Kamala Can't State Differences From Biden; X Back In Brazil; Report Emerges About U.S. Role In Destroying Nord Stream
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
No Difference? (9:28)
Elon Musk Folds to Pressure (45:29)
New Revelations About Nord Stream Attack (1:05:14)
Outro (1:28:23)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight... Ever since Kamala Harris was imposed on the Democratic Party and then the American public without a single vote being cast for her other than the only votes that actually matter namely Obama-led Democratic elites acting in secret her campaign has been most notable for its deliberate and continuous avoidance of taking a single substantive position on pretty much Anything other than abortion, which she favors, and LGBTs, whom she deeply loves.
A fantastic ally.
Other than that, there's really no substance at all.
For more than a month, her website was completely devoid of any issues page.
We had a bio page, a donate page, but no issues page.
And then finally, when one was added, it was more cliche than a Stephen Colbert monologue about Donald Trump.
And it's therefore unsurprising that Kamala, as she finally decided to submit to a media tour, albeit in the most friendly and adoring venues possible, Continues to be unable to articulate a single substantive view that she maintains about virtually any policy issue.
In fact, over several successive programs on which she appeared over the weekend, she was repeatedly asked by the most sympathetic interviewers possible the same completely predictable question.
Namely, what would you have done differently or what will you do differently than Joe Biden, the barely sentient and highly unpopular incumbent Despite the utter simplicity and complete predictability of this most basic question, she simply could not provide any coherent answer.
Yet again, displaying the complete emptiness that characterizes her, her political trajectory, and her presidential campaign And that has squandered much of the goodwill that she compiled when she emerged as an alternative to two 80-year-old men who the public has long been saying was a choice they disliked.
Now, like her campaign, Kamala is a completely empty vessel of ideas, full of ambition and careerism to be sure, but who has zero core or stable views, which became even more visible than ever over this weekend, which was intended to give the public some greater sense of who she is but ended up doing the opposite.
Then, five weeks ago, a single Brazilian Supreme Court justice notorious around the world for being an authoritarian censor decreed that Elon Musk's acts shall be banned from Brazil, due primarily to the platform's refusal to continue to comply with a mountain of censorship orders that routinely emanate from that court and which contain no justifying explanation about why these accounts have to be banned, let alone any due process for anyone to understand or contest it.
At the time, Musk declared that he would rather lose access to a market even as large and lucrative as Brazil if the only price for admission there were unjustly carrying out illegal censorship orders.
And Brazil has had X ban for five weeks now and the only people who could access it were ones willing to risk using a VPN since the judge also said that using a VPN is basically illegal and would subject you to a $9,000 a day fine for every day that you used it, which is higher than the median Brazilian income.
The problem for Musk became that the longer X's inaccessibility to the Brazilian market went on, the more harms for the company piled up.
X had massive fines imposed on it, millions and millions of dollars.
The censorship judge froze the assets of a completely separate company SpaceX and took its money out of the SpaceX bank to pay for X's fines.
X lost huge revenue, ad revenue it desperately needs, given how much it's in debt to its various creditors.
And millions of X users in Brazil migrated to competitors such as Blue Sky and Threads.
And the longer the ban went on, the more likely that migration was to be permanent.
So two weeks ago, X began stating to these Brazilian courts that it would reverse itself and comply with all demands in Brazil, not just from now on, but retrospectively as well.
And to prove that it meant it, it started banning all of the accounts that this judge had censored, including the accounts on X of elected officials.
It paid all the fines imposed on X, millions and millions of dollars, and it jumped through every other hoop that had been set up for it, in part to humiliate X as a condition for getting back to Brazil.
And all of this was done last week.
X had complied with every demand, but the Brazilian courts on purpose created some excuse as to why X couldn't come back online last week, namely that they paid their fines to the wrong judicial account.
And waited until this week, in fact today, to restore X. One might suggest that the delay was due to the fact that there was a huge midterm election held last Sunday in all of Brazil and X was unavailable for it as a result of that delay.
Now, some are depicting X's return to Brazil as some sort of ringing victory for free speech that must triumph over the authoritarian censors in Brazil and that it was Brazil that capitulated.
But the exact opposite is actually true.
Brazil forced acts into complete submission, and therefore this is one more victory for the growing state censorship regime and the consequences of that victory in Brazil, just like the one in France when they arrested Pavel Durev of Telegram, are already spreading, and we're going to show you all about that.
Then, when the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Russia and Germany was exploded under the ocean in late 2022 in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine war, That was not only one of the worst incidents of industrial terrorism in history, but it was also one of the worst environmental disasters in decades as massive amounts of gas leaked out from the destroyed pipeline at the bottom of the sea into the ocean for months.
At the time, parts of the U.S. government and its media allies, in the face of the obvious question of who did that, hilariously tried to suggest that it was Russia, which for some reason decided to blow up its own pipeline, a pipeline that it built and that is central to its plans for economic growth by selling cheap natural gas to Western Europe.
And yet, a new report out of Northern Europe this week Bolsters what Seymour Hersh and others had reported for a long time, which was in any event quite self-evident.
Namely that the United States, not Russia, the United States and its key allies in Ukraine played the significant role, if not the leading role, in this act of industrial sabotage.
And we'll tell you about this new evidence and remind you of just how extreme the propaganda was if they actually tried to convince people that it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There has long been several bizarre features of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign this year.
The first of which is the fact that she did not run for president in 2024, even though she's now the nominee.
The last time she ran for president was in the last election cycle, the 2020 election, when she ran in 2019.
And her campaign and she was such a disaster that despite every potential advantage in the world, massive cash from California, Obviously a reflexive desire of the media to elevate and love her because she would be the first woman of color ever to become president.
The fact that she was friends with huge numbers of major media figures and Silicon Valley investors.
Her campaign was such a disaster, she was so unlikable that she had to drop out of that race without a single vote even being cast.
That rarely happens at Democratic Party primaries.
When someone declares and raises a bunch of money, as she did, they say, well, let's give it a try in Iowa and New Hampshire and we can always pull out then.
Her campaign was such a debacle that she didn't even wait that long.
The other bizarre aspect is that until about six seconds ago, everybody agreed that Kamala Harris was a national joke.
Whenever she was permitted to come out of hiding as vice president and speak at some irrelevant event or some obscure meeting, the thing she said went viral because of how cringy and embarrassing they were.
And the thing for which she was most noted was she has that Incomparably annoying personality attribute where she rarely laughs at other people's jokes, but when she tells what she thinks is a joke, she will cackle incessantly Until she forces everybody else to crack a smile and laugh with her, even though nobody thinks it's funny.
I've known people like this.
I've gone out to dinner with them.
It's really just the most off-putting, alienating personality trait.
I've never seen anybody exhibit it quite as much as Kamala Harris.
But the oddest part is that she was imposed on the public.
She didn't get any votes this year.
No one voted for Kamala Harris for her.
President, as a result, she didn't have to campaign.
She didn't go through debates.
She never sat for interviews.
She never had to articulate any of the policies she believed in.
And so when Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and others imposed her on the country after forcing, through threats, the sitting President of the United States to pull out even though he didn't want to, she was a completely blank slate because she hadn't campaigned, not just to the public, but even to herself.
She had no idea what she believed.
She wasn't allowed to believe anything as vice president.
She was barely allowed to speak.
And when she did, she had to closely follow a script.
She didn't know anything about foreign policy or much of anything else other than her training as a lawyer.
And it's been a completely issues-free campaign in the most extreme way that I've ever seen from a major party candidate.
And even as we go along week after week, We're now about a month away from an election.
Think about 30 days now, maybe 29 days.
You would be hard-pressed other than, as I said, the fact that she's in favor of abortion and deeply loves LGBT people, deeply loves us.
Other than that, you would be hard-pressed to say anything that she actually believes.
In fact, the only time she's really expressed any views or had someone express views on her behalf Was when she had her campaign spokespeople basically repudiate every single issue that she based her 2019 campaign on when she had to run to the left of Joe Biden, but not quite to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Things like banning fracking, single-payer healthcare system, mandatory buybacks for guns, and a lot more.
Those are things, for some reason, nobody's ever explained.
She just no longer believes.
And so other than that, it's been an issue-free campaign.
Now, that worked for a while, in part because, as I've said, polls have long shown that people were craving some alternative to Trump and Biden.
And whatever else you want to say about Kamala Harris, just visually and energetically and in every other way, she is not similar to Trump or Biden, just on first glance.
Her age, her energy, her generation, etc.
And she definitely benefited a lot from just not being one of them.
But at some point, people are going to take a serious look at who this is, who they are being told they should consider for president, and they're going to want to know, what does she think?
Who is she? And she really hasn't heard, they haven't heard any of that from her because she's done nothing to explain it to them.
Her campaign has been designed to ensure that she rarely deviates from a teleprompter filled with speeches that are as devoid of policy beliefs as she is.
There's been some softening in the polls, no doubt for her.
It's still a very close race, but they obviously feel like they have to put her out in public more.
They could never subject her to an adversarial interview, not that there would be many shows that would do that anyway.
And so over the weekend, they put her on, I would say, the three programs that would be the most worshipful and obsequious possible, beginning with The View, The View, Followed by the Howard Stern Show.
And if you have any doubt about Howard Stern, just go and watch how he wagged his tongue and drooled with effusive praise for Hillary Clinton when she was on his show and Joe Biden was just on his show a few months ago when Rachel Maddow was on his show.
And then to cap it all off was Stephen Colbert, who basically spends every night hosting a therapy session for American liberals by bashing Trump.
Those are the three shows they put her on, knowing that she would never face a tough question and would probably come out looking good.
And her campaign and she are so vapid, she's so confused about what she can and can't say, that even in those venues, It ended up being embarrassing because she couldn't answer even the most basic question, the most predictable basic question.
Namely, you keep saying you're a candidate of change.
You keep saying you want to turn the page and move forward, but you have to remember that you've been in government for three and a half years.
You're not some outsider like Barack Obama was or Donald Trump was even more.
You've been in the political machine, so what is it that differentiates you between you and Biden?
And she was asked that repeatedly.
And she didn't have an answer.
Here on The View, I mean, I can't think of a show that you could put Kamala Harris on where they would do everything possible not to ask a hard question.
In fact, when she was introduced, she was introduced by Whoopi Goldberg who said, here's Kamala Harris!
And she, like, paused because she couldn't attain her glee.
And then she just said, the next president of the United States!
And all the women in the audience stood up and screamed and cheered.
I mean, it was as receptive an audience as it gets.
And yet, here's what happened as part of this love fest.
Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.
I mean, how do you go on that show and act like that question is something you completely didn't expect And not give a definitive answer.
You can say, no, no, there's nothing I would do different.
I was part of every decision.
I approved of everything.
And I supported everything he did.
Or you could just say something like, well obviously 2020 is a different year than 2024.
We have new challenges now.
I think Biden has done a great job, but there are some things I think we need to pursue more.
Diplomacy or green energy or job growth, whatever.
And just pretend that you have something.
But how do you sit there and be that blank?
You know, I never thought about it before, what I would actually do different than the sitting president.
Nothing comes to mind right now.
Maybe I can, like, get back to you by memo in a couple days.
And the thing that's amazing about that is, aside from the fact that she's running as a change candidate, yet can't articulate even a single thing she would do different than the status quo, her running mate is an extremely unpopular Incoming president who had to be threatened out of the race by democratic elites because it was so inevitable that he was going to lose.
So to not have any idea of how to distance yourself from him without looking like you're betraying him is just such an indication of how empty she is.
I'm not even saying it means she's a dumb person.
I don't think she is. I just think that everything she's done over the last three months has been about everything other than focusing on anything substantive to say or think.
Out of fear that anything that comes out of her mouth that sounds like a policy will alienate people who she doesn't want to alienate.
Maybe the only place you could go Aside from the view that would even be more obsequious and comforting, would be The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
So she went there as well.
And here is, she at least tried to answer.
She at least, she didn't say, nothing comes to mind.
She actually tried to pretend she was giving an answer, but just listen to what it is that she said.
Of course. Polling shows that a lot of people, especially independent voters, really want this to be a change election and that they tend to break for you in terms of thinking about change.
You are a member of the president administration.
Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?
Sure. Well, I mean, I'm obviously not Joe Biden.
I noticed. And so that would be one change in terms of...
But also, I think it's important to say...
Okay. Can you believe what she just said there?
She said, well, one big change is I'm literally not Joe Biden.
Meaning, like, I'm not him.
I'm a different human being.
I have a different name. I have a different genetic makeup.
He's in one place.
I'm in another. So one big difference is that he's someone and I'm someone else.
That is really the extent of her answer.
I mean, the question was not a bad question.
People want change.
You keep saying you're going to bring it, but you're part of this current administration, so what would be different between you and he?
What would you do differently? And she's like, well, obviously, I'm not him.
I'm a different person.
Different name, different social security number, different date of birth.
That's obvious. Everyone understands that.
Everyone already knows that.
She's not literally Joe Biden.
The question is, substantively, how are you different than Joe Biden?
Not in terms of her human identity.
And she just, she couldn't go beyond that.
And then this is what she added on that, of course, predictably got moronic, mindless applause from the Stephen Colbert audience.
But also, I think it's important to say with 28 days to go, I'm not Donald Trump.
And so when we think about the significance of what this next generation of leadership looks like, were I to be elected president, it is about, frankly, I love the American people and I believe in our country.
I love that it is our character and nature to be an ambitious people.
You know, we have aspirations.
We have dreams.
We have incredible work ethic.
And I just believe that we can create and build upon the success we've achieved in a way that we continue to grow opportunity and in that way grow the strength of our nation.
First of all, I love the suggestion that when you think about the American people, what characterizes the American people, what makes them different than everybody else is that we have dreams of our future.
We have ambition. And she loves that about us.
She loves so much that we have dreams and ambition about the future.
Unlike, I guess, I don't know, pretty much the rest of the planet that just kind of exists and mindlessly focuses on whatever is in front of them, never thinks about the future.
But that was pretty much the full extent of her answer.
And the only thing that would have made it more embarrassing is if she had started off by saying, I was raised in a middle class home, which is how she's been answering every one of these questions.
But how is it that her campaign hasn't given her some answer?
You know, like, oh, I think there was so much opposition to Joe Biden that we didn't get enough done here and here.
We had to recover from COVID and that made it impossible to do this.
So now that we're moving COVID, I want to focus on this more.
There's so many different ways to answer it.
And the fact that her brain cannot connect to and say anything substantive about the central question that Americans would want to know if they're considering voting for her is...
Such a clear illustration of what a farce she is.
That was farcical a week after she was announced.
That it's still happening.
Less than a month before the election is really kind of remarkable.
Here is her answer when she went on 60 Minutes.
And there was a scandal on 60 Minutes where they asked her a question about Israel and why it is that we haven't stopped them from doing certain things.
And she gave a babbling answer that was worse than devoid of substance.
It was Kindergarten-like and incoherent.
And 60 Minutes edited that part out and substituted it with an answer that sounded minimally more coherent, even though it wasn't actually the answer to that question.
So there's a scandal involving 60 Minutes that maybe we'll cover tomorrow.
But here was one of the exchanges they did show, which was a little different, but I would say almost as bad as everything we've just watched.
Listen to this. Let me tell you what your critics and the columnists say.
Okay. They say that the reason so many voters don't know you is that you have changed your position on so many things.
You were against fracking.
Now you're for it. You supported looser immigration policies.
Now you're tightening them up.
You're for Medicare for all.
Now you're not. So many that people don't truly know what you believe or what you stand for.
And I know you've heard that.
In the last four years, I have been Vice President of the United States.
And I have been traveling our country.
And I have been listening to folks.
And seeking what is possible in terms of common ground.
I believe in building consensus.
We are a diverse people, geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are and our backgrounds.
And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can figure out compromise and understand it's not a bad thing, as long as you don't compromise your values, to find common sense solutions.
And that has been my approach.
So, let's just think about that for a second.
These policy positions that she advocated were not from 1997 or 2005.
They were from the very last time she actually spoke out on her own behalf about what she said she believes.
And at the time, she was running for president.
So this excuse that like, oh, I've been vice president for the last four years.
I've really gotten to travel around and meet and talk to people.
You don't get to travel around and meet and talk to many people when you're vice president and surrounded by Secret Service.
Especially someone like Kamala Harris who doesn't particularly have an affinity for doing that.
But when she was running for president in 2020, presumably she was also running around the country talking to people about what they believe.
That's sort of the part of running for president is that you believe you have the pulse and the needs and the beliefs of the American people.
And all these things that she advocated for Were things that directly served her political needs at the moment.
She needed to get to the left of Joe Biden because she couldn't run as a moderate centrist establishment candidate because Joe Biden already had that lane occupied as a 50-year senator, eight years as Obama's vice president, a reputation for being moderate.
So she had to camouflage herself as some sort of Member of the left wing of the Democratic Party, but not quite as left as socialist, crazy Bernie Sanders.
And she did that by advocating a series of policy positions that shaped her entire campaign.
Single-payer health care system, a ban on fracking, the gun buyback, and several others.
And to not even have or pretend to have an explanation for why everything that she said then is Completely different now that she's repudiated those views in four years because she was vice president and got to travel around the country and talk to people.
And what, did she hear that they don't want single-payer healthcare system in that time?
Because actually polls show that a lot of people, in fact most people, favor that.
I really think that what made Trump win in 2016 was that he was so obnoxiously honest.
He was saying things that you're not supposed to say.
Remember he talked about how He used to just write checks to politicians in both parties because he knew that as soon as they did, they would call him and ask him what he wanted, and when he said what he wanted, they would give it to him.
And he talked about how the RNC purposely filled their debates with their high-level lobbyists and high donors, which is why Jeb Bush was being cheered, and he wasn't.
It just seemed like he was just speaking off the cuff, like saying what he believed, even if it was offensive.
And I think one of the reasons why people have become most disgusted with politicians and the political system is because they lack any iota of authenticity.
People can smell that.
You don't have to study it.
It's like a stench when you're speaking from the heart, when you're speaking with passion.
And the worst thing is to just so blatantly say whatever you need to say at the very moment for your own political opportunism.
And to not have an answer for that either.
And again, there's a lot of answers she could give about how our economic situation has changed because of COVID, about how fracking has become safer.
So many different things that you could say.
That for her to just kind of brush it off and say, oh, I'm now someone who believes in compromise...
It's just so...
They're obviously relying on only one thing, which is that they think they will win because enough people hate Trump.
And there was somebody else who had exactly that same strategy.
Her name was Hillary Clinton in 2016.
I'm not predicting this race.
It's all so close.
I'm not a pundit. I'm not trying.
All I'm saying is that all of this comes off just so alienating.
No one finds this convincing.
Now, at the same time that all this is happening where Kamala can't even speak a single coherent socialist, what do you mean?
Oh, it was a race for socialism, right?
Bernie said that credit card companies should...
Does it seem advantageous to you for you to have as one of your main surrogates, one of the richest people on the planet, a multi-billionaire?
Who attacks Donald Trump for proposing policies that would curb the power of credit card companies and America's largest corporations to screw over consumers or to degrade and to malign pro-consumer policies as socialism.
And let's remember that Bernie Sanders is an extremely popular politician.
During 2016, you ask anybody who traveled the country as a reporter, you go to labor union halls, it was extremely common to hear, my two favorite candidates are Bernie and Trump.
And to someone who's a professional reporter or a political analyst or someone who works in D.C., it makes no sense.
You think about everything as left versus right, Democrat versus Republican.
How does it make any sense to like both Bernie and Trump?
But that's not how our politics are defined anymore.
Socialists, communists, capitalists, right, left, people just want somebody who feels like they're going to stand up for them.
Remember Trump's inauguration and his convention speech was, I'm here to serve as the representative of the forgotten man.
And populist policies like curbing the ability of huge corporations to run roughshod over the rights of consumers.
People know they have to wait online or spend two hours on the phone just to get the smallest thing.
And then usually they don't end up getting it.
They have no rights. The idea that sending out a multi-billionaire like Mark Cuban to denigrate Trump's attempts to say, I'm going to fight against big corporate power, whereas Kamala Harris isn't, if that's somehow supposed to be beneficial, reveals such an ignorance.
Of the realignment, how politics have changed since 2016.
The Wall Street Journal is sort of the bastion ground zero for corporatist interest.
And it said pretty much the same thing when Trump came out and said, let's put a limit on how much credit card companies can screw over consumers with massive interest rates that they can never pay off.
The Wall Street Journal, being the spokesperson for Wall Street and the wealthy, said on September 22nd, quote, Trump's price controls on credit cards.
Quote, he wants to cap interest rates at 10%.
Is this the Sanders campaign?
What made the Sanders campaign popular was that he didn't sound like a Democrat or Republican.
He sounded like he was an anti-establishment, pro-individual, pro-worker, pro-consumer politician.
That's why he came so close to beating the Clinton machine.
Now, there are a few policies that Kamala Harris has embraced.
Not fundamental ones, just sort of ancillary ones on the side, kind of symbolic ones.
And for all the talk about how Trump is Hitler and Trump is the greatest threat to democracy, the ones that she's actually embraced are ones that actually came from Donald Trump.
That often copied or echoed what he proposed.
Here from CBS News in August of 2024, quote, Kamala Harris backs ending taxes on tips for service workers, echoing a Trump proposal.
Quote, it's a proposal her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has touted all summer in an effort to win over tipped workers.
Campaigning in Las Vegas on Saturday with running mate Governor Tim Walz, Harris pledged to work to eliminate federal taxes on tips earned by restaurant employees and other service industry workers.
Quote, we will continue our fight for the working families of America, including to
raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,
Harris said in Nevada.
Trump first announced his support for eliminating taxes on tips in June.
And as reiterated, the stance frequently rallies.
The former president responds to Harris's platform announcement over the weekend, called
her a quote, copycat, all caps.
I mean, this is a big part of the problem, is that when you run and you just turn yourself
into a chameleon who represents nothing that nobody can grab onto, who is this person?
Is she the far left wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal that she always claimed to be?
Is she now this super moderate compromiser?
She seems to be all of that and none of that.
It's very, very difficult to trust politicians.
People hate that more than anything.
Here from NPR in July of 2024.
Remember, I remember that.
Let me tell you a little story before I get to this.
In Rio de Janeiro, about five years ago or six years ago during the Trump presidency.
A very well-known writer who lives on the Upper East Side came to Rio and asked to have lunch with me, and I met him for lunch.
And he was telling me about all these...
He's gay.
He's part of a big gay couple, very wealthy, in the Upper East Side.
And he was telling me about all these wonderful fundraisers they were doing for, like, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand.
That's what... All these very wealthy mega donors, gay donors in the Democratic Party do.
They have all these fundraisers for the most mediocre and irrelevant Democratic Party politicians.
They have a big, fabulous party at their house.
Anyway, he was telling me about how he...
Recently did a book reading.
He wrote a couple of very, very popular books.
He went to a book reading and he said, I'm going to read you a passage and I want you to tell me whether this sounds like Nazi Germany or somewhere else.
And he told me that he read an article describing Trump's immigration policies at the border and And how everybody at the YMCA and the Upper East Side where he spoke said, that sounds like Nazism.
And he said, no, that's Trump's immigration policy.
And he paused this dramatic thing, like making it seem like he made a really good point about how Trump's hardcore border policies were like Nazism, like a Nazi concentration camp.
And now throughout this campaign, Kamala Harris is trying to sound as though she's even more hardline than Donald Trump is when it comes to the border.
And is anyone going to believe this?
after people like AOC dressed up in white and did photo ops outside of a parking lot near the border,
weeping and crying at the things they were supposedly seeing,
the atrocities they were supposedly seeing.
We were told that the Statute of Liberty was weeping over Donald Trump's immigration policies.
Here's Kamala Harris, NPR on Kamala Harris's campaign strategy from July 30th.
Quote, Harris tries to flip the script on Trump on the border during a raucous Georgia speech.
Quote, Republicans have attacked Harris as a failed border czar who did little to stop migration,
even though President Biden had asked her to find ways to address the root causes of migration
from Northern Triangle countries early on in her time as vice president.
Former president, that was so funny.
She went to Guatemala. She went to, like, Venezuela.
She didn't go to Venezuela, but she went to Guatemala.
I think she went to El Salvador, places she knew nothing about, had never been, and she was there to, like, investigate, and she was going to cure the root problems that caused people to leave those countries and come to the American border.
That was what her project was that Biden gave her.
Former President Donald Trump has made border security one of the signature issues, building a wall on the southern border and using various restrictions to try to cut back on immigration.
On Tuesday, Harris tried to turn the tables on this narrative, painting herself as a hard-charging attorney general of a border state who had walked underground tunnels between Mexico and California with law enforcement.
This is the sort of thing that just is frivolous to people.
And this is all her campaign is.
Now, here from the New York Post, Kamala Harris announces her steal policy.
This was from September 2nd.
And the headline was, Kamala Harris announces her steal policy, the latest move ripped from Donald Trump's playbook.
Quote, Vice President Kamala Harris announced she would keep U.S. Steel under domestic ownership at her campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Monday.
Marking yet another policy she has swiped from her opponent's playbook, quote, U.S. Steel is an historic American company and it is vital for our nation to maintain strong American steel companies, Harris said.
U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated.
Former President Donald Trump had voiced opposition to the U.S. Steel deal even earlier, saying in January that he would block the sale of voters or turn him to the White House, quote, I would absolutely block it instantaneously.
Trump said at the time, we saved the steel industry, now US steel is being bought by Japan.
So terrible. Harris has taken several policies directly from Trump campaign during her short time on the trail, including no taxes on tips and promising a child tax credit.
It's actually pretty amusing because Kamala is having a great deal of difficulty Distinguishing herself from Joe Biden, but if they asked her what would you be doing differently than Donald Trump, I think she would have a very hard time saying that as well, other than to say yet again that she would protect abortion rights and she would really give a lot of love and good allyship to LGBTs.
There is a controversy brewing in the campaign that I'll just briefly summarize just to illustrate this point, which is one of the things that Joe Biden did that I think he deserves credit for, one of the few things, is that he appointed to lead the Federal Trade Commission a person named Lena Kahn, who has a great deal of expertise in antitrust law.
And has been very aggressive in trying to prevent huge mergers and consolidations of massive corporations that prevent the little bit of competition and therefore the little bit of freedom that consumers have.
And a lot of Kamala Harris' big donors who don't want any challenges to centralize corporatist power, like Mark Cuban, who calls every attempt to protect the consumer communism or socialism, as well as Reid Hoffman, who's donated millions, are demanding that Lina Khan be fired if Kamala wins.
And yet, at the same time, you have a lot of Republicans, including not just Josh Hawley, but J.D. Vance, Trump's vice president, who have been among Lena Kahn's greatest offenders, explicitly on the ground that we need to protect American workers, we need to protect the consumers, they become anti-corporatist in their posture.
A lot of people are assuming that Kamala Harris is going to be an extension of Joe Biden.
She's going to be an extension of Joe Biden in a lot of ways.
I actually think she's going to be an extension even more so of Barack Obama because to the extent there were differences between Obama and Biden, it had more to do with the fact that Obama's administration was filled with neoliberals, with pro-corporatists.
They were extremely close to Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Remember in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Obama put as his Secretary of Treasury, Timothy Geithner, who had been notorious for being a loyal servant to all of Wall Street when he was the head of the Federal Reserve in New York.
His administration was filled with bankers.
Jamie Dimon called President Obama, President Obama called Jamie Dimon his favorite banker.
It was a very neoliberal, anti-worker, anti-individual administration.
And at least Biden had a few populist gestures, like some of these antitrust policies, like being a little bit more in favor of unions, that even Republicans who are trying to change the Republican Party from corporatist to populist, like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, cheered.
And yet, the fact that Kamala Harris's Biggest donors are demanding the firing of Lena Kahn, who's trying to prevent even more corporate consolidation that runs roughshod over the American worker and over the American single individual where you have no rights whatsoever to combat these mega conglomerates.
While people like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance are the ones who have been praising Lena Kahn, and there are some Democrats doing so as well.
AOC came out today and said, we're going to do everything to protect Lena Kahn.
It just shows that there's this realignment where these old-style campaign signifiers just simply don't work.
You have to actually convince people.
One of the things Trump did best...
That you're going to change how Washington works.
You're going to enact policies that will actually improve their lives.
And for whatever reason, Kamala Harris's entire campaign is structured around avoiding convincing people that they're going to change anything to the point where she's even incapable in the friendliest of environments to identify a single thing that she would do differently than the current, very unpopular administration of which she's been a part
for the last four years.
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Rumble is not available in Brazil or in France precisely because they prefer to lose access to those markets than capitulate to censorship demands.
And for me, that's a company that is engaged in a cause very few others are and is of the highest importance to preserve free speech on the Internet.
And one of the things they've had to do in order to, for example, make themselves sustainable since they can't have a lot of corporate clients, the media, as soon as they get a corporate client, will publish articles saying Corporation X is sponsoring or advertising on a platform that has all these bad people who are on it is they have to rely on both courageous independent sponsors of the kind who sponsor our show which is why we encourage you to at least give them a try but also to start promoting their own products one of which is 1775 coffee that coffee It is really a great tasting coffee.
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We have covered over the past six weeks the rather significant and unprecedentedly intense
conflict between the government of Brazil on the one hand and Elon Musk's ex-social
media platform previously called Twitter on the other.
Which actually culminated in Brazil taking the extraordinary step.
When I say Brazil, I mean one judge on the Supreme Court.
He ultimately got four other judges to vote with him for it.
But it was really at his impetus who simply issued an order banning X from existing in Brazil, ordering every telecommunications company in Brazil to immediately cut off X at the IP level.
And at the same time he did that, he invented a law out of nowhere that made it a crime to use VPNs.
VPNs, as we've explained before, are programs that allow you to hide the origins of your internet connection.
It's often used in authoritarian countries like China or Russia or Iran or now Brazil.
To get around government blocks of certain sites that you actually want to access.
And he said that anyone using VPNs to access this banned platform called Twitter will receive a fine of $9,000 a day.
$9,000 in the Brazilian currency is actually higher than in one day, the fine, than the average medium annual salary for Brazilians.
Just to give you an extent of how extreme that punishment was.
And over the last five weeks, X really has been available Unavailable in Brazil.
Now, I've heard, I'm not sure, I can't confirm it, I've heard that there are people who have been in Brazil still accessing X, presumably by using the VPNs that that court banned.
There were a lot of them, in fact. It seemed like there was a lot of civil disobedience.
But for many people, most media outlets and the like, observed the ban and haven't been on Twitter since August 30th, which is five weeks ago when X began to be banned in Brazil.
Brazil. Now, when that happened, it was in the context of Elon Musk viciously denouncing this judge as a dictator.
He said he's going to have his day coming soon when he'll be in prison, maybe thinking about the role Elon Musk would play if a Trump victory were to happen in a month and the role that he would play in the administration.
But it got extremely vitriolic.
And one of the things that Elon Musk said is that these censorship orders are so illegal and so unjust and so unconstitutional, all of which I believe is to be true as well, having lived in this country for quite a long time in Brazil, having an understanding quite well of its constitution and its legal processes, that he just couldn't in good conscience continue to censor huge numbers of people with no explanation provided, including Members of Congress, the Brazilian people, voted for in large numbers to represent them in Brazil, the country's capital.
And it was a very important stance.
Elon Musk repeatedly affirmed it and defended it.
It created a massive and important debate in Brazil around free speech and censorship and the limits online, but also in a lot of other countries.
And Elon Musk and X stood their ground for about two weeks or three weeks even after they lost access to Brazil.
And just to indicate what a huge market Brazil is, as I've said before, Brazil is the sixth largest, most populous country on the planet.
Only five countries on the planet have more people, greater populations.
And it's not only a large country, it's a very online country.
It's a very young population.
Brazilians are very, very active on social media.
And so it's an extremely important market for X to be in, especially after all the advertisers they've lost in the United States through all the attempts to drive advertisers away.
And X is not doing well financially.
Elon Musk bought X for $44 billion, but he didn't just write a check from his own bank account.
He used major banks and other financial institutions to give him the credit to be able to buy X for $44 billion.
And by all accounts, the value of X is now sharply reduced.
Certainly 50%, maybe even less, probably less.
In part because of his commendable insistence on free speech, which has driven away a lot of corporate advertisers and even a lot of users.
So to lose ACT, to lose Brazil, one of the most important markets financially for ACT is a major blow.
And then on top of that, one of the things that What the Supreme Court did was X decided that it was going to remove all of its physical presence from Brazil because the Supreme Court actually started to say if X doesn't censor who we want, we're going to arrest the executives and officials who work for X in Brazil and including its lawyers.
In order to protect those people, Elon fired the people who were in Brazil or relocated them and completely removed all of X's assets and properties from Brazil.
And yet at the time, because of what this court and this judge perceived as excess defiance of their law, he started imposing billions and millions of dollars On X. But because there was no bank account for X for him to seize, because Elon had pulled out all of its assets, he started to freeze the bank accounts of Starlink.
Starlink is a company inside SpaceX, a completely different company.
Elon is the major shareholder in both, but they each have much different shareholders.
They're incorporated differently.
They're totally different companies.
And he started freezing the bank accounts of SpaceX, of Starlink.
Starlink, in fact, provides a lot of free services to the people of Brazil.
Free internet services to people on the Amazon and other places that couldn't access it.
Poor kid who rely on his free service.
He's been awarded and given all sorts of homages Elon Musk has for philanthropically allowing Starlink to reach people for free in Brazil that otherwise would have no internet access and yet this judge got so fanatical and unhinged that based on zero legal basis including people who defend him typically admitted that He started taking the assets, millions of dollars, out of the bank account of Starlink and putting it into the Brazilian coffers.
And you can imagine the kind of pressure that Elon Musk was under, not only from the institutional investors who allowed him to buy extra $44 billion and who now have a stake in a company infinitely less than that and Losing access to Brazil would be a massive blow even further to that, but also to his investors in SpaceX who are saying, we're not willing to risk our assets and have our bank account seized in order to pay for this political cause that you have with a completely different company that we never invested in.
And I'm not defending you, and I'm just explaining why it is that starting around two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, X started signaling very clearly, not just signaling, but stating that they want to get back into Brazil and that they are willing to comply with all of the requirements to get back into Brazil that they previously refused to comply with.
They started censoring every account that this judge had previously ordered banned, including of elected officials.
They appointed a representative of X who would be physically president in Brazil the way that it was required.
And he said he would pay all the fines out of X's own assets and over the last two weeks X has been gradually leaping through every hoop that was set up for them in order to get back into Brazil by this judge completely retreating on every single stand they took.
And last week they were done.
They were completed.
They had completed every task and there was an expectation that X would be back in Brazil by last week.
The problem was Over the weekend, this last Sunday, there was a huge election, kind of like the midterm election in the United States.
The presidential election in Brazil is 2022 and 2026.
So 2024 is like a midterm election where they elect mayors and all of the city council members, basically municipal elections all over Brazil.
It's a very important one to test who's going to have influence in all these cities.
And so my guess is that the Supreme Court wasn't that eager to have X back and usable before the election.
And so at the very last minute, even though X had jumped through every hoop, this judge said, oh, you paid the fines, but you paid the fines to the wrong account inside our court.
It wasn't supposed to be this account inside our court.
It was supposed to be this one. And until you get that money out of this account and put it in the right account, we're not going to let you back.
So it took a few days. The election was over.
And by the way, the Brazilian right did quite well in that election, definitely better than the Brazilian left did.
And now X is back on the air as of today.
And I just want to make clear that even though a lot of people who support Elon Musk and what he did, and I'm one of them, a lot of them started to try and pretend that this was some sort of victory of free speech, that Elon stood his ground and Brazil backed down.
It's actually the exact opposite.
And you can even see that in the announcement that X's Global Government Affairs account posted today explaining what happened.
They said, quote, X is proud to return to Brazil.
Given tens of millions of Brazilians, access to our indispensable platform was paramount throughout the entire process.
We will continue to defend freedom of speech within the boundaries of the law everywhere we operate.
This concept that we will defend free speech but within the boundaries of the law everywhere we operate is the key point here because obviously nobody has a problem with them defending free speech within the boundaries of the law as long as...
I'm not sure if we have these pens here that I want but maybe we can pull.
Here's the key phrase.
They say we will defend...
Continue to defend free speech within the boundaries of the law, meaning every time a judge orders an account censored, X is promising that from now on in the future it will do what in the past it refused, which was immediately comply with these censorship orders.
What made X different is its refusal to comply with those censorship orders the way Facebook and Google And every other major media platform other than Rumble refuses to do.
And yet they're still saying we needed to give Brazilians access to our indispensable platform.
Now, X is indispensable in the sense that it's the place where most journalism and politics and activism takes place.
It's still not used by a majority of Brazilians or a majority of Americans, but for political activism, for journalism, for debate over political issues, it definitely is the kind of epicenter of the discussion.
But if X is promising in the future, like it just ended up doing, to reverse itself and say we're always going to comply with every judicial order to censor, the promise that they will continue to defend free speech rings a little hollow.
Now what may still make X different and better is that Facebook and Google often just censor on their own without even being told to.
Whereas X probably will continue to lean on the side of free speech and only do so when the courts order it to do so.
But for sure that is a retreat in terms of What it is that Elon Musk had said he wouldn't do, which is comply with these orders, which is why he was banned in Brazil, and he had to reverse himself to get back into Brazil.
Here from the AP today, giving a little bit of sense of how this is being reported, quote, Elon Musk's axe is back in Brazil after its suspension, having complied with all judicial demands.
That was the...
That was the...
I don't know how I put that black line there, but here, having complied with all judicial demands.
So that is basically what happened, is that X backed down.
Here's the text. Quote, Demareche ordered the shutdown of X on August 30th after a month-long dispute with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts, and misinformation.
Musk had disparaged Demareche, calling him an authoritarian and a censor, although his rulings, including X's nationwide suspension, were repeatedly upheld by his peers.
Musk's company ultimately complied with all of Demareche's demands.
Let me say that again.
Musk's company... I don't know why I'm being so uncoordinated with these pens today, but Musk Company...
The format is actually a little bit different, so I'm going to share some of that blame.
I'm not going to take it all, but I'll take some.
Musk Company ultimately complied with all of Dima Reisch's demands.
So that was why X is back in Brazil.
Not because X did its ground, but because it didn't.
Those demands included blocking certain accounts from the platform, paying outstanding fines, and naming legal representative.
Failure to do the latter had triggered the suspension.
Now, there were some pretty large pro-Musk accounts that characterized what happened here, maybe well-intentioned, but in a way that most definitely is not accurate.
The account lives of TikTok, upon learning that X is back in Brazil, said, quote, today, huge win for free speech.
When she saw a free speech victory for Elon Musk, Brazil has lifted its ban on X. And that account also characterized it as a free speech victory for Elon Musk.
Here's another supporter of Elon Musk, Elon Miles Chong, who said Brazil has just lefted the ban on X. Progress.
There's no conceivable way in which this is progress.
If anything, this strengthened Alexander Diomedes greatly.
It strengthened the regime of censorship that he's been overseeing.
Because Elon Musk thought he had all the leverage meaning you're not going to let all of Brazilians lose X and yet that's exactly what Brazil did and they continued to do it for five weeks after the election and there was not enough public pressure to force them to reverse and so who reversed himself was Elon Musk.
Again I say that he did so with viable reasons but if you're going to make that kind of a public stand I'd rather lose profit Then capitulate to unjust orders of censorship, either follow through with that or don't make those claims in the first place.
Because what this did is strengthen Alexandre de Marais, every headline in Brazil, every headline elsewhere, is Musk and X are humiliated, being forced to do everything they vowed they would never do.
Now, as we always say, the reason we talk about Brazil or wherever this is happening in the UK or Canada or the EU is because it's starting to happen everywhere.
A big catalyst for what happened in Brazil was that three days before Brazil ordered X ban, France had arrested The founder, the multi-billionaire Russian founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, who had always vowed to refuse government orders to censor turnover data, they arrested him by luring him into Paris.
They charged him with multiple felonies.
And then two weeks later, Pavel issued a public statement saying that Telegram was radically changing all of its rules so that in the future they would significantly fortify their content moderation and comply with all government orders.
When a state hangs over you, the threat of imprisonment, by design, you're going to start changing your policies, the same as if a government threatens to block your platform from appearing in the U.S. And this is exactly what is now happening in other countries.
From Reuters today, quote, Turkey blocks the instant messaging platform Discord.
Turkey's Information Technologies and Communications Authority published the access ban decision on its website.
Transport and Infrastructure Miniature Abdullah Piyar Olozul said the matter of the Discord platform made it difficult for authorities to monitor and intervene when illegal or criminal content is shared.
Quote, We can only intervene when users complain to us about content shared, he told reporters in Parliament.
Since Discord refuses to share its own information, including IP addresses and content,
with our security units, we were forced to block access.
It wasn't just Turkey that did that, it was also Russia from the Washington Post today.
Russia bans Discord chat program to the chagrin of military users.
Quote, Russia has moved to ban Discord, a popular platform for real-time communication,
drawing ire from the Russian military that has extensively used the app
to coordinate units on the battlefield.
And Ukraine, last month a Moscow court fined the American company for quote,
failing to delete prohibited information.
They later said it asked Discord to remove nearly a thousand pages and channels,
including child pornography and extremist statements, but some content was still available
aside from targeting harmful content.
The company has also used the term, quote, prohibited information.
Depression Western IT giants to comply with the company's censorship laws passed shortly after Russia launched its war in Ukraine.
Under Russian laws, criticizing the war, military or government officials supporting gay rights, Where sharing content authorized by opposition forces can be punished by law and viewed as, quote, calls for extremism.
Not only in Russia, not only in Turkey, not only in Brazil, but also in Ukraine, that fashion of democracy for which we're fighting because we love democracy so much and want to make sure it's preserved, even though its leader That won't face an election indefinitely until this war is over.
That democracy. From the Ukrainian Pravda, they also announced, quote, Ukrainian parliament to restrict telegram usage based on very similar rationale.
So I hope what you're seeing here is this very visible, rapidly worsening, and very dangerous trend where governments are tired of pressuring social media companies to censor.
They're now using force to do so.
I think the arrest of Pavel Jorov in France was the biggest escalation yet, but it signaled to all these other countries.
It signaled to Brazil. If France did it, you can do it.
And now you see every one of these other countries banning social media companies until and unless they capitulate and promise to obey the state's orders about the kind of content that can and cannot be permitted on the platform.
If you believe a free internet and the ability to use the internet to speak freely is a high value, there are few things more dangerous than this trend.
All right, we just wanted to give you an update on a story that we have covered for a long time, but that has been mostly forgotten and we haven't covered it for a while either.
As you recall, in late 2022, a pipeline that was built by Russia and Germany To connect Russia and Germany with the idea of allowing Russia to sell cheap natural gas to Western Europe through Germany, a massive pipeline that took a lot of money and a long time to build was exploded.
It was just blown up and rendered unusable.
It was just sitting at the bottom of the sea.
And aside from being an act of extreme industrial terrorism, you just blow up gas infrastructure and oil infrastructure, Then, also, it was a major environmental disaster.
Remember how we're supposed to care about the environment?
This is one of the worst environmental disasters in years, with all kinds of natural gas leaking from that platform that was transmitting huge amounts back and forth.
And amazingly, at the time, when this question arose, oh, who might have done this?
Who might have blown up this Nord Stream 2 pipeline?
Let's remember that the U.S., even before the war in Ukraine...
Wanted that pipeline gone.
In fact, it was Trump, despite always being accused of being a Russian agent, who led the way in trying to badger the Germans in Western Europe, Europeans, from not buying natural gas from Russia by saying, we pay for your defense.
Why should you buy gas from Russia instead of from us?
And their answer was, well, it's much cheaper to buy it from Russia.
Russia's much closer. Their natural gas is produced more cheaply.
But Trump said, we don't care.
We're paying for your defense.
You should buy it from us even if it's more expensive.
So the U.S. hated this pipeline for a while.
When Biden got into office on this wave of anti-Russian hatred and then the war in Ukraine started, they basically explicitly, Biden and Victoria Nuland, came out and said, if the Russians invade Ukraine, you can say goodbye to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
So the U.S. threatened repeatedly in public to blow it up.
And then nine months later when it was blown up, the Western media was like, oh my God, who might have done this?
Gigantic mystery. Could be anybody.
In fact, as we're about to show you, they tried to imply strongly that a leading suspect was Putin.
That for some reason Putin decided to blow up his own pipeline.
The one the Russians built, the one on which the Russians were relying for their future economic prosperity for decades to come.
It might have been just Putin who blew it up.
Seymour Hersh, who is one of the most decorated journalists on the planet, if not the most decorated, has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting about massacres in Vietnam and then Abu Ghraib.
I think he's won six Polk Awards for investigative reporting more than any other person.
Reported at the time, based on his decades-long Rolodex of deeply implanted sources of the intelligence agency, that it was the United States That was responsible.
Here's his article back in February of 2023.
He said how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline.
The New York Times called it a, quote, mystery.
But the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret until now, and he kind of detailed what he had learned.
And, of course, all the people in the know, still in the corporate media, who haven't been expelled like Seymour Hersh, Who don't have a tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the journalistic achievements he has and wouldn't compile a fraction of it, even if they live to be a thousand years old, all mocked him and said that was some weird conspiracy theory.
Today there was a report from a publication called Politiken, which is a...
An outlet in Scandinavia, which is where a lot of these investigations were taking place.
And in fact, it took place right off a Danish island.
That was where the pipeline was blown up.
And so it was the Danish conducting the investigation.
And up until now, the Danish have refused to release the findings of that investigation.
I wonder why. Probably not because they found that Putin did it.
It must be because it contains conclusions that would be damaging to the West.
But here today from that publication, it's actually from last week.
It's September 26, 2024.
It was published in the original Danish, and it's now been translated.
The title, A Small Danish Island Got Caught in a Major Political Sabotage Case.
Quote, In September 2022, the explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines attracted enormous international attention.
At first, everyone believed Russia was behind the sabotage.
Let me say, not everyone. A lot of us knew that was completely idiotic and scoffed at it and laughed at it as one of the dumbest pieces of propaganda imaginable.
But a lot of people did believe that Russia was somehow behind the sabotage.
The article goes on, While Denmark and Sweden have closed their investigations.
Quote, it's a huge case and the biggest act of terror in this area since World War II, said Soren Theem Anderson, administrator of Kristiansu.
In the beginning, we didn't know what the police were looking for and there were no ship names to relate to.
But it does affect us, of course, if there has been a boat with explosives right over there without us noticing anything.
On the phone, that was a quote from Ann Marie Coffert.
On the phone, her husband, the harbormaster John Anchor Nielsen, said he provided the police with information from the payment machine where ships dock.
But the machine contains no names, and he only spoke with the police a few times.
A journalist also showed the harbormaster a picture that didn't ring any bells.
For the first few days, the harbormaster claimed he, quote, wasn't allowed to say a word.
But today, John Anchor Nielsen can reveal that four or five days before the Nord Stream explosion, he was with the rescue service from Christiansome because there were some ships there and their radios were turned off.
It turned out that they were U.S. Navy ships.
When the rescue service approached them, he was asked by the naval command to turn back.
Therefore, the harbormaster leans toward the theory, as suggested by, among others, the American-star journalist Seymour Hersh, although without evidence, that the US was behind the sabotage.
Now, at first they tried to blame the Russians.
But then they tried to pretend that it was the Ukrainians.
Let me just say, the country that has the greatest interest in this besides Russia is Germany.
It was a shared pipeline between the two countries.
The Germans built a lot of it.
They invested a lot of it.
They were depending upon it to provide them with natural gas, cheap natural gas.
Whoever blew up the pipeline committed an act of industrial sabotage and terrorism against Germany, not just Russia.
And yet the Germans being kind of like the British, always just very compliant, complicit, being told what to do, have expressed no real interest in finding out who did it probably because they already know who did it.
Here was the Wall Street Journal in August, just a couple months ago.
Quote, a drunken evening, a rented yacht.
The real story of a Nord Street pipeline sabotage.
Quote, private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general.
President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off.
So they started to blame a rogue unit of Ukrainians who didn't even have the approval of President Zelensky.
Quote, The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it.
It involved a small rental yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers.
One was a woman whose presence helped create the illusion that they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.
Quote, I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones, and satellites.
One officer who was involved in the plot said, quote, the whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing.
And the iron determination of a handful of people who have their guts to risk their lives for their country.
By November 2022, German investigators believed Ukrainians were behind the explosion.
Ukrainian officials who participated in or are familiar with the plot to believe it would be impossible to put any of the commanding officers on trial because no evidence exists beyond conversations among top officials who were at least initially all in agreement about wanting to blow up the pipeline.
Quote, none of them will testify lest they incriminate themselves, one former officer said.
So apparently according to that theory that they tried to push, it was a tiny little band of drunken Ukrainians who on their own just decided to take a little boat, dive under the water, and engage in this extremely complex task of blowing up a very sophisticated underwater pipeline built by two industrialized countries, Russia and Germany, and simply nobody can prosecute them because no one has any evidence.
And according to that article, the Germans believe that it was the Ukrainians who did it.
And yet, rather than punish Ukraine, the normal thing for a country to do if another country blew up one of their most important pieces of industrial infrastructure, the Germans continue to arm and send massive amounts of weapons to Ukraine, the country they supposedly blame for having blown up their pipeline.
Just to give you a little reminder of the just preposterous propaganda to which we were subjected when this happened early on.
Here is from the BBC in May of 2023 titled Nord Stream.
Report put Russian Navy ships near the pipeline blast site.
There were Russian Navy ships, we were told.
Not American ones as we just learned, but Russian Navy ships near the pipeline blast site.
Underwater explosions last September knocked out the two Nord Stream pipelines built to carry gas from Russia to Europe out of action.
The cause of the blast is unclear.
Formal investigations are still taking place in countries close to the blast site.
So far they have said only that they believe the explosions were the result of sabotage rather than any kind of accident.
But one possible lead pointing toward Russian involvement in blowing up the Russian pipeline has emerged from details of suspicious Russian ship movements and the run-up to the Nord Stream blast reported by four Nordic public broadcasters and an accompanying English-language podcast cold front.
Very soon after the incident, the Washington Post was doing their best propagandistic act to suggest the same thing.
From September 27, 2022, quote, After the Nord Stream explosions, quote, Okay, just think about that logic.
The Kremlin wanted to threaten Europe and say, if you continue to support Ukraine, we want to show you what we can do to you.
As a result, They didn't go and blow up anything that was European.
They didn't go and blow up something on European land.
They went and blew up their own pipeline to say, look, we have the capability to blow up our pipeline at any time, our own pipeline that we spent tens of billions of dollars and our best engineers and all this effort to build on which our future economic prosperity depends just as a threat to you to show you that we can blow up our own pipeline, think what we can do to you. That was the theory the Washington Post and European countries tried to push to make it seem like it was Putin who blew up his own pipeline.
The damage did not have an immediate impact on Russia's energy supplies.
Russia cut off flows earlier this month, and European countries have scrambled to build up stockpiles and secure alternative energy sources before that.
Now, in case you think that the United States is too law-abiding and too benevolent to do something like blow up someone else's pipeline as an act of industrial sabotage...
That would be a big conspiracy theory to suspect that the Americans would be behind such a thing.
I give you Victoria Nuland, who at the time was with the U.S.
State Department running Ukraine for the Biden administration, much like she did for
the Obama administration, after which she had been running Iraq and NATO policy for
Dick Cheney and George Bush.
And this was shortly before the Russians invaded Ukraine when the U.S. government was warning
that they were about to.
And Victoria Nuland spoke at the U.S. Department of State and tried to warn the Russians of
certain things that will happen.
And here's one of the things she predicted.
With regard to Nord Stream 2, we continue to have very strong and clear conversations
with our German allies.
And I want to be clear with you today.
If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.
Now, just to be clear, as the US media suggested, that didn't mean she had anything to do with it.
What she was doing, she's like psychic.
And she was envisioning that if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or the other, there will be no more Nord Stream 2, meaning that the Russians, she can anticipate, will probably blow up their own pipeline.
Paris would have thought that she was threatening to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if the Russians invaded.
Here was her boss, ostensibly, Joe Biden, just a couple weeks later, on February 7th, Also being psychic about what would happen to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if Russia invaded.
There will be no longer a Nord Stream 2.
We will bring an end to it.
But how will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany's control?
I promise you we'll be able to do it.
Can you believe how propagandistic our media outlets are, both in the US and the West?
US officials, including the president and the actual ruler of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, stood up and said, if Russia invades Ukraine, we're going to blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
We're going to destroy it. We're going to end it.
It's not going to happen anymore.
And then when it actually got blown up, just like they promised, The U.S. media said, God, we cannot figure out for the life of us who might have done this.
And they actually tried to start suggesting that Russia blew up their own pipeline.
And once that didn't work, they settled on an even more preposterous story that some rogue group of drunken, low-level Ukrainians took a little tiny fishing boat.
to the sea of Denmark and just like dove while they were drunk underground without the approval of Zelensky or anyone else high up in the government and just kind of blew it up for fun like a little boat party took out a boat party had some beers and they're like hey you know what we're near the Nord Stream 2 pipeline why don't we see if we can blow it up And that was the version that until Seymour Hersh's article, which instantly got dismissed and mocked, and then the report this week was the one that the West more or less sold in case closed.
Nobody talked about who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline ever again.
Here was Secretary of State Antony Blinken shortly after the pipeline was actually blown up when he was asked about it at a State Department briefing.
This is also a tremendous opportunity.
It's a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.
That's very significant, and that offers tremendous Strategic opportunity for the years to come.
But meanwhile, we're determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.
So while the Western media was convincing people that Russia blew up its own pipeline, Anthony Blinken was saying, hey, you know what?
It turns out this is really good for us.
We've been trying to force the Europeans not to buy from Russia any longer.
And what do you know? Russia went and blew up its own pipeline and all the benefits were down to us and it only harms Russia.
Wow, we are so happy that Russia blew up its own pipeline and destroyed its strategic interest and benefited our own.
And none of this, for one moment, made the Western media think, are we going a little too far here in trying to convince people that Putin blew up his own pipeline?
A couple of months after that, Victoria Nuland went to the Senate As you might recall, this was when she was asked by Marco Rubio, in a leading way, whether Ukraine had any biological labs in Ukraine that they were afraid might fall into Russian hands because there were people suggesting this, and he was hoping Victoria Nuland would say, no, of course, there are no biological labs in Ukraine.
They don't pursue biological weapons.
And instead, Victoria Nuland said...
Yes, there are biological research facilities in Ukraine and we're very concerned about those falling into Russian hands.
And then when people like myself and a few other people noticed that and we said, wait a minute, what do you mean?
What does she mean by that?
What biological research labs Does the U.S. and Ukraine have in their country that are so dangerous they would be afraid of having it fall into Russian hands?
Every one of us who raised that question got called a Kremlin conspiracy theorist.
In fact, you can go to my Wikipedia page right now and there's a section called conspiracy theories.
And the one example of my spreading conspiracy theories was when I asked...
What Victoria Nuland meant in this hearing when she said, something I had heard for the first time, that Ukraine has extremely dangerous bioweapon facilities, bioresearch facilities in Ukraine that the U.S. was working with them to secure.
I wasn't the one who brought that up.
It was Victoria Nuland.
But anyway, I just remember that hearing for this.
But there was another part of this hearing where she was talking to Ted Cruz And even though it was Russia that blew up its own pipeline, both Victoria Nuland and Ted Cruz could barely contain their glee over their great luck that Vladimir Putin blew up his own industrial infrastructure.
Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.
I mean, you know, we talk a lot about Media propaganda on this show.
I mean, one of the reasons for this show, and one of the reasons why I got into journalism in the first place, was because there was so much propaganda, just lies constantly circulating, just false information, that my idea always was, well, I wanted to create a platform where I could push back against that, where I could show how that was false, present facts that undercut that.
And even though I've been doing that for 20 years now almost, sometimes it really does surprise me how far they're willing to go.
At the same time that they warned beforehand that they were going to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline if Russia invaded, at the same time that they had been urging since the Trump administration that the Nord Stream pipeline was terrible for U.S. interests because it allowed Western Europe to buy cheap natural gas from Russia instead of having to buy more expensive natural gas from the U.S., At the same time that they talked about all the benefits that the US got from having that pipeline blown up, at the same time that Victoria Nuland giddily celebrated with Ted Cruz how lucky and happy they were that it was a, quote, hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea, the media was actually trying to claim in multiple articles that it was probably the Russians who did it.
And then when Seymour Hersh reported, based on ample sourcing that has won multiple journalism awards for him over the decades of his career, that in fact the US was involved in those operations, the entire media scoffed at it, barely paid any attention, said he was a crazy old man.
And decided to go instead with this theory that I guess they thought was more viable than Putin did it, which was about these rogue five Russians having a party on a little boat who on a lark decided to dive, just had a bunch of explosives with them, and see if they could just do it.
Ukraine's not to blame because Ukraine didn't authorize it.
Zelensky heard about it, but he rejected it.
He wasn't to blame. Nobody was to blame at all, except these five guys who just acted on their own.
And then you had that report that came out of Denmark today saying, you know, actually what I saw, I wasn't allowed to talk about it until now, was these weird U.S. Navy ships right in the area who when we approached them told us to leave them alone and go back.
And I have to say, even though U.S. propaganda, U.S. media propaganda is a major source of this show and of my work, it sometimes does surprise me when you put these things together just how far they're willing to go.
And in fact, that has been pretty much the entire way, not just that this incident, that the entire U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, how the war in Ukraine happened, what it's for, how it's going, all of it is characterized by the same Low-level, absurd propaganda that if you challenge any part of, you will actually get put on an official list of being a Kremlin propaganda that has happened to not just me, but to everybody who has done so.
And sometimes it's worth taking a step back and realizing just how extreme and far they're often willing to go.
Because even if you're cynical and skeptical of the media, they will always go lower than you think.
They will always surprise you in the way that they do that.
Alright, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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