Australia Poised to Punish Companies That Don't Censor; Biden Escalates Further in Ukraine; Debate Interviews with GOP Senators
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Australia to Enforce Censorship (5:15)
Biden to Greenlight Strikes in Russia (39:22)
Debate Interviews with GOP Senators (1:07:51)
Outro (1:26:29)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, it seems that virtually every day brings a new escalation in online censorship from governments ostensibly in the democratic world.
That's because that's exactly what's happening.
As we always emphasize when we cover the new censorship powers of a particular country, the reason to care, even if you don't live in that country, is because every government, most certainly including the American government, is looking at how far other states get away with in terms of their destruction of online free speech and that in turn sends a signal to those other countries that they can also go there and then beyond.
We've covered France's arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durev and, not coincidentally, the decision by a Brazilian judge just three days later to ban X in all of Brazil and to criminalize the use of VPNs to access that platform.
By the way, I sure hope nobody is breaking that law in Brazil or circumventing it by using VPNs to use X after this order.
That would be terrible.
Now, in Australia, The government today unveiled an all-new instrument for coercing online censorship.
Namely, they will fine social media companies or tech platforms up to 5% of their gross global revenue.
You're talking about tens, about hundreds of billions of dollars in fines.
If those social media platforms fail to censor what the state considers to be disinformation or other false and harmful ideas.
This is an idea taking root in many countries, not just Australia, and we'll examine the implications.
Then, the war in Ukraine continues to get remarkably little attention inside the US, even though we are the country primarily funding, arming, and fueling that war, even at the debate Although it was mentioned, it was mostly done to force Donald Trump to either say that he wants Ukraine to win or be accused of being a Russian stooge.
But the subject of the war is barely ever discussed, what we're looking for, what the strategy is.
Whatever the reasons for this lack of attention, it's not because nothing significant is happening in that war.
To the contrary, key parts of the Ukrainian front line continue to crumble as the Russian army takes more and more land moving westward.
As increasing numbers of Ukrainians are refusing to fight, risking their lives and liberty to flee instead.
And as Joe Biden just today signaled his willingness to give the Ukrainians the green light to use long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia.
And obviously dangerous and provocative act.
In fact, one that Vladimir Putin previously said he would regard as a Western or NATO attack on Russia.
We'll cover the latest developments.
Then finally, last night we showed you a video package of multiple interviews that Michael Tracy, along with our producer Megan O'Rourke, conducted at the presidential debate with various Democratic members of the Senate and the House, as well as various Kamala surrogates, such as former Bush-Cheney donor and Trump official.
Anthony Scaramucci.
There are many revealing and highly entertaining moments there.
We will have the full unedited versions of all those interviews up on our Locals page tonight, if we don't already.
And tonight, we'll have edited segments of their equally compelling and revealing interviews with Republican lawmakers, including GOP senators such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Rick Scott of Florida, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Now, before we get to all of that, we have a few program remotes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app because if you do so, I'm not sure if you heard this yet, but it actually works on both your smart TV and your telephone.
And then if you download that app and use those devices on Rumble, it means that you can then follow any of the programs you most like to watch on this platform.
And once you do that and you activate notifications, which we hope you will, it means that anytime any of those programs begin broadcasting live on air, whether they're at their appointed time, whether because they're a few minutes late, whether they go on air about breaking news, you'll be notified by text, email, whatever.
Then you can just click on the link and begin watching.
It really helps the live viewing numbers of every program and therefore the cause of free speech on Rumble itself.
As another 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 the show there, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, where we have our live interactive after show.
Tonight being Thursday, we will go to that live interactive after show on Locals as soon as we're done with this show live, maybe just a few minutes in that interval.
And that after show is available only for members of our local community.
So if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those twice a week after shows, but to multiple interactive features we have there, it's the place we publish a lot of exclusive original content, as we did with my reaction to the debate earlier this week.
It's the place we publish written, professionalized transcripts of every show that we broadcast here, for those of you who prefer to read segments.
And most of all, it is the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we're doing here every night.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Probably the primary theme of this program, if I had to pick one, since it began roughly two years ago, has been the ever-escalating, continuously increasing attempts, not by tyrannical continuously increasing attempts, not by tyrannical governments in the East, but by nominally democratic governments in the West, to gain more and more control of free speech online, of the flow of information, of the kind of dissent that is permitted, to put all of that
under of the flow of information, of the kind of So the only type of information, the only type of speech, the only type of ideas that can flourish online are ones the government approves of and everything else will be forcibly censored.
We've made a great number of strides in getting to that very dystopian vision and None of these governments are nearly done yet.
They have a lot more planned in that regard.
And as we always say, when we report on what's happening in a Western country or part of the democratic world, even though it's a country that may seem far away, like France and Pavlodourov or Brazil panning, or Australia, all these countries are completely interconnected, not just symbolically, but in actuality, in terms of how they are planning together and collaborating and talking about this kind of effort to censor the internet under the guise of combating disinformation.
They have conferences all the time where they all go and appear in one another's countries and they present slides and presentations on how they're doing it.
And then a bunch of EU bureaucrats and a bunch of American officials and Australian officials and British officials and Canadian ones take notes.
And then every time one of those countries goes further, they have the same sort of interrelation.
They're all seeing how far each of them go.
And every time that one takes another step forward, it means that that becomes another previously unprecedented place for these governments to go when it comes to curtailing what really is the central technology If you want to think about dissent or organizing or expressing views that are designed to undermine ruling class power or establishment dogma, which is a free internet.
That's pretty much the whole game.
Especially as more and more people migrate to the internet, use the internet as will continue to happen.
If you have a free internet, it's a much, much different world.
than if you have an internet under the thumb of Western government.
And obviously, they understand that too, which is why there's constantly new steps being taken to put that flow of information further under their control.
In Australia today, as Reuters reported, Australia threatens fines for social media giants enabling misinformation.
Now, let me just say, ideally, I think it'd be great to live in a world where there are no false claims or inaccurate ideas It'd be fantastic to live in a world where there's no hate speech against marginal minority groups.
The problem, obviously, is the question of who determines what is disinformation, what is misinformation, what is hate speech, and what is true information.
And the entire foundation of thought that we are presented as children in America and the West more broadly is that no human beings can be trusted with that sort of decision-making power.
This is the primary realization of the Enlightenment on which all of Western culture subsequently has been based.
Which is that we cannot trust centralized institutions like monarchs or churches or aristocrats or dictators to determine for us what is truth and what is false and then to ban everything on the grounds that they consider it false and only allow information that is true.
The whole point of the Enlightenment was that we're actually endowed with faculties of reason And free speech is vital so that we can examine those dogmas of those institutions and decide for ourselves what we think is true or false.
And that is really, it's not an exaggeration to say, the power that is trying to be retrieved by the states that once again are demanding that we don't have the right to exercise our own faculties of reason.
We don't have the right to be exposed to various ideas as adults and to try and speak freely with their people in order to figure out what we believe.
No, they want to create a world, especially using the internet, where the only kind of information that is permitted to be read or heard is information of which they approve.
That's why I spent so much time on last night on the 23rd anniversary of 9-11 focused on what I, as I said, I consider to be the remarkably disturbing incident Where the Guardian had, in 2002, a letter written by Osama Bin Laden about why he claims there's so much anti-American anger in that region, namely due to our interference in that region, our militarism in that region.
And 20 years later, a bunch of young Americans on TikTok and elsewhere found that letter and were completely unaware that it existed and started thinking differently about 9-11, saying, wait a minute, is what we were told the accurate version?
Or is there another side of the story, which is what you have in a free society?
That's what you want to foster.
But because that's so scary now to every power center, they demanded that The Guardian, a news site, take down that letter so no one else could read it.
And The Guardian complied and then TikTok got pressured to banning any discussion of that.
So if you even try to discuss the Bin Laden letter on TikTok, where most young people, that's their social media platform of choice.
And they were the ones discovering it, and if you tried to talk about it anymore there, you would be banned.
The video would be deleted, your hashtags would be rendered invalid.
That is the definition of a tyrannical culture, where the governments have the power to make sure that you are exposed only to the information of which they approve, that serve their interests, and which they want you to believe, with the power to ban everything else.
And Australia is trying to do this, not directly, But indirectly, by saying that they will fine social media platforms that don't, on their own, take down or ban or delete what they regard as misinformation, the Reuters article goes on, quote, Australia said it will fine internet platforms up to 5% of their global revenue.
It's hard to overstate how, what an enormous amount that is.
I mean, think about how much Google or Facebook earns globally.
Tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars.
5% not a profit but of their overall just gross revenue for failing to prevent the spread of misinformation online.
Thus having Australia join a worldwide push to rein in borderless tech giants while angering free speech advocates.
The government said it would make tech platforms set codes of conduct governing how they must stop dangerous falsehoods from spreading.
To be approved by a regulator, the regulator would set its own standard if a platform failed to do so, then fine companies for non-compliance.
The legislation to be introduced in Parliament on Thursday targets false content that hurts election integrity or public health, calls for denouncing a group or injuring a person, or risks disrupting key infrastructure or emergency services.
The bill is part of a wide-ranging regulatory crackdown by Australia where leaders have complained that foreign domicile tech platforms are overriding the country's sovereignty and comes ahead of federal election due within a year.
Now, as I discussed with my guest last night, Brendan Carr, who is a commissioner with the FCC, this is one of the reasons why I was so concerned about what has now become the successful effort by the United States to ban basically the largest social media platform that Americans prefer to use, which is TikTok.
On sovereignty grounds.
But we can't have the Chinese controlling a platform where people get to speak to each other because it's an invasion of our sovereignty.
It's a threat to our national security.
This is exactly what all these democratic governments are now using.
The rationale they're now using to tell these social media companies, either you censor in accordance what we demand you censor, Or we will deem you a threat to our sovereignty and fine you 5% of your global income.
The article is on, quote, Already Facebook owner Meta has said it may block professional news content if it is forced to pay royalties, while X, formerly Twitter, has removed most content moderation since being bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.
Quote, Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to the safety and well-being of Australians.
As well as to our democracy, society, and economy, said Communications Minister Michelle Rowland in a statement.
Doing nothing and allowing this problem to fester is not an option.
So just think about how Orwellian that formulation is.
She's saying free speech is a threat to our democracy.
The only way we can save our democracy is if you empower us to determine which ideas are permissible and which ones are prohibited.
And I say we're evolving on purpose because all of us, in the U.S., the U.K., Europe, Canada, were given a book to read in high school or early in college that is intended to instruct us about what tyranny and authoritarianism is.
The classic George Orwell novel, 1984, from the mid-20th century, and part of the feature of this tyrannical government that he created in order to warn about how authoritarianism functions, Was what he called the Ministry of Truth, the part of the government that determines for us what is true and what is false, and therefore bans anything they deem false on the grounds that false information has no value.
It's highly destructive.
And because we're inculcated with that, that's why when the U.S.
government tried very directly to appoint a disinformation czar, that preposterous liberal cartoon named Nini Yankovich, as disinformation czar within the Department of Homeland Security, that was simply a bridge too far.
The backlash was too great for that because we're at least still in our DNA is this idea that government shouldn't be doing this and yet around the rest of the world, And increasingly, even in the United States, there's more and more not just acceptance, but desire to have the government play this role.
Now, the other thing I want to just note here is the irony of Australia doing this, because Australia was probably the country that became the most fanatical about COVID They would, if you tried to get into Australia, they would force you to stay in a closed quarantine for two weeks.
And people who didn't wear masks were forcibly put into these camps where they were isolated and kept there by force for weeks at a time.
And there was almost no debate permitted in Australia.
And one of the most important things that I think happened during the COVID debate in particular was that there was a lot of information that was deemed false
And that governments therefore demanded be censored, that even Mark Zuckerberg, who complied with a lot of those demands, ended up admitting last year, and also on the Joe Rogan show, the ideas that these governments wanted banned on the ground that they were disinformation, either, in Mark Zuckerberg's words, were reasonably debatable, or even true, questioning the dangers and efficacy of the vaccine, the origins of the virus.
Remember, early on, it was decreed true.
by Anthony Fauci and his crowd in that Lancet article, that they knew for certain the truth about the origin of COVID.
Namely, it had nothing to do with any lab leak.
It had nothing to do with scientists.
It was just simply a naturally occurring virus that zoonotically skipped from animals into humans.
They had no idea if that was true, but they said they knew that it was true.
And any attempt to dispute that was banned.
It would get you banned from the internet at the insistence of the US government on the grounds that that information is false and harmful.
And here we are now, three years later, and major parts of the U.S.
government, including the FBI and the Commerce Department, which investigates a lot of these issues, parts of the health agency, now say it's far more likely than not that the COVID pandemic started from a lab leak in China as opposed to naturally occurring through animal to human transmission.
So just think about how menacing that is, how sinister it is that Governments during the COVID pandemic exploited people's fears to get information censored because they called it disinformation that in fact was actually true information.
The disinformation was coming from those governments and what they wanted to ensure was that nobody could question or dissent from the information they were disseminating that in many cases was highly dubious and in many cases simply false.
And that's the point, is that of course, as I said, ideally, we'd all love to live in a world where no disinformation or false ideas exist.
The problem is that no human beings are trustworthy or competent to make that determination, which is why, since the Enlightenment, we've always believed that those determinations should be made by each of us, not by our rulers, using the faculties of reason we have, which in turn require the right of free speech.
Hear from ABC News in Australia yesterday, a little bit more detail on what's going on there.
The media watchdog will have more power to force tech companies to crack down on disinformation under the new bill.
Quote, under the changes, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA, would have additional information gathering, record keeping, code registration and standard making powers that would allow them to ensure social media platforms are meeting their obligations.
The proposed legislation has been reworked since the draft bill was released last year with initial exemptions for government content and politically authorized material scrap.
Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland, as you can see, she's someone at the center of this, She's sort of Australia's Nina Yankovich, told the ABC that for something to be deemed information and disinformation under the laws, it would have to be both seriously harmful and verifiably false.
Who verifies it's falsehood?
She said, quote, it is a very high threshold for what constitutes serious harm.
Don't worry.
We're going to be very careful, very sparing, very restrictive with what we censor, what we call disinformation.
You can trust us, we're good people.
We're not the far right.
We're very good people.
We're good hearted, we mean well.
We're just nice people.
We may make mistakes, but it's always well-intentioned.
And so you can trust us.
We're not going to use this to censor dissent or to shield ourselves from criticism.
Now, one of the most interesting things that has happened in my life over the past couple months is when I began doing that reporting that I talked about before, where we obtained a large archive from the chambers of Alexandre de Marais, the judge who's imposing all the censorship in Brazil.
And we began reporting on the private communications inside his chambers that we were able to get on the front page of Brazilian's large newspaper.
He immediately took this criminal inquiry, this endless, indefinite, permanent criminal inquiry that he leads called the criminal inquiry into fake news.
And he declared that our reporting was fake news and was designed to weaken Brazilian institutions and therefore overthrow Brazilian democracy, which is a crime.
And so he put our reporting in our paper, the newspaper with which we did the reporting inside that criminal investigation, because of course that's how government officials will always think.
If you accuse government officials of wrongdoing, if you accuse them of being wrong or misguided or ill-intentioned, of course they're going to think that's disinformation.
That's how people are.
You go anywhere online to any random person, you accuse them of something and they're going to say that's a lie.
And that's fine for them to react that way, they just can't have the power in their hands to prevent you from saying it.
Because that is the road, the short road, that leads to tyranny.
It goes on, quote, miserable and said the disinformation spread in the wake of the Bondi stabbing attack earlier this year would have fallen under the proposed changes because it was, quote, a kind that was seriously harmful.
The laws would also cover content that urges people against taking preventive health measures like vaccines, she said, or that could encourage threats to critical infrastructure like communication towers.
In the future, if there's some new vaccine that Pfizer or some other pharmaceutical giant presents and starts pushing and selling, and if the government believes in it, there's no questioning of that allowed.
There's no arguing that it's not proven, it's not tested.
She's saying that is exactly the kind of information that we intend to proclaim to be prohibited disinformation and to require social media companies to immediately take down.
Quote, we are also talking about harms to democracy and we know that disinformation in particular when spread by rogue states of foreign actors has the potential to undermine our democracy, she said.
That's exactly the rationale that Alexandre de Moraes uses in Brazil when he wants to imprison people who criticize him.
Exactly that.
Oh, you're saying false things about me?
You're claiming I'm misguided and corrupt or in error, and I'm not.
So what you're saying is fake news because I'm doing everything right.
And by criticizing me, you're claiming I'm not doing everything right.
That's fake news.
And the intent of your criticizing me is to weaken Brazilian democracy and destroy the legitimacy of Brazilian institutions, which I represent.
And there's nothing unusual about him other than that he's been able to consolidate more unlimited power in his hands than any other judge in the Western world.
But the mentality is pervasive throughout human beings.
We all are tempted by that.
I just want to give you the kind of physical embodiment of Michelle Rowland so that you can hear in her own words how she speaks, who she is, the kinds of things she says to justify what she's doing.
Again, she's Australia's communication minister.
Here she is speaking in June on Sky News.
You've got this Perfect Storm, a good one, of bipartisanship here, and a big push from traditional media.
Are you willing to go hard on these social media companies?
Peter Dutton's already talked about pushing them where it hurts them the most, and that's when it comes to money.
Well, where it hurts them the most also, and you'll get this from whistleblowers, is transparency and accountability.
You know, honestly, I don't like to judge a book by its cover, or a human being by their physical appearance, so I'm not going to do that.
Although I think I could hear, but I do want to just sort of ask you to observe the hubris and arrogance with which she speaks.
Just like the sense of self-righteousness that she has, the certainty in every one of her beliefs, such that she really does believe that she's not just justified but noble.
To force social media companies to take down ideas she dislikes and she regards as misleading, and obviously that would include criticism of her, or face back-breaking fines, 5% of their global gross revenue, for refusing to censor in accordance with the Australian government's demands, and not just when the government tells them to remove it, but they have to do it in advance, they have to guess
what the Australian government would consider to be disinformation, misinformation, and take it down without even being told, without even being asked.
That's what they cannot tolerate.
I remember we saw how Elon Musk treated the eSafety Commissioner.
Indeed.
And I think there's no repercussions there for him.
The important thing here is that we continue.
We have a regulatory framework in place.
We have an independent regulator.
We will continue to assert Australia's sovereignty in this area.
We will continue to not only expect but assert compliance with our laws.
And we will continue to make sure that our laws are up to date and that these digital platforms are held to account in a variety of areas, everything ranging from market power misuse to the impacts on children.
Just one final question.
Are you alive to the anxiety in this area that perhaps the government's being A little bit too slow on this.
We understand the complexity, but are you trying to do this as fast as you possibly can?
This is one of the... Oh my god!
I just, that is, I didn't see that this second part of the clip until just now.
So I thought, in my naivete, That this other person interviewing, this communication minister, who I'm sure considers herself a journalist, probably has that in her job title or whatever, was going to say, do you understand the anxiety of people who are concerned that this might allow the government, people like you, to censor their beliefs because you dislike them?
I was certain that was the question that was coming.
And Sedghi said, are you concerned with the anxiety people have that you're not acting fast enough to get these ideas offline?
Can you do this faster?
Is there any way you can go faster in implementing this censorship regime?
People who work in corporate media, who consider themselves journalists, are the leading censorship advocates online.
They want these social media companies brought to heel because they believe that they're the social media companies who have empowered people to speak without them.
are the big threat to their ability to maintain a monopoly on speech.
They hate the internet, they hate big tech, they want it regulated and controlled and censored.
So that they are able once again to dictate what people hear and what they don't hear.
So I really, as she was forming that question, I was like, okay, at least she's gonna ask, like, are there any censorship concerns that are valid here?
But instead she said, do you understand the anxiety people have about this, that you're not going fast enough?
... priorities of this government.
Keeping Australians safe, that includes children, there can be no greater priority for a government.
I announced in November last year that we would bring forward this review of the Online Safety Act, not for its own sake, but to make sure that our laws were keeping up to date.
We have backed the e-safety regulator.
In fact, we quadrupled ongoing base funding for e-safety because we understood that that task was so great.
There is no one more alive to this than the Prime Minister.
He understands because he listens to people as he travels around.
He listens to parents telling them their concerns around this.
All right, now in case you haven't gotten enough of Michelle Rowland from those two prior articles where I quoted her at length as well as this video that I gifted you, just want to, how could you ever get enough of Michelle Rowland?
I personally could not.
I want to show you an appearance that she made on ABC News, Australia's ABC News, yesterday talking about these new measures and the rationale behind them.
This is very important for Australians.
It's important for our security when we've got our top spy saying that missing disinformation poses a threat to our democracy.
We also have the head of defence saying the same thing.
Our regulators saying the same thing.
And we know that some 75% of Australians are concerned about the harmful impacts of missing disinformation.
This really goes to not only protecting Australians but protecting our democratic way of life.
And when will you introduce the bill and when do you expect it to be passed?
When do you want it?
Again, just so you're sitting there talking to a government official who is obviously very passionate about censoring the internet and taking down or preventing or banning or punishing the expression of ideas she considers to be wrong and traditionally just calling yourself a journalist meant that You're politically neutral, or you're supposed to pretend to be.
I don't really believe in that, but that's the model.
But the one thing you're not neutral on are the values of free speech and a free press.
That's, of course, you call yourself a journalist, you wind yourself up, and you're going to go wherever there's threats to free speech and a free press, and you're going to oppose those.
I mean, that's not in the journalist ethos.
I don't know what is.
And you see this this person as well who worked for Australia ABC just like the woman we showed you from a couple months before on Sky News when faced with a government official.
Who is talking so pompously about the importance to protect society from things she regards as disinformation to the point where they're going to pass a law to force them to be taken down.
His only question is like, when's this coming finally?
We've been waiting for it for so long.
Like, why are you keeping us hanging?
Can you get this done?
Please get this done fast.
When will this be done by?
I intend to introduce it in this sitting.
We would prefer to have this passed this year but again this is in the hands of the Parliament.
We intend to also self-refer this to committee because being a novel bill we want this subjected to all the parliamentary scrutiny that would otherwise be afforded it.
Have you left it too late in the term?
I think what's important here is that we have done the hard yards in terms of consultation.
We released an exposure draft last year.
We consulted widely on it.
We made, even in January last year, our decision clear that we would legislate in this area.
Just first of all, just take a look at her face, please.
And think about whether you would want to live in a society, a country where this person has the power to determine for you what is truth and what is false, what is true and what is false, and then has the power to force social media companies to take down what she has decided is false.
These same officials who spread infinite amounts of disinformation about the COVID pandemic.
And All throughout the West, this is what's happening.
All throughout the democratic world, this is what's happening.
And in both interviews, we showed you, I think, the whole thing or almost all of it.
Was there a single adversarial question asked for a single difficult or challenging question about aren't we kind of concerned with the government having the power?
Wasn't this like what George Orwell wondered about in 1984 like he called it the ministry of truth when he predicted the future about how tyranny would function?
Aren't you advocating for exactly that?
Isn't there like some censorship concerns here about how this might be abused even though you're such a good person?
Like maybe one day some person who's not as good as you like some person on the right We'll get into this office and have this power and then they will abuse it for their own interest?
Is that a concern at all?
There is no hint of that.
It's not even part of the discussion from a journalistic perspective.
Now, as we started out by saying, this gets contagious.
One country sees one country doing it, the other one then does it.
Three days after France arrested the multi-billionaire founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, and unsealed an indictment against him with this extremely pernicious theory that he can be held criminally liable for what other people do on his platform.
And even though there's 900 million users, he's somehow personally responsible for monitoring all of them.
Three days later, after that happened from the BBC, Elon Musk's axe is banned in Brazil after a disinformation row.
We've covered this story many times.
But then you see here in Politico, the EU charges Elon Musk's axe for letting disinformation run wild.
There's an actual formal investigation against axe.
Basically on the grounds that they're not centric enough, that they're allowing too many false ideas to circulate.
And this is what they said, quote, "The tech mogul's platform is the first to get hit with charges under new EU social media law.
The European Union is calling Elon Musk to order over how he turned social media site X into a haven for disinformation and illegal content.
The EU Commissioner on Friday formally charged X for failing to respect EU social media law.
The platform could face a sweeping multi-million dollar euro fine and a pioneering case under the bloc's new Digital Services Act, a law to clamp down on toxic and illegal online content and algorithms.
They're going to clamp down on toxic content, toxic speech.
They're clamping down on that.
Quote, Muxx's X has been in Brussels crosshairs ever since the billionaire took over the company formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
X has been accused of letting disinformation and illegal hate speech run wild, roll out misleading authentication factors and blocking external researchers from tools to scrutinize how malicious content on the platform spreads.
Infringements of the DSA could lead to fines up to 6% of X's global revenue.
It's not just Australia, it's not just Brazil, it's not just France, it's the entire democratic world.
And here's the real point I want to make about this, which is that if you create a law that renders the top executives or main shareholders of a social media company criminally liable, or even just civilly liable, but especially criminally liable,
If the government can claim that there's some content on the site that is illegal as disinformation or hate speech or misinformation or whatever, what are social media companies going to do?
The same question is if the government has the power to fine them 5% of their global revenue for failing to remove what the government considers disinformation, obviously they're going to err on the side of safety.
And they're gonna take everything down, everything down, other than the... I'm suppressing a sneeze.
I might let it go.
We'll see how that turns out, but I'm just giving you a roadmap for what's going on.
But anyway, I think this is such an important point, which is that if those social media companies are threatened with those kind of punishments, just put yourself in their position.
What would you do?
You would take down everything.
That is possibly considered by these governments to be too much dissent, too harmful of an idea, to be misinformation, to be false.
The only things you're going to lead up, the only things you're going to feel safe to leave up are the most banal, conformist, government-approved messaging.
Praising leaders, cheering their policies, cheering their wars.
Because you're going to be petrified that anything else might be deemed misinformation by one government or the other, and then you're going to be the next Pavel Durov who gets arrested as soon as you step onto one of those countries' soil.
Or you're going to be hit with some massive fine that even for a billionaire is a serious threat.
That's the point of this whole framework.
The point of this framework is to incentivize social media companies to take down everything that could possibly offend government officials.
And, you know, at this point, as I always say, it's impossible for me to do anything more to convey the dangers of it other than describe what's happening.
I think it really does speak for itself.
We've talked often about how modern day life has created all sorts of previously rare disorders in terms of mental health.
There's all sorts of anxiety disorders and insomnia and depression.
People are stuffed with all sorts of pharmaceutical products and medications to deal with this because modern day life segregates us.
It leaves us feeling isolated.
Everything through technology severs real connection.
All those reasons that I'm sure you're familiar with and have of kids are now being pumped with Adderall or antidepressant drugs to deal with this.
And those pharmaceutical products and solutions can work in some cases, but it's really not the ideal case.
If there's a way to not use these pharmaceutical products to manage the stresses of your life, then I think it's highly recommended to try those alternatives.
I think it's highly recommended to try those alternatives.
Some people use yoga, meditation.
Some people use yoga, meditation.
But one of the products that I've used in my own life that has really helped me get away from a lot of medication for insomnia or for other sorts of things like that is CBD, which comes from CBD Distillery.
It's really been a real change.
I think it will be for you.
I know it has been for everybody with whom I've spoken.
It's a targeted formulation that are made from the highest clean quality ingredients.
There's no fluff, no fillers, just pure, effective CBD solutions designed to help support your health.
And for those of you who don't know, CBD is one of the ingredients in marijuana.
But the active narcotic in marijuana is THC that is not anywhere in these products.
This product is purely organic.
It doesn't have the effect of Marijuana or anything like that, it can help you with anxiety, it can help you with depression, it can help you with pain, it can help you with insomnia, and the good part about it is that it's all natural and organic.
In two non-clinical surveys, 81% of customers experienced more calm, 80% said CBD helped them with pain after physical activity, and an impressive 90% said they slept better with CBD.
If you struggle with a health concern and haven't found relief or you're relying too much on medications, you can make the change.
Like I started to do with CB Distillery and with over 2 million customers and a solid 100% money-back guarantee, if you feel the product's not working the way you expect it to or want it to, CB Distillery really is the source to trust.
I have a 20% discount to get you started.
If you visit cbdistillery.com and use the promo code Glenn, you can get 20% off your order.
That's cbdistillery.com, code GLEN, and the code GLEN will get you 20% off your first order.
The war in Ukraine is headed pretty quickly, just in a few months, to its third full year, to completing its third year, heading into its fourth year.
And there is, heading into its third full year, I should say.
And there is not only no end in sight, but this war, which has always been dangerous from the start, Because it involves a country with the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet, which is Russia, on one side, and the United States, the second largest nuclear stockpile on the planet, on the other.
Two countries that have previously brought the war to the world at the brink of an extinction-level nuclear Armageddon.
This war is only getting worse.
It's only getting more unstable.
It's only getting more dangerous.
It's also getting worse and worse and worse for Ukraine.
Originally, the claim of Western leaders, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the entire Democratic Party, much of the West, was, oh no, we're going to stay in this war until the very end.
And the end is defined only by one thing, total victory.
And by total victory, we mean the expulsion of every single Russian troop from every centimeter of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which the Russians annexed in 2014 following the U.S.
and Western-backed coup that removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine and replaced him with someone chosen by Victoria Nuland.
And because of its access to the Black Sea and its general strategic value to Russia to guard against attacks by the West, they regard Crimea and attempts to take away Crimea from them as existential.
They would absolutely use nuclear weapons to prevent that, like any nuclear power would if they feel that there's a war against them, to take something away from them or to threaten directly the survival of their country.
So the definition of victory from the beginning was impossible.
Russia would not give up Crimea.
They would use nuclear weapons beforehand.
And the idea that the U.S.
and NATO and Ukraine are going to expel Russian forces from this country is preposterous, always has been, and especially is now given that Russia continues to advance westward to chop up and eat up more Ukrainian territory as the Ukrainian front line just continues to collapse for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that Ukrainians no longer want to fight in this war.
There's no fighters left.
The ones they forced to go to the front line at the tip of a weapon are completely untrained.
They're not fighters.
They get eliminated very quickly.
They know they're being used as cannon fodder.
It's a very grim situation.
And the Western response is not to try and facilitate a diplomatic resolution to get out of this war and to get it stopped.
It's the opposite.
It's to keep escalating every time things get worse.
Here from the New York Times today, Russian forces are stepping up attacks on a strategic city, Ukraine says.
So it's not coming from the Kremlin.
It's coming from the Ukrainians themselves.
And this has been going on, this warning, for a long time.
And now the Russians are there.
And it's a crucial strategic city.
Bombardments are increasing in and around Poprovsk in eastern Ukraine, with water supplies now out, while Russian troops simultaneously press a new counterattack in the Kursk region, which is the part of Russia that Ukraine is occupying, thinking that Russia was going to divert all its troops there, and that would fortify the Ukrainian front line, and none of that has happened, obviously.
Quote, warning that Russian troops are now on the city's doorstep.
About five miles away, officials renewed call for all residents to evacuate.
The city's population has dwindled from around 62,000 at the beginning of August to 18,000 people by Wednesday, local and regional authorities said.
At the same time, Moscow's forces are now pressing a counterattack toward Ukrainian positions in the Kursk region of Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday.
That statement came after posts on social media by Russian military bloggers and commentary by analysts that Ukraine had lost control of several villages in recent fighting.
Those who remain in Pokrovsk now must rely on water from wells dug near apartment blocks, according to residents.
Already much of the city is without natural gas or electricity.
Quote, the situation is dire and won't improve anytime soon, said the head of the Ukrainian military administration for the Donetsk region.
And he said that in a post on the Telegram messaging app of the loss of water in Pokrovsk.
Quote, leaving is the only smart option.
So it's just a question of time before the Russians take over the city.
One of the reasons why this town is so important strategically is because the Ukrainians use it, use the rail that passes through it, uses the roads that passes through it to supply their troops that are fighting in Eastern Ukraine.
And there's a very good chance that once the Russians take over the city, those supply lines will collapse.
And there's also a good chance that Ukrainian troops that form the front line in Eastern Ukraine might actually be encircled by Russian forces.
Nothing looks good from a Ukrainian perspective in this war.
Nothing.
And that's the Ukrainians saying that themselves.
Here's The Economist from earlier this month.
Quote, Danger in Donbass as Ukraine's front line falters.
Russian fighters are trying to encircle the defenders.
Quote, If you imagine that the front lines in Donbass are well defined, you should think again.
Alexander, an officer with Ukraine's 79th Brigade, watches the battlefield near the front line of Kirokov on control room screens every day.
The Russians are mostly in front of Ukrainian positions, he says, but sometimes cause havoc kilometers behind them.
For the wretched pairs of soldiers in scattered positions at the edge of what he calls the kill zone, it is more often not a one-way mission.
As many as 18 soldiers might die to dislodge two war-and-hungry Ukrainians, but eventually We are exchanging lives and territory for time and the opponent's resources.
Recently, the Russian pressure has grown more insistent and wider, spanning a front from Poprovsk to Volodar in the south.
This, Ukrainian soldiers believe, is evidence their enemy has been reinforced with new reserves.
The wide front gives the Russians more options to attack, said Mike Temper, the nom de guerre of a mortar battery commander with the 21st Battalion of Ukraine's Separate Presidential Brigade.
They are using their numerical advantage to see gaps in our defense and develop where they can.
So these are very Reliable sources, if you want to look at things from a Ukrainian perspective.
This is coming from media outlets that are vocally in favor of fueling the war in Ukraine.
The New York Times and The Economist are coming from Ukrainian sources warning of how much advances the Russians are making, how brittle the Ukrainian front line is, how it's only a matter of time before they expand more and more.
And in the face of that, you would think that the West would start contemplating How a peace deal can be forged, how some kind of resolution to this disastrous war for Ukraine that's destroying their country, eroding their population, taking on an entire generation of people who are forced to the front line, how this war can finally end.
I know the West loves this war.
They think that they're being clever, they don't have to die in the war, they just send unwilling Ukrainians to die in it, and they're weakening Russia.
And I've said from the beginning, from February of 2022, that the goal of the United States, the goal of the West, is not to save Ukraine.
The goal of the West, the goal of the United States, is to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of their own geostrategic interests in weakening Russia.
And not only were they going to save Ukraine, it was going to be destroyed.
It was just a question of time given just on the size issue alone.
And in the face of all that, here's what Joe Biden, whatever that means, or whoever that now refers to, is going to do.
Quote, Biden is poised to approve Ukraine's use of long-range Western missiles in Russia, long-range weapons in Russia.
Quote, President Biden appears on the verge of clearing the way for Ukraine to launch long-range Western weapons deep inside Russian territory as long as it doesn't use arms provided by the United States.
European officials said.
Now, that whole formulation is very odd to me.
That Joe Biden appears on the verge of clearing the use of European weapons, Western weapons, deep inside Russia, as long as it's not arms provided by the United States.
Why does Joe Biden have the power to determine how the weapons that are provided by the Europeans are used?
The obvious answer is because the European countries are vassals of the United States.
They do what we tell them to do.
So what Biden is essentially saying is, I'm no longer going to object or ban or stand in the way of Europe, our NATO allies, providing long range missiles that the Ukrainians are permitted to use to strike deep inside Moscow, deep inside Russia.
It's hard to overstate what an escalation that is.
The only thing short of doing that to providing weapons, missiles, long-range missiles that can be used to strike deep inside Russia, which obviously the Russians understand and know is being authorized and funded and fueled by the United States and their NATO allies, is sending combat troops to go fight the Russian army in Ukraine.
That's pretty much all that's left.
Do you feel comfortable assuming the risks of whatever might happen by having Western weapons and missiles landing in Moscow or St.
Petersburg or deep inside Russia?
All over Ukraine, the risks that that obviously produces.
The New York Times goes on, quote, the issue, which has long been debated in the White House, is coming to a head on Friday with the first visit to Washington by Britain's new prime minister, Keir Starmer.
Britain has already signaled to the United States that it is eager to let Ukraine use its, quote, storm shadow long range missiles to strike at Russian military targets far from the Ukrainian border.
But the British, being little poodles in the United States, want explicit permission from Mr. Biden in order to demonstrate a coordinated strategy with the United States and France, which makes a similar missile.
American officials say Mr. Biden has not made a decision, but we'll hear from Mr. Stormer on Friday.
Every time this has happened, these kind of articles, Biden poised to now do X, whereas X was previously off the table when it comes to Ukraine, always a test balloon to make sure that there was no Unexpected opposition there never is and then Biden eventually announces that that's exactly what's going to happen.
If you are Vladimir Putin and the British are saying we're going to supply the Ukrainians with the long-range missiles and tell them to use them to strike deep inside Russia, why would you not take your own long-range missiles and strike deep inside London and in the UK?
Why would one major country allow this puny little twerpy country, the UK, to enable deep inside your own country of Russia to be attacked with their missiles and then not do anything back to the British and to NATO generally, and of course the United States.
That's the game that's being played all over Ukraine.
Reuters today says, quote, Putin says that the West will be fighting directly with Russia if it lets Kiev use long-range missiles.
Can that be any clearer?
President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the West would be directly fighting with Russia if it allowed Ukraine to strike Russian territory with Western-made long-range missiles, a move he said would alter the nature and scope of the conflict.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pleading with Kiev's allies for months to let Ukraine fire Western missiles, including long-range U.S.
Atacams and British Storm Shadows, deep into Russian territory to limit Moscow's ability to launch attacks.
In some of his most hawkish comments on the subject yet, This is hawkish from Putin, but not from the West.
In some of his most hawkish comments on the subject yet, Putin said such a move would drag the country supplying Kiev with long-range missiles directly into the war, since satellite targeting data and the actual programming of the missiles' flight paths would have to be done by NATO military personnel because Kiev does not have the capabilities itself.
Quote, so this is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not.
It is a question of deciding whether or not NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict.
Putin told Russian state TV.
Imagine what would happen if China said we're giving long-range missiles to Venezuela and Cuba With the explicit purpose of telling them that they can use those to strike deep into American territory.
Do you think we might hold China or Russia responsible if they did that?
Probably we would.
Certainly we would.
There's no question we would.
And by hold them responsible, I mean we would consider that a war not being launched and waged solely or even primarily by Venezuela and Cuba, but instead by the powers backing them and giving those weapons, giving those missiles to those countries with the specific intent that they use them to strike deep into American soil.
And while, of course, the pretext is going to be, oh, we're just going to strike Russian military installations, we've already seen The Ukrainians launching drone attacks in and near Moscow that struck civilian apartment buildings, that killed Russian civilians, and that's going to happen at an infinitely higher rate when you're talking about these long-range missiles.
How long and how much is Russia going to withstand that without escalating the war and holding the West responsible?
You're talking about the country with the largest nuclear stockpile.
You're talking about a war that is failing, collapsing.
And out of this desperation not to suffer the humiliation of losing, we are now on the verge of doing something that the Russians, quite rationally and expectedly, would consider to be the immediate direct involvement as active belligerence to the United States and NATO allies.
Now, inside Ukraine, their view of the war is a lot different than our view in the West because they're the ones who actually have to fight and die in it and watch their entire country be destroyed.
And there's always been a big problem with resistance, with people fleeing and deserting.
But as this war has gone on, it's gotten far, far worse, which is only compounding the Ukrainian inability to fight off the Russian army.
In The Intercept, which occasionally does still publish a worthwhile article when sort of forced to by outside contributors on September 11th, the ...
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, sorry.
My former colleague at The Intercept, who now is with Just Foreign Policy, which is an outstanding foreign policy advocacy group, Aida Chavez, she published this article in The Intercept about how much worse the problem with Ukrainian desertion is getting.
Now, the headline is a headline that I'm sure was chosen by The Intercept, which is, quote, progressives were pilloried for wanting to end the Ukraine war in 2020.
Things have only gotten worse.
Which progressives were trying to end the war in 2022?
Every single member of the Democratic Party, including on the progressive wing, AOC, Bernie, every single one of them, voted to fuel and fund this war and never has raised a single syllable of objection since.
There are some people on the left Not the relevant, mainstream Democratic Party left that were opposed to it, but almost all of the opposition to this war has come from the populist right wing of the Republican Party.
Those are just facts.
I mean, like six dozen or seven dozen Republican House members voted against funding the war in Ukraine, predicting that this would happen, something like 11 or 12 Republican senators, and that's it.
Not a single Democratic member of Congress ever did.
But leave that aside.
As I said, I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that that is a intercept headline designed to not appear to be defending the right, the worst sin there is.
And then it says, with tens of thousands more killed and Ukraine's leveraged tanking, the quickly withdrawn House Democrats' letter is proving prescient.
So I understand what this is referring to, but let's focus on the part about the unwillingness of Ukraine to fight, not which side gets credit, because I just set out those facts that make that very clear.
Quote, during the fall of 2022, Western support for defending Ukraine was achieving results that few had thought possible.
A successful Ukrainian counteroffensive had pushed Russia out of Kharkiv, and it was on the verge of being forced out of Kherson, too.
The successes were so rousing, That President Joe Biden began to worry about Russia getting desperate and the potential risk of a nuclear escalation.
In private remarks at a fundraiser, Biden reportedly said that the risk of nuclear, quote, Armageddon was the highest it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After news of those comments broke, 30 progressive Democrats issued a letter echoing Biden's concerns and urging the administration to pair support for Ukraine's successes with, quote, a proactive democratic push to seek a ceasefire.
The signatories were unequivocal that they supported Biden's commitment to Ukraine.
A draft of the letter had even come in for criticism from the grassroots support of diplomacy for its staunch support for sending billions of arms into Ukraine.
It all seemed very reasonable, especially amid talk of nuclear war.
The lawmakers were torn to shreds.
Simply for saying we still support the war in Ukraine.
We still want to fund it.
We just would like to have you start also pursuing a diplomatic resolution given that Joe Biden himself has said that the risk of nuclear Armageddon has never been higher as a rule of this war since the Cuban Missile Crisis where the U.S.
came very close with Russia Today, however, the war is stuck.
The momentum has shifted, and tens of thousands more Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives, and even members of the foreign policy establishment are coming to realize it.
In 2022, the progressives have been pilloried and cowled.
Today, they look more prescient than ever.
I strongly resist this idea that the prescient warnings about the war in Ukraine were coming from progressives, just because a few of them, a couple dozen, wrote a letter saying, we support the war in Ukraine, keep funding it, keep fueling it, just please try and see if you can get a diplomatic resolution.
The only real opposition from the start has come from where I said it came, but the more important part here is that the I do think parts of the foreign policy community are starting to recognize what a complete disaster this has been, which is completely predictable given all the people we've had on our show from John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs from the start and so many others who have laid out exactly what happened here.
I mean, I remember two and a half years ago, John Mearsheimer saying, Ukraine is going to be left as a rump state.
The Russians are going to absolutely do whatever they have to to grab as much of their territory as possible.
They had 20 percent, they have 25 percent.
And he said, it's just going to be a rump state as a buffer zone between Russia and the West and not a functioning state.
A video emerged where this interviewer, Mikhail Zygar, interviewed Victoria Nuland, who used to be Dick Cheney's top foreign policy advisor, then ran Ukraine for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and now runs Ukraine for Joe Biden, the only time she was out of power was when Donald Trump was in office.
She's now left the government, I think in part because she didn't get the promotion she wanted.
She wanted to be Secretary of State.
It didn't look like she was going to get it.
So she's out for now.
But she's still the architect, one of the main architects, not only of the war in Ukraine, but also the 10-year earlier coup that led to the ousting of the democratically elected president who was too close to Moscow in the view of Victoria Nuland and replaced by somebody she chose who the U.S. could work in control.
And she's asked here about reports that at the very start, there were active, robust negotiations between Ukrainians and Russians to resolve this before it became this war.
And that the UK under Boris Johnson, especially the US as well, intervened and put a stop to those negotiations to make sure that this war continued instead and wasn't peacefully resolved.
And here's what she said when asked.
There was a story first told by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that both sides were really close to the end, to the successful end of the negotiations, and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson interfered and stopped Ukrainians prevented Ukrainians from signing the deal.
And then Ukrainian representative Arahami kind of confirmed it.
Yes, he said in an interview that there was some kind of advice from Boris Johnson to stop negotiating and to win this war militarily.
Where is the myth?
Where is the truth?
I mean, look at that nauseating grin, but I just want to make clear what that question was.
He wasn't just asking, "Hey, by the way, were there some negotiations that you stopped He was citing extremely knowledgeable firsthand sources, such as the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, Naftali Bennett, and even high level members of the Ukrainian parliament who have said publicly, there was a ton of progress between Moscow and Kiev early in the war, February and March, where essentially Ukraine would agree not to seek NATO membership.
It would provide a sort of semi-autonomous zone in the eastern part of Ukraine as well as in Crimea, where, by the way, the people of Crimea, the people in eastern Ukraine, identify far more with Russia than they do with the Zelensky government in Ukraine.
And then essentially it would assuage Russia's concerns without having the Ukrainians face a destruction of a generation of men.
by dying in a war and the destruction of their country and leaving it as a rump state.
So there's people with very reliable knowledge who have said explicitly that that was happening and that it was the British and Americans who intervened and put a stop to those negotiations and that's what, as she sits there and grins, this is what the interviewer asked for and here's what she said.
The truth.
Relatively late in the game, The Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going.
And it became clear to us, clear to the Brits, clear to others, that Putin's main condition was buried In an annex to this document that they were working on, and it included limits on the precise kinds of weapon systems that Ukraine could have after the deal, such that Ukraine would basically be neutered as a military force.
No, let me just say, she's saying that, first of all, notice here that the whole premise, the conceit of that entire answer is, oh, the Ukrainians were really dumb.
They thought they had a chance to make a deal with the Russians.
But we, their masters in London and Washington, we saw something they didn't understand, that buried in this appendix was the real Putin goal, namely that he wanted to limit the amount of weapons that were present on Ukrainian soil.
Precisely because the West has long been saying that they're going to make Ukraine part of NATO.
The West changed their government in Kiev, right on the other side of the most sensitive border.
And in case you think that that's some kind of unprecedented condition, the reason the Cuban Missile Crisis happened is because the Cuban government, after the failed Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 to overthrow the Castro government, which the CIA led and failed to accomplish, Wanted security against future U.S.
attempts to invade and engineer a coup.
And so they asked the Soviet Union, will you put nuclear weapons in our country as protection against U.S.
invasions?
And the Soviet Union did.
Had nuclear submarines around Cuba.
That was what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about.
The United States said, we will absolutely not accept the presence of these weapons in a country 90 miles from our southernmost border in Florida.
And not only did that almost lead to war, it almost led to a nuclear war.
It was just a matter of luck that it didn't.
Just to give you a sense for how dangerous these things can spiral.
So of course the Ukrainians don't want extremely threatening weapons because, the Russians rather, in Ukraine, because of what is happening now.
Namely that they now have very sophisticated long-range missiles that are now being given the green light to shoot deep into Russian territory.
I mean, I assume those were negotiable.
Those limits are all over the place.
We obviously don't allow certain kinds of weapons to be in certain countries where we feel threatened by it.
We do that all the time.
But the idea that she would sit there so smugly and be like, yeah, we did.
They asked our advice.
They didn't ask her advice.
They knew that they had to do what they were told by Washington and Britain because that's who was going to fund them and arm them and protect them.
There wasn't an equal relationship.
They had to do what they were told.
And the message from London and Washington is she's admitting while she smirks.
It's like, yeah, we looked at this deal and we're like, no, you can't do that.
You're gonna have to let your country go up in flames.
Sorry.
This is not a deal we can accept.
There were no similar constraints on Russia.
Russia wasn't required to pull back, Russia wasn't required to have a buffer zone from the Ukrainian border, wasn't required to have the same constraints on its military facing Ukraine.
And so, people inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal, and it was at that point that it fell apart.
It fell apart because people inside Ukraine, the ones who were asking the advice, also she said people outside Ukraine, meaning me, the master of Ukraine, she's in there smirking over the fact that she sabotaged a peace deal that had it been permitted to go forward, not only would have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in American money, which no one cares about, just keep pouring that into Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing, that's what it's for,
But also would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives of both young Russian men and young Ukrainian men, would have averted the complete destruction of Ukraine, what will be the reconstruction of it through JP Morgan and BlackRock and a whole bunch of other vulture funds that will profiteer off it at the expense of the American taxpayer as usual.
She's proud of the fact that she intervened with Boris Johnson to veto any negotiations.
She wanted that war to go forward.
She desperately wanted it.
And they admit it now.
They say, look, this is a great war for us.
We haven't had to sacrifice a single one of our soldiers or a single one of our citizens.
We're just forcing Ukrainians to die.
And if they don't want to fight, we're taking them at gunpoint.
We're putting them in prison.
We're threatening to execute them if they desert.
They're the only ones who are dying, so it's great for us, and we get to weaken Russia at the same time, even though Russia's not actually being weakened.
So this should forever end any doubt about this obviously truthful historical narrative that the reason why this war wasn't diplomatically resolved at the beginning was because Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson vetoed it because they knew they weren't going to be the ones who suffered.
Instead, they were going to be the ones who benefited.
All right, last night we showed you various interviews that I found very compelling and revealing that Michael Tracy and Megan O'Rourke conducted in what's called the spin room after the presidential debate, where a bunch of surrogates for each candidate go to say why they won, etc.
And being real journalists, they didn't use the opportunity to ask those expected questions like, who do you think won the debate?
And why did your candidate do better?
And what was the most important exchange?
They used the opportunity to confront them with a lot of inconsistencies.
In their claimed worldview, which is what journalists should do.
Getting back to those interviews with that Australian communications minister.
So we're proud of the fact that the people we send to these events actually do real journalism.
And there were some amazing confrontations that Michael and Megan were able to foster that weren't just screaming matches, but were extremely illuminating.
And we have a few more for you.
Last night we showed you, I think, almost entirely interviews with Democrats, except for Anthony Scaramucci, who's been a lifelong Republican, worked for Bush and Cheney, was in the Trump White House for about seven seconds as communications manager, but now is a Commonwealth surrogate.
And when Michael Tracy asked Scaramucci about how is it that you're praising, Kamala's praising the endorsement of Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney is the person you were calling, you know, a war criminal and a coup monger just 20 years ago.
Scaramucci said, oh, you're obviously a hard right guy because now in our newly aligned political culture, left and right have no meaning except that apparently if you dislike Dick Cheney and you point out his war crimes and all the reasons why he should not be held up as some sort of noble and reliable arbiter of who should be president, if you remind people of the Iraq war or the assault on civil liberties and the war on terror, that now means you're on the far right.
Just like if you advocate free speech, that also codes as far right.
That's just a sign of how meaningless those So we want to show you excerpts of several of these interviews, including with the Senator from Florida, Rick Scott, the Senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, the Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, as well as South Carolina's other Senator, Tim Scott.
And then we have a couple of other members of Congress and the Democratic Party who, time permitting, will show and we'll put all the full animated videos on Locals for our Locals subscribers to be able to watch.
But here's the package we put together for you of the interviews with these Republican lawmakers.
Hi, Senator Scott.
We're with Rumble.
Can we have a quick minute with you?
How are you doing?
What's your name?
My name is Michael Tracy.
This is Megan.
Hi.
So today, Secretary Blinken said that the Biden administration is considering allowing Ukraine to use U.S.
munitions to strike even longer-range targets inside of Russia.
Is that prudent in your mind?
And how would the Trump administration, a future Trump administration, handle questions about what constraints to impose or not on Ukraine?
First off, I think everything that Biden and Blinken and Harris have touched is a disaster.
If Trump was president, Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine.
If Trump was president, Iran wouldn't have had all the money, so the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas wouldn't have had the money and the resources, and Hamas wouldn't have invaded.
If Trump was president, I don't think we'd have all the problems we have in Latin America.
I think what Biden, Harris, and Blinken need to do is decide, do they want Ukraine to win or not?
They've held back weapons.
They've tried to run the war.
So if they want Ukraine to win, let Ukraine win.
If they don't want Ukraine to win, stop giving them weapons. - And looking forward, I mean, we can-- - I think it's so notable there that there is a faction of the Republican Party, the more MAGA, populist right faction, that has been critical of the Biden administration on the grounds that we shouldn't be in Ukraine at all.
We shouldn't be funding that war or that money should be used for improving the lives of our citizens at home, that that is not a threat to our national security, who governs various provinces in eastern Ukraine, which is my view from the beginning as well.
But there are a lot of Republicans who are more in the establishment wing of that party, like Rick Scott, who have to criticize Biden and Harris because that's part of his job of being a Republican senator on everything, including Ukraine.
But notice that his criticism of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is not that they put too much American funds into Ukraine, not that they funded this war too far and too much, not that they pursued a very dangerous confrontation with Russia.
Their criticism of the Biden-Harris administration is the opposite, that somehow they haven't done enough for Ukraine, that they haven't given enough to Ukraine, that they put too many constraints on Ukraine.
I guess from the position of Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott, We should have told the Ukrainians, not only are they free to use American long-range missiles to strike Moscow, blow up the Kremlin, use American weapons.
We should have given them American weapons, long-range American missiles, and told them to do it at the start.
In other words, his criticism of it is that Biden-Harris haven't done enough for Ukraine.
Here's the same Rick Scott when asked about our ongoing funding and arming of Israel's military and its war as well.
Give them weapons.
And looking forward, I mean, we can look in the past and say whether a different approach might have prevented the war, but looking forward to a potential second Trump administration, would there be fewer constraints imposed on Ukraine involving questions like this?
Would that be your preference?
It's up to one person.
It'll be up to Donald Trump.
Right, but what insight do we have in terms of what his policy approach would be there?
I think you'd have to ask him.
I'd love to!
If you look at his record, we were not at war when he was president.
And so he did a variety of things to get us out of war.
Well, he did arm Ukraine, right?
And that was one of the big grievances cited by Putin as to why he even went to war in the first place.
The U.S.
was sending lethal arms to Ukraine.
Well, if we weren't at war, first off, Putin didn't invade when Trump was president.
This all started with the Afghan debacle.
Right after Biden became president and Harris became vice president.
We'll have to see what happens when Trump wins.
What Biden has done has been a disaster for Ukraine, for Iran, for Israel.
The world's a more dangerous place because of Biden-Harris plan.
So Trump addressed a gathering of the Republican-Jewish coalition last week.
Miriam Adelson introduced him.
She's spending a lot of money on this campaign, I think a minimum of $100 million.
What is her agenda, if you want to put it that way, with regard to a second Trump administration?
What are her policy priorities, and what is she looking for Trump to give her with her investment of that amount of money, which is pretty staggering?
I think it's pretty clear Trump was the most pro-Israel president in the history of this country.
Miriam Adelson is somebody that supports Israel.
If you look at all the problems that Israel's having right now, none of them happened under Trump.
It all happened under Biden and Harris.
She wants a president that's going to support Israel.
Support Israel is kind of a cliche, though.
What specific Specifically, would that mean on a tangible level, would she want the U.S.
to authorize Israel to maybe annex the full West Bank?
There are some people in Israel who call for that.
I think it's real simple.
Don't support Iran.
Don't appease Iran, which causes all the problems, and support Israel.
On Iran, very quickly, and I'll let you go.
The Trump administration had this policy of maximum pressure on Iran, imposing— They had that policy, and it worked.
Well, it didn't work if the objective was ultimately to change the Iranian government, right?
And that seems to be what a lot of people would prefer to ultimately happen.
It created a lot of immiseration within Iran.
The economy obviously was very damaged by that.
In Iran, couldn't import lots of goods, even for medical supplies.
So would we expect sanctions to be used as prolifically in a second Trump administration as in a first?
And Biden continued many of those sanctions.
I know you quibble with how vigorously he enforced them on the oil exports.
He didn't.
Iran has so much money right now because Biden didn't enforce it.
That's why Hamas had the money to go into Iran, why the Houthis are still shooting at Americans, and why Hizballah is shooting rockets into Israel.
It's all because Biden and Harris have had this appeasement policy towards the Ayatollah.
When Trump wins, I hope he has maximum pressure against Iran.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Senator Scott.
Senator, there was a moment when Donald Trump referenced the deal that was brokered between Mike Pompeo and the Taliban in 2019-2020, and Donald Trump effectively said that his intent apparently was to renege on the deal or claim that the Taliban had violated the provisions of that deal and therefore maintain a U.S.
force presence in Afghanistan.
Does that mean that the war effectively would have not ended if Trump had won a second term?
Donald Trump's point was that he negotiated a deal through Mike Pompeo that the Taliban did renege on.
There's a brand new report out—it goes hundreds of pages—that shows how they reneged on it.
He said he showed a picture of the Taliban leader's house to him.
Why?
The message was, we know where you live.
We will kill you if you harm the hair of a single American soldier—the exact opposite of what Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have done.
So U.S.
troops would have remained in Afghanistan under Trump, receiving incoming fire, rocket attacks on Bagram Air Base and so forth?
The Taliban, like most other foreign leaders, would have been afraid to renege on their deal with Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump certainly wouldn't have left all those people behind, left all those weapons and equipment behind either.
Senator Graham, tonight Donald Trump said that Israel would cease to exist if Kamala Harris was elected.
Hasn't the Biden-Harris administration supplied an enormous amount of munitions to Israel?
How would it cease to exist if Kamala Harris gets in office and continues the same policy?
The biggest threat to the Jewish state is Iran, and they've let Iran run wild.
They were broke.
They were in a box.
And they relieved the sanctions.
And the root of all evil in the Mideast is Iran.
And these folks have let Iran run wild and has threatened the very existence of the Jewish state.
If the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, I think they will use it.
I don't think they're going to stop unless somebody makes them stop and they're not worried about...
Tonight Donald Trump said that if Kamala Harris were elected, if Kamala Harris were elected, Israel would cease to exist.
How could that be the case if the Biden-Harris administration has supplied such an extraordinary amount of munitions to Israel?
Actually, I'd say the reverse of that is actually true.
That the Biden administration has slow-walked the resources necessary for Israel to have already won the war, number one.
Number two, the first tweet that came out, the first communication that came out of the White House on October the 7th was actually telling Israel to stand down.
I would rather have a president who stands strong, firm, and completely on the side of right and standing with our greatest ally in the Middle East, Israel.
That did not happen under the Biden-Harris administration.
So, watch.
Sorry.
Okay.
We're fumbling around.
So, it was clear that the fact of the matter is Donald Trump has been a strong, clear supporter of Israel.
And thank you.
And Biden-Harris have been...
Thank you.
Have a good night.
...kept in their support.
So, this is the tension that I don't think there's much of a resolution for inside the Republican Party, which is they know their only chance to win is with Trump.
God.
They know that Trump has for eight years articulated a foreign policy that is much more of an aversion to conflict and war and to military fighting.
He has been vehement in his denunciation of Bush-Cheney foreign policy, of neoconservatism, vowing to end it.
But if you listen to all of those senators who are close to Trump, who are important for Trump, Tim Scott, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, What is different between their worldview and neocons?
Their criticism of Biden-Harris is not that we're funding too many wars, not that we're sending too many arms of our own stockpile that gets depleted to other countries.
Their critique is that we should have been doing a lot more.
I honestly don't understand, other than literally signing over the U.S.
Treasury to the Israelis and putting it under Netanyahu's control, what more the United States could have done We've paid for that entire war.
Most of the weapons that have been dropped on Gaza by Israel is provided directly from the United States for that purpose.
On top of the four billion dollars that we give them every year for no reason other than the fact that Obama on his way out negotiated that deal with Netanyahu.
So you have $4 billion every year, and then whenever Israel has a new war with its neighbors, which it does frequently, they come to us and say, pay for it, pay for the military, pay for our wars, give us all the weapons, and we give it all to them.
What weapons did we slow walk?
What weapons have they not had that they would love to have had to destroy Gaza even further?
And then the same with Ukraine.
I know a lot of people on the right believe that voting for Donald Trump is a way to get the U.S., to extricate the U.S.
out of Ukraine, and he may think that, but these are the people who are going to have a lot of influence on him.
This is what I was asking Fred Flights the other night, the former ally of John Bolton, who is now split with John Bolton, primarily because John Bolton criticizes Trump, and he probably will have a very high-standing role in the in the Trump White House on the national security team.
And he was saying, when I asked him on Ukraine, that he thinks the thing that Biden-Harris did wrong, well, were two things.
One is that they failed to pursue diplomacy, but also that they should have been arming Ukraine far more and lifting all the limits on the use of those weapons so that we don't end up in a nuclear war with Russia.
And then at the same time, they want to be more involved in the Israeli wars with Hezbollah and with Hamas and with the Houthis and with Iran.
And of course they also, if you ask them, do you think the U.S.
has been sufficiently antagonistic toward or militarily aggressive toward China, they would say, no, no, we've appeased China, even though we have military bases in circling China and all kinds of military assets buzzing around their coast all the time.
So Donald Trump may still have those same instincts, And if you ask me, I believe that he does.
When you listen to him in these sort of stream-of-consciousness ways, when he's talking to Elon Musk or Lex Friedman, when he's not using a script or a teleprompter, I think that he still has those instincts like, why are we involved in this war?
Why is this our war?
But the campaign he's running is most definitely not based on that kind of mentality.
This whole idea that, oh, Israel will cease to exist because the Kamala Harris administration won't do enough for it.
They're not confronting Iran enough.
How many countries are we supposed to be at war with at the same time?
We're supposed to be at war with Russia and Ukraine, even more.
We're supposed to be at war with Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran and the Houthis on behalf of Israel.
We're supposed to be more militarily aggressive to China.
I thought the idea of the Republican Party, as they're rebranding, was to try and get away from wars, try and withdraw from neoconservatism.
But the point of this whole exercise is for these people to defend Donald Trump, be his main surrogate, so that they then get to influence the way that he thinks about foreign policy.
And this is the thing that's going to be in Donald Trump's ear.
And that's why the big, big question about what would be a second Trump administration if he wins is, to whom will he end up listening?
And in what direction will he end up going?
And it's very, very difficult to say.
I think it's very easy with the Democrats to know.
Kamala Harris wins.
It's going to be a continuation of the Obama administration, and to some lesser extent, the Biden administration.
But although Donald Trump was president for four years, it oftentimes was a mishmash, this internal conflict.
Fred Flight and others have said the reason for that was because Trump got to Washington for the first time as president.
He hadn't spent any time there.
And you get manipulated by all these forces that understand Washington very well, people you think you're supposed to listen to.
You end up appointing so many people that you're told to appoint who aren't aligned with your ideology.
You, in fact, are to sabotage it and to prevent it.
And he says, but this time Trump understands Washington much better.
He understands who his friends are.
He understands who his enemies are.
I hope so.
But I have a lot of doubts, given that he looks at Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio as the same foreign policy, and Tim Scott and Rick Scott as his close allies, as the people whom he trusts.
He still talks positively about Mike Pompeo, as he did in the debate.
So I think that's always the question mark.
Now, at the end of the day, I guess I prefer a question mark when it comes to foreign policy orthodoxy to just a party that I know for sure is going to pursue it.
But the problem with that question mark is that it may not go in the direction of abandoning that foreign policy orthodoxy.
It may go in the direction of what these senators are saying, which is we want even more aggression.
We want even more war.
Now, of course, they say with more aggression comes peace.
But historically, maybe that's sometimes true.
Historically, it's often not true.
And if the United States had been doing what these Republican senators wanted, which is flooding Ukraine with even more arms with no limitations, the risk of war with Russia would have been much, much higher, much, much earlier.
And it's already very high.
I get the argument, oh, if Trump were in office, none of this would have ever happened.
It is true these things didn't happen when Trump was in office, but there was a lot of conflict in the Middle East, and this kind of neoconservatism has proven very, very dangerous in the past, and there is still a significant influential part of the Republican Party that has Trump's ear that is contaminated by the core tenets of neoconservative ideology.
You just heard that in all of those interviews.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, a system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all their major podcasting platforms, where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really does help 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, which is available only to members of our local community.
So if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those after shows, the one of which we're about to do this being Thursday night, but to a variety of other interactive features.
We put a lot of exclusive content there.
We often have every day.
In fact, we have professionalized written transcripts of every show that we broadcast here.
And most of all, it is the community on which we really do most rely to support and enable this show and the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For those who have been watching this show, we are naturally very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
