Black Socialists' Mixed Verdict on Acting as Russian Agents; U.S. Seeks to Ban RT Worldwide; Lee Fang on Ukraine Escalation & 2024
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Mixed Verdict on Uhuru Trial (5:36)
Propaganda Wars (38:09)
Interview with Lee Fang (53:49)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Hysteria over Russia and the supposed threat it poses to our way of life, the script Democrats invented in 2016 and then thereafter to explain their loss to Donald Trump, continues to fuel assaults on core civil liberties inside the United States.
Ironically, it's not Russia, but the fear of it that is destroying our way of life.
We have frequently covered the case of the US-based African People's Socialist Party, a very small party.
of leftists led by black radicals pretty standard ones whose leaders are now in their 80s and who have spent decades opposing American wars and NATO imperialism and naturally therefore also oppose the native war in Ukraine.
In late 2023 they were indicted on felony counts of acting as Russian agents largely for the crime of speaking out and engaging in activism against U.S.
involvement in the war in Ukraine because the FBI was able to find Trivial, very trivial financial connections to Moscow.
A few thousand dollars over many years.
They alleged in an indictment that these black leftists were acting as agents of Russia when opposing the war in Ukraine and criminally failed to disclose it.
A jury in Tampa just yesterday acquitted all four of those defendants on the most serious count, namely that they acted as an agent of the Russian government to spread propaganda inside the U.S.
But it did convict them on four of the lesser charge of conspiring against the United States with Russia.
So it's a little bit of a confusing verdict, but we'll tell you all about the verdict and its implications.
Meanwhile, the State Department boasted today of its intense efforts to have RT, the state media outlet of Russia, ban it as many countries as they can, arguing that RT's presence, its mere existence in the world, has had the effect of convincing people around the world to question has had the effect of convincing people around the world to question and then oppose the NATO war Can't have that.
Can't have any information being disseminated that undercuts American and Western policy.
Now, as always these days, whenever people start reaching conclusions, the U.S. government dislikes, they immediately turn to the sources of that dissent and try to silence it.
That's become the very normalized way of life.
Now, even during the Cold War, Americans frequently heard from Soviet leaders and Soviet news media such as Pravda, but in today's world, where values of free access to information and free speech are eroding, not even those minimal rights are guaranteed, the same ones we had during Finally, last night we covered the Biden administration's imminent decision to radically escalate the war in Ukraine by allowing long-range missiles provided to Ukraine by the UK and the EU to be used to strike
Deep inside Russia, the government's reaction, the Russian government's reaction, was clear and predictable and swift.
Because those missiles can only be fired with NATO military officials guiding them by satellite, something the Ukrainians cannot do, and because the missiles are coming from the UK and the EU with the specific intent of using it to strike inside Russia, Russia will regard any such usage as marking the entry of the US and NATO Russia will regard any such usage as marking the entry of the US and NATO into this war as direct belligerence against Russia and will treat all
Now, my former Intercept colleague, Lee Fong, easily, in my view, one of the best and most intrepid investigative journalists in the country, has been examining the very serious risks posed by such escalation in Ukraine.
He just published on his Substack earlier today a new article entitled, quote, New York Times' previous reporting undermines its war escalation journalism.
Warnings about major escalation of war and potential nuclear war take a backseat to think tank experts from the defense industry.
There you see the escalation.
Headline in the screen.
We'll speak to Lee about all of that, about the general refusal of the West to even take seriously the threat of nuclear war, about another investigation he did last month on the much greater degree of Israeli influence inside the United States, people being paid by the Israeli government to spread Israeli propaganda, and then various issues related to the 2024 election as well.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
We have spent the last couple of years reporting with some degree of frequency about the decision by the Biden administration to indict a black socialist group, often called the Uhura Movement, on the basis of the American Revolution.
on charges that they were acting as Russian agents.
Now, we've interviewed the lawyer for the defendants in that case.
We've interviewed the defendants.
We have had experts on.
We've covered it at length.
Very few other media outlets have covered it.
One of the only ones that did during the actual indictment was Tucker Carlson, who put the head of this black socialist group on his program and has talked about this prosecution so much because it's so obviously an attempt to criminalize free speech, in the United States, particularly when it comes to dissenting against in the United States, particularly when it comes to dissenting against policy toward the war in Ukraine.
These are not people who just out of nowhere started opposing the war in Ukraine as though it were inconsistent with their lifelong ideology because they were being paid by the Russian government.
They weren't being paid by the Russian government.
And they were advocating exactly what you would expect them to.
There's all kinds of people that come out of the black radical left-wing movement in the United States, and they would never ever dream of endorsing a NATO war in Europe against Russia.
It would be inconceivable.
That would be what would be suspicious, is if they actually supported that war.
These people come out of the 1960s tradition of people like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey and people like that, and they have had as one of their primary leading views, the defining, shaping views of their group, the fact that militarism inside the United States, the military industrial complex, endless war, imperialism,
are not only immoral and destructive in their own right, but deprive American citizens, and particularly poor people and black people, which is what they focus on, inside the United States as well.
And yet the United States government saw them advocating against the war in Ukraine.
It's a tiny little group.
Most people have not even heard of this group.
I hadn't before I started covering this case, so it's not like they're having some huge effect on internal and domestic opinion in the United States.
And they were able to find very trivial transactions between people in Moscow who never told this group they were with the Russian government, who the U.S.
government alleges had a connection to the Russian government.
Talking about $1,000 here, $700 here for an event, for some sort of ad.
And just based on that alone, they brought a federal indictment full of felony charges accusing them of being undeclared Russian agents, criminally spreading propaganda inside the United States on behalf of a foreign government.
Two of the defendants were 81 years old, which is the leader of the group, another who is 79 years old, who has spent their entire life doing things like this.
So we've been covering the The criminal proceeding as it has evolved.
And then earlier this week in Tampa, the trial concluded and then a jury returned a verdict where they acquitted all four of the defendants on the most serious charge, which was acting as a agent of the Russian government to spread pro-Russian propaganda inside the United States.
But it did convict them on a charge of conspiracy, conspiring to act.
With Russian agents, which I presume means that they thought about doing it, they talked about doing it, but they never actually became Russian agents.
But even the attempt to become one was somehow itself a crime.
But it's a much less serious crime.
The jury did not find that they were Russian agents.
That's the crux of the case.
Here's the New York Times version of events.
The headline was, activists convicted of conspiring to act as Russian agents.
Quote, the four defendants were acquitted of the more serious charge of failing to register as Russian agents.
The case in Florida offered a window into Russian influence operations.
Quote, an unusual federal trial detailing the inner workings of a Russian influence operation in the United States ended on Thursday with jurors convicting four members of a black power group of black power groups of conspiring to act as agents of the Russian government.
The defendants were acquitted of failing to register as Russian agents, a more serious charge.
So there's really no coherence.
In this jury verdict, the defendants already said we're going to appeal it, but of course they're celebrating the fact that the jury did not find that they ever acted as Russian agents.
And the only charge in which they were convicted, this conspiracy charge, through theoretically providing up to five years in prison, is very unlikely to provide anywhere near that.
The New York Times article goes on, quote, prosecutors have argued during the week-long trial in Tampa that the defendants had gauged in a seven-year conspiracy to sow division in American politics.
I had always thought the purpose of the free speech clause and a free press was to create division by challenging things that the government was saying, by convincing people that government leaders were corrupt or lying or acting with ill motives.
A unified, homogenized country, by definition, can never be free.
Quote, the defendants countered that the government was trying to criminalize their support of Russian ideology, which they argued was protected political speech.
Speaking after the verdict on Thursday, three of the defendants and their lawyers said they considered the acquittal on the more serious charge to be a victory.
They also vowed to appeal the conviction on the lesser charges.
Quote, the most important thing is they were unable to convict us of working for anybody except black people, said Amali Yeshatella.
The chairman of the Uhura movement sat on the courthouse steps, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
That's the leader of this group that I interviewed, that Tuck Carlson interviewed, several other people have.
Nowhere near enough, given how sinister this case is and how it's intended to chill the exercise of free speech.
He added, quote, but I am willing to be charged and found guilty of working for black people.
The movement is the activist arm of the American People's Socialist Party, an organization promoting black power.
The groups are based in San Francisco, Florida and St.
Louis.
For decades, the movement has protested issues like racism, colonialism and policing.
When the Justice Department indicted these four individuals as part of this black radical left-wing group for the crime of opposing the war in Ukraine, the Department of Justice, it was in April of 2023, posted this press release about what they were doing.
Quote, U.S.
citizens and Russian intelligence officers charged with conspiring to use U.S.
citizens as illegal agents of the Russian government Quote, a federal grand jury in Tampa returned a superseding indictment charging four U.S.
citizens and three Russian nationals with working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Services, FSB, to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States.
That's the charge on which they were just acquitted.
Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded, and directed U.S.
political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda.
The indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.
Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, A criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia Berlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia in the United States.
Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights.
Freedom as Russia Denies Its Own Citizens to Divide Americans and Interfere in Elections in the United States, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olson of the Justice Department's National Security Division, quote, The Department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S.
elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S.
citizens or foreign individuals abroad.
Now, we covered the case where there was an indictment unsealed last week by the Justice Department where they accused a company of posing as an American company in order to pay several right-wing influencers such as Tim Pool and we covered the case where there was an indictment unsealed last week by the Justice Department where they accused a company of posing They apparently were paid a lot of money.
The indictment itself says that they had no idea that they were actually getting paid by anyone connected with the Russian government.
And so there's no indictment possible of them nor of presumably Tenant Media, the people who were indicted or the people with RT and other people who had organized this, engineered this system.
But everything about this, of course, as we're approaching the 2024 election, is...
It's all about rejuvenating this narrative about Russia interfering in our sacred democracy and in our election.
It's what they did in 2016.
It's what they did in 2020, right before the election then, when they called the Hunter Biden reporting based on the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation.
It's obviously no coincidence that right before the election, the Biden Justice Department is trying to scare everybody about Russian influence again.
One of the few programs that covered it, surprisingly actually, this indictment, was Democracy Now!
And in June of 2023, because usually that show is fanatically embracing of Russiagate and all of the Russian paranoia, they interviewed, I believe, the leader of the group or one of the defendants.
Yeah, the leader of the group, the same person we interviewed who was a defendant.
And here's what he said.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
While the federal indictment of Donald Trump is making headlines around the world today, we end the show looking at another federal indictment that's received little press attention.
In April, the Biden administration charged four U.S.
citizens from a Pan-Africanist group with conspiring with the Russian government To sow discord in U.S.
elections.
Amali Yeshotela, chair of the African People's Socialist Party, faces charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, along with Penny Hess, Jesse Neville and Augustus Remain Jr.
Three Russians were also named in indictment unsealed by the Justice Department.
This follows a violent FBI raid on the activists' properties in Missouri and Florida last summer.
African People's Socialist Party has been a longtime advocate for reparations for slavery, a vocal critic of U.S.
foreign policy.
Amali Eshatela joins us now, chairman of the African People's Socialist Party, located in St.
Louis, Missouri.
Amali, thanks for joining us again.
We spoke to you after the FBI raid on your house in St.
Louis.
If you can now talk about the indictment, your response to what the government is alleging.
Well, thank you very much.
First of all, I want to say we have to stop meeting like this.
I think the first time we met was after the government attacked our Uhura House in St.
Petersburg, Florida in 1996, 300 strong.
And then we've talked subsequent to that, the July 29th attack on the Hooter House in St.
Petersburg, Florida, and as you mentioned, my home in St.
Louis, Missouri, as well as offices and homes of party members in two states, St.
Louis and in St. Petersburg, Florida.
So as you mentioned, the indictment happened after something like nine months after we were characterized as unindicted co-conspirators in some plot with the Russians, who—it is said that we served in fighting who—it is said that we served in fighting for—around the questions of reparations and fighting to bring
the United States before the United Nations for the crime of genocide against African people and for our differences with the United States in terms of the Ukraine war.
I mean, you can just take one look at this guy and just listen to what he says, and you know exactly what he is.
This is what he's been doing his whole life, is he's a political activist on behalf of this left-wing ideology.
Obviously, it doesn't matter if you agree with it or not.
It doesn't make the slightest difference.
He considers himself a black power advocate, as I said, that comes out of this sort of bubble.
Black Panther movement of the 1960s and Malcolm X and those kind of teachings and all of those black left-wing activists, black power activists and the like in the 1960s were vehemently opposed to the American war machine because they were shaped by the Vietnam War.
And even Martin Luther King got around in 1968, or 1967, actually, the year before he was murdered, one year to the date before he was murdered, when he spoke at Riverside Church, and he apologized for, and he said, for a long time I thought that all I could do was focus on racism and racial inequality and civil rights here in the United States, but I've come to realize, and he said, too late, but I have come to realize that there can be no domestic progress until
The war machine and imperialism are reined in and we stop endless war because until we do that, we're going to be a country that just pours all of its resources into arms manufacturers that's devoted to destroying people, to extinguishing populations, and not to improving the lives of our citizens at home.
And that's what this group is all about.
They also advocate reparations and they have always been opposed to the U.S.
government's foreign policy.
You wind them up and they are opposed to the U.S.
foreign policy.
The idea that they needed Russian money or that they only started sowing discord.
These are radicals.
That's what they do.
They sow discord.
That's their purpose.
That's what they're trying to do.
That's what they've always been doing.
Because you find a very trivial connection with people in Moscow who you claim are somehow connected to the Russian government or Russian intelligence, and then you charge them as Russian agents.
Just gives you a sense of how extreme the U.S.
government has become when it comes to anything regarding Russia.
And again, I think the idea here is to signal to other people, look, if you think about sowing discord in the United States, if you think about challenging
Our foreign policy with respect to Russia or really if you agitate for any kind of policy that we regard as destabilizing and we can find even a tiny amount of money where you were connected to somebody we can claim was part of a foreign government we're going to indict you as being foreign agents of that government and that as I said is the charge on which they were acquitted.
We interviewed the leader, Molly Yachtella, back in February of this year, and here's part of what he told us.
In cases like the one that you're currently involved in where the question is, is somebody acting as an agent of a foreign government, Typically, when I think of someone who's acting as an agent of a foreign government, that to me is somebody who's like a lobbyist, somebody who's saying things that they don't believe because they're being paid to say them, or to work on behalf of a foreign government.
In this case, in the case of your advocacy against US involvement in Ukraine, or even your advocacy where you end up citing On the side of Russia in certain controversies, do you see that as consistent with the activism and ideology that you've been pursuing and defending for decades?
It's very much consistent with it.
The fact is that it's very disingenuous for the United States government to charge us of not having agency, that we're working on behalf of a foreign government.
The fact is that I was in Belfast, Ireland in 1983 and working in solidarity with the Irish people in opposition to British colonialism.
I was in Nicaragua at the time of the Reagan inauguration in opposition to U.S.
solidarity with the people of Nicaragua who had just won their freedom despite the policies of the United States government.
Time of extreme turmoil that even changed some policies of the United States government in terms of how I would characterize people like me who were talking about freedom and had determined that people who were engaged in struggles like in Nicaragua and El Salvador that had emerged, it wouldn't be tolerated.
In terms of calling them freedom fighters, they would be characterized as terrorists.
And so I was in Spain, invited to speak in Spain by an NGO that was supported by the Spanish government.
I was there in 2007.
And when I spoke there, I spoke also in opposition to U.S.
policies that were impacting on peoples around the world.
I was invited to speak at Oxford Union.
And I spoke in 2019 and I opened my presentation in 2019 expressing solidarity with with the government of Venezuela that at the time was being challenged by United States policy as well.
So this is historically what we've been about.
And so this whole notion that somehow we become an employee of Russia because I visited Moscow and got marching orders from Moscow at that point, that's been responsible for the fact that we ran and participated in elections, not gun battles, but elections.
Participate in elections in St.
Petersburg Florida for mayor for for City Council 2017 2019 we ran candidates on reparations and things like that that suddenly We are learning is a consequence of a relationship to Russia and not due to the agency of black people and even the whole nonsense about Russia and Hiring us to talk about genocide.
I mean, we held a convention, a tribunal on reparations for black people in the United States in 1982.
In God marching orders, you know, for the fact that we ran and participated in elections, not not not gun battles, but elections participate in elections in St.
Petersburg, Florida for mayor for for city council.
2017, 2019, we ran candidates.
on reparations and things like that, that suddenly we are learning is a consequence of a relationship to Russia and not due to the agency of black people.
And even the whole nonsense about Russia hiring us to talk about genocide.
I mean, we held a convention, a tribunal on reparations for black people in the United States in 1982 in New York City and use international law as a basis for that.
And one of those laws was the UN Convention on the punishment and on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide.
So it's disingenuous.
There's nothing that we're doing now that we haven't been doing for the last 50 years.
Yeah, I remember when Doug Carlson interviewed him and he put him on his primetime Fox show.
He told his Fox audience, hey, I want you to hear from this 82-year-old black leftist radical because he's just been indicted on these unbelievably dubious charges as a Russian agent, criminally acting on behalf of Russia.
I remember Tucker saying on there that, you know what, I'm sure I don't agree with this guy much, but actually come to think of it, I'd probably really love to have dinner with him.
And maybe we actually do agree on more than I would suspect.
And I think the reason why Tucker found this case so enraging and therefore appealing to cover was because, as I said, you just listen to this guy speak.
And it's so easily recognizable what he is.
He was in Nicaragua in the 80s.
He was, you know, traveling the world on behalf of left-wing causes, protesting American imperialism and militarism his entire life.
He's two or three years older than Joe Biden.
He's 81 or 82 years old.
So actually maybe a year older than Joe Biden.
I think he's 82 now.
Imagine Joe Biden speaking this coherently in such a focused way for so long about pretty complex issues.
Congratulations to him on that.
I think what makes this so offensive just, you know, as he said was, this is what I've been doing my whole life.
This is what my whole life is about.
Now, suddenly, the only reason why I'm talking about reparations or opposing NATO imperialism is because the Russians ordered me to.
I'm an agent of the Russian government.
I have to take marching orders from Russia.
He's been doing all of this through the 70s, through the 80s, at the height of the Cold War.
Through the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, Jimmy Carter, the Reagan administration, and Bush, and Clinton, and Bush and Cheney, and it was fine.
And now we suddenly arrive at this moment in our history where we're even more obsessed with and fanatical about Russia than we were at the height of the Cold War, as we're about to show you.
And suddenly at the age of 82 or however old he is, he gets charged with suddenly acting as an agent of the Russian government because he's sowing discord inside the United States.
All right, let's listen to the rest of this.
You can go back decades.
Of course, I'm a genocide.
So it's disingenuous.
There's nothing that we're doing now that we haven't been doing for the last 50 years.
Yeah, I mean, it's so bizarre.
You know, you can go back decades, of course, to the Cold War and it found its most disgraceful expression in the McCarthy era where the U.S.
government, the U.S.
security state, would routinely accuse American citizens who dissented from the policies, the war policies of the U.S.
government, of being somehow in cahoots with the Kremlin, or disloyal, or an agent of the Kremlin.
And it's really bizarre to watch that be rejuvenated even after the ideology of Russia has changed so radically, albeit often by the Democratic Party, the kind of neoliberal order.
Just this week we saw a suggestion from Nancy Pelosi that anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protesters might be somehow connected to the Kremlin and they ought to be investigated.
This kind of paranoia that we hadn't seen for decades.
So to me that's the point.
In addition to interviewing the chairman of the movement, we also interviewed their lawyer to talk about some of the legal aspects of this case.
And I think beyond the legal issue, and we're going to show you what the lawyer said because I think it's so important, especially given this acquittal, is the kind of discourse and cultural reflex this demonstrates.
It has become almost reflexive.
In the discourse of American liberalism, to just anytime you hear anyone challenging your party, challenging your leaders, challenging your ideology, opposing the politicians that you follow, to just instantly accuse people of being a paid agent of the Russian government, of being a Kremlin asset.
We've shown you so many times how often that's happened to so many people.
Remember when Hillary Clinton accused Tulsi Gabbard of that, for daring to run against her in 2016?
And how everybody who had any kind of prominent platform who opposed the NATO war in Ukraine was put on an official list of the Ukrainian intelligence agency accusing us of being Russian propagandists.
I know I ended up on four or five of those official lists, at least myself.
But just in general, that's just now baked in to the way Democrats and liberals think about the world, which is so ironic, so ironic.
Because in the sort of left-liberal civil libertarianism in which I was raised, that kind of formulated my very initial views when I was much younger, the McCarthy era was considered to be, after, say, the internment of Japanese Americans, probably, or, and you can go back to the 1917 Espionage Act, but certainly one of the top worst infringements
Of free speech rights, of free thought thinking rights, of civil liberties, because it wasn't that there were no communists in the government.
There were.
The point was that Joseph McCarthy routinely accused people of being Russian agents because of their political views without the slightest evidence and ruined their lives with ease all the time.
He constantly carried around a briefcase in which he claimed that the evidence proving they were Russian agents was in his briefcase, but he could never show it.
These people were never charged with crimes.
They weren't convicted, but they had their lives ruined, their reputations destroyed.
They ended up blacklisted because everyone was petrified of working with them once Joseph McCarthy branded them a Russian agent.
And of course, most of the people whom he targeted were in the Democratic Party, were on the left wing, the left liberal flank of the Democratic Party, and that was why in 2016 when I watched Democrats and Liberals embrace the same exact script and now eight years later do it, certainly longer than McCarthy was able to do it, and with a lot more fervor, Just everybody is a Russian agent.
Here's people who want reparations and who went to Moscow and opposed the war in Ukraine.
Let's put them in jail as Russian agents.
It's not only embedded in the culture now, but also in the law.
So here's the interview we did with Leonard Goodman, who is the lawyer who represented these four defendants, or I think three out of the four.
And he talks here about the legal components of this case.
I could just mention one other thing about the indictment.
It also charges that they're spreading Russian propaganda and disinformation.
So that seems to completely contradict the finding that this is content neutral, this has nothing to do with speech.
And the one interesting thing is in the motion to dismiss, we cited Um, we looked at their speeches and cited articles by Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs that say the exact same thing in different ways, but basically the exact same thing about the United States involvement in Ukraine, which is something that's named in the indictment.
That our advocacy or our complaint that the United States was involved in provoking this war.
So we cited those articles and the government's response was to say that, well, when we say disinformation, that doesn't mean it's not true.
It could still be true but it's basically Russian tradecraft and they intend to call experts to say, basically Russia experts, to say that even though it's truthful information it still benefits Russia and we're still doing Russia's bidding.
So it's quite bizarre.
It's almost Alice in Wonderland to basically say disinformation.
If you look it up, it means false information, but not according to the government in this case.
Well, that's why I think this case is worth so much attention because that is becoming one of the most pervasive tactics.
Of course, this word disinformation is being used to censor the Internet.
And what it's really being used to do above all else is criminalize dissent.
Exactly as you said, the minute you oppose US involvement in the war in Ukraine, which obviously advances the interests of the Russian government, regardless of whether or not that's your intent, they regard you automatically as a Russian propagandist.
And if there's Anyone who believes that this prosecution would have been brought if this party had, instead of opposing U.S.
support for Ukraine, been cheering for U.S.
support for Ukraine, I can't imagine the level of naivety and or dishonesty necessary to believe that.
I mean, this is just a theme that is actually pervading so many things that happened.
Just last night, we covered the Australian government's intention to start imposing massive fines on big tech companies if they don't remove what the government considers to be disinformation and to do it in advance.
This is everything that governments dislike, that Western governments dislike, is now deemed disinformation.
Increasingly, it's becoming criminalized and already it's Something that cannot exist on the internet.
That's why X no longer exists in Brazil because things that a single Brazilian judge called disinformation or fake news wasn't immediately taken down and that's considered a crime.
And this is the framework that is pervading now, not just our rhetoric and discourse the way it was in 2016 through 2018, 2019 with Russiagate being the obsessive focus, but also increasingly The law, not just the law in the West, but the law here in the United States.
So I'm glad this group and the defendants who stood trial were acquitted of the main charge.
And I should add that last week, Jill Stein went to the Green Party candidate, went to this trial and spoke up in defense of this group and denounced the prosecution as an attack on free speech.
And of course, he was instantly accused by leading Democrats of cavorting with Russian agents, even though they hadn't even been convicted of that crime and have now not been acquitted of it.
So it's in the DNA now of the Democratic Party, the liberal establishment, but also increasingly the laws and regulation of online speech throughout the West.
So we'll probably have hopefully one of those defendants on next week, but I'm sure we'll have the lawyer on to talk about what this verdict exactly was and where they go from here.
Have you ever wondered what's really in your daily cup of coffee?
A.
Have you really ever thought about that?
Studies have shown that 45% of commercially available coffee beans contain mold toxins and nearly a third of that survives the roasting process.
That's disgusting and obviously unhealthy.
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Speaking of Russia fanaticism pervading the United States and its legal framework, one of the things that I think got too little attention in terms of a massive escalation of one of the things that I think got too little attention in terms of a massive escalation of censorship in the West was soon as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and Europe and the UK and the US and NATO got involved in that war, the EU, as I've said many times before,
To platform RT or Sputnik or any other Russian state media.
So if you're a European citizen and you know that your government is funding and financing this war and you want to hear from the other side, you can't because the government made it illegal for you to even hear that.
Which, as I've explained before, is why Rumble is not available in France, because the French government said, we see that you're violating our law by still platforming RT and Sputnik, and you need to remove that immediately.
And when Rumble said no, the French said, we're going to cut you out at the IP level then.
Continuous attempts to demand censorship of every government in the world as a condition for allowing citizens to access their The information they want to seek.
Now the U.S.
government today is announcing something very similar with regard to RT.
It's announcing essentially that they are now trying to engineer a worldwide ban on RT.
Just prevent any of that information from getting anywhere.
and I thought it was very interesting what the State Department spokesman who announced it explained was the rationale. - I wanna thank Kerry Gu sitting in the back of the room and all the people at the GUC This is something that's been put together over many, many, many weeks and months, and a lot of people put their heart and soul into this sort of work to be able to get it available to you in all these details, so that you can then question me and Jim about cats and crowdfunding.
But this is going to be a long-term campaign, and that's the point of the analogy to Huawei.
That's something that began under the Trump administration, continued under the Biden administration.
We are going to be talking, the Secretary will be talking, the President will be talking.
Assistant Secretaries of State like Jim and especially his colleagues in Latin America and Africa and Asia are going to be working with their colleagues to try to show all of those countries that right now broadcast with no restriction or control RT.
Do you hear what's wrong with RT?
They have broadcasting with no restrictions or control.
That's what's wrong with RT.
Same thing wrong with social media, with Axe, with Rumble, with TikTok.
They allow free speech.
They allow information to be disseminated with no constraints or restrictions.
And then he goes on to add what the real problem with RT is that they have.
I mean, it's incredibly dumb.
I haven't seen this before, but it's incredibly dumb to come out and just admit that.
has had a deleterious effect on the views of the rest of the world about a war that should be an open and shut case.
I mean, it's incredibly dumb.
I haven't seen this before, but it's incredibly dumb to come out and just admit that.
That the reason you're trying to shut down RT is because it has had an effect on convincing much of the world to turn against the war in Ukraine.
So you want to cut off the source of that dissent because you want to make sure the world just submits and agrees with and applauds whatever wars the United States wants to get involved in.
It's really quite an admission.
Especially because the idea of the First Amendment in the United States doesn't just mean you get to say what you want, it also means you get to read what you want.
Including foreign propaganda.
We talked about that with the Bin Laden letter and how offensive it is to be to every American, even if you despise the Bin Laden letter and think it's worthless, to be told that you can't read that because it's been banished online.
That the government, that journalists pressured the Guardian to remove it from their website and to Then pressure TikTok to ban any discussion of it.
When we had Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission on earlier this week, I asked him about that and he did talk about, even though he is an advocate of banning TikTok, the Supreme Court precedent where they have said that access even to foreign propaganda is the right of Americans.
Not even in the Cold War, which remember we regarded as an existential threat with the Soviet Union.
We went to many, many wars, many proxy wars, almost blew up the world twice over it.
It was the consuming, driving policy that shaped what the United States was from the Late 1940s after World War II, where we were aligned with Russia, where the National Security State was created with the National Security Act of 1948, all the way through the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, that was the primary focus of the United States as a country, as a culture.
Even then, we didn't ban Russian state media.
You could go and read Pravda if you wanted to.
We heard from Russian leaders all the time.
Richard Nixon did a very famous debate that I would actually really encourage you to watch on YouTube.
The famous kitchen debate that he conducted with Nikita Khrushchev, where Richard Nixon advocated for capitalism and Nikita Khrushchev argued for communism.
And they just had an open debate that was broadcast on television.
There was no sense of, oh, we have to keep Russian propaganda away from you.
But we are now in a world where this is so normalized that the minute we identify, the government really, not we, the government identifies information that they think is harmful, that they think is convincing of things they don't want you to think, the instinct is to immediately go to the source of it and try and suppress it, try and censor it, try and break it, so that the only information the world is hearing is the government's information or people aligned with the U.S.
government's view.
Here's the, uh, yeah, and by the way, there were millions of people around the world watching RT before it was taken off YouTube and there still continues to be millions of people around the world who watch RT on cable and in all kinds of countries around the world.
That's what the U.S.
government is so concerned about.
Here from the U.S.
State Department, they were actually much more clever in how they tried to justify it than that spokesman was who just admitted, like, sadly, RT has had the effect of getting a lot of people to turn against the war in Ukraine.
Now, let me just say, living in a country, Brazil, where the government is absolutely opposed to the NATO war in Ukraine, the Brazilian government has repeatedly refused to provide any
Help or assistance even the German Chancellor came to Brazil and met with the Brazilian President Lula da Silva and asked for a certain technology that is necessary for the German tanks that they wanted to send to Ukraine and even on just on that the Brazilian government said we're not providing we're not getting involved in this war in Ukraine that's not our war we're going to keep our resources focused on The lives of our citizens.
They're going to spend money and resources to fuel the NATO war in Europe.
And lots of leaders, including Lula, but around the world, have said that they regard this as NATO's fault.
This isn't because RT has brainwashed them.
It's because just like those black socialist activists, over decades, there's been an ideology and an understanding and a framework of how to understand the world.
But just like Democrats instantly blamed their 2016 loss on Russia, so too does the U.S.
government blame the fact that so many people have turned against their war on the Russians as well.
Here's the announcement by the State Department announcing the attempt to ban RT.
Quote, alerting the world to RT's global covert activities.
This was published just today.
Quote, today the United States is designating three entities and two individuals for their connections to Russia's destabilizing actions abroad.
According to new information, Much of which originates from employees of Russian state-funded RT, formerly Russia Today.
We now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet.
It has been an entity with cyber capabilities.
It is also engaged in information operations, covert influence, and military procurement.
These operations are targeting countries around the world, including in Europe, Africa, North and South America.
The United States Please believe us, the United States supports the free flow of information.
We're not taking action against these entities and individuals because of the content of their reporting, or even the disinformation they create and spread publicly.
Perish the thought, we would never do that.
We're taking action against them, they said, for their covert influence activities.
Covert influence activities are not journalism.
Do you think the United States has ever worked with media outlets, or still works with media outlets, or has U.S.
funded media outlets?
That disseminate American propaganda in other countries?
Do you think we might be doing that too?
Quote, the United States will always stand for freedom of expression.
Always.
Including with those with whom we disagree.
We encourage dissent, open debate, and free discourse.
We love those things.
But we will not stand for attempts by state actors to carry out covert activities with the goal of hijacking that discourse.
Consistent with General License 25F, these targets may continue to engage in journalism and media operations that are not prohibited by U.S.
sanctions, of course, determined by the U.S.
government.
Now, the little obedient puppies in London, the U.K.
government that always follows along, immediately, they don't even wait a day to jump and obey.
Announced that they were going to immediately obey what they were told to do by the State Department, hear from the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.
Today is the official statement on RT, FCDO statement following U.S.
attribution of RT to Russian state.
A FCDO spokesman said, quote, the U.K.
supports the U.S.
in their assessment that RT is not only a state-funded propaganda house but deliberately working to undermine our collective security on behalf of the Kremlin.
Already a mouthpiece for Russian disinformation, RT has mutated into an altogether more harmful organization.
Alongside its public lies and disinformation, RT has also used proxy outlets under the guise of independent media to disseminate false pro-Kremlin narratives, such as that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine, that the NATO war is highly provocative and destabilizing, that kind of pro-Kremlin narrative.
That Ukrainians are resisting going to the draft because they don't want to fight as cannon fodder in a war that they can't win?
Those kind of pro-Kremlin narratives.
Quote, together with our international partners, we have already taken strong measures to prevent RT from achieving its pernicious objectives, sanctioning its parent company TV Nefasty, and working to restrict its influence.
We will continue to bear down on those who would threaten our collective security and democratic values.
I love so much when censorship is justified in the name of having to uphold democratic values.
As I said, that every time there's censorship in Brazil, it's immediately justified as the need to protect Brazilian democracy.
When we heard the Australian communications minister last night justify why they were going to punish big tech companies for not centering what they regard as disinformation, she said it's necessary to protect Australian democracy.
And of course, that's the view of the United States and the Europeans as well.
I... Okay, here's a... Just to give you a sense.
A article from June of 1973, very much at the height of the Cold War.
This was under the Nixon administration.
Leonid Brezhnev was the Soviet leader.
And here's the New York Times publishing, quote, the text of the Soviet party leader's television address to the American people.
So even back in 1973, there was no attempt to keep Russian perspective, Russian government perspective, away from the American people to the country, American media outlets wanted Americans to hear from them.
And they printed the entire text.
And it was a letter specifically to Americans, just like the Bin Laden letter.
Nowadays, you couldn't publish something like this, as the Guardian proved when they removed the Bin Laden letter.
But back in 1973, again at the height of the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union were existential enemies, we didn't have that kind of censorship that we're seeing today.
Dear American, said the letter, I highly appreciate this opportunity of directly addressing the people of the United States as my visit to your country.
I would like, first of all, to convey to all of you the greetings and friendly feelings of millions of Soviet people who are following with great interest my visit to your country and our talks with President Nixon, and who are looking forward to this new Soviet-American summit meeting, making fruitful contributions to better relations between our countries and our stronger and stronger universal peace.
Then it went on to detail everything that Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, said.
And as I said, you could read Pravda, you could buy Pravda, and other Russian state media, Soviet state media, because that's what a free country offers to its adults, the right to read whatever it wants, they want, even with propaganda or the views of the bad foreign countries, at least that used to be right.
Now, at the very same time, the very same week that the US government is working to shut down RT globally, as responsible statecraft,
Reported on September 11th just two days ago quote the house passes 1.6 billion dollars to deliver anti-china propaganda overseas Quote somehow it's a crime when Russia does it to us, but good quote information ops when we want to discredit Beijing's Belt and Road initiative worldwide, and it basically describes how The US State Department is now going to fund quote independent media to combat the what they call the propaganda of
Media all over the rest of the world.
A state-state media, basically.
And as we demonstrated before, the celebrated Cyte Bellingcat that does propaganda all the time for the CIA and for US wars, despite being heralded as and even given awards for greatness in independent media, Are funded by the CIA's arm, the National Endowment for Democracy.
There you see the Bellingcat's funding.
We did a whole show on this.
They also get income from governments as you see at the bottom including the EU.
They're funded by foreign organizations and here is the funding and partnership page of Bellingcat from this year.
Bellingcat currently receives grants from the following organizations and there you see the EU.
The EU funds Bellingcat.
And so as we say that state media is toxic, that we can't allow it, that we can't allow Americans to hear from it, we are at the same time funding exactly that sort of media ourselves through the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy.
All right.
We have our guest here, and I want to get to him because as much as he loves listening and watching our show, he does it every night.
We didn't invite him on just to do that.
We invited him on to actually participate in the show, so I want to make sure we get to them.
He is, as I said, my friend, my former colleague at The Intercept.
He has become, I think, One of the very, very best investigative journalists.
He now writes at Substack and he has a new article about Ukraine in the media.
He has a recent article that we actually didn't report on about Israeli influence operations inside the United States and notably how they are not treated anywhere the same as alleged Russian influence operations.
And we want to talk to him about many other things, including things regarding the 2024 Lee, it is always great to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
Congratulations on getting to listen to so much of our show, but I'm happy to have you be able to speak as well.
I was enjoying every second of it.
No, I know, I know.
You're one of our biggest fans.
All right.
You have this new article out in Substack that I believe you published just today, just a few hours ago, where you're essentially describing the tactics of media outlets, including the New York Times, to suppress or get people to be indifferent toward the risks of escalation or the risk of nuclear war.
From doing things like allowing the EU and the UK to launch long-range missiles deep inside Russia.
There's the article on the screen.
It says the New York Times previous reporting undermines its war escalation journalism.
And there's a sub-headline that describes as well.
So let me just ask you, what do you think the New York Times and broader corporate media outlets are doing in order to kind of suppress this debate about or the debate that we should be having regarding Ukraine?
Look, many reporters have pointed out this dynamic that oil lobbyists, you know, bank lobbyists, defense industry lobbyists often launder their viewpoints through academic appearing think tanks that instead of going directly to the media, they will work with something that has a euphemistic name that has a nonprofit title that, you know, seems dedicated to the public interest and
Funnel their money and opinions through that to shape the media.
I'm not the first one to point this out, but what's incredible here is that the New York Times is agenda setting for this Ukraine-Russia conflict, constantly kind of just reporting on every step of this escalation, whether it's
supply new tanks, new fighter jets, new missiles, with this latest decision to allow long-range surface-to-surface missiles that could strike Russian oil refineries, cities, civilian and military infrastructure, a major escalation of the war.
The New York Times is repeatedly going to just one independent expert voice.
You know, they'll quote the political and military leadership and then have one expert opinion voice, and it's the CSIS think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
What's incredible here is that 10 years ago, the New York Times did a series of investigations.
You know, I mentioned that I'm not the only reporter to point this out.
The other reporters to point this out are the New York Times.
They did a whole series on how, out of all the most prominent think tanks in Washington DC,
Among the most prominent think tanks, CSIS is very problematic in the sense that they have been working with defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman, and many others, allowing registered lobbyists to appear as scholars at this think tank to promote higher defense spending, higher export licenses of American defense products.
meetings with defense officials, you know, helping shape the entire programming at this think tank.
They've really exposed it.
You know, the New York Times did a great job 10 years ago.
But zoom forward to today, when they're reporting on this major escalation in the conflict, just as they've reported over the last two years on this conflict.
They're repeatedly going back to CSIS, and in the latest news article today, just about this decision to use these ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles, they're quoting CSIS as their only expert, and they're quoting an individual, Seth Jones, who doubles as a consultant at a defense industry public affairs firm that reportedly engages in lobbying.
So they're doing the exact same thing that they've called out for a decade.
Well, one of the other points that I want to add to that, I know you've done reporting, which we're going to get to in a separate article that you published last month, on how much Israeli money is flowing to influence Americans to advocate for the Israeli government.
Sort of exactly what these defendants in the case that we just covered were accused of doing for Russia, and yet nobody seems to care.
Nobody seems to mind.
That's all.
No one pays attention to that.
No one talks about it.
You'd probably be anti-Semitic if you tried.
But we'll get to that in a minute.
There was also some New York Times reporting that I know you paid a lot of attention to because one of the think tanks I talked about was one where you worked about how so many of the leading think tanks that influence our foreign policy, like the Brookings Institution, are drowning in all sorts of foreign money, particularly Persian Gulf money, the United Arab Emirates, or Qatari money, or Saudi money, and
You know, I remember there being a big scandal at the Center for American Progress because they would often publish who their funders were.
And many of the largest ones were just anonymous.
But one of the ones that often funded the Center for American Progress was the Emiratis, the government of the United Arab Emirates in Dubai.
And they are obviously notorious for their savage human rights abuses and dictatorial conduct and the like.
Why do you think that things like that, that kind of foreign influence, get almost no attention in lieu of focusing almost exclusively on Russia?
Well, you know, these laws, you know, they are neutral in the way they're written.
You know, they're supposed to apply to all foreign agents, any kind of foreign country funding, propaganda funding, lobbying.
They have to Abide by the Foreign Agent Registration Act and disclose their activities.
But as we've seen, this law is selectively applied on U.S.
enemies and on U.S.
allies.
It's rarely applied.
So the fact that the Emiratis, which do disclose a lot of lobbying, but at the same time We never see the same type of enforcement.
kind of bundle of lobbing that's completely in the dark, we never see the same type of enforcement.
I mean, at best, we've seen a little bit of Gulf country enforcement.
There has been some of a crackdown on some Qataris influencing some think tanks.
But Emirati money flows across Washington, D.C.
The think tank that I used to work at, the Center for American Progress, those on the center left, those on the center right, those certainly on the center, university professors, lawmakers, their staff, even the arts institutes all across and ballet and theater all across D.C., everyone's getting Emirati money.
And so, you know, they've bought off the elite class in D.C.
So not only are they allies of the U.S., but they're truly kind of ingrained into the power structure.
Right.
Just to emphasize that point, I mean, these think tanks are not just these like quasi scholarly groups.
It's just papers that nobody reads.
They're usually people that go in and out of government.
They're often like a kind of shadow government, a part of the State Department or our foreign policy.
And the Center for American Progress, as you know, was founded by John Podesta, who was one of Bill Clinton's top aides and then ran Hillary Clinton's campaign, certainly would have been her chief of staff had she won.
And then the next president was someone named Neera Tanden who, aside from being a crazy woman on X, also became and still is working as a top domestic foreign policy advisor to Joe Biden.
They were running institutes making a ton of money that were funded by the Emiratis.
All of Washington is drowning in foreign money.
Tony Blair became extremely rich by essentially just going around the world and using his name and credibility on behalf of some of the most savage dictators on the planet.
It's remarkable how we Fixate on like a thousand dollars of Russian money as though it's a threat to the pillars of our democracy, when basically the elites of our whole country are feeding off that foreign troll.
Just on the topic of this article that you wrote, the New York Times' reliance on this kind of handful of experts who all say the same thing, and they have these benign-sounding names, just like the pro-censorship groups do, those ones that PR Omidyar funds, and Bill Gates, and George Soros, these kind of like organization for the promotion of a healthy discourse.
And like all they're really there to do is like give reports on what is disinformation, therefore what should be censored.
The thing that just strikes me so much about this is we played this video last night from George Carlin He was on the Late Late Show with Tom Snyder.
This was back in 2008.
And he was kind of, he was talking about media and he said the reason why people like say Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn, he named two left-wing radical historians, but you could now put into that group some sort of people on the populist right as well.
The reason they're not on TV is not because they're not qualified to opine in our discourse.
I mean, you're talking about extremely credentialed people.
He was saying that the reason why they don't go on TV is because the parameters of debate are agreed to and established by the media in advance, and it's a very, very narrow range of debate, even though you see people on television yelling at each other.
I think this has always been a sort of subtle point but so important is that if you go and talk to people at the New York Times or wherever or any of these corporate media outlets, they will say and they really believe it, oh we don't We don't propagandize.
We don't try and drive people to what to think because we're free.
We include all opinions.
And yet, as you say, one of the techniques, the key techniques that you can use propaganda is picking and choosing who is worth hearing from and who is not.
And if somebody is just vehemently opposed to the NATO war in Ukraine or warning about the escalation, they'll just be deemed inherently unserious for that reason alone.
No, just as we talked about earlier this year, there's a range of U.S.
government-funded, it's not just the billionaires like Gates and Omidyar.
U.S.
taxpayer money flows to a range of anti-disinformation think tanks that create reports for social media, for the mainstream media, for other reporters, basically as guidebooks of who you're allowed to speak to and who you're not.
And they use claims like hate speech and disinformation and false allegations or at least allegations with absolutely no evidence of certain critics of the war of being Russian agents, and they will disqualify dissidents or any kind of critical view.
They've done that to you, they've done that to Jeffrey Sachs, they've done that to John Mearsheimer and many other experts to try to limit the scope of the debate.
And I'm not one to say that our Media in the U.S.
is equivalent to that in Russia or China or some other authoritarian structure.
You know, I do think we have a much more dynamic and open media with much more free speech and individual rights in this country.
But if you look at how the debate is shaped, the kind of contours of the Overton window at the big establishment press that kind of agenda set and set the narrative for the rest of the media that have incredible influence, not just in elite circles, but in the grassroots as well.
On topics like the Ukraine-Russia war, for certain foreign policy, you know, major power conflicts, the range of acceptable opinion is incredibly narrow.
Go back and read the last 20 kind of news articles at the New York Times around these debates over, you know, Congress approving that $40 billion, $50 billion aid package earlier this spring, about the decision to provide new fighter jets and Abrams tanks, and now this You know, debate around extending the range of these attack missiles.
You won't and you look for the expert opinion buried 10 paragraphs deep in each article.
You won't find any criticism.
You won't find the criticism you'll read is from CSIS and similar things like the Atlantic Council that are funded by defense contractors and.
And the U.S.
government basically arguing the only criticism is that, you know, it's not enough.
We should be going further.
We should be striking, you know, Russia more directly.
We should be providing more arms.
It's incredibly propagandistic.
And it kind of just it's it's potentially why we haven't had a more serious debate in Congress and in the kind of public sphere about this very dangerous conflict.
Yeah, I remember back in 2002 and 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war, everyone knew the incentive scheme in Washington.
If you came out as a think tank scholar or some expert in the history of war and you just simply said, I'm against the invasion of Iraq, I think that weapons of mass destruction are non-existent, I think this intelligence is manipulated, You had some space in media to be heard, but you didn't get into the door of where policy is made.
You were automatically excluded because it was deemed that you had nothing of use to say.
Everyone understood that if you wanted to get into the policymaking rooms in Washington, if you wanted to be called to testify before Congress, You could quibble with the Iraq war policy.
Oh, I think we should wait a couple more months until the UN inspections are done.
I think we should ignore the UN.
I think we should go in.
There was that kind of debate.
As long as you affirm the core fundamental premise that we were going to invade Iraq, that was the price of admission to be deemed serious.
Or competent enough to be heard as an expert, and that's the same exact thing with the war in Ukraine.
The minute you say, I think we should get out of the war in Ukraine, I think we should just get a settlement done, by definition you are considered somebody unqualified to be listened to, and you simply won't be included in the New York Times no matter how credentialed you are.
You're automatically excluded.
All right, let me ask you, Lee.
You said something like this earlier today on social media, it's something that we've talked a lot about, and I genuinely, it's something that shocks me, but I genuinely don't understand it, because the US, the conflict between Washington and Moscow was generally considered, genuinely considered existential as part of the Cold War, from the end of World War II up through the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s.
Some very extreme things were done in the name of that conflict, and Driving all of it was this, people, everybody was petrified about the possibility of provoking a nuclear war because the U.S.
had used two nuclear weapons to end World War II just in 1945, which for the Cold War was still pretty recent.
And people are petrified of it.
Kids used to, every day, get trained to how to go into nuclear bomb shelters.
The desire to avoid nuclear war, not even intentional, but by miscalculation, miscommunication, misperception, was absolutely essential to everything we did.
And as you observed earlier, and I've been observing this for a while, too, it's as though that fear, no one has that fear anymore in the West.
To the point that every couple months we cross some line that we previously said we would never cross because it's too provocative or too dangerous in terms of escalating with Moscow and we've even had articles like in the Atlantic and other places saying now we can't be blackmailed by nuclear war.
It might not even be that big deal.
You could probably survive it.
What do you think explains this really deranged indifference to or minimizing of the risk of the one thing that actually can be an extinct stream level event for humanity?
I think fundamentally just starting this conversation that This is a dangerous conflict that is tempting the risk of all-out nuclear war.
You know, there's lots of different scenarios.
It's possible that it might start with a small tactical nuclear weapon that is done as kind of a demonstration of might that then escalates to a response.
You know, we don't know exactly how this would play out, but this is one of the closest we've come since the Cold War, probably the most closest we've come to a serious nuclear conflict.
And it's just incredible to me because the New York Times and other corporate mainstream media outlets are not against any type of emotional blackmail around existential risk.
You know they've written hundreds of articles around how dangerous the pandemic was and in many cases overstating the health risk of COVID-19.
And other times they've written In that same kind of batch of existential risk articles, they write about climate change, about famine and flood and sea level rise.
I mean, COVID-19 and climate change are serious issues.
But if you're going to take the editorial angle that, you know, if you're the paper of record and you need to be reporting on potential civilization-destroying events, But carefully avoid the potential for nuclear war, you know, just to kind of put your listeners in the right mindset.
I mean, if there was something equivalent happening in Mexico, if the Chinese government had overthrown or helped overthrow the Mexican government and, you know, the U.S.
had invaded Mexico and then got bogged down in a guerrilla conflict and was perhaps losing some territory or losing that war, And the Chinese started supplying missiles that could then strike major American cities, major American oil refineries, major American civilian centers.
How would we respond?
We wouldn't, we would possibly, you know, use nuclear weapons, I think, in that scenario.
And you have to put yourself in the place of the Russians, even if you completely I mean, I completely oppose the invasion of Ukraine, and I think Putin is an authoritarian leader.
But this conflict is complex, and there are many historical events that led to this invasion, and where we're at today.
We could at least put ourselves in the positions of the Russians, that once American-made, Lockheed Martin-made attack missiles are being launched deep into Russian territory, striking areas that are core to the Russian country.
If that happened to us, there would be a democratic demand for nuclear weapons.
And with just this conversation of, what are we risking here?
What are we fighting for?
Is this for a few miles of territory in the Donbass?
What does peace look like?
What could this, you know, escalation lead to?
I mean, these questions are simply not being asked.
I mean, we had a one-day attack on our soil.
In our lifetime, the only real attack on our soil Which was on September 11th.
And we went to war for the next 20 years over it.
We radically reshaped our country's character and our legal framework and our values.
And we bombed, you know, close to 10 countries in that time we invaded to.
So that was a one day attack.
So think about what's happening in the minds of the Kremlin if right on the other side of their border, the most sensitive part, the one that was invaded twice in two world wars that killed tens of millions of their citizens in the 20th century, namely Ukraine, you have all this Western presence and now NATO countries are participating in the launching of and encouraging the launching of long-range missiles deep into Russia, meaning Moscow, St.
Petersburg, their major metropolitan areas, No country would tolerate that, let alone one with nuclear weapons, and it seems like we're just playing this kind of game with it.
Like, hey, let's see what happens if we cross the line and now send tanks.
Let's see what'll happen if we send fighter jets.
And now, you know, what else?
There's not really much space left other than direct combat once we say we're going to provide long-range missiles and give you the green light to shoot them, especially since, as the Russian government pointed out today, the Ukrainians don't have the capability to shoot those long-range missiles with any precision because you have to use satellites to do so, which only NATO can do.
So NATO, by definition, will be participating in those attacks through the use of their satellites.
And I guess I just want to ask you one more time because maybe there is no one.
Maybe we don't know the answer any more than I do.
I'm asking not rhetorically because I generally don't know.
What do you think has caused this?
Like, it's insane.
It is insane to have thousands of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed at one another's cities The two greatest nuclear powers on the planet, Russia and the United States, that came very close in the past, at least twice, to actually blowing up the entire world and ending humanity, not all that long ago.
And to just be like, eh, who cares?
Let's just see what happens.
Let's just keep provoking it.
What explains that kind of demented indifference?
I don't have an answer to that.
American hubris and privilege that this is a country that, for the blessing of fate, that we're surrounded by oceans and have no near-peer threat, and this hemisphere has never been truly invaded and conquered in the modern sense of the word.
We haven't suffered the way that Russians have, so we can't empathize with this kind of paranoia about the West that they have.
Um, but just look at the major disasters and the way that that wars have unraveled in history.
It's come from a combination of hubris and kind of sleepwalking through really kind of reckless decisions without thinking about how the enemy or the adversary could respond.
And that seems to be the case here.
I hope not.
But just rationally, you know, I'm not a military expert, I wouldn't pretend to be, but just rationally speaking, if missiles, long-range missiles were raining down on major American cities, as you mentioned 9-11, as the 9-11 equivalents were happening on a regular basis, if this kind of missile, you know, decision is approved, How would the U.S.
respond?
I think that's the kind of debate we need to be having.
It's so obvious.
It's so easy to see.
As you said, there'd be a democratic demand, a very intense one, for serious retaliation, if not nuclear weapons.
If you don't use your nuclear weapons when your cities are being attacked by long-range missiles from a great power, what are they for, if not for that?
I mean, if the deterrence value of them fails, Because no one takes it seriously anymore, which the West is doing, then the only thing left to do is to use them.
All right.
Let me ask you about this article I alluded to, which was published on your Substack last month, and you wrote that with your co-author Jack Paulson.
Is that correct?
And here it is on the teleprompter.
We actually had both of you on to talk about a prior investigation into Israeli influence operations in the United States, but this was a new one on August 17th entitled, Leaked Israeli Documents Reveal Effort to Evade Foreign Agent Lobbying Law, the exact law that was just used to prosecute these lifelong black leftist radicals by Accusing them of only opposing NATO imperialism, which they've been doing their whole life because Russia ordered them to and paid them to.
What is this?
What are these leaked documents and what did they reveal about Israeli influence ops inside the United States?
Well, the last time that Jack and I came on to your show was for the first part of this investigation.
That was back in July, where we revealed that this Israeli influence operation that was launched back in 2017-2018 to encourage Americans to oppose BDS activism, you know, any kind of peaceful boycotts or sanctions against Israel for its conduct against Palestinians or the occupied territories.
And this kind of covert influence operation died down over the years and then was relaunched after October 7th, after the Hamas attacks last year.
And they've been working to influence a lot of our debates on college campuses and in Congress.
Now, this latest investigation published last month in collaboration with The Guardian takes a look at hacked uh emails and documents from the israeli ministry of justice that's their equivalent of the justice department and they these emails basically look at the internal discussions around that initial launch of this influence operation back in 2017 2018 2019
Where the Israeli government realized that they were breaking the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
That they were clearly, you know, giving money to Americans to influence public opinion and American public policy, and those are the triggers for the law.
In fact, you don't even need to give money.
If you're taking just direction from a foreign power, that's a trigger for the law.
But they secretly retained a former general counsel from the DNC to advise them on how to avoid triggering FARA registration.
They discussed how increased enforcement of FARA post-2016 with the many indictments around Russia and Ukraine and the Trump administration might mean that their own kind of influence operation would trigger a DOJ investigation.
They wanted to avoid that.
And they go into tactics into how they could continue influencing American public policy and public opinion without registering for FARA.
So they talk about setting up kind of dummy third party proxies and nonprofits to channel the money through to kind of conceal the source.
that They talk about... Like the type that was just used allegedly by RT to funnel huge amounts of money to the right-wing media outlet Tenet Media and their influencers like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, exactly that sort of same scenario.
Almost to a T, exactly the same as what's been alleged there.
So it's kind of incredible.
And they talk about, hey, you know, when we talk to the American recipients and the people involved with this, we'll do it only in person meetings.
So there will be no written notes.
They talk about how, since they're creating a chain of command through these proxies, will the kind of ultimate beneficiaries of this money Truly use it as intended, and they say, don't worry, we have all kinds of mechanisms set up to make sure they're carrying out our agenda.
I'm paraphrasing here, but we posted all the documents on our respective subsects, Jack and I, so you can read them for yourself, these internal Israeli documents.
And it's just incredible because, you know, like we said at the beginning of the segment, many countries engage in attempts at influence, attempts at, you know, shaping American Laws, opinion, regulations, big major decisions around foreign policy.
But this far along seems to be very selectively applied because we've laid out.
And in addition, many Israeli media outlets have laid out.
They've done exposes on how this money from the Israeli government was channeled to groups that went on to help lobby for anti-BDS laws that appeared in Israel to actually say on video, thank you for the money.
And these are Americans, including American legislators.
And then went back and lobbied more to enact laws that were beneficial to Israel.
So this is kind of definitionally the type of activity that FAR was designed to regulate.
And it doesn't even prevent this type of activity.
It just simply says you have to disclose.
You have to disclose where the money's coming from, what kind of activities you've engaged in the last six months.
It's a disclosure law.
And at the Israeli memo state, even that is kind of dangerous because that degrades the effectiveness of the recipients of the money.
Any kind of individual that is disclosed as a foreign agent is less effective as a lobbyist.
Obviously, that's the whole point of the disclosure, is to not let people deceive the public into believing that they're advocating on their own instead of on behalf of the government.
I personally would tell the Israelis who wrote these memos, just relax.
The idea that any American citizen is going to be prosecuted and indicted by either party for serving as an undisclosed agent of the Israeli government is virtually nil.
The only time that it ever happened was when this Jewish-American agent...
agent of the security state, the U.S.
security state, Jonathan Pollard, was acting as a spy for Israel and passing the most sensitive top-secret documents to the Israeli government.
That was a bridge too far even for the U.S.
government.
He was indicted and prosecuted and I think spent something like 25 years in prison, but it was a source of intense animosity between the Israelis and the Americans.
The idea that you would imprison a spy for your good friend Israel was outrageous.
And I also remember, you know, during the Soda reporting, one of the documents that we published and reported on was a document that said that Israel is by far the recipient of the most amount of surveillance tech.
We give them the most amount of surveillance technology, the most amount of raw data that we collect.
And yet at the same time, in a separate list of the top cyber threats to the United States, Israel was number one or number two on that list, meaning Israel gets all our cyber tech, uses our surveillance technology, gets our raw data, and then becomes the leading threat to spy on the United States, to and then becomes the leading threat to spy on the United States, to gather information, sweep up information from the United States government and from Americans to the point where the NSA regards them as among the greatest cyber threats to the United States, our
You know.
Well, I would only point to, in terms of the US-Israel kind of alliance here, and the intelligence sharing that you mentioned, look at how Israeli spying technology was allegedly used for the murder of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, or just the news story that was just like a one-day news story, but it would have been a year-long controversy if it was almost any other country.
The fact that there were stingrays on those kind of mobile cell phone spying devices that were found around the White House and allegedly placed there by Israeli agents.
You're saying that if Russia had done that, there would have been a little bit more sustained attention?
Possibly.
Who knows?
You can never know for sure.
It's a counterfactual.
All right, let me ask you this last question, Lee, before I let you go.
I know a lot of people think that you're very young, you like to perpetuate this mythology too, but you're actually not.
And I know that you remember how Americans talked about specifically Dick Cheney during the Bush administration.
I know you're about to say, oh, I was only 14 or whatever, but I know through that you remember it very well.
It became part of your political framework.
And for those who don't remember it, I mean, not only was he repeatedly accused of being a war criminal, but the consensus among liberals and Democrats was that He essentially engineered a coup by ascending to power in the 2000 election because the Republican majority on the Supreme Court stole the election from the rightful winner, which is Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, and instead appointed George Bush and Dick Cheney.
As you know, earlier this week, in fact over the weekend, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney both endorsed Kamala Harris.
And Dick Cheney's pretty old.
He kind of stays out of the spotlight.
He issued a statement.
But Liz Cheney was all over the media, as you would expect her to be.
And when she was asked, is the reason you and your father are supporting Kamala Harris simply because you're concerned about American democracy?
I love the idea that Dick Cheney, who stole the 2000 election in the eyes of liberals, is so concerned about American democracy and the transfer of power and the integrity of elections.
But she was asked, is that the reason or are there other reasons?
She said, no, there's a lot of other reasons, including the fact that even on foreign policy, how my father and I see foreign policy, we regard the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris as far closer to our ideology and view than we do a Trump-led GOP in the isolationism and pro-Russia stance we regard the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris as far closer to our ideology and view What do you make of the fact, first of all, do you think Liz Cheney is right that the Democrats and a Biden,
Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are closer to the foreign policy ideology of the Cheney, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are closer to the foreign policy ideology of the Cheney, which has never changed, they've never said it's changed, than the Trump GOP, And what do you think about the fact that Democrats are just openly embracing the Cheneys?
I mean, that was the one person Kamala Harris really touted was the fact that Dick Cheney was endorsing her.
Well, look, the Republican Party is not monolithic.
There are big factions of it.
The establishment of it is still very new conservative, but they are scared to death about people like J.D.
Vance and, you know, depending on the time of day, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's a little bit all over the map, but there are populist elements of the GOP that seem ascendant that wholeheartedly reject the neocon point of view that are anti-interventionists, that are skeptical of the foreign intervention and foreign war and these kind of entangled foreign alliances.
So, you know, the Democratic Party, just in terms of this zero-sum game that we have, a winner-take-all democratic system, where since they see kind of this instability on the right for their viewpoints, they are drifting to the left, at least to the center-left, where since they see kind of this instability on the right for their viewpoints, they are drifting You
There are a number of people who are serving in the Biden administration who have recently served, like Victoria Nuland, who are very well-connected with this network of D.C.
neocons.
In terms of this endorsement, I mean, it doesn't make sense to me.
I mean, it kind of makes sense in the sense that Kamala wants to move to the center and have bipartisan credential, but Hillary Clinton's big fault in 2016 was embracing the establishment with a bear hug and not really realizing the populist anger at the powers that be, whether that's in Wall Street or the establishment political system.
Kamala has not done that to the same degree, but she risked, I think, a lot of her candidacy viability by repeating the same mistake.
Yeah, I don't know if you know or if you've heard, but she grew up in a middle-class home with a middle-class mom.
Lee, thank you so much.
It's always great to have you.
The two articles that you published, the one about Israel and its influence operations campaign and these leaked documents, the one about how the New York Times relies on particular sources to shape this narrative is exactly the kind of sort of really like classic shoe-leather investigative journalism that you do and people can find that and I hope they will Subscribe to your sub stack where that kind of reporting is very frequent, and it's always great to see you.
