Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship Regime -- and Our New Live, Prime-Time Rumble Program
We are launching a new live, one-hour, prime-time news broadcast. Armed with cable-sized budgets, it will be part of a network that Russell Brand has already debuted.
November 08, 2022
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Clockwise from top left: UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology speaks during the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Forum in Dubai, on March 28, 2022 (Photo by KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images); U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images); Google headquarters (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images); The Comcast/NBC Universal building in Los Angeles, CA (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images);

This article was originally published on Substack on Oct. 28, 2022

The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.

 

The Consortium of State and Corporate Power

There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and "false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be "disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic DialogueThe Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research LabBellingcatthe Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.

That these groups are funded by the West's security state, Big Tech, and other assorted politically active billionaires is not speculation or some fevered conspiracy theory. For various legal reasons, they are required to disclose their funders, and these facts about who finances them are therefore based on their own public admissions. So often the financing is funneled through well-established front groups for CIA, the State Department and the U.S. National Security State, such as “National Endowment for Democracy.”

As has always happened with censor-happy tyrants throughout history, the more centers of power inject themselves with the intoxicating rush of silencing their adversaries, the more intense the next hit has to be. Every movement that has wielded censorship as a political weapon tells itself the same story to justify it. In ordinary times, they will casually recite, free speech is a vital value. But these are no ordinary times in which we are living. Our enemies and their ideas are different. They are uniquely hateful, false, inflammatory, and dangerous. The ideas they espouse will destabilize society, cause direct harm to others, deceive people, and incite violence against institutions of authority and their followers. Thus, they reason, we are actually not censoring at all. We are simply preventing evil people from doing harm to society, the government, and to citizens.

Look to any government or society in which censorship prevailed — either today or throughout history. This narrative about why censorship is not just justified but morally necessary is always present. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a censorship supporter. They need to be supplied with a story about why they are something different, or at least why the censorship they are led to support is uniquely justified.

And it works because, in the most warped sense possible, it appeals to reason. If one really believes, as millions of American liberals do, that the U.S. faces two and only two choices — either (1) elect Democrats and ensure they rule or (2) live under a white nationalist fascist dictatorship — then of course such people will believe that media disinformation campaigns, censorship, and other forms of authoritarianism are necessary to ensure Democrats win and their opponents are vanquished. Once that self-glorifying rationale is embraced — our adversaries do not merely disagree with us but cause harm with the expression of their views — then the more suppression, the better. And that is exactly what is happening now.


Banishment From the Financial System

One of the latest, and perhaps most disturbing, new frontiers of censorship is the escalating means of excluding citizens from the financial system as extra-judicial punishment for expressing views or engaging in political activism disapproved of by establishment power. In one sense, this is not new.

In 2012, I co-founded the group Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) — along with the Oscar-winning CitizenFour director Laura Poitras, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others. The creation of that group was in response to the 2010 demands made by then-Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), in his capacity as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, along with other war hawks in both parties, that financial services companies such as the online payment processor PayPal, credit card companies MasterCard and Visa, and the Bank of America all terminated the accounts of WikiLeaks as punishment for the group's publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs: a trove of documents which proved systemic war crimes and lying by the U.S. Security State and its allies. Watching U.S. national security state officials pressure and coerce private companies over which they exert regulatory control to destroy their journalistic critics is exactly what is done in the tyrannies we are all conditioned to despise.

All of those corporations obeyed, thus preventing WikiLeaks from collecting donations from the public even though the group had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes. Amazon then booted WikiLeaks off of its hosting platform, removing the group from the internet for weeks. This was nothing less than extra-legal banishment of WikiLeaks from the financial system. We created FPF in order to circumvent that ban by collecting donations for WikiLeaks and then passing those funds to the group. When I announced the group's creation in a 2012 Guardian article, and while reporting on these pressure campaigns against WikiLeaks in a separate Guardian article, I explained how dangerous it would be if the U.S. Government could simply prohibit any journalistic groups it dislikes from participating in the financial system without even charging them with a crime:

So this was a case where the US government - through affirmative steps and/or approving acquiescence to criminal, sophisticated cyber-attacks - all but destroyed the ability of an adversarial group, convicted of no crime, to function on the internet. Who would possibly consider that power anything other than extremely disturbing? What possible political value can the internet serve, or journalism generally, if the US government, outside the confines of law, is empowered - as it did here - to cripple the operating abilities of any group which meaningfully challenges its policies and exposes its wrongdoing?. . . In sum, [by forming FPF], will render impotent the government's efforts to use its coercive pressure over corporations to suffocate not only WikiLeaks but any other group it may similarly target in the future.

Last week — in response to numerous reports this year of PayPal's expanding use of expulsion from the financial system as punishment for what it deems “extremist” political views and activities — the tech investor Stephen Cole recalled this then-unprecedented 2010 silencing campaign against WikiLeaks that was led by PayPal. Cole wrote: “I was an engineer at eBay/PayPal when PayPal censored donations to Wikileaks in 2010. That’s the first time I remember wondering… are we sure we’re the good guys?”

Back in 2010, this ominous tactic was depicted as just a one-time exception, an isolated case for a particularly threatening group (WikiLeaks). But in the last year, there is no question that exclusion from the financial system is becoming the tool of choice for Western censors in both the public and private sector, who work together — just as Big Tech and the U.S. Security State do — to identify and punish dissidents too dangerous to be permitted to speak.

The most alarming harbinger of this tactic came in February of this year when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an emergency decree granting himself the power to freeze the bank accounts of any Canadian citizen who he determined, in his sole discretion, was participating in or otherwise supporting the truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates and passports. As a result of Trudeau's extraordinary seizure of unchecked power, “Canadian banks froze about $7.8 million (US $6.1 million) in just over 200 accounts under emergency powers meant to end protests in Ottawa and at key border crossings.” The BBC called this tactic “unprecedented,” as it empowers the Prime Minister to freeze the personal bank accounts of anyone “linked with the protests …. with no need for court orders.” If it is not considered "despotic” for a political leader to wield the power to unilaterally seize the personal funds of citizens as punishment for peaceful protests against the government's policies, then nothing is.

But this tactic worked to end the peaceful protest which Trudeau opposed — people cannot survive if they cannot access their funds or participate in the financial system — and it is thus now being aggressively expanded. Perhaps the leading weaponizer is PayPal. Last year, PayPal announced a new partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a once-respected group that battled anti-Semitism and defended universal civil liberties, before becoming yet another standard liberal Democratic Party activist group devoted to censoring adversaries of neoliberal orthodoxy (the ADL has, just as one example, repeatedly demanded the firing of America's most-watched host on cable news, Fox News's Tucker Carlson). The stated purpose of this PayPal/ADL partnership was “to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities,” with the ultimate goal of “uncovering and disrupting the financial flows supporting [what the ADL claims are] white supremacist and anti-government organizations.”

But predictably — indeed, by design — this “partnership” was nothing more than an ennobling disguise to enable PayPal to begin terminating all sorts of accounts of people and businesses who expressed political views disliked by its executives. Over the past year, a wide range of individuals have had their PayPal accounts canceled due solely to disapproved political views and activism.

The lesbian activist Jaimee Michell was notified by PayPal last month that the account of her activist group, Gays Against Groomers, was being immediately canceled due to unspecified rules violations. Moments later, the group — created by gay men and lesbians to oppose attempts by trans activists to teach trans dogma and highly controversial gender ideology to young schoolchildren — was notified that their account with PayPal's subsidiary, Venmo, was also canceled immediately, leaving them with few options to continue to collect donations. Around the same time, the British anti-woke and right-wing commentator Toby Young, who had created a group called the Free Speech Union to oppose speech-based cancellations of accounts, was notified by PayPal that the group's account, used to accept donations, was also being cancelled; though PayPal refused to notify Young of the reason for the cancellation, it told The Daily Mail "it was trying to balance ‘protecting the ideals of tolerance, diversity and respect’ with the values of free expression.”

At the time of his PayPal expulsion, Young had become a vocal opponent of the U.K. Government's escalating involvement in the war in Ukraine. Two of the sites on which this long-time right-wing figure relied for his opposition to NATO involvement in Ukraine were MintPress and Consortium News, two populist left-wing sites long devoted to anti-war and anti-imperialism policies. Several months earlier, those two anti-establishment left-wing sites were notified by PayPal that their accounts were being immediately closed, and that the balances in their account would be seized and may never be returned. PayPal refused to tell either news site, or Coinbase, which reported on the account closures, what its reasons were. It was just an arbitrary decree by unseen authorities who not only closed their accounts but threatened to seize their donations without bothering to provide a reason. Now that is real tyrannical power. MintPress writer Alan MacLeod said that “this is a warning shot fired at anyone even remotely antiestablishment,” adding that “alternative media operations run on shoestring budgets and rely on enormous corporations like PayPal to operate correctly. If they can do this to us, they can do it to you.”

Earlier this month, PayPal announced that it would fine account holders $2,500 if, in PayPal's sole discretion, it was determined that those users were guilty of “promoting misinformation.” In other words, PayPal would just steal their own users’ funds from their account as extra-judicial punishment for the expression of views that PayPal — presumably working in conjunction with liberal activists groups such as ADL and billionaire-funded “disinformation experts” — decrees to be false or otherwise unacceptable. When this new policy provoked far more anger than PayPal evidently anticipated, they claimed it was all just a big mistake — as if some PayPal computer on its own accidentally manufactured a policy advising users about this seizure of funds. Regardless of whether PayPal returns to this policy — and there are, as Forbes noted, some unconfirmed reports that it is starting to do so — the intent is clear, because it is so consistent with so many other new frameworks: fortifying a multi-faceted regime of state and corporate power to silence and punish dissent.


Union of Big Tech, U.S. Security State and Corporate Media Giants

In May, the Department of Homeland Security's attempted appointment of a clearly deranged partisan fanatic, Nina Jankowicz, to effectively serve as “disinformation czar” sparked intense backlash. But liberal media corporations — always the first to jump to the defense of the U.S. Security State — in unison maligned the resulting anger over this audacious appointment as “itself disinformation,” without ever identifying anything false that was alleged about Jankowicz or the DHS program.

Though anger over this classically Orwellian program was obviously merited — it was, after all, an attempt to assign to the U.S. National Security State the power to issue official decrees about truth and falsity — that anger sometimes obscured the real purpose of the creation of this government program. This was not some aberrational attempt by the Biden administration to arrogate unto itself a wholly new and unprecedented power. It instead was just the latest puzzle piece in the multi-pronged scheme — created by a union of U.S. Security State agencies, Democratic Party politicians, liberal billionaires, and liberal media corporations — to construct and implement a permanent and enduring system to control the flow of information to Western populations. As importantly, these tools will empower them to forcibly silence and otherwise punish anyone who expresses dissent to their orthodoxies or meaningful opposition to their institutional interests.

That these state and corporate entities collaborate to control the internet is now so well-established that it barely requires proof. One of the first and most consequential revelations from the Snowden reporting was that the leading Big Tech companies — including Google, Apple and Facebook — were turning over massive amounts of data about their users to the National Security Agency (NSA) without so much as a warrant under the state/corporate program called PRISM. A newly obtained document by Revolver News’ Darren Beattie reveals that Jankowicz has worked since 2015 on programs to control “disinformation” on the internet in conjunction with a horde of national security state officials, billionaire-funded NGOs, and the nation's largest media corporations. Ample reporting, including here, has revealed that many of Big Tech's most controversial censorship policies were implemented at the behest of the U.S. Government and the Democratic-controlled Congress that openly threatens regulatory and legal reprisals for failure to comply.

Wall Street Journal Editorial, Sept. 9, 2022

Every newly declared crisis — genuine or contrived — is immediately seized upon to justify all new levels and types of online censorship, and increasingly more and more offline punishment. One of the core precepts of the Russiagate hysteria was that Trump won with the help of Russia because there were insufficient controls in place over what kind of information could be heard by the public, leading to new groups devoted to "monitoring” what they deem disinformation and new policies from media outlets to censor reporting of the type that WikiLeaks provided about the DNC and Clinton campaign in 2016. This censorship frenzy culminated in the still-shocking decision by Twitter and Facebook to censor The New York Post's reporting on Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine based on documents from Hunter Biden's laptop that most media outlets now acknowledge were entirely authentic — all justified by a CIA lie, ratified by media outlets, that these documents were “Russian disinformation.”

The riot at the Capitol on January 6 was used in similar ways, though this time not merely to un-person dissidents from the internet but also to use Big Tech's monopoly power to destroy the then-most-popular app in the country (Parler) followed by the banning of the sitting elected President himself, an act so ominous that even governments hostile to Trump — in France, GermanyMexico and beyond — warned of how threatening it was to democracy to allow private monopolies to ban even elected leaders from the internet. Liberal outlets such as The New Yorker began openly advocating for internet censorship under headlines such as “The National-Security Case for Fixing Social Media.”

The COVID pandemic ushered in still greater amounts of censorship. Anyone who urged people to use masks at the start of the pandemic was accused of spreading dangerous disinformation because Dr. Anthony Fauci and the WHO insisted at the time that masks were useless or worse. When Fauci and WHO decided masks were an imperative, anyone questioning that decree by insisting that cloth masks were ineffective — the exact view of Fauci and WHO just weeks earlier — was banned from Big Tech platforms for spreading disinformation; such bans by Google included sitting U.S. Senators who themselves are medical doctors. From the start of the pandemic, it was prohibited to question whether the COVID virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan — until the Biden administration itself asked that question and ordered an investigation to find out, at which point Facebook and other platforms reversed themselves and announced that it was now permissible to ask this question since the U.S. Government itself was doing so.

In sum, government agencies and Big Tech monopolies exploited the two-year COVID pandemic to train Western populations to accept as normal the rule that the only views permitted to be heard were those which fully aligned with the views expressed by institutions of state authority. Conversely, anyone dissenting from or even questioning such institutional decrees stood accused of spreading "disinformation” and was deemed unfit to be heard on the internet. As a result, blatant errors and clear lies stood unchallenged for months because people were conditioned that any challenging of official views would result in punishment.

We are now at the point where every crisis is seized upon to usher in all-new forms of censorship. The war in Ukraine has resulted in escalations of censorship tactics that would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. The EU enacted legislation legally prohibiting any European company or individual from broadcasting Russian state-owned broadcasters (including RT and Sputnik). While such legal coercion would (for now) almost certainly be banned in the U.S. as a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and free press rights, non-EU companies that decided in the name of open debate to allow RT to be heard — such as Rumble — have faced a torrent of threats, pressure campaigns, media attacks and various forms of retribution.

One of the easiest and surest ways to be banned these days from Big Tech platforms is to reject the core pieties of the CIA/NATO/EU view of the war in Ukraine, even if that dissent entails simply affirming the very views which Western media outlets spent a decade itself endorsing, until completely changing course at the start of the war — such as the fact that the Ukrainian military is dominated by neo-Nazi battalions such as Azov, especially in the Eastern part of the country. Regardless of one's views on the Biden administration's involvement in this war, surely it requires little effort to see how dangerous it is to try to impose a full-scale blackout on challenges to U.S. war policy, especially given the warning by Biden himself that this war has brought the world closer to nuclear armageddon than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

It cannot be overstated how closely aligned Big Tech censorship is with the agenda of the U.S. Security State. And it is not hard to understand why. Google and Amazon receive billions in contracts from the CIA, NSA and Pentagon, and, as we reported here in April, the most vocal lobbyists working to preserve Big Tech monopoly power are former Security State operatives. Illustrating this alignment, Facebook — at the start of the war in Ukraine — implemented an exception to its rule banning praise for Nazi groups by exempting the Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi Ukrainian militias.

This regime of censorship is anything but arbitrary. Its core function is to shield propaganda that emanates from ruling class centers of power from critique, challenge and opposition. It is designed to ensure that Western populations hear only the assertions and proclamations of state and corporate elites, while their adversaries and critics are at best marginalized (with warnings labels and other indicia of discredit) or banned outright.


Pro-Censorship Corporate “Journalists”

No discussion of this growing and limitlessly dangerous censorship regime would be complete without noting that central role played by the West's largest media corporations and their largely-millennial, censorship-obsessed liberal employees who bear the deceitful corporate Human Resources job title of “journalist.” The most beloved journalists of modern-day American liberalism are not those who divulge the secret crimes of CIA, or the chronic lies that emanate from the Pentagon and other arms of the U.S.'s endless war machine, or monopolistic abuses of Big Tech. Indeed, journalists who do that work — challenging and exposing the secrets of actual power centers — are the ones most hated by liberals in light of their adoration for those institutions. That is what explains their support for Julian Assange's ongoing imprisonment and Edward Snowden's ongoing exile as the only way to avoid the same fate as Assange is suffering.

Today's journalistic icons of American liberalism are not those who confront establishment power but rather serve it: by relentlessly attacking ordinary citizens as punishment for expressing views declared off-limits by these journalists' establishment masters. As I have previously reported, there is a horde of corporate employees at media behemoths with the classic mindset of servants of petty tyrants, whose only function — and passion — is to troll the internet searching for upsetting dissent, and then agitate for its removal by centers of corporate powers: NBC News’ disinformation unit employees Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny; The Washington Post's “online culture” columnist Taylor Lorenz; and the New York Times’ tech reporters (Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac and countless others). At the time I first reported on what they are assigned to do, I dubbed this “tattletale journalism": the fixation with demanding the immediate cessation of “unfettered conversations” and the constant attempt to confront and expose ordinary citizens for the crime of expressing prohibited views.

Clockwise from top left: censorship advocates Brandy Zadrozny (NBC News’ "disinformation unit”); Taylor Lorenz (The Washington Post); Ben Collins (NBC News’ "disinformation unit”); and Ryan Mac (The New York Times tech unit)

In September, Matthew Price, CEO of Cloudflare — a major tech company that provides services constituting the backbone of the internet, including security protections — refused to capitulate to the pressure campaign to cancel the site called KiwiFarms. The cancellation demands were based in the claim that the forum was allowing "harassment” and doxing of a Twitch streamer named "Keffals,” whom Lorenz in The Washington Post — under the headline “The trans Twitch star delivering news to a legion of LGBTQ teens” — had months earlier christened the Patron Saint of Trans Victimhood. Price, the CEO, warned that because Cloudflare is a security company and a hosting service, not a social media site, it would be extremely dangerous for them to start closing accounts based on public dislike of the content that appears on those sites. This is how he explains the company's steadfast refusal to capitulate to censorship demands — such cancellations, he explained, would be akin to demanding that AT&T refuse telephone service to right-wing commentators by arguing that they use their telephones to spread harmful views:

Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.

Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflare's security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.

But Cloudflare's refusal to capitulate to censorship advocates infuriated NBC News’ Ben Collins — whose primary purpose in life is to agitate for greater and more repressive control over the internet to stifle views that deviate from establishment liberalism — and, along with his NBC colleague and fellow censorship advocate Kat Tenbarge, used the massive corporate platform of NBC News to pressure Cloudflare to obey, claiming Cloudflare's refusal to censor on command endangers trans people. Within less than 24 hours of the publication of Collins’ article — blasted to millions of people across the various platforms owned by NBC and Collins’ corporate owner, the Comcast Corp. — the CEO of this powerful company reversed himself, groveling before the media's censorship advocates and vowing that this would be a one-time exception. “This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” he wrote, as he announced that he would do it anyway (it will, needless to say, be the opposite of a one-time exception, since any millennial censor at The Huffington Post or Vox can now easily force Cloudflare to keep censoring by exploiting this new precedent with new articles about their censorship target using the “worse-than-Kiwifarms” formulation).

And thus did this corporate "journalist” once again usher in a brand new escalation in the strengthening censorship regime: tinkering with the infrastructure of the internet to expel sites and people anathema to liberal pieties. As usual, not just liberals but also the left cheered this forced capitulation, as they are somehow convinced that the world will be a better place when the power to silence voices and ideas is in the collective hands of the U.S. Security State, their oligarchical partners who own Big Tech, and their servants who masquerade as "journalists” deep within the bowels of the West's largest media corporations. Polls leave no doubt that Democrats are vastly more supportive of internet censorship not only by large corporations but also by the state, and that is the mindset that asserts itself over and over to cheer these censorship schemes by the West's most powerful institutional actors.

This is the regime of censorship whose tentacles grow each month and whose power expands inexorably. Like all censors, the consortium that controls and funds this regime recognizes that whoever controls the flow of information will wield unchallenged power, and that few powers are more potent and tyrannical than the ability to relegate one's critics to the most distant fringes or to silence them altogether.


Our New Nightly Live Program on Rumble

Any article that simply reports on these vital developments with free speech and systemic censorship is, by itself, journalistically worthwhile, even necessary. With so many Western corporate journalists supportive of or (at best) indifferent to the grave dangers this system imposes, the truth behind this censorship regime — who is constructing it and for what purposes — is far too rarely revealed. Any news article reporting on the component parts of this escalating regime would be inherently valuable.

But when it comes to this sinister regime of information control, I long ago ceased believing it sufficient merely to report on it. I regard the need to fight against this regime of censorship, to destabilize and subvert it, and ultimately to defeat it as a paramount cause, the journalistic and political cause I prioritize above all others. Little is possible, including meaningful journalism, if we are prevented from being heard, if our discourse is strictly controlled and policed by the very power centers our rights allow and encourage us to challenge. Few other values can be defended, and few other injustices exposed and combated, if ruling class elites continue to acquire the defining tyrannical power of information control and silencing of dissent.

Action, not just words, is required. That is why I have been devoting myself to supporting only those sites and companies genuinely determined to resist pressures and other forms of coercion to censor on behalf of Western establishment institutions, and instead to preserve and fortify spaces for free speech and free inquiry online, with the ability to reach large numbers of people. It does nobody any good — other than one's adversaries — if one willingly ghettoizes oneself into fringe and marginalized precincts. What is required is a cause-driven commitment to free speech along with the strategic ability to attract large audiences — and that, to me, means doing my journalism only on platforms with a demonstrated commitment to these values and an demonstrated ability to reach large numbers of people.

For this reason, the platforms with which I have worked over the past two years are ones that have proven not just a willingness but an eagerness to express defiant contempt for these censorship pressures and an impressive commitment to ensuring free expression: Substack for written journalism, Callin for podcasts, and Rumble for video journalism. Each has been the target of pressure campaigns of the type that caused the Cloudflare CEO so pathetically to reverse his own refusal to obey censorship orders after less than a day. Each of these platforms has refused to accede to these demands in the way that Cloudflare and so many others before it have done. That is precisely what is needed to subvert the growing censorship regime: people and companies that simply refuse to obey.

Rumble in particular has been the target of intense attacks — in part because it agreed to allow RT to broadcast on its platform in order to protest the EU's outlawing of that network and thus incurred the wrath of the Russia-obsessed corporate media, but also because it has experienced massive growth largely as the result of growing anger toward Big Tech censorship. Rumble has begun attracting not only political commentators banished in unison by Big Tech — such as the recent banning Andrew Tate, who promptly moved his large audience to Rumble — but also cultural commentators and Gen Z personalities increasingly angry at the repressive climate imposed by Google on its YouTube platform. This is driving more and more growth to the platform, which in turn is causing establishment media corporations to devote more and more energy to disparaging it.

Crickey, Aug. 29, 2022

Rumble's lawsuit against Google for antitrust violations — alleging that Google is using its market dominance of search engines to hide Rumble videos in order to protect Google's YouTube — created a significant win for Rumble, as we reported here in August, as the judge refused Google's request to dismiss the lawsuit. That ruling allows Rumble to obtain invasive discovery about how Google manipulates its search engine algorithms, and for whose benefit.

As a result of what appeared to be the genuine commitment of Rumble's founders to the cause of free speech and anti-censorship efforts, I was part of a group last year — that included former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and frequent Joe Rogan guest Bridget Phetasy — which agreed to create video journalism exclusively for that platform. Our show, called System Update, was a great success, surpassing all of my expectations. Several of our video broadcasts — with little promotional budget or regularly scheduled programming — exceeded 750,000 viewers, while our shows routinely exceeded 200,000 views. Pursuant to our agreement, we uploaded each video to YouTube several hours after they debuted on Rumble, and with the exception of one or two videos, the Rumble videos performed significantly better.

(Notably, The Washington Post article announcing our move attempted to disparage Rumble as a toxic sewer of disinformation. To do so, it cited one of those benign-sounding groups — what The Post heralded as “the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London” — to call Rumble “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world.” As I documented in a detailed video report on Rumble, that “Institute” cited by the Post as its disinformation expert is one funded by and serves as a partner to the U.S. and UK Security states as well as Big Tech itself. In other words, the Post unwittingly illustrated how this sham "disinformation” industry is weaponized by institutions of establishment power to deceive the public into believing that their decrees are apolitical proclamations based in science rather than what they are: extremely politicized schemes on behalf of Western power centers designed to make crude censorship appear enlightened and scientific.)

This stunning success over the past year — with audience sizes that would make many cable programs envious — has led us and Rumble to now enter into a far more sweeping, ambitious and exciting commitment. As part of a new live network of news shows that Rumble will host on its platform, we will be very imminently launching a new and radically expanded version of “System Update.” Our broadcast now will be a one-hour, nightly news and commentary show that will air live, exclusively on Rumble's platform, from Monday to Friday at 7:00 pm ET. At the end of each program on Rumble, I will move to my dedicated community page on Locals — the platform recently purchased by Rumble that is designed to build communities of content and commentary (more about that later) — where I will continue the live broadcast for subscribers only, for roughly 20-30 minutes, by answering questions about the show, engaging critiques and suggestions, and otherwise directly interacting with our audience.

Anyone who is a paid subscriber here on Substack will have the automatic right to also become a subscriber to our Locals community, free of cost or charge. In other words, if you already purchased a yearly subscription here at Substack, you will continue to have full access to all of my written journalism here, and will also have full access to everything we do at Locals, including the after-show that is exclusively for audience interaction with our subscribers. However much time you have left on your Substack subscription — for instance, those who purchased a one-year Substack subscription in June and thus have eight months remaining on their Substack subscription — will automatically receive eight months of free subscription to our Locals community. Anyone here who purchases their Substack subscription on a monthly basis will be able to do the same on Locals.

The new network of live one-hour shows on Rumble already launched when Russell Brand debuted his new live show, "Stay Free,” on Rumble on September 28. Many of his shows, after less than a month, are already attracting an audience size of 250,000 views or more (I was one of the guests on his debut show, starting at 41:00, where we discussed the purpose and goal of these new shows). Rumble will shortly be unveiling other hosts who have similarly heterodox and independent views. On September 8, The Wall Street Journal broke the story of the new network of shows Rumble is committing to, and it includes many details about our new upcoming program.

Our new live program was originally scheduled to launch on September 10, but was delayed due to the ongoing health crisis in my family which I have discussed several times here. That health crisis has unfortunately not yet resolved itself, and that makes it quite difficult for me to commit to a concrete launch date for the show because, to be honest, there are days when I am simply not equipped to work, and I do not want to launch the show until I am confident I can produce five nights of high-quality live programming.

We are, however, extremely excited by the new show. Rumble — knowing that we need to produce very high-quality shows if we want people to turn off CNN and other corporate television networks and watch our shows instead — has provided very sizable production budgets. That has allowed us to build a new state-of-the-art studio where our show will be hosted, and to hire a large studio team to produce the show with the same technical quality that one would expect to find on any other prime-time television show.

Until we can commit to a definitive launch date — meaning when our family is whole again and I am not spending significant parts of my days speaking with teams of doctors and ICU nurses — we are instead going to produce a “soft launch” of the show. To do that, we will very shortly — within the next couple of weeks — begin broadcasting our live show not yet on Rumble but on our Locals page. In other words, for the first couple of weeks, as we work out the kinks in the show and do the kind of test run we would do in any event, we will produce our show for the first couple of weeks exclusively for our Substack and Locals subscriber base. That will enable you to be part of the process as we develop the show, to provide feedback on how to make it better, and to begin watching what we believe and expect from the start will be very high-quality news, reporting and commentary. I would not put anything on the air, even as part of a “soft launch,” that I did not have pride and belief in.

In so many ways, this show is a new and significant challenge for me. We have committed to producing a one-hour live program five nights a week. The show will begin with an in-depth monologue (up to twenty minutes) that is similar in kind to the evidence-heavy presentations we have been producing as part of our periodic System Update programs on Rumble now. The second segment will entail an in-depth interview of roughly twelve to fifteen minutes with a political official, a journalist, or someone who otherwise has something original and informative to say. The third segment will be devoted to covering the top two or three new stories of the day — including with live on-the-scene reporters — but we will cover these stories in a much different way, with a different voice and perspective, than what you would expect to see by turning on your television to watch corporate news. And the last part of the show will consist of a regular, rotating series of topics and segments as we transition into the live, audience-participation after-show on Locals.

Written journalism has always been the foundation of how I participate in our discourse and that will continue. But this new live program will enable me to reach entirely new audiences (many people now, especially but not only younger people, will only consume news through video), and to do reporting and construct analyses using the most potent technological tools. I am convinced it will do nothing but expand the reach and impact of the journalism I already do here.

While the show will be part of a new network of shows hosted on Rumble's platform, it is not a Rumble show. By that, I mean that — unlike other programs that appear on television — we will not exist within or report to any corporate management or corporate structure. Rumble has no interest in producing news and political programming, only in providing an ideologically-neutral and content-neutral free speech platform that enables everyone to speak and be heard freely. Rumble thus does not have any editorial managers or any other executives who can be or want to be in a position of overseeing anyone's content. Our contract provides that we have full, complete and unlimited editorial freedom and journalistic independence; Rumble has no desire and no ability to review any of our shows; and our contract is guaranteed and cannot be terminated due to the disagreement with or objections to any of our viewpoints, content or reporting.

Ultimately, no contract in the world can really guarantee one's editorial freedom (as I learned when The Intercept brazenly violated the contractual right I enjoyed since I co-founded the site in 2013 to publish my reporting directly to the internet without any editorial interference or control, editorial censorship which led me to quit and come to Substack almost two yeas ago to this day). These kinds of relationships require trust, and I have absolute trust in the commitment of the founders and managers of Rumble to devote the site to values of free speech. Even if they were not genuinely committed to these values as a cause — and they are — they know that Rumble's self-interest requires the fulfillment of its commitments to free speech since the reason for Rumble's success is precisely that it is becoming the free speech alternative to Google's YouTube.

Once we have our date for the soft-launch of our show on Locals, we will notify all subscribers here. All one needs to access our Locals community — and thus have exclusive viewing rights to the first couple of weeks for our debut as well as the right to watch and participate in the after-show on Locals — is a current Substack subscription. Those of you who are already paid subscribers here will not need to do anything other than opt-in to your new free Locals subscription when we send that email announcing our launch date. But the show itself — once it debuts in its nightly form on Rumble — will be freely available to the public at large: no subscription required. Our primary goal — after producing high-quality journalism and broadcast programming — is to reach as large an audience as possible. We do not want to be paywalled and thus reduce the reach of our work.

Complaining about, denouncing and even protesting the escalating censorship regime in the West will not stop it or even impede its growth. What will do so is the creation and growth of platforms that are committed to free speech and which are fully fortified in all ways — ideologically, politically and technologically — to resist encroachments into our most basic right: the right to freely express ourselves, to freely communicate with one another, and to freely challenge, question and dissent from the policy agendas, dictates and decrees of institutions of authority. Free speech platforms like Rumble, and our new live nightly "System Update” program on it are, above all else, dedicated to advancing this central cause.


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Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted
TOMORROW: Submit Your Questions Here and Glenn Will Answer Them!

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MTG and Thomas Massie are the two best people in our government.

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Hi Glenn, glad you're back.
Just wanted to thank you for the segment on RFK Jr. I don't always agree with everything you say on a subject, but I absolutely do agree with your take on this. It was perfect. I would frame that segment if I could.
Seeing those clips from the hearing, and hearing how angry Bennet, Wyden and Warner were made me very happy. There's something to be said for being hated by all the right people. I'm more convinced than ever that Bernie Sanders was one of the biggest frauds ever thrust upon the American people. He is actually the number one recipient of big pharma money in the senate.
I admit, I'm a big fan of Kennedy. He is the main reason I was glad Donald Trump won last November. I read his book, 'The Real Anthony Fauci', years ago and was appalled in a way that is hard to express in mere words. Your show on the experiments he ran on beagles a year or so ago made me sick. I don't believe in hating anyone, but if I have an exception for that belief, ...

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

We are not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

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Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

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Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

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So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

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This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

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The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

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