Right-Wing Populists Barred from Running in Democratic World; JFK Reporter Jeff Morley on CIA Involvement and his Testimony in Congress Today
Reporter Jefferson Morley discusses the key revelations from the newly released JFK files after testifying before Congress. Plus: another right-wing populist is barred from running for office in the democratic world.
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As I said last night, I really hate April Fools, so don't expect any sort of deceit or fun or anything like that.
There may be some jokes, but not along the April 1st variety, because I'm a strong, ardent opponent of April 1st.
Take that position quite seriously, and I intend to follow through with it.
But welcome to a new episode of System Update, which is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the French right-wing politician Marine Le Pen is leading many polls to become the next president of France in 2027, after her National Front Party won the EU parliamentary elections last year.
But fortunately for the French establishment, which has long hated and feared Le Pen, they have at least for now solved their Le Pen problem, not by persuading French voters to reject her or abandon her.
As one would expect one would do in a democracy, but instead by securing a criminal conviction against her that magically results in her being banned from running for office for five years, which just coincidentally extends to the 2027 French presidential election in which all polls agree she has a good chance to win.
This is not the first time we have seen a right-wing populist leading in the polls suddenly become banished from the ballot.
The opposite is true.
It is now becoming commonplace in the so-called democratic world.
In the name of protecting democracy, establishment factions have banned from the ballot former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, who now has a sizable lead in the polls for the 2026 election to defeat the current Brazilian president Lula da Silva and be re-elected to a second term.
But luckily for Bolsonaro opponents, he too is barred from running.
We saw something very similar happen recently in Romania, where a previously unknown right-wing populist candidate, Kalin Djordjescu, unexpectedly won the presidential election in late 2024, only for the EU and the United States to work with Romania to simply invalidate that election.
Doesn't count!
And then, when Djordjescu was quite substantially leading polls for the second election they decided to have, this is maybe like the outcome of the first, They simply banned him from running too, and now he's off the ballot.
And of course, getting Donald Trump banned from the ballot was a major priority of the Democratic Party throughout 2023 and 2024, knowing, as they often said, that that was their best chance, perhaps their only chance, to beat him.
We'll break down what these guardians and saviors of democracy are doing when banishing their most popular opponents from running, as opposed to trying to defeat them democratically.
But first, There are a handful of reporters who have doggedly investigated and reported on and followed every aspect of the investigations into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
One of the best of those, Jefferson Morley, testified today in front of Congress about the significance of the newly released JFK documents, along with others who have long followed the JFK investigation, including Director Oliver Stone and others.
You'll recall that last week we reported on and broke down the unredacted memo that was released by the Trump administration to their credit, they declassified all the documents, that JFK confidant Arthur Schlesinger wrote to the president, President Kennedy, about the reasons the CIA desperately needed to be reined in.
And while I'm morally here to talk about his testimony today, that Schlesinger memo, and much more on the CIA's role as reflected in the long history of this investigation, but especially Let's do it!
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right after this brief word from our sponsor.
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Jefferson Morley is a best-selling author and a veteran Washington journalist known for his investigative books that expose the covert history Of American power, his most recent book is Scorpion's Dance, The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, which explores the secret relationship between CIA Director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon.
He is, as well, a leading authority, I believe one of the top two or three journalistic authorities on the JFK assassination.
He has spent decades prying loose the CIA's deepest secrets and challenging the official narrative, and he testified earlier today at Congress about what these newly declassified documents from the Trump administration actually Thanks for having me,
Glenn. I'm very glad to be here.
Yeah, I'm glad to have you.
I recommended the interview that you recently did on Breaking Points, which was about 30 minutes, that you did with Sagar and Jetty and Ryan Grimm.
I found it one of the most illuminating interviews in recent times, especially on these documents.
But I want to explore some other things beyond what's in that interview as well.
And I want to begin, you testified earlier today before the House Task Force on Declassification, which is chaired by Congresswoman Annapolina Luna, the Republican of Florida.
And I know that you and everybody else interested in not just the JFK assassination, but the role that the CIA has played in our politics and our history, was very interested in these documents and more broadly interested in getting to the bottom of this case, whether we really ever learned the truth.
What was your sense having testified before the committee about whether that interest and excitement is shared by most members of Congress?
Let me talk about Chairwoman Luna first, because I've gotten to know her over the last couple weeks when she launched this House Task Force on Declassification, and I've been very impressed with her attitude.
She's a can-do person.
When I said, I said, we need to get these documents from the CIA, she said, you know, give me a memo and I'll call Ratcliffe's office today.
So she's very proactive.
I think her leadership has been very strong.
You know, we had some partisan politics in the hearing today, which I think was unfortunate because it's not really a partisan issue.
I mean, I'm a pretty liberal guy.
That's why I wanted to be on your show, you know?
And so I'm hopeful that the task force is going to do serious work.
The most encouraging sign?
She says we're going to have another hearing on JFK, and we're hoping to get some more first-hand witnesses.
So I want to spend most of my time with you on the substance of these documents and the investigation, but just before I get to that, which will be next, just along those same lines, I don't want to make it a partisan issue either, but there is a palpable shift in how our political spectrum thinks about the U.S. security state, the CIA, the nefarious role they've often played.
It used to be, as you said, you're a liberal Democrat.
It used to be foundational to American liberal and left-wing politics to distrust and view the CIA and the security state as quite sinister, as needing reform.
And it was more typical that conservatives would defend them.
No, these are patriotic organizations.
We need them.
We love them.
They have to operate in the dark.
And there's been so much change.
It was Donald Trump who finally declassified these documents as he promised to do.
It's Chairwoman Luna, a very right-wing member of Congress who's leading the way, as you I just want to show you a clip from today Uh, that involves Congresswoman Jasmine Kroc of the Democratic Texas, who has become in a lot of ways one of the leading faces of the Democratic Party, the American liberalism.
And here's what she had to say about the JFK documents and the hearing itself and the possibility of the CIA involvement.
Previously classified JFK assassination files are now public and show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy.
But what I find funny about this hearing is that the Republicans are here re-litigating whether CIA agents lied 60 years ago, but aren't doing anything about the CIA director lying to Congress just six days ago.
We should be having a hearing on the fact that Thank you.
oversight over the administration's handling of classified information, the Republicans Okay, so there's more of that, but she's essentially saying, look, these new documents vindicated the CIA that had no role to play in any of this.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorian.
In any event, it doesn't really even matter.
There's no reason for us to know.
We should focus on the signal gate or whatever.
As somebody who's been aligned with the Democratic Party for a long time, do you think that's become a more common sentiment?
Absolutely. And it's really unfortunate.
I mean, to bring up something totally unrelated about what's going on with the current controversy.
The JFK files is something that there is broad support for across the political spectrum.
And there's no need to drag partisan politics into this issue.
It's just not an issue.
You know, Representative Luna did a good job of leading this and this kind of reflexive, you know, Jasmine Crockett hadn't even read the documents.
She didn't even listen to what I said about the false testimony of three top CIA officials.
Facts don't register anymore, which is a problem universally.
But it's especially a problem when We're actually making progress on the JFK story.
President Trump's order was a breakthrough and it's one of the few things I agree with him about.
A very positive measure.
We obtained last, on March 18th, a lot of important information and we're getting more as we proceed.
You know, remember Glenn, they released 80,000 pages of documents Yeah, records. And so that's the positive thing.
Luna's talking about having another hearing.
I think that's a good idea to bring more JFK witnesses and educate people about what really happened.
I mean, I thought it was bizarre when the day that it was released, everybody ran to their social media accounts or their programs to tell everybody what these documents show.
We focused only on one document, which was the unredacted Schlesinger memo, and only to the extent that it revealed things about the CIA in general, not necessarily their role in, if any, in the JFK assassination.
But before I do, I think some of this is generational.
I mean, I didn't live through the JFK assassination.
I wasn't born yet.
Other people who were, were not very old.
Obviously, Congresswoman Crockett wasn't.
She was born, I think, in the 1980s or even 1990s.
So I understand why some people might say, oh, this is kind of old and ancient history that we don't need to go excavating through.
What is your answer to that?
Why do you think it matters so much to kind of continue with the investigation?
Well, let me explain.
My readership at the JFK Facts newsletter is very diverse, from Maga, Christian nationalists on the right, libertarians, anti-imperialists, liberals on the left.
And we don't have a big culture war on the site.
People want to talk about this.
People want a real debate.
And the idea that people are coming reflexively to the defense of the CIA without even acknowledging or incorporating these records, We're going to talk about the Schlesinger memo in a second.
Why should people care?
You know, what we're missing right now in American politics is what President Kennedy talked about in 1963.
He's talked about, we need a strategy for peace.
Not peace in our time, peace for all times.
not a Pax Americana enforced with America as the world's policeman, but a peace for everybody.
And that's the vision, really, that died in Dallas.
So when people say, why does it matter now?
You know, you don't hear that voice anymore in American politics, not from Democrats and not from Republicans, you know.
And that's what's missing.
And that's why it's important to understand what died when President Kennedy died.
We lost something very real.
And I would say, you know, And that's led to a much more militarized, aggressive, interventionist foreign policy, which Kennedy was trying to steer the country away from.
That's what's important about the Kennedy assassination.
We've lost something when we lost President Kennedy.
So let me let me get dive into these details now and let's start with this Schlesinger memo for because we For our viewers who might have seen it.
I think when it was released I believe two weeks ago We we delved very deeply into what this memo is what the newly released material Demonstrates and in some for those who don't know Arthur Schlesinger was a very respected historian especially among the kind of Kennedy circle We're
And you've offered a lot of plans for how to reign it in.
Pretty serious and severe plans.
So I wanna hear what your thoughts are on the newly released portion of that.
But before you get to that, Do we have evidence that the CIA was aware of the conversations taking place in the JFK White House about the need to rein in the CIA?
Absolutely. Dick Helms, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, said in his memoir that this period after the Bay of Pigs was a stormy interregnum.
Sorry, he was the director of the CIA when?
Dick Helms, not in the 60s, but later on with Nixon?
No, he was deputy director at the time of the Bay of Pigs and later became director.
So at the time of Kennedy's he was deputy director and And Helms said in his memoir, this was a stormy interregnum for the agency, where they understood that their continued existence was in the balance.
Ultimately, Kennedy decided not to do the reorganization.
It was just too big a lift, I think, for him in terms of politics.
But the Schlesinger memo shows that he was talking about it very seriously.
And the key thing there was what Schlesinger the encroachment of the CIA on the president's foreign policymaking authority.
And, you know, you've talked about the Schlesinger memo.
You recall some of those details.
47% of State Department officers at the time of Kennedy's assassination were, in fact, CIA officers.
So the CIA is taking over the political reporting function of the state.
called it a state within a state.
Which is kind of ironic since now the term deep state has become this source of liberal mockery as though it's some bizarre Unhinged conspiracy theory and you knew you had Dwight Eisenhower coming out of the 50s serving two years two terms as president Warning about the military-industrial complex on his way out and then you have Arthur Schlesinger Calling it a state within a state when writing to JFK about it.
So this memo has been out for a while I think for a few years or even longer but what we have now thanks to President Trump's declassification order is the full unredacted memo.
So is there, are there things that we have learned that are important in the unredacted parts that we didn't previously know?
Yeah. I mean, there was a whole page that was, that was redacted.
So like the statistic that I just quoted to you, the 47% of state department officers were actually CIA officers that was redacted by the CIA.
For the past 60 years, you know, the fact that the CIA had 128 people in the Paris embassy, that was redacted.
And you know, when you look at it, that's not national security information.
No American would be threatened or harmed by that information.
It's only the reputation of the CIA.
And so what you see in these redactions, these redactions are justified in the name of national security, right?
You need to protect us from our enemies.
Our enemies aren't fooled.
The only people that were fooled were the American people.
And that's why we need this full declassification, because we're the only ones that are in the dark about the way the CIA is operating.
About your argument that the reason the CIA or other parts of the government perceive JFK to be threatening, perhaps threatening enough to want to kill him, is that he was talking about this radical transformation of our foreign policy, of finding a way to get out of endless wars and become a nation of peace.
There are people very knowledgeable who are also on the left, one of them is Noam Chomsky, who has said over the years that he finds that unpersuasive because, and I guess it's a very Chomsky way of looking at things, that although there was a little bit of resistance here and there on the part of JFK and his administration to the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community, obviously they had an argument after the Bay of Pigs, they fired.
As I said earlier, None of Kennedy's enemies on the right ever said that at the time.
They said that he was a weakling, if not a traitor.
You know, the idea that Kennedy was a Cuba hawk or a Vietnam hawk, no Cuba hawk or Vietnam hawk in 1963 ever said that, you know.
So, but Chomsky, the problem with Chomsky's argument is he hasn't really familiarized himself with the debates.
You know, CIA Director Richard Helms was trying to pressure Kennedy into a more aggressive Cuba policy.
And four days before the assassination, Richard Helms brought a machine gun into the Oval Office as a way of convincing President Kennedy to take a more aggressive stance.
And when you read Kennedy's account of it, it's hard not to believe that he understood that he was being threatened.
I mean, think about that.
The CIA Director, Deputy CIA Director, is demonstrating to the President, your security perimeter is not secure.
Right. That's four days before President Kennedy was killed.
So, you know, the idea that there weren't profound conflicts at the top of the U.S. government.
I mean, I know Noam Chomsky is a smart guy, but he needs to pay attention to the historical record.
There were profound conflicts between Kennedy and the national security establishment in the fall of 1963.
Nobody who pays attention, especially to the new records, that that wasn't the case.
Yeah. And obviously, Chomsky's not here to defend himself, but he's Let me ask you this.
This is one of the things I learned from your work.
I remember growing up in the'70s and'80s, and my understanding of the JFK assassination was that Lee Harvey Oswald was just sort of this weird loner, that he had a couple of appearances
here and there in some public and political sectors, but that by and large he was kind of a nobody, sort of like what they're depicting the person who did the first assassination attempt against President Trump in Pennsylvania, like just a guy, a weirdo, not really connected.
I thought nobody knew of him before this all happened.
And in fact, the CIA had a big, long, large surveillance file on him.
What interest did the CIA have in Oswald prior to Oswald's alleged role in the JFK assassination?
They were interested, first of all, in recruiting him as a possible source or contact behind the Iron Curtain.
And that was one of the key documents that emerged on March 18th, was a document where Angleton talked exactly about Who he targeted for that type of recruiting.
The second thing that they were interested in was his pro-Cuba activities.
And that was something that the CIA denied at the time.
They pretended like they didn't know anything about this.
You know, when you talk about a big surveillance file, this is what I showed to Representative Luna today.
They had 198 pages on him.
On November 15th, when President Kennedy was getting ready to go to Dallas.
So Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut in the eyes of the CIA.
He was a known quantity who top CIA officials, top counterintelligence officials, knew everything about him as President Kennedy was preparing to go to Dallas.
So of course there's suspicions, you know, and people say, oh well that's incompetence, or you know, they didn't know Oswald didn't present a threat.
Wait a second.
Part of the reason you have a counterintelligence staff is to protect you against assassinations.
And that clearly didn't happen.
Angleton failed to do his job.
But nobody knew anything about this.
The CIA imposed a cover story, the lone gunman.
And Angleton, instead of losing his job, he kept it for another decade.
Well, let me ask, I know you have to go in just a few minutes, so I want to just respect the time.
I just have a couple more questions, briefly.
You know, this is one of the things that, like, you know, I think that you grow up and you're kind of bombarded to believe the establishment narrative about everything.
I mean, that's why it's the establishment narrative, because they have control of the institutions that shape your thinking.
And the more you kind of look into these things, the more basis you have for skepticism, including the fact that, you know, Alan Dulles, who We're good.
Alan Dulles, he had immense weight on conducting the official investigation.
I've always said it's kind of like putting Ben Shapiro in charge of an investigation to find out who's at fault in Gaza.
You know what kind of outcome you're going to get if you put Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission.
You're putting like a chief suspect on there.
What are the best reasons we have to distrust both the process and the conclusions of the Warren Commission?
I mean, the fact that Alan Dulles was on it, the fact that the Warren Commission was deceived about the surveillance of Oswald, they had no idea that the CIA had 198 pages of material on Oswald.
The Warren Commission was told that they had only minimal information about Oswald.
So, you know, the Warren Commission was fed a false story about Oswald.
Glenn, I'm gonna have to go soon.
Okay, I know.
All right.
I have one more question, but I'm gonna let you go.
One more question, yeah.
Okay, I'll just ask you briefly.
James Angleton, who was this senior CIA official, has been central to your work.
You said today in your testimony that he was one of three senior CIA officials to have lied to the Warren Commission about the investigation, that that was sort of a tipping point for you.
What did Angleton lie about, and how did he deceive the Commission?
Well, actually, what we learned last month was that Angleton lied to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.
He was never had to testify to the Warren Commission.
In 1978, he testified and he was asked, was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project?
And the answer was yes.
Angleton had personally put Oswald under male surveillance.
They were intercepting his letters to his mother from the Soviet Union.
He was under male surveillance from 1959 to 1962.
When Angleton was asked by the HSCA, was Oswald ever part of a CIA project, he said no.
And what we know now is that But that was a lie, and he was lying under oath about what he knew about Oswald before the assassination.
So that was a tipping point for me, because until March 18th, we never knew that.
All right, Jeff.
Thank you for your great work.
We're going to definitely have you back on as you work your way through these documents.
We'd love to pick your brain more about this.
Really appreciate the time.
I know you're busy tonight after your testimony, so we're going to let you go.
But thanks once again.
Thanks a million for having me, Glenn.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.
One of the ironies, I think, in Western politics or throughout the democratic world over the last, let's say, decade or so, has been there is a group of people, a very powerful faction, you could say the kind of establishment faction, that's composed of both the center-left and the center-right in most Western democracies,
that have engaged in all sorts of highly classically anti-democratic measures In the name of saving democracy.
They herald themselves as the saviors and guardians of democracy.
They say that only their enemies are a threat to democracy.
They're the saviors of it.
But the reality of politics in the democratic world over the last decade has been that for a variety of factors, in the U.S. you can go back to the war on terror and the lies of the Iraq war, but more recently the 2008 financial crisis whose repercussions are Expressing themselves to this very day,
jeopardizing people's financial security, the policies of free trade and de-industrialization, and then all the deceit and crackdowns around COVID have turned huge portions of the population into vehement anti-establishment warriors.
These people hate these establishments.
They hate whoever they perceive as defenders of the status quo.
It started to express itself in 2016 with things like the British people voting to leave the EU out of hatred and contempt for EU bureaucrats in Brussels and then obviously followed a few months later by what was for most people of the shocking victory of Donald Trump over the ultimate establishment maven Hillary Clinton and ever since then it's been one after the next and obviously historically when establishments feel threatened By some new event or some shift in political sentiment,
their tendency being the establishment is not to assuage it, not to persuade it, but to crush it.
And the establishment today, unlike say 400 or 500 years ago, are not monarchs in name, they're not churches in name with some sort of absolute say, the way the Catholic Church had over a lot of countries.
Have to pretend to be Democrats, people who believe in democracy.
That's how they pitch themselves.
And so they have been just openly doing things like censoring their political opponents, creating an industry designed to decree truth and falsity that nobody can deviate from with this disinformation industry.
And more disturbingly, and I think more desperately, showing how desperate they really are.
Because in so many countries, the establishment is in deep trouble, typically because of an emerging Right-wing populist movement, occasionally because of left-wing populism as well, both of which manifest as anti-establishment movements.
Their solution has just been to basically bar democracy, limit democracy, prevent the most popular opponents of the establishment, typically right-wing populists, from even running on the ballot, from just saying you're banished from the election.
The thing we're told is what Putin does, When he has fraudulent elections because his opponents can't run.
These are just theatrical elections that are very stage managed.
That's exactly what has been happening throughout the democratic world in multiple different countries over at least the last decade.
And a lot of people are noting that even more now because of what happened in France.
Here from the New York Times yesterday, Marine Le Pen barred from French presidential run after embezzlement ruling.
Quote, the verdict effectively barred the current front runner in the 2027 presidential election.
You're gonna see how common that fact is in all of these cases.
She's the current front runner in the 2027 presidential election, meaning the French people, the French citizens, A plurality of them, or a majority of them, want Marine Le Pen to be their next president.
But it bars her from the 2027 presidential election, from participating in it, an extraordinary step, but one the presiding judge said was necessary, because nobody is entitled to, quote, immunity in violation of the rule of law.
Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen's protege and a likely presidential candidate in her absence, said on social media, quote, not only has Marine Le Pen been unjustly convicted, French democracy has been executed.
The verdict infuriated Ms. Le Pen, an anti-immigrant nationalist politician who has already mounted three failed presidential bids.
I mean, failed in a very literal sense that she didn't win.
But her party and she have been That the party, as founded by her father, was a very fringe party.
And under her leadership, it has become a mainstream party, one of the most powerful parties in France.
She made the runoff twice.
So it's failure in the sense she didn't become the president.
But it's hard to say these are failures in the sense that the French people rejected her.
She's been gaining more and more support over the years, to the point where her party won first place In the EU parliamentary elections last year in France, which is what really scared the French establishment about the possibility that she could actually become president.
Murmuring, quote, incredible, she briskly left the courtroom before the hearing was over.
Ms. Le Pen, looking grim, told TF1 television that the ruling was a, quote, political attempt to thwart her.
She said that millions of French people were outraged and she vowed to fight back despite slim chances of legal success.
Quote, let's be clear, she said, I am eliminated, but in reality it's millions of French people whose voices have been eliminated.
Notice I have not uttered a syllable about what I think of Marine Le Pen or her politics or anything like that because it's completely irrelevant.
If you actually believe in democracy as the premier way to select our leaders, which I do, It should be disturbing if it has actually becoming a weapon to exploit the judicial system or use lawfare to defeat your political opponents, not at the ballot box, not by giving the people in the country the choice to vote for, but by prohibiting them from becoming on the ballot.
If it were just one case, then you'd have to spend a lot of time debating Marine Le Pen's case.
And we're gonna have somebody on this week who has been following Marine Le Pen's case closely.
Who understands the intricacies of French law in a way that I don't, so I'm not sitting here propounding on the validity or otherwise of her conviction, just the fact that it has now become part of an obvious trend where politicians like her, especially when they become too popular, are being banned.
And there are a lot of people in France who are saying so, including people who are, to put it mildly, not Marine Le Pen friends.
One of them is the leftist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who Has found more popularity too, and he put out a statement on Axe about this, and it's in French, but the highlighted portion is the part that we think is most relevant, where he said the decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people.
Meaning, even if you find her guilty, okay, let the people decide whether they want her as president.
Lorraine Walkies, who is the head of the right-wing Republicans, said something similar.
He posted a tweet on X as well, and the translation is, quote, Oh no, it seems extremely obvious to me.
In the United States, of course.
Even if you're convicted of a crime, then it doesn't mean that you can't run.
The socialist leader Eugene Debs ran for president as a third-party candidate during the Wilson administration from prison.
Had the Democrats succeeded in convicting and imprisoning Trump before the election, as they were desperately trying to do, that would not have resulted in his being banned from the ballot.
He could have run even as a convicted felon.
In fact, they did convict him.
of a felony charge, or multiple repetitive felony charges in New York, and he still was permitted to win, and the American people decided.
We know he was convicted.
We don't trust that conviction.
We think it's politically motivated.
And in any event, we want him to be our president.
That's what democracy means.
The Democrats tried other ways to get him banned from the ballot, as we'll get to, and they almost succeeded.
That was clearly their goal, but in the United States, at least, it's left to the people to decide, and that's what a lot of French politicians across the political spectrum are saying.
Here's the polling data, the most recent polling data, on the French presidential elections from the International Market Research Group on March 31st.
Intentions to vote in the presidential election, quote, two years before the next presidential election.
An IFOP poll for the Journal du Dimanche reveals the voting intentions of the French people for the next presidential election.
In the most favorable scenario, The national rally candidate would collect 37% of voting intentions, that's Marine Le Pen's party, nearly 14 points more than her score in the first round in 2022.
Edouard Philippe appears to be the best placed candidate to qualify for the second round against Marine Le Pen.
His score ranges between 20 and 25% depending on the different configurations tested.
So she's not just leading in the polls, she's leading the polls by far.
Not enough to avoid a runoff?
She's made the runoff twice now and lost to Macron.
But the question is not is Marine Le Pen going to be in the second round.
She for sure will be.
The question is who can get just enough to make it with her.
And unlike in the past in France where that party was considered toxic and off-limits where everybody would unite to prevent it from gaining any power.
That's not really the case anymore.
I mean, you did see that in the subsequent parliamentary elections in France that Macron called after Marine Le Pen's party won the EU parliamentary elections and he called new elections for the parliament, solved the parliament, called new elections and the left-wing coalition led by Melenchon, but he wasn't really the candidate because he's too, he eliminates too many people outside the actual left.
Came in first, Macron's party came in second, Le Pen's party came in third, but it was very closely disputed.
So there's the possibility that there could be a coalition to defeat her.
We're likely never to find out, because the French establishment is too afraid to let her run in the ballot as fear that she might win.
As I said, if that were an isolated case, we could just sort of say, well, is Marine Le Pen guilty?
That's the French law, but it's by far not an isolated case.
It has become the common scenario.
Here from the BBC, On March 26, it's reporting on the case of Brazil and the ex-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist, who actually shocked the country, shocked Brazil,
when he won the presidency in 2018 over the Workers' Party of Lula da Silva, which had dominated Brazilian politics, had occupied the presidency from 2002 when Lula first won.
Until 2016, when his successor Dilma Rousseff was impeached, and her vice president took over, but he didn't even bother running again.
He was widely hated.
So in 2018, that was the first election that the Workers' Party didn't win since 2002.
16 years earlier, they dominated Brazilian politics.
Ironically, in 2018, Lula was intending to run again, and he was leading in polls early on, and he ended up being We're good to
go. Center-right figures, even right-wing figures, but who are very pro-establishment and hate the way those figures hate Donald Trump.
The center-right in Brazil despises Bolsonaro, but they thought by impeaching Dilma and then imprisoning Lula, they would be an easy path to victory because they were always the party second to Lula, kind of like Marine Le Pen and Macron.
They just couldn't ever beat the Workers' Party.
So they thought once they get rid of Lula and impeach Dilma, they have a clear path to power.
Instead, Nobody wanted them.
Nobody ever liked them.
So once they got rid of Lula, instead of winning, they got Bolsonaro, who they hated more than Lula.
And Bolsonaro won by a sizable margin against the Workers' Party in 2018 in the runoff.
And then in 2022, everyone knew that there was only one person who could beat Bolsonaro, and that was Lula, who was in prison.
So the Supreme Court of Brazil invalidated his conviction after upholding it many times.
They actually used the excuse of the reporting that I did with my colleagues there that showed prosecutors and judges had cheated, but that was just their pretext.
They only let Lula out of prison.
They wouldn't have let him out no matter what we reported, had they not wanted to.
They only let him out because they knew that only he had a chance to beat Bolsonaro.
But even with everything that happened to Bolsonaro, the entire establishment against him, COVID, ruining the Brazilian economy, shutting down the economy, all of those Scandals about vaccines and masks and lockdowns and countless corruption charges running against what had been the most popular politician in Brazil, Lula da Silva. That election was extremely close, decided by about one point.
All night Bolsonaro was leading, kind of at the last minute, Lula overtook him, but it was an extremely close election.
And now Lula's popularity is plummeting, plummeting.
His presidency has unraveled.
He's about to be 80 years old.
Bolsonaro is not young himself.
He's about four years younger, three years younger.
But the country is not happy at all with Lula and people are very afraid of his chances to be re-elected.
There's a high likelihood he's gonna lose, especially if he runs against Jair Bolsonaro.
But fortunately for the Brazilian establishment, Bolsonaro can't run because two years ago he was declared ineligible and now they're about to Convict him before the Supreme Court on charges that he engineered a coup or tried to engineer a coup Which probably sounds familiar to the American ear since that was a charge against Trump as well Here from the BBC on March 26 Brazil's Bolsonaro to stand trial on coup charges court rules quote the Supreme Court's five-member panel voted unanimously in favor of the trial
going ahead and by the way this five-member panel that's deciding his fate They could have given it to the entire 11 judge Court.
But they instead gave it to one part of the court that's five judges that's composed of Lula's personal attorney, who represented him in all those corruption cases, who he then appointed to the Supreme Court.
Lula's left-wing ally and Justice Minister, who he also appointed to the Supreme Court.
And Alexandre de Marais, who has become the figure of Brazilian censorship, who's obsessed with destroying the Bolsonaro movement.
So three of the five judges are completely in Lula's pocket.
Quote, the trial could start as early as this year and if found guilty, Bolsonaro, 70, so he's actually nine years younger than Lula, could face years in prison.
Speaking after the court's decision, Bolsonaro told a press conference the charges against him were, quote, grave and baseless.
He has always denied trying to block Lula's inauguration.
The panel was tasked with determining whether there was enough evidence to put Bolsonaro on trial, the first to cast his vote, On Wednesday was the judge heading the panel, Alessandro de Moraes.
He recommended that Bolsonaro As well as other seven other former government officials described by the Attorney General as quote co-conspirators stand trial over the events which led up to the storming of government buildings by his supporters on the 8th of January 2023, a week after Lula's inauguration, a federal police investigation into the riots and the eventual leading up to them was launched.
Their 884 page report, which was released in November 2024, alleged the quote then President Jair Messias Bolsonaro planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organization By
the way, he's the alleged victim of this plot as well.
Doesn't mind that at all.
He's still gonna sit in judgment even though he's the victim the investigator and the judge That's the Supreme Court justice who headed the panel which has now decided that the case should proceed to trial While he is already barred from running for public office until 2030 for falsely claiming that Brazil's voting system was vulnerable to fraud Bolsonaro has declared had it declared his intention to fight that ban so we could run for a second term in 2026 now Let me just be clear there.
He is now criminally charged with Planning and plotting a violent coup once Lula won that would reinstall Bolsonaro.
We haven't had the trial yet.
All we have are media leaks and now the police report under the control of Lula's government and Marais.
I don't find the evidence particularly persuasive but That'll be decided, as it should be, in a trial.
Unfortunately, he's unlikely to get a fair trial.
But that isn't why he's banned from running.
He was already banned from running, completely independent of these allegations of a violent coup.
And that's due to the fact that before the election happened in 2022, and then after he lost, he alleged that there was voting machine fraud.
And for that and that alone, The Supreme Court decided he's now ineligible to run, that that was an abuse of power, an attack on democracy.
And I should also say that during that 2022 campaign, when Biden was president in Brazil, that 2022 campaign, Biden dispatched the CIA, he dispatched Jake Sullivan, his national security advisors, and other top officials to go to Brazil and interfere in that election by essentially saying that Bolsonaro's claims of voting fraud are completely invalid,
threatening Brazil with Punishments or consequences, warning Bolsonaro not to raise the issue of election fraud at the same time the USAID was funding the censorship groups, the disinformation groups that were systematically censoring Bolsonaro supporters in countless ways that we've reported on many times before.
So his banning from the ballot, similar to the way Marine Le Pen was banned, happened not because of these criminal allegations of a coup, but because of those allegations that he made of Voting machine fraud.
Hear from the AP in June of 2023.
This is before he was indicted on the coup.
Allegations. Quote, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until 2030.
Quote, five judges on the nation's highest electoral court agreed that Bolsonaro used government communication channels to promote his campaign and sow distrust about the vote.
Two judges voted against the move to ban him.
The case focused on a July 18, 2022 meeting where Bolsonaro used government staffers, the state television channel, and the presidential palace in Brasilia to tell foreign ambassadors that the country's electronic voting system was We're good.
The meeting did take place.
It was convened by the then president.
Its context is available.
It was examined by everyone and there was never a denial that it did happen," she said.
Mello said the decision is quote very unlikely to be overturned or removes Bolsonaro from the 2024 and 2028 municipal elections as well as the 2022 general elections.
The former president also faces other legal troubles, including criminal investigations.
Convictions could extend his ban by years and subject him to imprisonment.
Former President Fernando Collor de Melo and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were declared ineligible in the past, but Bolsonaro's case marks the first time a president has been suspended for election violations rather than a criminal offense.
Brazilian law forbids candidates with criminal sentences from running for office.
Quote, the decision will end Bolsonaro's chances of being president again, and he knows it, said Carlos Melo, a political science professor.
A professor at INSERP University in Sao Paulo.
After this, he will try to stay out of jail, elect some of his allies to keep his political capital, but it is very unlikely he will ever return to the presidency.
Now, all of this is very, very, very, very fortunate in an incredibly coincidental way for the Brazilian establishment and Bolsonaro's enemies, and that's because Bolsonaro had said he wants to run again in 2026 against Lula, he wants to be re-elected.
Very similar to Donald Trump, got elected in 2018 Bolsonaro did, lost by a tiny margin in the interim, and then now intends to run again to become, to assume his second term, and polls show that he is very likely to win.
Here from the Brazilian outlet Wall on March 29th, the headline is, though ineligible, Bolsonaro leads with 41% for 2026, compared to Lula's 26%, poll says.
It's a 15 point lead that Bolsonaro has among the people of Brazil who should decide who they want as their president.
Here from CNN Brazil, yes, Brazil has a CNN, is contaminated and infected with CNN, the Brazilian version.
A separate poll shows this, quote, Lula would lose to Bolsonaro and his wife Michelle Bolsonaro in an eventual second round runoff, says polls.
In the scenario with Bolsonaro, who is ineligible to run Until 2020-30, the former president reaches 51.1% and Lula 37.3%, which is a 14-point lead.
With Michelle Bolsonaro, who's Bolsonaro's wife, the former first lady has 48.5% and the current chief executive has 37.3%.
So even Bolsonaro's wife, who's never been elected to public office, was the first lady of the country, has a nine-point lead over Lula.
But obviously, they'd much rather run against her than run against Jair Bolsonaro, who has already proven that he can win a national election.
Here's why the establishment is so scared of him.
They threw everything at him during his first term.
And remember, I'm not commenting on my views of Bolsonaro.
As I said, I did the reporting that ended up being the pretext for the Supreme Court to allow Lula out of prison to invalidate his convictions.
And when I did, Bolsonaro threatened me several times explicitly with prison.
I ended up being criminally indicted for that reporting, although the Supreme Court had a press freedom ruling that required dismissal of those charges.
So I've had a lot of acrimonious history with Bolsonaro, but just like Marina Penn, that has nothing to do with Any of this.
Again, I actually believe in democracy.
I think the president should be determined by who wins.
Here's what happened in 2022.
If we can go back to that, just as a reminder, because they threw everything at Bolsonaro.
They thought that they were behind the candidate Lula, who was incredibly popular, and yet here from El Pais, October 31st, 2022, the day after the election, or Yeah, the day after the election.
The headline, Lula defeats Bolsonaro in the closest election in Brazil's history.
Lula da Silva, the leftist former president, will govern Brazil for the third time after securing just under 51% of the vote.
With 99.7% of the votes counted, Lula stood at 50.89%, with 67-year-old Bolsonaro close behind at 49.1%.
So about a 1.7 percentage difference.
Difference, the Brazilian left will return to power six years after their last president Dilma Rousseff was impeached.
So like in France, the Bolsonaro problem is solved.
Who cares if he's leading in the polls?
Who cares if a majority of Brazilians want him as president?
Nope. Banned from the ballot in the name of saving democracy.
Obviously, everybody remembers that Trump faced four felony convictions.
Indictments in four different jurisdictions, two state, two federal.
And that was the Democratic strategy, was to imprison Trump before the election.
They never were able to do that, but they tried.
But beyond that, they also just wanted him banned from the ballot independent of criminal convictions by claiming that the constitutional provision banning people who led an insurrection from running for high office should apply to We're good to
go. Which rests on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment will almost certainly force the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve whether Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, is actually eligible to hold future public office.
The Colorado court ruled that Trump cannot appear on the state's presidential ballot next year, but the ruling will not take effect immediately to give Trump time to appeal.
The court, which consists entirely of Democratic appointees, and even there it was four to three, It's the first in the nation to side with activists and voters who have filed numerous lawsuits around the country claiming that Trump is barred from office under the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause.
That clause states that anyone who quote engaged in insurrection or rebellion after taking an oath of office to support the Constitution is forbidden from holding any public office.
And then shortly after the Colorado Supreme Court banned him, several attorneys general in blue states came out with rulings that Siding the same rationale to ban him from the ballot and the Supreme Court ultimately decided by 9 to 0 that only Congress had the power to do that, that individual states can't go around adjudicating these things on their own and put Trump back on the ballot.
The Democrats tried to do what France did to Marine Le Pen just this week, what Brazil has done to Bolsonaro.
They tried to just win by just eliminating their competition.
Here from Business Insider, August 15, Trump faces a total of 91 felony criminal charges across his criminal indictments.
Hush money settlement to Stormy Daniels, the first criminal case against Trump, is a state case connected to $130,000 hush money payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
In a June indictment, federal prosecutors alleged Trump took classified documents with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, then tried to foil the government's efforts to get them back.
He was charged with 37 felonies in that case over the alleged, quote, willful retention of national defense information.
Later that month, a superseding indictment in the case dropped, adding three additional counts against the former president, bringing the total in the classified documents case to 40. January 6th Capitol insurrection, Trump was hit with four more charges in connection with his involvement in the January 6th Capitol riot and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
And then in Georgia on Monday, Trump was indicted in that state in connection with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the state.
Trump faces 13 felony charges in the RICO case, a type of criminal case usually used against organized crime, and 18 other Trump allies were also charged.
Democrats really made no bones about the fact that they were using these multiple investigations to try and win the election.
Here was Joe Biden in October of 2024 Just a couple weeks before the 2024 election and this is what he said.
I know this sounds bizarre.
It sounds like if I said this five years ago, you'd lock me up.
We gotta lock him up.
Okay, so first of all, while everybody was clapping for lock him up, meaning put him in prison, obviously, Biden muttered, politically lock him up, whatever that means.
Lock him up has a pretty No meaning.
Remember Trump, to the horror of so many Democrats, said, we have to lock Hillary up.
They had those lock her up chance of 2016.
Now here's Joe Biden right before the election saying we have to lock him up.
They wanted to put, looking at polls, showing that Trump had a good chance of winning, just out of desperation, they're like, we've got to put him in prison.
We've got to lock him up, like we're told all the bad countries do.
in...
In 2024, heading into the election, she said, quote, our democracy is truly at risk.
Trump has corrupted the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.
This latest decision by MAGA U.S. District Judge Aline Cannon That's the part I always love the most.
That the people who are calling for their for their Here from the New York Times on the day in December of 2023 that the Colorado Supreme Court by
4-3 ruling banned Trump from the ballot.
They had a crosstab new poll release from the New York Times in Siena that said Donald Trump leads Joe Biden by 46 to 44% among registered voters.
So the Colorado Supreme Court in a blue state saw Trump had a good chance to win.
He was leading in most polls against Biden.
And they're like, you know what?
Let's just prevent him from running on the ballot, even though he hasn't been charged with a little unconvictive insurrection.
Let's just say he can't run.
The Wall Street Journal in December of 2023, right at the same time, Trump takes 2024 lead as Biden approval hits new low, Wall Street Journal poll finds.
Unhappiness with Biden's performance is pervasive with economic pessimism weighing him down.
He lags four points behind Donald Trump, 47 to 43% on a hypothetical battle with only those two candidates.
Trump's lead expands to six points when five potential third party and independent candidates are added to the mix.
So they were panicking.
They knew Trump was going to win if he were allowed to be on the ballot.
I mean, you could see that support for Joe Biden collapsing rapidly, if for no other reason than just people understood that he was mentally unfit, that he was cognitively impaired and could not actually manage the country.
So that's another country where they tried.
There, they didn't succeed in actually getting Trump Off the ballot, but they certainly tried, in the name of democracy, to ban their opponent as well.
And then in Romania, I think we might even have actually the most flagrant and glaring case.
Because there, they actually had an election.
And the first round was won by a previously obscure right-wing populist.
With the EU and the US, the Romanians invalidated the election.
Said, let's just have another election.
Saw that that candidate was likely to win again, and we're like, this time we're gonna ban him so he can't win.
Here from Politico.EU in November 2025, uh this is December 2024 I think, alternate that December 2024, ultra-nationalist candidate scores a stunning first-round win in the Romania election.
Georgescu won with 22.94% of the vote.
He was followed by liberal reformist candidate Elena Laskany at 19.1% in second place after she edged ahead of center-left Prime Minister Marcel Siolakou on 19.5%, a difference of just over 2,700 votes.
An early exit poll suggested that Siolakou and Laskany were set to qualify for the presidential runoff, but Georgescu surged into the lead as vote count So they have this populist right-wing candidate, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, not wanting to adopt the European view that Europe is at war with Russia.
And candidates like that have won throughout the EU.
Even in Slovakia, Which had long been a ardent opponent of Russia because of the history of the Cold War.
Robert Fico, a former prime minister, ran on a platform in late 2023 of stopping aid to Ukraine, and he won.
He was then almost killed in an assassination attempt, but he's still running the country.
He miraculously survived that.
So here's another right-wing populist in Europe, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, that the establishment hates, who shocked the establishment because they had two candidates they were happy with when he came in first in the first round of voting.
And as a result, because they didn't get the outcome they wanted, here's what happened from political EU December.
benefited from a TikTok campaign that was similar to the influence operation run by the Kremlin in Ukraine and Moldova, according to declassified Romanian intelligence documents.
The file said Moscow was targeting Romania as an enemy state using, quote, aggressive hybrid actions, a view backed by the United States.
The second round runoff was due to be held on Sunday, and voting has already begun in Romanian diaspora communities and other countries.
The court simply cancelled the process completely, leaving voters bemused as they turned up to cast their ballots.
Now, look at what they did there.
They basically concocted their own Russiagate.
They said, yes, this candidate that we hate won the election, fair and square, came in first.
But, There were some ads on TikTok that helped him that we think came from Russia.
So, our election is invalid, the Russians interfered.
Just like they tried to do in 2016, like, hey, we found some Facebook pages and some Twitter bots that seemed like they came from Russia, and that makes Trump an illegitimate president.
That's the theory that they used.
Now, leaving aside the fact that the so-called interference by Russia is quite small, In the context of millions of people going to vote.
Do you think, does anyone believe that the U.S. and the E.U. don't interfere at least as much in these elections to ensure the outcome that they want?
You think it's only Russia interfering in the Romanian election and not the E.U. and the U.S. despite how strategically important Romania is to them despite the fact that The EU and the U.S. took the position that the election should be nullified, that that candidate should be banned.
The EU and U.S. have their fingerprints all over these countries, manipulating and funding opposition groups and demanding certain outcomes.
And then Russia puts some TikTok videos, supposedly, in support of their candidate.
They want to win.
And the whole election has to get validated.
Do over.
We didn't get the candidate that we wanted.
In the name of democracy, we have to cancel that election because the candidate that we hate won.
From CNN, March of 2025, chaos erupts in Romania after the far-right frontrunner is banned from a presidential vote.
Quote, after a 10-4 vote, Romania's electoral bureau said Sunday it was invalidating The decision came just over a week after Romanian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Dredescu, accusing him of crimes such as attempting to subvert the constitutional order and establishing a fascist organization.
Evidently a fascist organization that Romanians want to govern their country.
Here from the European Conservative January 2025, former censorship czar of France and the EU admits a EU role in annulling the remaining election.
Quote, Terry Brenton, you may remember him.
We've covered him before.
He was the EU official obsessed with the censorship regime, wanted to ban Axe.
He actually opened the criminal investigation into Axe after October 7th under EU laws, claiming that there was too much disinformation that Elon Musk was permitting against Israel.
That was their way to try and get people on their side against Elon Musk.
Oh, Elon Musk is allowing too much anti-Israel disinformation.
So he's in violation of EU laws.
And he was such an extremist, he was forced out.
Even by European standards, he was deranged.
But he never goes away, and here he was, Thierry Brenton, the European Union's former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview at the end of last week that the Romanian Constitutional Court bowed to EU pressure.
Remember, the reason they're saying this election has to get cancelled and this candidate bowed is because they are so upset the Russians interfered, yet here is A French EU official admitting that the reason the Romanian constitutional court invalidated the election is because of EU pressure.
Quote, it annulled the country's presidential election last month, following the first-round victory of the Euro-skeptic and anti-NATO right-wing populist candidate, Calun Drogescu.
Democratic countries, citizens of democratic countries, do not have the right to vote for quote-unquote right-wing populist candidate, Europe-skeptic candidates, anti-NATO candidates.
That is not allowed.
Obviously, because they have to bar those candidates from running in order to save Romanian democracy and European democracy.
Quote, Brent Tan, who remains infamous as the EU's self-styled digital enforcer, responsible for the bloc's infamous online censorship mechanism, the Digital Services Act, boasted, boasted about Brussels interference, not Russia's interference, Brussels interference, In Romania, as if it was not only acceptable, but even a moral obligation to cancel democratic elections based on the outcome.
Brenton then went further to add that Germany can expect the same treatment if the voters dare to elect the alternative for Deutschland, AfD party, in next month's federal elections.
Quote, we have to prevent interferences and make our laws apply, Brenton said, referring to the alleged Russian involvement, before admitting actual EU interference.
Quote, we did in Romania.
And we will obviously have to do it in Germany if necessary.
The view of the guardians of democracy, the safeguards of democracy, the people in the war fighting anti-democratic forces, is that you can have all the elections you want, all the elections you want, have free, just keep voting.
As long as the candidates most likely to win that they fear and hate most are barred from the ballot so that you can't vote for them.
That's what the democratic world now means.
That's what democracy in Europe and the United States Parts of South America, that's what it means.
And that's to say nothing of the censorship regime that they impose to accomplish it.
EU officials are also very upfront about the fact that they need this censorship regime.
Under these laws, they pass the Digital Services Act, in the EU, the Online Safety Act, in the UK, various laws in Canada, in Brazil.
They claim they need those because with elections imminent, they have to prevent the spread of disinformation, meaning they have to censor views that they are most afraid of, that they think will help sink them in the election.
And what's happening here is very obvious.
These center-left, center-right, neoliberal establishment orders are justifiably hated by their populations.
Hated, despised.
Even when On a rare occasion, one of them wins.
It's a total fluke, like what happened in the UK, where the Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer won.
They won with a small percentage of the vote, 34%.
It was largely a backlash against the corrupt leadership of the Conservative Party of the Tories under Boris Johnson and people like that.
And they were never popular, this centre-left party.
They are now, I mean, as soon as they won, Keir Starmer is hated across Britain.
So even when they win, it's only a very kind of fluke election.
In general, they're so despised, even in the UK where they won they're despised, but they eked out a victory, but usually they're so despised now they know they're despised and in a free and fair election they cannot win.
They cannot win with free speech permitted.
And they're cracking down on all of the defining core ingredients of what democracy means and telling you in the most Orwellian way possible That they're doing it because they're the ones who have to save democracy, by which they mean they have to stay in power at all costs.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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