one of the oldest newspapers in the West, removed the letter from its website so that nobody could read it any longer, nobody could link to it any longer. | |
| That was one of the only places where it existed. | |
| That's where the people on TikTok found it. | |
| And that's where they were linking to, to say, oh, go read this. | |
| So the Guardian removed the letter, this is of great historic importance, from their own site, and then pressured TikTok to ban any discussion of it. | |
| And that's exactly what TikTok did. | |
| So 23 years later, yet again, There was no discussion allowed of what the real reasons were that motivated anti-American hatred in that region. | |
| Here from The Guardian, you can't go to The Guardian's website and see this anymore, they removed it. | |
| Once people actually started reading it, they took it down, a news outlet took down this extremely important historical letter. | |
| But you can go to the Wayback Machine and still see it. | |
| Here it is, the Guardian letter to America, November 24th, 2002. | |
| And originally it said full text, Bin Laden's letter to America. | |
| And here is part of Osama Bin Laden's explanation about why there's so many people in the region who hate the United States. | |
| A, you attacked us in Palestine. | |
| Palestine which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. | |
| The British handed over Palestine with your help and your support to the Jews who have been occupying it for more than 50 years. | |
| Years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction, and devastation. | |
| The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes and you are the leaders of its criminals. | |
| And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. | |
| B. You attacked us in Somalia. | |
| You supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon. | |
| C. Under your supervision, consent, and orders, the governments of our countries, which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis. | |
| Your forces occupy our countries. | |
| You spread your military bases throughout them. | |
| You corrupt our lands and besiege our sanctities to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures, meaning oil. | |
| F. You have starved the Muslims of Iraq where children die every day. | |
| Talking about the sanctions regime imposed by the Clinton administration. | |
| Is it a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions and you did not show concern? | |
| You know, when 3,000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down. | |
| Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace? | |
| Three, you may then dispute that all this does not above does not justify aggression against civilians for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake. | |
| This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom and its leaders in the world. | |
| Therefore, the American people are the ones who chose their government by way of their own free will, a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. | |
| Thus, the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and the continuous killing, torture, punishment, and expulsion of the Palestinians. | |
| The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government and even to change it if they want. | |
| Now that is a repulsive moral rationale, that we can kill civilians because they bear responsibility for their government that they chose and therefore the policies of it. | |
| But it's worth noting that that is the primary justification for why people will defend Israel basically destroying the entire civilian infrastructure of Gaza. | |
| They'll say, back in 2006, the last time Gazans voted, Almost 20 years ago, when half their population weren't even alive, let alone old enough to vote, they chose Hamas as their government and therefore are now eternally responsible for anything Hamas does. | |
| So there's no innocent civilian in Gaza. | |
| They're all Hamas supporters. | |
| That was exactly Osama bin Laden's rationale for why he believed it necessary or justified to attack American civilians. | |
| I have a few more things to show you. | |
| We have our guest here, so I just want to stop for a second and just kind of underscore this point, which is that if you're a free citizen, if you're somebody who is engaged with the world, the one thing you want to avoid doing is living in a closed information society where the only messaging you hear is the messaging of what your government approves. | |
| Because when that happens, your free choice, your democratic vote, your freedom of thought and assembly are all illusory. | |
| Because the only information you're getting is a very partial picture. | |
| And when human beings have that power to censor what they don't want you to hear and feed you and submerge your brain only in what they do, they're going to use it. | |
| That's a power that no human can resist the abuse of. | |
| And that's what happened after 9-11. | |
| And not only after 9-11, but it continues to this very day. | |
| Think about how unbelievable it is. | |
| The young people found that bin Laden letter, started to read it, started to talk about, wait a minute, is there more to the 9-11 story than we've been told? | |
| Did our own policies in the region contribute to the anger that led to that? | |
| Does it still contribute to anger in that region? | |
| You don't have to agree with any of that. | |
| You can think that 9-11 happened because they hate our freedoms, that all of that was just pretext or invented or whatever, but the idea that that should not be available to read, that people should be barred in the United States from discussing it, is unbelievable, especially given that 9/11 continues to be exploited as a symbol of our great freedom, of the fact that we are a free people. | |
| A free people banned from hearing any other side of the story other than the narrative that we've been fed. | |
| Brennan Carr is a former communications lawyer. | |
| He now serves as a Trump-appointed commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, which is the federal agency charged with regulating media and communications. | |
| Unusually for an FCC commissioner, he has been quite outspoken about several matters of public debate, including his opposition to big tech censorship, which he has been very steadfast on, the censorship specifically imposed around the COVID discourse, and most recently, he has been quite outspoken in opposition to the decision by one judge in Brazil to ban X in the entire country as a result of X's failures to comply with a whole variety of unjust censorship orders. | |
| He has also at the same time been one of the leaders urging the banning of TikTok on national security grounds, and he plays a very important role in all these issues. | |
| He's not a pundit. | |
| He's an actual commissioner on the FCC, and for that reason, we are excited to speak with him tonight. | |
| Mr. Carr, welcome to our show. | |
| It's great to speak with you. | |
| Thanks for coming on. | |
| Yeah, thanks so much for having me, and thanks for all your work over the years. | |
| Really appreciate your insights and perspectives. | |
| Yeah, I feel very much the same way. | |
| So let me start by asking you, What is it that motivated you? | |
| Because usually FCC commissioners are pretty obscure. | |
| They're like, they're regulators. | |
| They're people who work in behind the scenes agencies. | |
| You've decided to kind of use this platform to speak out principally in defense of free speech and in opposition to big tech censorship, online censorship from wherever it comes from. | |
| What kind of motivated you to do that? | |
| And what is it that the FCC can do about that? | |
| Yeah, it's a good question. | |
| You know, at the FCC, there's five of us that are commissioners, three are of the president's party. | |
| So right now we have three that are Democrats, you have two that are Republicans. | |
| As you noted, I was originally nominated by President Trump back in 2017. | |
| I was actually re-nominated by President Biden last year. | |
| You have to have Republicans on the commission. | |
| And so every commissioner is independent. | |
| We are outside of the administration. | |
| That gives us a lot of freedom and leeway to pick and choose the issues that we focus on. | |
| And one of them I've been very focused on over the years is this really sort of recent or last couple years surge in censorship. | |
| We see it domestically in the US and we see it abroad as well. | |
| In fact, one of the first times I think you and I crossed paths was when a number of Democrats in Congress were writing letters to cable companies urge them to drop Fox News and Newsmax based on the political perspectives of the newsrooms there. | |
| We saw other efforts where there was a license transfer of a radio station in South Florida going to perceived conservative buyers, and Democrats wrote the FCC and suggested that we should block it on that basis. | |
| And so I've tried to sort of speak out where I see that taking place. | |
| And recently in Brazil, It fits that. | |
| We can unpack it. | |
| It's part of this global surge in censorship, but also I think it's a really concerning authoritarian trend in Brazil that should give businesses across the board a lot of concern. | |
| This isn't just about Elon Musk. | |
| It's not just about failing to have a registered agent. | |
| There's something happening here that we can unpack that I think, like Bill Ackman said, is putting Brazil on the path to becoming uninvestable. | |
| Yeah, I definitely want to delve a little bit more into the Brazil case. | |
| Obviously, as I'm sure you know, we are based in Brazil. | |
| It's kind of amazing that if we want to watch our own show or transmit our own show on Rumble, which is no longer available in Brazil for similar reasons, we have to use a VPN to do it. | |
| Obviously, we have to use a VPN if we want to access Axe, even though somehow this judge invented a law that it's now a criminal offense to do so, and you have to pay $10,000, $9,000 a day if you are caught doing so. | |
| a day if you are doing so. | |
| But for those of us who have lived with the internet for a long time, You remember its emergence in our lives and sort of the incipient stages. | |
| The key attribute of the internet that made it so exciting and innovative as a technology was that it was free. | |
| Meaning you could speak anonymously or under your own name. | |
| You could have privacy on it. | |
| No one could surveil you or find you or trace you. | |
| Most importantly, no centralized corporate or state power could regulate the kinds of things that you could say. | |
| The innovation was, this was going to be an instrument to enable citizens around the world to trade information, to talk to each other, to organize, to transmit information without having to rely on big media corporations and without having to be subject to government Approval. | |
| In your mind, I think the internet was that for quite a long time, but in your mind, when did this censorship ethos or system begin to emerge as a system and what is it that you think caused it? | |
| Yeah, look, I think a couple I think I think you're exactly right. | |
| I think if you go back to 2012, there was a real rise in free speech on the Internet. | |
| In fact, President Obama went to Facebook Silicon Valley headquarters back in 2012 and. | |
| Give a speech where he said the free flow of information on the Internet is key to in his words a healthy democracy and then flash forward 10 years and a few short miles down the road. | |
| President Obama gave a speech in 2022 at Stanford, and he talked about the threats. | |
| That come from the free flow of information and talked about it as being a potential threat to democracy. | |
| So if you look at the bookends there of 2012 to 2022, something very fundamental, as you noted, has changed. | |
| We used to view free speech in the Internet. | |
| In fact, America itself, whether it was, you know, free speech over any modern means of communication, radio free Asia. | |
| You know, we embrace free speech during a lot of the sort of 2010 2012 global unrest, and we viewed it as a tool To take down authoritarians. | |
| And then I think something happened in 2016, right around Brexit, right around the election of President Trump. | |
| There's a very clear shift that people said, you know what? | |
| Maybe this free speech on the Internet thing is not compatible with the outcomes that we want to see at the ballot box. | |
| And so something has changed fundamentally. | |
| All of those powers that were at play to promote free speech, to undermine authoritarian regimes, have sort of turned those jets into reverse. | |
| I think you're seeing globally this clean back of control over free speech. | |
| And again, even go back even further. | |
| The modern day op-ed launched on the pages of the New York Times in 1970s. | |
| And there was an editor at the time, John Oakes, and he said, diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy. | |
| The moment we insist that everybody think the same way we do, our democratic way of life is in jeopardy. | |
| Of course, flash forward now 50 years and New York Times op-ed page, you know, had people fired over running a free speech piece, the Tom Cotton op-ed story. | |
| So I think you put your finger on it. | |
| There was a first generation of free speech, of empowerment on the internet, and these established gatekeepers now are working hard to get control of it. | |
| Brazil's the latest example. | |
| Yeah, another thing the New York Times does, by the way, is they play a very agitating activist role in demanding and then punishing big tech companies if they don't censor enough. | |
| They'll publish stories, Facebook allows neo-Nazis, and it's all designed to demand that either you censor more the types of opinions that we want or what we think is disinformation, or we're going to accuse you of having blood on your hands or allowing all this hate speech to flourish. | |
| One of the controversies over the last couple of years has been, and this is most certainly central to your critique of the censorship around COVID, has been this continuous communication from the government under the Biden administration to the big tech platforms, encouraging, coercing, demanding, hectoring, threatening that certain types of dissent, certain types of information that the government in its judgment has decreed to be false or harmful or hateful or whatever, be censored. | |
| And obviously, the U.S. government has a lot of leverage over these big tech companies to force that to happen. | |
| It's not just an option or a suggestion. | |
| It's something far greater than that, as two courts have ruled before the Supreme Court threw it out on standing grounds. | |
| But the people who will defend that will say, government does have a legitimate role in conveying to big tech companies information that they think is false or harmful, information that they think is coming from a foreign government that's disinformation designed to destabilize our government. | |
| What's your view on the legitimate role, if any, of the U.S. | |
| government to communicate their concerns to big tech companies about certain kinds of speech that's being permitted? | |
| There could be some minimal role there as you articulate it, but I think what we've seen over the last couple of years, in particular the Biden-Harris administration, is they just blew past any possible line in the sand that could be legitimately drawn. | |
| The evidence that's been brought to bear shows that not only were they flagging just pure political speech, satire, memes, but they did so with a clenched fist. | |
| Meaning, they made very clear that their continued, the Biden administration's continued defense of 230 protections, which are protections, whether you like them or not, that big tech has benefited from, that those were at risk. | |
| They made clear that they were looking at anti-competitive, you know, anti-trust actions. | |
| So at the same time that they were sort of going beyond merely flagging Certain types of posts. | |
| They were going right to political speech, and they were doing so with a carrot and a stick right there. | |
| There's an entire line of Supreme Court cases, actually the jaw-boning line of cases, where if you're a federal official and you are pressuring a private entity to censor another private entity, well then effectively the First Amendment is in fact in vogue. | |
| I think that this is one where Justice Alito and our Supreme Court And dissent was right in one of these recent cases where the majority said, you know, we don't think there's enough there to really demonstrate that there was some official government pressure that crossed the line. | |
| Yeah, we've covered that case, the Bantam Books case, which was kind of the seminal case back in 1964, where this Rhode Island Zoning Commission wanted this book taken down from a bookseller because they thought it was obscene and they basically threatened, cajoled, and finally the bookseller brought it down and the Supreme Court held that was a state action just through that pressure. | |
| I want to you played a major role in the debate around whether the US should ban TikTok or force a sale to to a company not connected to or controlled by China. | |
| And I want to get to that in just a minute. | |
| But before I get to that, you might have heard, I think, at the end of right before you came on, I was talking about the incident last year where a bunch of people on TikTok Younger people had discovered something that they didn't know had existed, which was this Bin Laden letter where he purported to explain why there was so much anti-Americanism in the region. | |
| And they were kind of shocked to have learned about this letter because it contained a lot of things that they had never heard before, that they had never thought about before, that they had never known existed. | |
| And they began debating it and talking about it quite a bit, especially in connection with the current U.S. | |
| support for the Israeli war in Gaza. | |
| And what happened, as you know, I think, is that there was a lot of pressure on TikTok to ban discussions of that letter. | |
| The Guardian was coerced into removing it from their site. | |
| So they took down this document that, whatever you think of it, has historical importance. | |
| And then TikTok did end up banning any discussion of the Bin Laden letter, the hashtags about it, the link no longer worked. | |
| With regard to that incident, did you see that as a similarly repressive and dangerous act of censorship, or did you see some sort of noble aspect to that? | |
| There's a Supreme Court case that goes back, I believe, to the 1950s. | |
| It's a Postmaster General case, and it establishes the fact that Americans have a First Amendment right to seek out and obtain foreign propaganda, or information the government labels as foreign propaganda. | |
| That was a case that involved a newsletter called, at the time, the Peking Review. | |
| It still exists today. | |
| It's called the Beijing Review. | |
| Americans have the right to seek that foreign propaganda out, and the government can't stop it. | |
| The TikTok debate as a general matter is really interesting because I think it draws a line between government action based on conduct, which we can get into in that case, or government action based on content. | |
| And I think if you're taking action against TikTok because you don't like that the Bin Laden letter was circulating on there, I think that is not just wrong as a policy matter, but that's a First Amendment problem. | |
| And again, I think if you look at what's happening in Brazil with X, and again, we'll stay with TikTok here, but if you look at Brazil and X, The Brazilian government is expressly saying that we are taking action against X because of the content of the speech that's out there. | |
| So the issue that I think a lot of people legitimately have with TikTok is its conduct. | |
| It was engaged in certain actions that we can talk about that are distinguishable from speech. | |
| There's some cases where maybe it's close. | |
| I think the tie goes in favor of not taking government action in those cases. | |
| But I think in my view, TikTok was so far beyond legitimate conduct that we can get into, that that was a basis for action. | |
| But yeah, to your point, the Bin Laden video and that circulating is not a permissible basis for the government to take action. | |
| Americans have that right. | |
| But what about the pressure on the Guardian and TikTok to take action to prevent it? | |
| Not necessarily even from the government, but from journalists, from influential people saying, this can't be permitted, take this down, don't let this conversation In Sue, is that something that bothered you, even independent of the question of state action? | |
| Yeah, I mean, look, my view, I think it's perfectly fine for people to have a debate and say, look, me, private sector person, I don't think that this is a good thing for you to be showing. | |
| That debate can take place. | |
| But I'm not a big fan of sort of these, you know, pressure campaigns to silence speech. | |
| I think if consulting adults want to have a conversation about something, they should. | |
| I mean, my view is not that this is like that Sandra Bullock movie, Bird Box, where you got to like hold everybody's eyes open and compel them to see and read speech that they don't like or don't want to. | |
| At the same time, if two consenting adults want to access information, they should be free to do so. | |
| I would put it in three buckets. | |
| One, the government shouldn't step in and pressure in that circumstance. | |
| Two, the private sector can have debates and there can be these sort of protests. | |
| There can be ad boycotts. | |
| I don't love that. | |
| But I think sort of the third piece of it is we shouldn't go so far as making it as impossible for consenting adults to be debating any topic. | |
| Again, debating ideas, that goes to the heart of how we solve our biggest problems. | |
| Let's spin it around. | |
| Let's think about it. | |
| It's silencing speech that leads us into difficulties. | |
| We saw it with COVID. | |
| And so I think that's the problem. | |
| We should allow consenting adults to have these conversations. | |
| As a cinematic reference for holding people's eyes open forcibly and forcing them to ingest content, I probably would have referred to the clockwork orange, but maybe we're just revealing our respective ages in that difference. | |
| Alright, let's go to Brazil, because... | |
| I've lived in Brazil for 20 years. | |
| I have a lot of connections to this country. | |
| My children are Brazilian. | |
| I care a lot about what's happening here and its future. | |
| And I definitely agree with you that the attempt by the Brazilian government to ban acts is an extreme escalation of authoritarianism. | |
| The fact that it was not even done by Congress, but by a single judge who at the same time invented this criminalization of VPNs. | |
| It's something that, you know, banning acts is something that exists in about seven countries. | |
| It's not a very glamorous list to be added to. | |
| So I agree with you on that. | |
| But I spent a lot of time talking to and arguing with and debating Brazilians who favor this move by Alessandro de Marais and the court. | |
| And their argument sounds a lot to me like your argument sounds about the U.S. banning of TikTok. | |
| I understand the distinction you drew, which is that. | |
| The banning of TikTok is not about the content of speech, but about the conduct of the company. | |
| But the Brazilians who favor the banning of acts will say that Elon Musk is a foreigner who is trying to use his power and influence to disseminate pro-Bolsonaro, pro-far-right wing propaganda in our country. | |
| And in order to protect our sovereignty, In order to not allow some foreigner to dictate to us what information our citizens are swamped with, we're not taking action because we don't like the speech. | |
| We're taking action because it's a matter of our sovereignty, which sounds a lot to me like the argument in favor of the U.S. | |
| banning TikTok. | |
| How do you distinguish those two? | |
| Yeah, I think it's a fair question and critique to ask me to sort of discuss those two cases and how I've come out so differently. | |
| And I think these two examples are sort of perfect ways of delineating this distinction between conduct on the one hand and content. | |
| And I'll start really briefly with TikTok. | |
| So the type of conduct that we're talking about is very different than the type of conduct arguably being addressed by Justice Morey. | |
| In TikTok, and I'll just run through this really quickly because I think it's a great example. | |
| This started with their cybersecurity expert, one of their C-suite officials, saying that U.S. | |
| user data doesn't even exist inside China. | |
| And then we got inside leaked materials that showed, in fact, quote, everything is seen in China. | |
| So it was about conduct of this data transferring that they'd misrepresented. | |
| Then there was episode after episode. | |
| They had There was a story that they had been surreptitiously surveilling the location of a journalist that had written negative stories about TikTok. | |
| And TikTok came out and not only denied the story, they said that the journalist writing that story lacked journalistic integrity. | |
| Well, a month later, TikTok came out and said, actually, mea culpa, we did launch this effort to surveil the location of those journalists. | |
| Other times they came out and said, look, we're going to wall off this US user data so it doesn't find its way back into China. | |
| Don't worry. | |
| And then again, investigative reporting found out that that day was still accessible to personnel inside of China. | |
| And so there was this track record of the conduct I'm talking about being the actual physical transfer of data back to China. | |
| You can argue that's sort of a good or bad thing, but they were plainly repeatedly engaged in misrepresentations along those lines that undermined our faith in them from a national security perspective. | |
| Now, That's very different than what's taking place in Brazil with X. There's no claim at all that X is somehow collecting data that it shouldn't be in transferring. | |
| It's not conduct in that sense. | |
| What they're saying is that we are worried that free speech on X will result in people engaging in conduct in our country, which is, you know, two very different conceptions of the word conduct. | |
| And in particular, if you look at Justice Dei Mori, What he says is that we're worried about the incitement of anti-democratic acts. | |
| And it's funny because he's sort of scratching at a concept that's in U.S. | |
| law, which we have sort of incitement to violence as sort of an exception to our protection for free speech, but violence is an unlawful act. | |
| What he means when you read his decision, incitement to anti-democratic acts, he then goes on to say, is voting the wrong way. | |
| And so that's what makes this very fundamentally different. | |
| They're concerned about the content that people are reading on X, as opposed to the concerns I had on TikTok, which is not having to do with the content. | |
| Go ahead and have the Bin Laden video up there. | |
| It was about the obtaining of this data and the transferring of it. | |
| And so I think these cases are actually really good at highlighting the line that I think exists. | |
| But I don't fault anybody that reasonably looks at all this and says, it's just too much for me. | |
| There's too much censorship going on. | |
| This is too fine a line that you're drawing in my view. | |
| I think a reasonable person can come to that conclusion. | |
| And I respect that view. | |
| I appreciate that distinction. | |
| I frankly have never understood the argument that TikTok needs to be used as a means of spying on Americans given that Every other social media platform collects, stores, and then sells this tracking information, this surveillance information on the open market. | |
| We know that the Director of National Intelligence was actually purchasing this information, which they could not have obtained without a warrant had they tried to get it themselves. | |
| So I never understood why China just can't buy that on the open market. | |
| But let me just ask you from the other perspective. | |
| Both Facebook and Google are banned in China. | |
| And one of the arguments of the Chinese was that we all know that Facebook and Google collects massive amounts of data on whichever users use their platform, including our own citizens. | |
| And we consider it a threat to our national security to allow these American-based companies with close ties to the American government to collect And do whatever they want with the personal private data of our citizens and the way they operate on the Internet. | |
| Do you regard that rationale as justified in the same sense that you regard the defense of the U.S. | |
| action in banning TikTok to be justified? | |
| Really think so. | |
| And here's why. | |
| One, the evidence that we saw showed that TikTok was collecting far more data than sort of commensurate social media applications and data that wasn't necessary to the running of the application. | |
| Two, we set up a process where that data wouldn't leave the U.S., in which case we would allow them to continue to operate, but we lost faith in that process because we kept finding more and more information from leaks and otherwise, that despite setting up these firewalls, the data was still getting back to the CCP. | |
| So if China had come in and said, look, U.S., we don't trust your judicial system. | |
| We don't trust the protections for this data. | |
| Wall it off. | |
| And if Facebook and others have been given that chance and then tried to wall it off, and then if China said, hey, we caught you red-handed, the data is still going back, then it may be on the same footing as the TikTok scenario. | |
| But I think sort of China just jumped directly to the block and the ban. | |
| And I think they did so in the context that made it clear that it was more about free speech than it was about data flow. | |
| But it's possible they could have headed down a path and that Facebook and Google might have engaged in similar conduct. | |
| And then I think then it would have made it more analogous. | |
| So I want to be respectful of your time. | |
| I just have a couple more questions. | |
| I actually have a lot more, but I will have you back on and we can talk about some of the other issues. | |
| But just to stick with the TikTok issue for a second. | |
| The TikTok ban was originally proposed by the Trump administration during those years when Donald Trump was president. | |
| It had a lot of support among congressional Republicans and Senate Republicans as well, based on this concern that you're raising, this national security concern about China. | |
| But it could never get enough votes to pass. | |
| It only got enough votes once the Biden administration came in. | |
| And began also advocating for this ban on TikTok. | |
| Joe Biden was a very vocal advocate of that. | |
| And finally enough Democrats, after October 7th, decided that they were willing to vote in favor of TikTok. | |
| And their rationale, and they've talked about it openly, was not the concern that you were raising about China being a national security threat. | |
| Some of them give lip service to that. | |
| But again, when that was the only argument, it didn't get enough votes. | |
| What made Democrats finally decide that they need to take action against TikTok Was that they perceived, especially the vocally pro-Israel members of that caucus, which is a majority, that they thought that one of the reasons why young people were turning against Israel and were empathizing with the pro-Palestinian cause was because there was so much anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian speech being circulated on TikTok, that that's what made it a sufficient threat that we needed to take action to either ban it or force a sale. | |
| I understand the action itself is one that you defend on the grounds you've articulated, but does that, the sort of cause that enabled it to be passed and ultimately signed by the Biden administration, that to me seems like that's about content and not about conduct. | |
| Does that concern you at all, that motive to ban TikTok? | |
| Yeah, look, it's hard to sort of look at hundreds and hundreds of members of Congress and try to sort of unpack sort of a leading thread in motivation for it to pass. | |
| But I will agree with you that, you know, to the extent that people were in favor of this ban purely because they did not like the content that was circulating post-October 7th, However, you know, sort of. | |
| Once views are on that content, that was the motivation. | |
| Then I do think you run into the same type of problems that we had with the Supreme Court case and the Postmaster General. | |
| I don't think that that should be the reason that someone goes down to the well and casts their vote. | |
| Now, there's a second sort of version of that October 7 story, which was, you know, some people saying, OK, maybe it's not the content that I'm worried about, but this is evidence of sort of CCP control because it's so out of step with other sort of social media platforms. | |
| Again, that's that's sort of close to the line, but maybe not across it. | |
| But if you look sort of factually at the timeline, really the key event was this March hearing earlier that year where their TikTok CEO testified. | |
| That really galvanized support in Congress. | |
| There was a lot of work over that summer on the bill, on the drafting, on the strategizing. | |
| And it sort of all came to fruition, as you pointed out, post-October 7th, but there was an awful lot of legwork to get it to the sort of the one yard line. | |
| But again, I don't disagree with you. | |
| If someone wants to ban TikToks, they don't like the proportion of Hamas-Israel content on there, then I think that's a problem under our First Amendment. | |
| But again, I don't think that's what happened here, at least not sufficiently in terms of the whole body of Congress. | |
| No, I understand that. | |
| I mean, I would encourage you to go look at even what the spearheads in the Republican Party of this ban had to say about why they finally got enough votes after October 7th, why that was the key event. | |
| What actually brought Democrats on was this concern about too much anti-Israel speech on TikTok. | |
| But I understand, obviously, there's a lot of other motives that attracted a lot of support for that. | |
| Let me just ask you this one final question. | |
| What TikTok basically is in the United States, at the end of the day, and I understand leaving aside the surveillance concerns or the privacy issues, is it's a social media platform that tens of millions, really more than a hundred million, I think a third of the population, choose voluntarily to use. | |
| Nobody forces them to go into TikTok. | |
| They choose that social media platform as their primary place for forming communion with other people. | |
| Learning about and expressing political views, organizing politically, it's a place that one-third of Americans want to use, do use constantly, and especially young people use almost exclusively. | |
| So when you say, okay, we're going to take this app that you like most, where you express your political views, where you get your access to information, and we're going to ban it. | |
| We're not going to let you use it. | |
| It's no longer going to exist in this country the way X doesn't exist in Brazil. | |
| I understand the distinction. | |
| But do you see any kind of censorship concerns to that, even if you think the national security problems outweigh it? | |
| I think anytime the government steps in and takes an action that Deals with a platform that has that many people on it, where they're exchanging information of the sort that you talked about. | |
| It's incumbent on the government officials to be very clear and make the case for it. | |
| And I do think it's fair for people to be concerned. | |
| Again, the analogy I would draw is there is this Supreme Court case called Arcara Books, where there's a bookstore, quintessential First Amendment activity. | |
| People go to the bookstore to educate themselves. | |
| And the government found out that there was a prostitution ring or similar conduct being run out of the bookstore. | |
| And it went to the Supreme Court, and the guy defended it and said, you can't shut down my bookstore. | |
| This is where people engage in First Amendment activity. | |
| And the Supreme Court said, like, we're sorry, dude, but, you know, you guys were engaging in illegal conduct in the bookstore, so we're going to shut it down. | |
| There's no First Amendment analysis. | |
| I sort of think that's the case with TikTok, where all these people are using it for legitimate purposes, but ultimately, you know, the platform's owners We're engaging in conduct, this transfer of data behind the scenes that was a national security problem. | |
| Now, again, my ideal outcome here is this thing continues the way it is from a content perspective, and we simply sever that ownership ties so the millions of Americans can continue to be on TikTok. | |
| That's what the bill would do. | |
| I would hope that that's ultimately where the sort of TikTok ownership lands. | |
| Or the other final analogy I'll give you is Someone can take a pen and write the most salacious anti-American propaganda they want. | |
| The government can do to take that pen away for that reason, based on the First Amendment. | |
| But the moment someone takes that pen and picks a lock with it, that's a problem. | |
| And we take the pen, and it's no defense to say, but we were engaging it for speech. | |
| Yeah, I agree with you that people should be concerned. | |
| Yeah, I think it's incumbent on us to be very clear about what the risk is and not say, well, I got a secret briefing I can't tell you. | |
| You know, I can tell you the 10 things that gave me pause from a conduct perspective, and I should be able to do that. | |
| But again, I can, you know, think that reasonable people could look at all this and say, look, it's you're drawing a line that I don't think is there. | |
| It's too slippery of a slope. | |
| I think that's fair. | |
| But, you know, I've attempted to sort of, you know, Be sensitive to these issues, but when I think something is sort of so on the conduct side and so far from speech or content that we can take action. | |
| All right, sorry, just one final quick question, because it's so refreshing to have a discussion of this TikTok ban, which I think is incredibly consequential, no matter your views, in a substantive way. | |
| So just as a last question, one of the concerns that people have expressed is that, as we know, and as we've been talking about, U.S. | |
| big tech companies are very susceptible to government pressure to censor. | |
| And because of the fact that TikToks ownership in company, parent company doesn't have that same pressure, that basically forcing a sale to an American company, one that's closer to the U.S. government, will enable the U.S. government now to control not every social media platform, but one, but now every social media platform. | |
| Do you have concerns at all about that, about forcing a transfer to a ownership group that will be more responsible to censorship demands of the U.S. government? | |
| One of the ways I think the legislation tried to sort of address this concern is there's no requirement that it divests entity. | |
| It simply can't divest to sort of Iran, China, North Korea, Russia. | |
| So there's any number of other corporate structures that aren't beholden to the U.S. | |
| that this could be distributed to. | |
| And I'd be very comfortable with that. | |
| When it comes to pressure from the U.S. | |
| government, I think we need a baseline protection in place. | |
| And one of the things that I've suggested is that We can do this through law, or we can do it voluntarily. | |
| If any social media company receives pressure from any government official, right, left, or center, to take speech down, they should immediately publicly disclose that fact. | |
| If they feel like they can't publicly disclose it because there's national security implications, then they should disclose it on a bipartisan basis to members of Congress. | |
| I think that would go a long way to stopping these sort of secret pressure campaigns towards censorship. | |
| So frankly, I would ask all social media companies, Meta, Google, all the way down, will you commit, particularly between now and the election when we need to be most sensitive to free speech, if you get pressure from a government official to do takedown or to censor speech, you should put your hand up and you say, hey, this happened. | |
| If it's a legitimate reason for it or it's just passing along for information, okay. | |
| But transparency is a great disinfectant. | |
| I think that'd be a good step to protect against this pressure that has taken place. | |
| Well, you've become a very, I think, important and thoughtful and Thanks so much. | |
| voice in all these debates, which I really appreciate. | |
| I also really appreciate your taking the time to kind of delve into these matters in a deep way. | |
| I was thrilled to have you on the show. | |
| We'd love to have you on again. | |
| Thanks so much for coming on. | |
| I hope you have a great evening. | |
| Yeah, I really appreciate it. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| All right. | |
| Now, I spent a good amount of time at the start of the show talking about the underlying causes of 9-11 and the like. | |
| And there's a few things that we have prepared that I'm going to leave out and omit, but there's a couple of things that I absolutely think are necessary to complete the conversation. | |
| One thing is that we're going to have to do One of which is to point out that the idea that Al-Qaeda was motivated not by hatred of our freedoms, but by Our government policy in that region was not some idea relegated to the fringes of radical extremists, but was something that was openly discussed, including by the CIA for many, many years. | |
| Here from the BBC in July of 2004, Al-Qaeda's origins and links. | |
| Al-Qaeda, meaning quote the base, was created in 1989 as Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden and his colleagues began looking for new jihads. | |
| The organization grew out of the network of Arab volunteers. | |
| who had gone to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight under the banner of Islam against Soviet communism. | |
| During the anti-Soviet jihad, Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. | |
| Some analysts believe Bin Laden himself had security training from the CIA. | |
| The, quote, Arab Afghans, as they became known, were battle-hardened and highly motivated. | |
| In fact, a lot of those fighters who were fighting to eject not American influence but Soviet influence from Afghanistan actually were called and met with to the United States and met with President Reagan in the White House where he heralded them as freedom fighters because that time they were fighting to eject Soviet occupiers from Afghanistan rather than American occupiers from their lands. | |
| And back then, we fully understood that that was their motive. | |
| Not that they hated the freedoms of the Soviet Union, but they wanted to get the Soviet Union to cease interfering in their lands. | |
| And we consider them heroes for doing that. | |
| Here from NBC News, December 10, 2003. | |
| Bin Laden comes home to roost. | |
| Michael Moran looks at U.S. | |
| ties to Osama Bin Laden, trained and funded by the CIA to wreak havoc on the Soviet army and now turning his talents on Americans. | |
| At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a codename, blowback. | |
| That's a CIA term, blowback. | |
| Simply defined, this is the term describing an agent, an operative, or an operation that has turned on its creators. | |
| Osama Bin Laden, our new public enemy number one, is the personification of blowback, and the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage, reap what you sow. | |
| Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency, by the CIA, as something of a dilettante, a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero. | |
| I think one of the most important moments in our public debate when this idea finally entered the mainstream was when Ron Paul ran for president in 2008, had a much more successful outcome than anyone anticipated, especially given what he was saying. | |
| And he got into a very vitriolic argument with another one of the candidates seeking the Republican nomination, which was Rudy Giuliani, Giuliani when Ron Paul expressed the view that the reason 9/11 happened was because of our actions there, not because they hate us for our freedom. | |
| Ron Paul was very difficult to demonize as a traitor given his long time service in the military as compared to Rudy Giuliani who never spent a day in the military, somehow avoided the war in Vietnam like most of the people who Call any dissenters traitors or whatever. | |
| Kind of like the way Hillary Clinton said Tulsi Gabbard was a traitor to the United States because she was being groomed by the Russians, even though Tulsi Gabbard spent her whole adult life in the U.S. | |
| military defending the country in combat, etc. | |
| And Hillary Clinton obviously never did, nor did her husband. | |
| But anyway, I think this exchange was so important because it was a Fox News debate, and you can tell the entire room, the entire stage was absolutely against Ron Paul, but I think this is one of the first times that Americans really heard this theory of causation. | |
| The intervention was a major contributing factor. | |
| Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? | |
| They attack us because we've been over there. | |
| We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. | |
| We've been in the Middle East. | |
| I think Reagan was right. | |
| We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. | |
| So, right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. | |
| We're building 14 permanent bases. | |
| What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? | |
| We would be objecting. | |
| We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. | |
| Are you suggesting we invited the 9-11 attack, sir? | |
| I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it. | |
| And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama Bin Laden has said, I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier. | |
| They've already now, since that time, have killed 3,400 of our men and I don't think it was necessary. | |
| Well, let me just say that what Ron Paul is saying there, you can disagree or agree with it to whatever extent you want. | |
| I think it was a crucial moment for the truth to be heard by the American public, even though they may not have been ready for it, even though they may not have been prepared to ingest it at the moment. | |
| But the only reason why he was able to make that argument, and he kept referring to it, was because he was able, as a free person, to read the statements of the people in that region who hate the United States. | |
| And he was saying, go read what they say. | |
| And that's exactly what was censored in the United States through a collaboration, an agreement between media outlets on the one hand and the government on the other, an agreement not to allow Osama bin Laden or any one of his comrades or people with whom he worked to be heard in the United States by inventing this insanely insulting excuse that he might use some sort of hidden code to activate a sleeper cell, but they have even said, like, we think it's propaganda. | |
| And as our guest from the FCC, Brendan Carr, just explained, there's a constitutional right that you have to access foreign propaganda if you want. | |
| That's part of free speech, is you get to access the information you want, which is why when the EU banned or made it criminal for social media platforms to platform RT, it was so offensive that you're an adult citizen of the EU, even if you want to hear from the Russian government, you're now banned from doing so. | |
| That was the censorship that happened in 2001, but it's also the censorship that happened just last year. | |
| When the Guardian got pressured to remove a historical document of great importance, which is the Bin Laden letter that Ron Paul was using to make this argument, and that people on TikTok were banned from speaking about forcibly. | |
| Here's the rest of this exchange. | |
| Wendell, may I make a comment on that? | |
| That's really an extraordinary statement. | |
| That is an extraordinary statement. | |
| As someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. | |
| I don't think I've ever heard that before. | |
| And I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. | |
| Now, as we know, Rudy Giuliani was the owner of 9/11. | |
| He had full rights over how it was understood, how it was talked about. | |
| I'm not really sure why. | |
| He was the mayor of New York at the time that it happened. | |
| He sort of got a reputation for doing heroic things. | |
| I'm not really sure what it was that he did that was so heroic. | |
| But obviously, he was going to seize that moment. | |
| And you heard the reaction from people. | |
| These are mostly Republican operatives. | |
| We've talked before when we went to the RNC debate, the first one in Milwaukee, how that room is filled, where the people who get heard the loudest are all party operatives, lobbyists, donors. | |
| So, of course, they're going to be on Rudy Giuliani's side of that debate. | |
| But what's so notable is Rudy Giuliani said, I've never heard that before, this theory. | |
| But the reason we got attacked on 9-11 because of what we were doing in places like Iraq, where our sanctions regime killed 500,000 children, which Madeleine Albright told 60 Minutes she thought was worth it, in her words, or that we were overthrowing their governments and imposing... He said he never heard this before, even though that was the version of events, the argument, the rationale that al-Qaeda, that Osama bin Laden, that many, many people in that region had been giving for many, many years | |
| And the fact that someone like Rudy Giuliani had never heard that before, according to him, until Ron Paul said it, doesn't really surprise me because it has been a great aggressive act of repression to ensure that doesn't remain in our discourse. | |
| Of course, here is the rest of this exchange. - And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. | |
| Congressman? | |
| I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. | |
| When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback. | |
| The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages, and that persists. | |
| And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. | |
| If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. | |
| They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. | |
| They come and they attack us because we're over there. | |
| I mean, that has so much logic to it that it's shocking that people react to it with such venom. | |
| I think precisely because it has so much logic to it. | |
| Here, just to underscore the empirical foundation of that vision, is the fact that there's a lot of research linking what was called suicide terrorism, the willingness of people to give up their own lives to kill other people from that part of the world. | |
| Obviously, Their Islamic beliefs are in part what enables them to give up their own lives because of what they believe about the afterlife and the like. | |
| But Islam itself is not sufficient to do it. | |
| They need some motive to hate the people that they're attacking. | |
| And this University of Chicago political science professor, Roger Pape, did a lot of research to find out what motivated that. | |
| And here you see the political headline in October of 2010. | |
| Researcher says suicide terrorism is linked to military occupation. | |
| Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, will present findings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause, namely military occupation. | |
| Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Department of Defense, the Threat Reduction Agency. | |
| They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprising some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times, the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 U.S. Marines. the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in And I should note that Ronald Reagan... | |
| Despite having enormous amounts of pressure to avenge that attack, Israel was demanding that they build a massive force to attack Hezbollah and the Lebanese who were responsible for that attack on the U.S. | |
| military base. | |
| Instead said, what are we doing? | |
| Why do we have a huge military base in Lebanon where they were not wanted? | |
| And he pulled out that military base, understanding that it was highly provocative and was not in the American interest. | |
| The article goes on, quote, we have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100% of the terrorist campaign, Pape said in an interview last week on his findings. | |
| Pape said there had been a dramatic spike in suicide bombings in Afghanistan since U.S. | |
| forces began to expand their presence to the south and east of the country in 2006, while there was a total of 12 suicide attacks from 2001 to 2005 in Afghanistan. | |
| When the U.S. | |
| had a relatively limited troop presence. | |
| Since 2006, there have been more than 450 suicide attacks in Afghanistan, and they are growing more lethal, Pape said. | |
| Deaths due to suicide attacks in Afghanistan have gone up by a third in the years since President Barack Obama added 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. | |
| Quote, it's not making it any better, Pape said. | |
| Honestly, it's stunning that we even need empirical evidence on this. | |
| It just takes a little bit of empathy. | |
| As Ron Paul said, think about it if that were being done to our country. | |
| If there were some foreign power arming Mexico and Canada, say China, to intervene in our country, to blow things up, to undermine our government. | |
| And then China itself started occupying our government, or Russia, or whomever you want to fantasize about. | |
| There's actually a 1984 film, very popular film, where the Russians occupied, invaded and occupied the United States, and it glorified the people who were using what would be called terrorism, resistance, violent resistance against them. | |
| Which is, of course, what you would do if people were interfering in your country. | |
| You'd be very angry at the outside forces responsible for that. | |
| I mean, it's just so blatantly obvious. | |
| Now I just want to show you this one clip where I, I guess, debated this issue with my friend Megan Kelly on her program. | |
| And I consider Megyn Kelly very smart, very sophisticated, very insightful analyst. | |
| But she came out of Fox News, and that's where a lot of this mythology about 9-11 originated. | |
| The idea that if you say anything like what Ron Paul said, you're sort of a traitor, that it's, of course, all about Islam, has nothing to do with us. | |
| And I guess I was kind of surprised that even 22 years later, she still believes that. | |
| And so we were able to explore in a very civil way, but I think also spirited way and therefore revealing what the foundations of these views are and how valid they are. | |
| I just want to show you a little bit of this exchange. | |
| I get that, and I cede that point, but I also feel like they hate us. | |
| Not the Iranian people, but the leaders over in Iran. | |
| They're going to hate us less if we don't back Israel. | |
| I don't buy it. | |
| Hell no. | |
| They hate us because of our principles, because of our constitution, because of the way we live, because women walk around in tank tops. | |
| We could go down the list, but it's not going to go away if we stop supporting Israel. | |
| Megan, this was the debate about 9-11. | |
| Like, why did they hate us? | |
| Why did they attack us? | |
| And the neocon narrative was, oh, they hate us for our freedoms. | |
| And bin Laden repeatedly said, there was that letter that recirculated that was banned from TikTok. | |
| We are angry at America because they are constantly insinuating themselves into our region. | |
| They imposed a sanctions regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. | |
| They put troops on Saudi soil. | |
| The reason Iran hates us I'm not justifying it at all, but I think it's very important to have an open eyes about your own country, is that in 1954, we overthrew their democratically elected government, the CIA did, and we imposed on them for the next 25 years, one of the most savage and brutal dictatorships In the world, the Shah of Iran. | |
| And so when Iran had its revolution and finally deposed their dictator, the Shah of Iran, of course they knew the United States was responsible for his imposition on them for all those decades. | |
| And so they had a lot of animosity toward the United States. | |
| There are all kinds of countries in the world, Korea and Japan and Brazil and Norway that have all the same grievances we do. | |
| Yeah, but Glenn, I mean, you're looking at a country, Israel, Israel has a sense of due process and fairness, and Iran is hanging people from cranes. | |
| Iran is stoning women to death for not wearing the damn hijab. | |
| How the hell are we going to have a relationship with them? | |
| It's a no. | |
| Megan, we have relationships with the most savage dictators on the planet, our close allies in Saudi Arabia and our close allies in Egypt. | |
| Okay, but you have Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, all of which are American allies that are among the most brutal and savage dictatorships in the world. | |
| We're fine with having relationships, good relationships and alliances with countries that are extremely repressive as long as they do the thing in the United States. | |
| One of the reasons is their hatred of Iran and vice versa. | |
| I mean, those two groups are Shiite versus Sunni, and there's a long-standing hatred between them. | |
| One of them wants to completely annihilate Israel, and one of them was actually open-minded to doing a deal with Israel and getting to a better place when we were backing Israel under Trump, when we were helping making it stronger. | |
| And these other allies, Saudi Arabia and the others, were starting to look at it like, you know what, maybe we are going to have to deal with this country. | |
| We're moving toward peace. | |
| It's true. | |
| The dictators of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf state regions understand that there can be economic benefits from a relationship with Israel. | |
| They don't represent the people of those countries. | |
| These are dictators imposed by military coups that the United States propped up. | |
| And all I'm saying is we're very tribal as human beings. | |
| We always like to see things through the perspective of our side to believe that We're the morally superior ones. | |
| We're the victims. | |
| They're the aggressors. | |
| They're evil. | |
| I understand the appeal of that narrative. | |
| But you were just talking about the multiple wars that we fought in the Middle East. | |
| We invaded Iraq and destroyed it. | |
| That strengthened Iran by strengthening the Shiite militias. | |
| Saddam Hussein was a vehement I agree with that. | |
| of Iran. | |
| We created the vacuum out of which ISIS emerged. | |
| Even Tony Blair says that we were in Afghanistan for 20 years. | |
| We've been bombing that region for a long time. | |
| I think on some level, we have to take some responsibility for why there's anti-American resentment in that region and ask whether that that's worth it. | |
| I agree with that. | |
| I don't I don't disagree with you at all on that. | |
| And I'm very. | |
| So, you know, you can watch the whole debate if you wanted I didn't mean to select a certain part, but I felt like it was a pretty good representative sampling. | |
| And as I was listening to this, I'm honestly amazed of the need to point these things out that I think should be so self-evident. | |
| But I also understand that even the smartest people are vulnerable to propaganda. | |
| We all are, every single one of us. | |
| I mean, when I started writing about politics full time, one of the things that started to shock me was how many beliefs I had ingested that were just false, that just kind of I absorbed from the ether, because I wasn't focused on politics, I wasn't deconstructing the premises of it, I didn't have time to investigate it, go to original sources. | |
| And only once I started to do that, and I wasn't 20 years old, I was in my late 30s, It was, I saw how many things I had ingested that were absolutely false, including some of that mythology about 9-11. | |
| But I do think that's amazing, but I think the most amazing thing, and honestly, that's why I wanted to use the opportunity one more time to stress this, because I haven't thought about this incident for quite some time, but having revisited it today when planning the show and talking about it, I just want you to focus and remember how unbelievable it is | |
| That soon as young Americans started to discover the Bin Laden letter and question the narrative that they've been fed for 20 years about why the 9-11 attack happened, and started to make links between our involvement in the region, our support for Israel, our bombing of those countries, our overthrowing of their governments, our imposition of their dictators, when they started to make that link, oh wow! | |
| This has been going on for a long time, and it's actually part of why 9-11 happened. | |
| It's not because they hated us for our freedoms. | |
| It was an immediate, systemic, successful attempt to wipe that letter from the internet so that no one could read it anymore. | |
| I cannot believe that The Guardian removed that document from its website. | |
| What kind of media outlet would do that? | |
| Oh my God, these people are reading this document. | |
| We better take it down. | |
| We can't have them reading this and consuming it and debating it. | |
| And then TikTok, desperate to stay in the country, was easily pressured within 24 hours to just ban any discussion. | |
| They took down every video talking about that Bin Laden letter. | |
| They banned the hashtags that people were using to find it. | |
| The link to the document no longer worked. | |
| That is real censorship. | |
| It's been going on for 23 years in this country, starting from that time when the government and the media collaborated to prevent Bin Laden from being heard based on blatant bullshit excuses that he was going to blink or tilt his head and activate a sleeper cell, all the way up until last year. | |
| When that letter was banished. | |
| And that's the reason why very smart people still believe that the 9-11 attack happened because we were innocent victims who were just minding our own business, just being free. | |
| Got attacked, not because of everything that we've been doing in that region to those people, to those countries for many, many decades, all for our own interest and against theirs. | |
| All right, our intrepid, ruggedly independent reporter, Michael Tracy, went last night to the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, along with one of our show's producers, Megan O'Rourke. | |
| And both of them were able to interview many members of Congress from each party, as well as various operative types. | |
| And we put together a couple of edited packages to kind of give you a sense for the sort of thing that they were able to hear. | |
| So this first clip, is a variety of members of the Senate and the Congress in the Democratic Party who were being asked about Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris and why they're celebrating it, what they think it means, what they think motivated it. | |
| And here's what they had to say. | |
| Tonight, Kamala Harris touted the endorsement of Dick Cheney. | |
| Did you find that at all bizarre? | |
| Would you welcome the endorsement of Dick Cheney? | |
| Am I the only one who remembers that he was integral in launching the Iraq war on false pretenses? | |
| Is that all but memory hold now? | |
| She's trying to win an election, right? | |
| And in winning an election, you're trying to build a coalition that's as big as possible. | |
| So it is important That there are a whole bunch of Republicans, many of them who worked very closely with Donald Trump, who, having seen him up close, are convinced that he is deeply unqualified to do the job. | |
| So I do think it's important that there are a host of people who disagree with Kamala Harris on policy, But are supporting her because they believe that the election of Donald Trump would mean the destruction of our democracy. | |
| It just, I think, solidifies the stakes of the election. | |
| But do Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris really disagree substantively? | |
| They seem to have fairly compatible foreign policy worldviews from everything I heard from Kamala tonight. | |
| Yeah, I think they disagree significantly. | |
| On what? | |
| On what? | |
| Yeah, what do they disagree on? | |
| I mean, did Kamala Harris support the Iraq war that Dick Cheney started? | |
| She wasn't in public office at the time. | |
| She may well have. | |
| Does she support giving unfettered subsidy to the oil and gas industry? | |
| So you asked me for some examples. | |
| I gave you some examples. | |
| This was Kamala Harris's biggest audience of her career. | |
| Very important to how she's being interpreted. | |
| So I just want to interject here, because you're going to hear a lot of that, that the thing that amazes me the most And Michael didn't really, in this clip, include this, but we've talked about it before, is that is their excuse. | |
| They're saying, look, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney have nothing in common with Kamala Harris in terms of policy or ideology, even though both of them said that they do. | |
| Even though both of them said when endorsing Kamala that one of the reasons they were doing so is because she's closer to their foreign policy vision than a Trump-led Republican Party. | |
| Obviously that's embarrassing for any Democrat to admit, given how much everyone remembers how the extent to which Dick Cheney was demonized as Hitler and Darth Vader and whatever. | |
| And so the excuse that they're using is, no, Dick Cheney's not supporting us because he loves our ideology or agrees with us, even though, as Michael pointed out, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney are vehement supporters of supporting the war in Ukraine, supporting and arming Israel, strengthening NATO, expanding NATO, all the major foreign policy debates that are being discussed. | |
| And obviously, even when it comes to the war in Iraq, the current president who is elected, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, did vote for the war in Iraq. | |
| sort of the prior Democratic nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton, as did the 2004 nominee John Kerry, who then played a major role in the Obama administration. | |
| So the idea that, oh, she's a Democrat, she was opposed to the war in Iraq, that doesn't follow if you have no evidence for it. | |
| But nonetheless, that excuse that, oh, Dick Cheney is just doing it because of his devotion to American democracy, it's as though, as Michael, the phrase that he used, everything's been memory-hold because in 2000, the consensus among Democrats was that there was a coup in our country that the real winner of the 2000 the consensus among Democrats was that there was a coup in our country that the real winner And had the vote in Florida been continued and the recount been completed, That's who would have won the election because that's who got the most votes. | |
| But instead, the Republican Supreme Court goes this line of thinking, intervened to stop the recount because they wanted to install George Bush and Dick Cheney as the winners of the election, even though they were really the losers. | |
| So the accusation was Dick Cheney ascended to power by virtue of overturning the legitimate outcome of the 2000 election through a coup, through an anti-democratic insurrection. | |
| So to watch them use that excuse now as the reason for why Dick Cheney is supporting Kamala, that, oh, he's just so passionately defending American democracy, believing in the integrity of our election so much, when 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they were accusing him of having instituted one of the only coups in the United States and the nullification of the actual results of our election, is remarkable. | |
| And yet, as you're about to see, this is what pretty much all of them said. | |
| Let's play the rest of these. | |
| Her career, very important to how she's being introduced to the American people, and she's choosing to cite the endorsement of Dick Cheney. | |
| Didn't you find that bizarre? | |
| What I found that the Vice President was able to do tonight was to introduce herself to the American people. | |
| What I found is that she was able to articulate her vision for the future of the country. | |
| I found that she was able to talk about the support of people who are different than her, who think about the world very differently than she does, as a demonstration of how we need to unite our country and move our country in a direction where all Americans can see themselves and their families doing more than just surviving. | |
| Dick Cheney is certainly competent to judge the one issue that matters, which is the preservation of our democracy. | |
| Would you welcome the interview? | |
| Seriously, can you believe it? | |
| Can you believe that? | |
| Dick Cheney is certainly competent to judge the only issue that matters, which is the preservation of American democracy. | |
| All you have to do is ask him. | |
| Whether Dick Cheney took power by virtue of a legitimate election and a democratic outcome, or whether Dick Cheney instituted a coup using the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which is what every single Democrat and liberal I knew were saying in 2000, the ability of these people to just memory hole everything that has happened previously that's inconsistent with the narrative they want to promote now is truly alarming and kind of remarkable. | |
| Let's go with the rest of these. | |
| Would you welcome the endorsement of Dick Cheney? | |
| I am here to support Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, and I'm excited about a new generation of leadership that's going to turn the page on Donald Trump. | |
| Senator, Kamala Harris touted tonight the endorsement of Dick Cheney. | |
| If memory serves, you lost your leg in combat in Iraq. | |
| In a war that Dick Cheney was integral into launching on false pretenses. | |
| So if you want to claim that Dick Cheney now is putting country above party or what have you, alright, I'll take that point I suppose. | |
| But don't you find it a bit bizarre that Dick Cheney is one of the few people whose endorsement that the Democratic nominee touted at this debate? | |
| Well, she touted many, many endorsements. | |
| She also talked about all of the retired generals, all of the people, the former Trump, the people that worked with Trump who said, hey, we've worked with this guy. | |
| He is clearly unfit to be president of the United States. | |
| He is unfit to be commander in chief. | |
| He disparages our troops. | |
| He has no respect for our military men and women or their families. | |
| And he is incompetent as a leader of the greatest nation on the face of the earth. | |
| What about Dick Cheney? | |
| Well, again, he is one of the people who has come out, and Liz Cheney as well, but bottom line is that... Yeah, and what did you make of her touting his endorsement? | |
| I think when somebody, like Dick, even Dick Cheney, even Dick Cheney says that Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. | |
| That says something about how low Donald Trump... But what's it say about Kamala Harris? | |
| So first of all, I think Michael is an excellent interviewer. | |
| But imagine the kind of audacity it takes to just walk up to a senator from Illinois and be like, hey, remember Dick Cheney? | |
| He's the reason you lost your leg, that you can't stand up. | |
| Because your leg was blown off in the war that he started. | |
| What do you think of the fact that Kamala Harris was touting him? | |
| The other thing I would say is that Of course, in general, if you're running for president, you want to build your coalition as big as possible, whatever. | |
| You want to be perceived as some sort of transcendent, bipartisan figure, that all makes sense. | |
| But when Dick Cheney comes out and says explicitly, and when Liz Cheney says the same thing, that you're actually closer to our foreign policy beliefs than we are, even though we haven't changed our foreign policy views at all, Not only should that be something you don't count, that should be something that should make you re-evaluate who and what you are, and should make every person prepared to vote for a Democrat. | |
| start to question what is this party that Dick and Liz Cheney, to say nothing of people like Bill Kristol and David Frum who wrote those early Bush speeches. | |
| Bill Kristol was the architect of the Iraq War before 9-11. | |
| What does it say that all these people perceive? | |
| These are not stupid people. | |
| They're liars and there are a bunch of other things, but they're definitely not stupid. | |
| What does it say about the Democratic Party that they now perceive that the Democratic Party is their best vehicle, not for saving American democracy. | |
| They don't give a shit about that. | |
| That it's the best vehicle for advancing their foreign policy views that, for the last 20 years, Americans in the Democratic Party have called fascist and racist and warmongering. | |
| What does it say about the Democratic Party that people like that are identifying more with the Democratic Party than the Trump-led Republican Party? | |
| Let's watch the rest of this. | |
| What was your response? | |
| What does it tell you that Dick Cheney's worldview is apparently compatible enough with Kamala Harris' worldview that she's going on her biggest national stage of her career and touting the endorsement of Dick Cheney? | |
| Did you find that bizarre? | |
| No, what this is about is who's fit to be Commander-in-Chief, who actually will respect and support the Constitution of the United States. | |
| How is Dick Cheney fit to determine who's fit to be Commander-in-Chief? | |
| And that's why the coalition, the folks that are surrounding and supporting Kamala Harris, is very broad. | |
| Because all the policy issues that we're debating tonight, at the end of the day, there's only one candidate there, and that was Kamala Harris, who respects the Constitution, who respects the rule of law, and won't continue to deal in big lies. | |
| Did Dick Cheney and George W. Bush respect the Constitution and rule of law? | |
| I remember mass warrantless surveillance being inaugurated under that administration. | |
| It's very clear that this election is about who can actually respect the rule of law, and that is Kamala Harris. | |
| So Kamala Harris tonight touted the endorsement of Dick Cheney. | |
| Is he one of these traditional Republicans who people are looking back on retrospectively and valorizing? | |
| I think it's a very important endorsement for Vice President Harris because this guy's calling her things like Marxist and communist and comrade. | |
| And a guy like Dick Cheney is not endorsing her if any of those things were true. | |
| And so what we know about Mr. Trump, he's a lie machine. | |
| He told 30,450 lies. | |
| So why is Dick Cheney endorsing her? | |
| Do they have compatible worldviews? | |
| Well, incompatible enough. | |
| Remember, Dick Cheney, like myself, is a first principles person. | |
| So what are you looking for? | |
| What's the principle? | |
| Invading Iraq? | |
| No, you know, you should let me talk to you. | |
| You're like a right wing journalist, right? | |
| Hard right, right? | |
| I got that. | |
| Let me talk. | |
| Ask one more question. | |
| Let's go to something else. | |
| All right. | |
| Here's another. | |
| Oh, here's another. | |
| You don't know my M.O. | |
| You thought you thought I'm a right wing because I expressed sexism of Dick Cheney. | |
| Well, I'm not a Republican. | |
| I've been a registered Democrat. | |
| So, final question. | |
| And maybe this is too conspiratorial for you, and maybe it shows I'm wearing a tinfoil hat, but did Dick Cheney and George W. Bush uphold the Constitution such that they're now a venerated, favorable contrast with Donald Trump? | |
| Explain that to me. | |
| Well, I think it's prima facie. | |
| I don't even think that needs to be explained. | |
| Bush and Cheney upheld the Constitution? | |
| They certainly did. | |
| Really? | |
| Fascinating. | |
| How about the Fourth Amendment? | |
| Well, no! | |
| How about the Fourth Amendment? | |
| They went to the UN and created that war. | |
| What are you implying, the Patriot Act? | |
| Well, no, no, there was mass warrantless surveillance that was inaugurated under George W. Bush, 2006. | |
| Well, first of all, you have to go to a judge to get the warrants. | |
| Second of all, read the paper. | |
| Yeah, Kangaroo Court, the FISA Court. | |
| Here we go with the tinfoil stuff. | |
| I can cite you endless constitutional scholars who will talk about the Kangaroo Court of FISA Courts. | |
| People disagree with the stuff, but the law got voted in by the Congress. | |
| It's called the Patriot Act. | |
| You may not like the law, then get yourself elected and go raise a caucus of people and get out of the law. | |
| Vote to renege the law. | |
| You may not like the law, but the law got put into place and there is a process to protect people. | |
| I want my family safe. | |
| You know what? | |
| I work for the American government. | |
| I understand the threats that are out there to the people of the United States, and I want my family safe. | |
| And I like Bush and Cheney. | |
| That's just me. | |
| All right, well, I guess, you know... There are so many things hilarious about that. | |
| You could see Michael getting progressively more agitated and excitable. | |
| He started off kind of subdued, a little bit rational, and just each person who we heard defend Dick Cheney just kind of excited him, just set him off a little bit more progressively with each interview. | |
| He got a little more aggressive, a little more interrupting. | |
| Somebody just suggested to me here that Michael should be selected to moderate the next debate. | |
| I think it would be an outstanding choice. | |
| A couple of things that were really interesting about that whole package, but also the interview with Anthony Scaramucci. | |
| Michael was asking questions that were critical of Dick Cheney and were arguing that things like the Iraq War and warrantless eavesdropping and all the other dismantling of basic American liberty, so say nothing of the 2000 election, was evidence that Dick Cheney and George Bush are not actually competent arbiters of upholding the rule of law? | |
| My The entire foundation of my journalism when I started writing about politics was that they were dismantling core civil liberties in the name of the war on terror, focusing on things like the imprisonment, arrest of people with no due process, no trial, putting people in prison for years, Americans and non-Americans alike, with no due process of any kind, not even opportunity to go into court, torturing people, spying on Americans without the warrants required by law. | |
| And by the way, what he said there that they have to go to the FISA court is totally wrong. | |
| The scandal was exactly that. | |
| George Bush and his administration authorized the NSA to spy on American citizens and their conversations if they were talking to someone outside the country with no warrants of any kind. | |
| They didn't have to even go to the FISA court, that very minimal kangaroo court. | |
| They didn't even have to do that, even though there was a law in place requiring that. | |
| And when that scandal finally emerged, The argument of the Bush administration and Dick Cheney in particular was, we're not bound by congressional law when it comes to national security. | |
| We do whatever we want with national security. | |
| Congress has no right to govern or limit what we do, even when it comes to spying on the American people. | |
| And there you see a lifelong Republican, Anthony Scaramucci, who's now an official surrogate of the Kamala Harris campaign. | |
| That's why he's in that spin room advocating for her. | |
| Who, first of all, accused Michael Tracy of being some hard-right activist because he was critical of Dick Cheney and the Iraq War and things like the War on Terror. | |
| I mean, if that doesn't show you the realignment that has happened, I don't know what will. | |
| And then he actually went on to aggressively defend things like the War on Terror and all the other things that were done in the name of the War on Terror by saying, I have kids, I want to be safe. | |
| This is right out of the Bush-Cheney era. | |
| And that's why George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Liz Cheney feel so at home in this party and in this campaign, because it's filled with and dominated by people who, as Liz Cheney herself said, have a closer foreign policy vision to the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris than to a Trump-led Republican Party. | |
| It has nothing to do with democracy or anything else like that. | |
| The idea that Dick Cheney, at 83 years old, suddenly decided that he cares so much about American democracy that he's going to support Kamala Harris is so laughable. | |
| But I found it so interesting that if you criticize the Iraq War, you question the U.S. | |
| security state, as Michael did in part of that interview we didn't show, but we'll put the whole thing up online. | |
| But you get accused of being an expiracy theorist, a far-right activist. | |
| But it really does show the kind of spirit and sentiments that have emerged around the Democratic Party and the Kamala Harris campaign. | |
| So we're going to put all of these full interviews on our Locals platform. | |
| We also have another package to show you, which we're going to show you tonight, but we're nearing about two hours with several Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, a couple others, I think Tom Cotton, where they were also actually Rick Scott, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, among others, where they were questioned in quite an adversarial way as well. | |
| So we're going to show you that package tomorrow. | |
| We're also going to put those full interviews up on Locals. | |
| And you can take a look at those. | |
| All right, so that concludes our show for this evening. | |
| I'm glad we were able to delve into some of the propaganda that not only shaped the perception of 9-11, but absolutely continued to do so. | |
| As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. | |
| You can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms. | |
| If you rate, review, and follow our program there, 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 for our live interactive After Show, where we take your questions and respond to critiques and criticisms and objections. | |
| We hear suggestions for future shows and for future guests. | |
| That After Show is available solely for members of our Locals community. | |
| So if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those twice a week after shows, but to, as we just said, a lot of original content. | |
| It's where we put my immediate reaction and analysis of last night's debate. | |
| We put it exclusively there until later today. | |
| It's where we're putting a lot of these interviews in their full unedited form, which are highly entertaining to watch. | |
| We put a lot of original content there that's exclusively available for our supporters on Locals. | |
| It's the place where we publish every day. |