Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Writing • Culture
New Law Sought by Brazil's Lula to Ban and Punish "Fake News and Disinformation" Threatens the Free Internet Everywhere
Many nations seem poised to abandon the core lesson of the Enlightenment: no human institution can or should be trusted to decree Absolute Truth and punish dissent from it
February 25, 2023
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Left: Former President Jair Bolsonaro at Alvorada Palace in Brasilia, on November 1, 2022. (Photo by EVARISTO SA/AFP via Getty Images) / Right: President Lula da Silva speaks in Buenos Aires. (Photo by Manuel Cortina/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

A major escalation in official online censorship regimes is progressing rapidly in Brazil, with implications for everyone in the democratic world. Under Brazil's new government headed by President Lula da Silva, the country is poised to become the first in the democratic world to implement a law censoring and banning "fake news and disinformation" online, and then punishing those deemed guilty of authoring and spreading it. Such laws already exist throughout the non-democratic world, adopted years ago by the planet's most tyrannical regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. 

If one wishes to be generous with the phrase "the democratic world" and include Malaysia and Singapore – at best hybrid "democracies" – then one could argue that a couple other "democratic" governments have already seized the power to decree Absolute Truth and then ban any deviation from it. But absent unexpected opposition, Brazil will soon become the first country unambiguously included in the democratic world to outlaw "fake news" and vest government officials with the power to banish it and punish its authors. 

Last May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was forced to retreat from its attempt to appoint a "disinformation czar" to oversee what would effectively be its Ministry of Truth. That new DHS agency, at least nominally, was to be only advisory: it would declare truth and falsity and then pressure online platforms to comply by banning that which was deemed by the U.S. Security State to be false. The backlash was so great -- the CIA and company are not exactly world-renown for telling the truth -- that DHS finally claimed to cancel it, though secret documents emerged in October describing the agency's plans to continue to shape online censorship decisions of Big Tech. 

Brazil's law would be anything but advisory. Though the details are still yet to be released, it would empower law enforcement officials to take action against citizens deemed to be publishing statements that the government classifies as "false," and to solicit courts to impose punishment on those who do so.

The Brazilian left is almost entirely united with the country's largest corporate media outlets in supporting this censorship regime (sound familiar?). The leading advocates of this new censorship law include pro-government lawyers, famous pro-Lula YouTube influencers, and even journalists(!). They are now being invited to and feted in "fake news" and "disinformation" conferences in glamorous European capitals sponsored by UN agencies, because the EU is eager to obtain such censorship powers for itself, and sees Brazil as the first test case for whether the public will tolerate such an aggressive acquisition of dissent-suppression authorities by the state. (Recall that the EU itself, at the start of the war in Ukraine, escalated online censorship to an all-new level by making it illegal for any online platform to host Russian-state media outlets; Rumble's refusal to obey France's command to remove RT from its platform forced Rumble to cease broadcasting in France).

Last Sunday, Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, announced that I had become a regular columnist for the paper (I will likely publish columns every other week, and those with international relevance will be published in English as well). Their offer came after months of rather intense controversy in which I have been vocally denouncing as dangerously authoritarian the regime of censorship and other weapons of dissent-suppression imposed by a member of Brazil's Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes. 

Even prior to enactment of this newly proposed law, the online censorship attacks of this single Brazilian judge, acting with the support of the a majority of its Supreme Court, has been so extreme that even liberal American news outlets have published critical articles on him and what they suggests are his lawless and wild censorship binges (including three in The New York Times, one in the Associated Press and another in The Washington Post). One New York Times article – published weeks before the first round of the 2022 presidential race that sent Lula and incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro to a run-off – described the judge's conduct this way: 

Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal. And this year, 10 of the court’s 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a livestream.

 

The power grab by the nation’s highest court, legal experts say, has undermined a key democratic institution in Latin America’s biggest country as voters prepare to pick a president on Oct. 2.. . . In many cases, Mr. Moraes has acted unilaterally, emboldened by new powers the court granted itself in 2019 that allow it to, in effect, act as an investigator, prosecutor and judge all at once in some cases.

As the AP articles notes, we were the first to reveal one of Judge de Moraes' secret censorship orders, which I obtained and then reported on in an episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, which was viewed by more than half a million people:

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Despite also being the journalist who – back in 2019 and 2020 – exposed the grave corruption committed by the once-heroic Brazilian judge and prosecutors who imprisoned Lula in 2017 – reporting that won top journalism awards in Brazil, garnered universal praise from the Brazilian left, resulted in an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute me, and ultimately led to Lula's release from prison and restored his eligibility to run for president in 2022 – both my husband David Miranda (a Congressman until last month) and I have, overnight, become among the most reviled figures by Lula's followers. This has been in part due to my increasingly active opposition to growing censorship efforts led by this judge and his left-wing allies, censorship which the Brazilian left and their corporate-media allies support with great fervor and with something close to lock-step unanimity.

Those left-wing attacks against us began when David announced in January, 2022 that he was leaving his left-wing party PSOL – which had long been opposed to PT and Lula – because he objected to the party's decision to support Lula's presidential candidacy in the first round of voting. He instead joined the center-left party PDT in order to support presidential candidate Ciro Gomes. 

Because David was the first national left-wing political official to publicly refuse to support Lula's candidacy in the first-round of voting, it was necessary for PT to make an example of him (and, by extension, of me). The campaign of vilification was deeply personal. Even as a couple accustomed to being the target of such campaigns, the attacks on us from Lula's followers were unlike anything I had seen in terms of vitriol, unrestrained online mob rage, and the kind of bigoted tropes the left pretends it reviles but instantly unleashes against any member (such as David) of the "marginalized groups" the left believes it owns. 

As is true in the U.S., nothing enrages the left and provokes the lowest and most scurrilous attacks more than when a person they believe they own due to their membership in a "marginalized" group who proclaims their independence and right to think critically (in September, I was forced by David's health crisis to petition the election court to withdraw his re-election candidacy, and the new Congress was inaugurated on February 1 without him).

But those already-lowly attacks escalated severely when I became much more vocal about my increasing concern over the country's growing reliance on censorship and due-process-free persecution of PT's opponents. Unlike in the U.S. – where the liberal-left still pays lip service to their support for free speech while clearly acting to subvert it – the Brazilian left barely bothers with this pretense. Many simply acknowledge that they do not believe in free speech, and equate a defense of free speech with fascism. They do so with no apparent recognition of the irony – that the first thing a fascist regime does is ban books and criminalize dissent – and despite the fact that free speech is a right guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution. 

For the globalist order increasingly petrified of internet freedom - they blame online free speech for everything from Brexit and Hillary's defeat to skepticism of health authorities and growing opposition to U.S. support for the proxy war in Ukraine – Brazil has become the perfect test case for seizing state power to censor the internet in the name of stopping "fake news and disinformation." Nothing fosters support for authoritarianism the way fear does, and much of the Brazilian establishment believes they are fighting a new War on Terror. Even with Bolsonaro vanquished for now in Florida, his party in the last election won the most seats in both houses of Congress as well as key governorships across the country.

Just as the Bush/Cheney government exploited the 9/11 attack, and the Biden administration still exploits the January 6 riot, to justify previously unthinkable assaults on core civil liberties, the Brazilian left – in union with the country's establishment – is now exploiting the January 8 invasion of government buildings by a few thousand Bolsonaro supporters to argue that anything and everything is justified in the name of their "war on terrorism" (unlike the 3,000 deaths on 9/11, and the deaths of four Trump supporters on 1/6, nobody died or was grievously injured on January 8 in Brasilia). And using the same playbook of neocons to support their crisis-justified civil liberties attacks, anyone in Brazil who even questions the need for new censorship powers and other attacks on dissidents demanded by the government is accused of being "pro-Terrorist" or an "apologist for fascism" (I honestly never thought I would live to see the day when one stands accused of being pro-facist for opposing censorship rather than supporting it, but such are the times in which we live).

That is why Europe, and large sectors of the U.S. establishment, see Brazil as the perfect laboratory to test how far censorship powers can go. With many Brazilians believing they just suffered their own 9/11 or January 6, all power centers know that the perfect time to seize new authoritarian powers and abridge core liberties is when the population is in a state of fear and terror, and thus willing to sacrifice liberties in exchange for illusory promises of security.

And recall that polling data in the U.S. shows that very large majorities of Democrats (and a disturbingly robust minority of GOP voters) would support a law similar to the one pending in Brazil to empower the state to restrict internet freedom in the name of stopping "misinformation." As Pew found in 2021, 65% of Democrats "say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means limiting freedom of information." Perhaps the First Amendment would be a barrier to implementation of such a law in the U.S., but there is ample public support, especially on the liberal-left, for state censorship of the internet.

A major reason I accepted the offer to become a Folha columnist is that it gives me a significant platform in Brazil to combat what I regard as these increasingly grave attacks on core liberties, not only because they threaten rights of free speech, due process and a free internet in Brazil, but because they threaten all those values far beyond Brazil's borders as well. My reporting on this new "fake news and disinformation" law sought by Lula's government as set forth below includes parts of my first Folha column published last Sunday on the dangers of this newly proposed law, as well as significant new passages I wrote for an international audience and for publication of this new article here on Locals.


 

Ten days before the run-off voting for the 2018 presidential election which sent Bolsonaro into the presidency, Folha reported that an "illegal practice" was being used to help Jair Bolsonaro win that election. "Companies are purchasing large packages of messaging assailing [Lula's] Workers' Party (PT) for mass dissemination on WhatsApp," Folha explained.

Bolsonaro not only denied the story but accused both Folha and PT of spreading Fake News. As Folha noted at the time, Bolsonaro's party "intended to sue" his election-year rival Fernando Haddad of PT. Bolsonaro accused PT of "spreading false news."

Upon winning the presidency, there was no law available to Bolsonaro – similar to the one which Lula's government is now proposing – that would have empowered his government, or judges sympathetic to him, to ban discussion online of Folha's reporting by claiming it was "fake news." But if he did have that power – if the law which PT hopes to implement to govern "fake news" had been in the hands of Bolsonaro's allies – it is very reasonable to suspect they may have used it to suppress those revelations on the ground that, in the view of Bosonaro's supporters, the allegations were "false."

After all, the new law proposed by Lula's government would empower both the judiciary and the equivalent of Brazil's Solicitor General (AGU) to take more aggressive action to combat "fake news" online. Among other new powers, the proposed law would permit "an action by the AGU, a body that legally represents the government, to file legal cases against those it regards as authors of false content." 

In a January 19 interview with Folha, Lula's chief spokesman, Paulo Pimenta, vowed: "we will start to respond more forcefully, more sharply, to information that distorts the truth and is wrong."

Everyone would love to live in a world in which an omnipotent and benevolent power who rules us allows only truthful statements, while it accurately identifies and then outlaws all false claims. Such a world sounds like paradise: no errors, only truth. Who could possibly be opposed to that? 

Unfortunately, human nature makes such a world impossible. If history teaches any lesson, it is clear that treating human leaders or institutions as capable of god-like infallibility and super-human wisdom is quite dangerous. 

Humans have tried all this before. For a thousand years prior to the Enlightenment, most societies were ruled by omnipotent institutions – monarchies, empires, churches – that claimed to possess absolute truth and therefore outlawed any views that deviated on the ground that they were "false."

The core innovation of the Enlightenment, one of the greatest intellectual advancements of human liberation, was that all human institutions are fallible, that they endorse false claims either due to error or corruption, and that every individual must always retain the right to question and challenge their orthodoxies. 

In sum, there is no such thing as an institution of authority that can be trusted to decree what Truth is. The oldest indigenous societies, far from Europe, had already internalized this lesson, having discarded faith in centralized authorities in favor of decentralized power and dispersed democratic values. And what is now called "the democratic world" is founded in the view that secular truths are ascertained not by decrees of monarchs, clerics and emperors, but by free and open debate driven by human reason and the sacred right to dissent.


 

Since the start of the COVID pandemic, it has been bizarre to hear left-liberals throughout the democratic world proclaim their devotion to science while simultaneously demanding that all "false statements" about science be banned. Science cannot exist if one assumes that permanent truth has already been apprehended. Science requires the acknowledgement that even its most brilliant and accomplished experts may have embraced grave errors and faulty assumptions. Scientific truth is unearthed only by permitting challenges to prevailing orthodoxies, not by prohibiting let alone outlawing them. 

To say that one believes in science while demanding that "falsity" be banned is like saying that one believes in religion while demanding that prayer be banned. Scientific discovery, like all intellectual endeavors, only advances by a process of trial and error, by challenging and objecting to prevailing beliefs so that error can be uncovered. To ban "false claims" is not to honor and strengthen science but to vandalize and kill it. 

From the start of the COVID pandemic, many of the claims made by the world's most prestigious experts and trusted institutions have turned out to be false or uncertain. As just one example, the World Health Organization announced in February and March of 2020 that asymptomatic people should not wear masks and that doing so could make a COVID infection worse by "trapping" the virus. In April, the recommendation was the opposite: everyone should wear masks regardless of one's health condition. 

In 2018, any Brazilian "fact-checker" would have affirmed as true the statement that Lula was a "thief," as he was convicted of multiple corruption felonies, which Brazilian appellate courts affirmed on appeal. By 2022, the situation was reversed as Brazilian courts nullified that conviction (in large part based on the revelations of our reporting regarding the corruption on the part of Lula's judge and prosecutors). As a result, Brazil's election courts in the 2022 campaign banned campaign materials calling Lula a "thief" on the ground that they were false. 

In other words, what was considered Gospel about Lula in 2018 became prohibited Falsity just four years later. That is the unyielding, universal pattern driving human intellectual advancement: what is deemed Truth one minute becomes shameful and discredited the next.

For that reason, at the heart of every censor resides one of the most toxic human traits: hubris. It is astonishing to watch some humans believe that they have managed to liberate themselves from this historical cycle of misperception, misapprehension and error, and instead believe that they have become owners of the Truth. Even with the best of motives, only hubris would lead people to have so much confidence in their truth-finding abilities that they would want the state to make it a crime to question or deny their views of the world. And yet no other mentality than this one can account for someone supporting the kind of law to ban and punish "fake news and disinformation" as the new Brazilian government and its allies in Congress are on the verge of adopting.

Error is the inevitable condition of even the most well-intentioned humans. But most humans do not operate with the purest of motives. Humans with great power are highly likely to abuse that power absent very serious limits. Even if you believe you finally found political leaders with almost god-like virtue, who can be trusted not to abuse such powers when suppressing ideas as "false," it is extremely likely such laws will be transferred in the future to new leaders with different ideologies and who are more human than the deity you have been fortunate enough to have found.

And as has been widely reported, the new industry to define "disinformation" is largely a scam. It is funded by a small handful of liberal billionaires, and employs highly politicized actors who claim a fake expertise – "disinformation experts" – to masquerade their ideological views as science. Any attempts by the state to make "fake news and disinformation" illegal will almost certainly rely on this fraudulent industry to justify their censorship decisions by claiming that their assessment of truth and falsity has been supported by "experts."


 

If Brazil implements this proposed law, it will not be the first time a government is empowered to ban "fake news" on the internet. Other countries live under governments which have been given the power to ban journalism and commentary on the ground that it is judged by the state to be dangerous, to be false, to incite violence, or to foster social instability or even revolutions against the prevailing order. 

Regimes with such laws are the planet's most despotic: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Singapore and Qatar (whose law, entitled "Crimes against the internal security of the State," allows the state to "impose up to five years imprisonment on anyone who spreads rumors or false news with bad intent"). 

There, the outcome is predictable. All dissent against government orthodoxies and criticism of its leaders are quickly labeled "false" or "dangerous" or designed to incite violence and are censored on that ground. Last May, the UN, warning about a newly proposed "anti-disinformation" law in Turkey, "expressed concern after the vote by the Turkish parliament of a law that could imply the imprisonment of up to three years of journalists and users of 'social media' for the dissemination of 'fake news'."

Those attacks on dissent using these "Fake News" laws are not due to "abuse of a good law." They are, instead, the inevitable, arguably the intended, outcome of such a law. No political faction is immune from believing that any dissent from its core pieties is not just misguided but deliberately false and even dangerous.

The dissent-suppressing persecution where such laws have been allowed to flourish are entirely predictable. Only in authoritarian cultures, or ones that wish to return to the pre-Enlightenment days of full submission to institutions of authority, would citizens trust political, governmental or religious officials with the power to declare absolute truth and then, using the force of law, bar any expression that deviates from it.

These abuses of "fake news" laws happen in those countries where those laws have been adopted not because those countries are different than ours, but because they are the same. All powerful leaders, even well-intentioned ones, will be highly tempted to ban dissent on the grounds that it is dangerous or "false." 

Humans, by our very nature, are incapable of acquiring absolute truth about politics or science even with the best of motives. What one generation believes to be proven Truth (the earth is the center of the universe) is demonstrated by subsequent generations to be gross error, though such truth-tellers often suffer severe persecution when "falsity" is rendered illegal (which is why Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Voltaire and many others like them wasted years attempting to avoid prison or worse, often unsuccessfully, due to laws banning ideas deemed "false" by the reigning authorities of their era). The intellectual history of humanity has one indisputable lesson: humans will always err when claiming they have discovered such absolute truth that nobody should be permitted to doubt or challenge their claims.

It is likely for these reasons that "the large portion" of the Brazilian legal specialists consulted by Folha about Lula's proposed law to ban "fake news and disinformation" emphasized "that a legal process of this kind by the government can set a precedent that represents a risk to freedom of expression, given the possibility of being weaponized for judicial harassment against critics and opponents."

Even if you are lucky to have found the most trustworthy and benevolent leaders in history, ones who are somehow capable of decreeing truth without erring and who use such laws only in the most noble ways – something the Brazilian left believes of Lula and his government – at some point other leaders will be elected and they, too, will have such powers. 

When assessing whether one should support a proposed law, the key question is not whether one is comfortable with it in the hands of leaders one likes and trusts, but whether one is comfortable with such powers in the hands of different leaders.

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Trump’s Landslide Win: Our Analysis, With Journalist Lee Fang
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Good evening. It's Wednesday, November 6, the day after the 2024 presidential election. 

Tonight: Donald Trump last night won the American presidency for the second time in a sweeping landslide. Trump won all seven of the so-called swing states. He is almost certainly likely to win more than 300 Electoral College votes. His lead in the popular vote over Kamala Harris is now almost 4 million, which would make him only the second Republican candidate this century to win the popular vote, the other being the wartime president, George W. Bush, in 2004. He also beat Kamala and her running mate, Tim Walz, in his home county in Minnesota. As striking as the massive margins are, is the breadth of demographic groups in which Trump made major strides since 2020. In fact, in virtually every demographic group other than college-educated women, Trump improved his vote totals from 2020 and 2016, chief among them among Latinos, but also Arab and Muslims, young people, and, by large distances, non-college-educated white men and white women. In other words, Trump, who has been branded by the national media virtually every day since 2015 as a racist, a white nationalist, a white supremacist fascist, owes his win in large part to the massive number of nonwhite voters who migrated from the Democratic Party toward Trump, starting in 2016 and into 2020 and even more so in 2024. 

On top of that, the Republicans took control away from the Democrats of the Senate and appear likely – it's not certain, but it appears likely – that they will maintain control of the House as well. The biggest loser in all of this, besides the Democratic Party and their neocon allies such as Liz Cheney, is the corporate media to say that they are becoming more and more irrelevant at a rapid speed is to severely understate the case. They spent the last week of this campaign focusing on such towering issues as how a joke told by a comedian at a Trump rally enraged celebrities such as Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez, thereby, according to them, jeopardizing Trump's ability to attract Latino and especially Puerto Rican voters, as if that's the first thing on their mind when they go to vote. They spent 48 hours melting in contrived indignation over their false claim that Trump threatened Liz Cheney with execution by firing squad. I suppose we'll see whether that actually is scheduled shortly, whether it's on pay-per-view or whatever. But at least as of now, it was a completely fabricated allegation that they spent two or three days full days drowning in and that most of their time over the past two months has been screeching that Trump is the new Hitler coming to put all of them – these very important people in the media, the pundits and the various politicians – to come and put them all into camps. 

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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

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Good evening. It is Monday, November 4h.  I'm Michael Tracey, filling in once again for the enigmatic Glenn Greenwald, who is off doing something or other tonight. But we're going to have a jam-packed show for you because, as you might be aware, tonight is the eve of the 2024 presidential election, and therefore, there is much to discuss.  

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Pennsylvania, as everybody is tediously aware, is ground zero for the 2024 campaign. The amount of propaganda that everybody is being bombarded with in this state is astounding. It was probably similar in previous years, but now it just seems like it's reaching a new level. You cannot turn on the television without seeing five consecutive ads from politicians who are criticizing other politicians. It's just suffusing the entire commonwealth and people might kind of just not be inhabiting the same world if you live in, I don't know, Vermont or Arkansas or Kentucky or Massachusetts or some other place that's not seen as hotly contested in this election. It's obviously to do with the structure of the U.S. electoral system where we allocate electors by popular vote in individual states, and then whoever gets the majority in the Electoral College wins. Therefore, people pour into the states that are seen to be the most critical to winning the Electoral College. And here we are in Pennsylvania. 

I've been across the country covering the elections. I've been in Nevada, I've been in Arizona, I've been in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and now here I am concluding the spirited and wonderful 2024 campaign season here. And tonight, I cap things off by just having gone to one of Donald J. Trump's final rallies. He could always, who knows, hold additional rallies if he wins or even if he loses, it's difficult to say, but at least as of this campaign cycle, one of his final rallies was this afternoon in Reading, Pennsylvania, spelled deceptively as ‘reading’ but all the locals know that it's pronounced Redding. 

So, make sure you have that down if you ever want to become a political prognosticator and discuss this particular micro section of Pennsylvania, the commonwealth. And there was an interesting occurrence at this Trump campaign rally that I was there to witness myself, where he gave a curious shoutout to a particular political ally of his. And so, let's play that clip of Donald Trump today at the rally in Reading, Pennsylvania. 

 

Video. C-SPAN. November 4, 2024.

 

Donald Trump: So normally you see all these jobs and everything, hundreds of thousands of jobs just because of the size. And they just announced, Mike, you'd be amazed at this, Mike. Look at our Mike. Look at that. He lost all that weight. You look so handsome. Stand up, Mike Pompeo. Stand up, Mike. He looks so handsome. Wow, man. I'm going to ask him how the hell did he do that? That's good. Good. That's great. 

 

I was sitting actually behind Pompeo further up in the in the arena style seating, and I saw him stand up. He waved to the crowd. Trump prompted the crowd to give Mike Pompeo a nice round of applause. One of the few people that Trump actually singled out for praise in this particular event. We've heard a lot one of the big Trump campaign themes is supposedly that he has this Avengers-style dream team of new people who are going to come into a second Trump administration and combat the deep state or bring peace and prosperity and justice to America. And I've always found this a bit odd because although people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and others promote this kind of fairy tale, Mike Pompeo has always been one of the foremost people in the Trump coalition, the Trump governing coalition. He was one of the few senior-level administration officials in the first Trump administration with whom Trump never had a personal falling out. Trump first appointed Pompeo as CIA director and then elevated him to secretary of state, in which capacity Pompeo served for the majority of the Trump presidency and carried out dutifully their joint policy initiatives. 

One of those policy initiatives was to basically declare jihad against Wikileaks, which when Pompeo was CIA director, he called a hostile nonstate intelligence service and then directed the resources of the executive branch to combating and ultimately prosecuting in the form of Julian Assange, who, of course, was indicted in 2019 and then again with a superseding indictment in 2020, he was extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh Prison, and only a few months ago was he finally released, under the Biden Department of Justice. Assange and his counsel arranged for a plea agreement that enabled him to leave prison and go back to Australia. So, people kind of try to assert that there's some fundamental disparity or incongruence between Trump and Pompeo. Yet Trump has been going around praising Pompeo. He told the radio host Hugh Hewitt recently that Pompeo is among the people who are in consideration for another senior-level role in his forthcoming administration, which would make perfect sense because he and Pompeo were in total harmony, as far as anybody could tell, while Trump was in power the first time. Trump even went on Joe Rogan and favorably name-dropped Pompeo and then now here Pompeo is going around in the Trump entourage, campaigning with him and getting called out by Trump as one of his favored backers. So, I mean, people can have this hallucinatory view of like what Trump might do because are they bought into this whole RFK Jr. mythology where because like RFK Jr. might have some ancillary role at the Food and Drug Administration with like removing toxins from oil supplies that therefore Trump is going to have this new group of like heroic superstars to dismantle the Deep State, Trump himself is telling you who is within his sphere of influence and who is within his orbit. It's Mike Pompeo. If you're a person who views yourself to be an enormous defender of Wikileaks – as I've always been since, I don't know, 2009, 2010 – when they first became prominent in American domestic politics and international affairs as well, then it's just a massive bit of cognitive dissonance to be cheerleading for Donald Trump when he's telling you blatantly that Mike Pompeo is still in his good graces. Mike Pompeo also spoke at the Republican convention. I mean, this is not hidden. It's coming out of Donald Trump's own mouth.

If people want to employ some kind of circuitous reasoning and still claim that it's of urgent moral necessity to reinstate Republican executive power, okay, that's your prerogative, but at least go into it with some clarity as to what you're doing. You know, I didn't vote for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump – not that anybody should particularly care about my own voting behavior, but I do think it's worthwhile to be at least transparent about what I've done. I've never bought into this whole taboo that certain journalists have where you're supposed to steadfastly conceal your own private political activity or voting behavior. That never made sense to me. And I wrote out a whole explanation of why I did this. This was an interesting thought, that people could look it up if they'd like, it was published over the weekend. 

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But one thing that I am trying to do is call attention to the legions, the tens of millions of nonvoters who are constantly berated and hectored and lectured and scolded for not voting for one of the two major party candidates. Either they're voting third party or not voting at all, which I think is a perfectly valid position for people who are abstaining from the electoral process because they don't wish to concede that it has any legitimacy in their eyes. And there are so many voters across Pennsylvania. Before I get on to this, I do want to ask the producers to throw up the photo of the woman at the Trump rally who was sitting behind me. She was a Spanish-speaking woman. 

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And before I get on to my larger point, I just do want to point out that if you go and sit at one of these Trump rallies, I mean, Reading, Pennsylvania, is heavily Latino and there were lots of people who were cheering when Marco Rubio – supposedly one of the former neocons, quote-unquote, who has been banished from the Republican Party under Trump but who is still also within the Trump sphere of influence, just like Tom Cotton, who is also sitting in the VIP section at this rally today, but, you know, I say too much in this regard, I guess, for some people. But I do want to point out, just like the very clear diversity in the demographics that are supporting Trump this time around, I mean, I think it's very much probable, almost even certain that Trump will receive a heavily diversified vote racially, ethnically and religiously tomorrow, probably superseding or exceeding the racial diversity of his vote in 2020 and 2016. And if anything, he might be going down with white voters overall, mostly highly educated white voters. If Trump does lose, it'll probably look something like college-educated white voters trending against him just as happened between 2016 and 2020. And it's not offset sufficiently by the increased level of support from racial minorities that he receives, including that woman who happened to be behind me at the rally. And there were lots of other diverse people at this rally. So, I mean, it cuts right against this fanciful idea that Trump is leading some sort of, quote, “Nazi” movement. I mean, it doesn't seem to include all that much of an appeal to, like racial purification zealotry if you're including within the current iteration of the mock a movement of very visibly diverse set of people. 

But anyway, the undecided voter I think is very interesting. I also wrote today an article for Newsweek where I went and surveyed lots of undecided voters in Pennsylvania and people, I think, have a misconception about what the prototypical undecided voter is this late in the election cycle. It's really not a voter who is determined to vote and is still trying to make his or her mind up between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Those voters do exist. I mean, you would never know it if you look at Internet comment sections all day, but that title does exist. 

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But more often what you encounter are people who are undecided voters in the sense that they don't know whether it's even worth their time to go vote at all. They tend to have a disenchanted idea of the electoral process as a whole, skeptical toward the two major candidates, they might be more favorable toward one or the other, but the decision point that they've yet to complete in their thought process is whether to even vote at all. And interestingly, a number of these people if they were prodded, if they were maybe targeted by a competent Republican, get-out-the-vote operation – which we're told Elon Musk is funding in Pennsylvania, remains to be seen whether that's going to be effective – but I encountered more often than not among this like basket of voters who are undecided about whether to vote, more often – again, I grant this is anecdotal, but like, what else can I do in terms of conducting reportage than compiling anecdotes? – more often than not, these people who are undecided about whether to vote, they have like a preference for Trump. So, they could be amenable to motivational interventions on the part of some Republican apparatus to try to get them out to vote, to encourage them to be motivated enough to go act on their preference. But so far, they haven't been reached in that way, at least from what I have been able to gather in my sample size. So, it's 25 people and there are a lot of people who reflect this kind of profile. 

Yesterday I was out across different parts of most like Philadelphia suburbs, with Meghan O'Rourke, who is a producer here on the System Update show and we were just going to do Man-on-the-Street interviews. Sometimes people can kind of maybe snicker at the utility of conducting this kind of interview, but they're really pretty informative, I find, because you're kind of just doing a random sample of voters. I particularly wanted to see if we could identify nonvoters. People who are abstaining from the election, whether out of pure apathy, out of distaste for the two candidates, or for any other reason because I think that those segments of voters are under-analyzed. 

But first, I want to show you a clip of an interview that we did with a person who really reflects why I think more people should do more On-the-Street interviews because you're bound to encounter a voter or a would-be voter who just defies any stereotypical expectation you might have. So, let's go to the interview that we did with the young woman who was a Walmart worker. 

 

Video. Walmart employer. Norristown, PA.

 

M. Tracey: Yeah. So, what do you think about the election coming up? 

 

Interviewee: I think this election is very important this time. It's a lot going on, so we need a good president, you know? And I think Trump will be a good president, in my opinion, because he's actually done stuff in the office. I haven't really seen the vice president like really do anything, even though being vice president. Yeah. So, I just feel like a guy being a president is better in my opinion. 

 

M. Tracey: Really? 

 

Interviewee: Yes. 

 

M. Tracey: Explain. 

 

Interviewee: I feel like… What's her name? 

 

M. Tracey: Kamala. 

 

Interviewee: I feel like if Kamala was president, I feel like we will be in war with, like, other countries, because she will, like, I don't know. Females are very sensitive. 

 

M. Tracey: Wow. What do you like that Trump did when he was in office the first time? 

 

Interviewee: I can't remember. Okay. I know he did something. Some stuff. Like people said, I don't like Trump, but like, they have to understand, like he did do stuff while he was in office. 

 

I just wanted to play that, not because it's necessarily totally representative of anything in particular, but because you encounter all these amazing anecdotal stories about how people formulate their political views. And as somebody who covers politics for better or worse, day in and day out, you can kind of get into certain patterns or rhythms in terms of how you kind of just assume that the electorate is shaping up. And, you know, we came across a Walmart worker. She was actually 17, okay, but she was working at Walmart, so, she's not eligible to vote this year. But she says her family is all voting for Trump. She wants Trump to win. She has some striking views as to whether a woman should be in office and know she's a young Black woman who's a low-wage worker at Walmart and supporting Trump. So, I just throw that out there to say that there are so many manifestations of the voter that I think you only really encounter if you go out into the wild and just kind of talk to a random selection of people, get off the Internet. Not that the Internet is totally useless, but in terms of, you know, encountering people who are kind of out to defy your expectations as to how people arrive at their political preferences, it's useful to go out and talk to people. 

So, I had the bright idea of going to Walmart because I think that's sort of an instructive place to kind of talk to people who may be undecided or less engaged in the political process and yes, let's play that other interview that I did with the second woman at Walmart with her son. 

 

Video. Mother and son at Walmart. Norristown, PA.

 

M. Tracey: So, you said you have not really been following the election much at all. What do you know? To the extent that you know anything?  

 

Mother: I know that there is Kamala Harris and I know Donald Trump. Yes. 

 

Son: And I know the perfect pick. 

 

Mother: And he knows who he would pick. 

 

M. Tracey: Who would you pick? 

 

Son: Kamala Harris.

 

M. Tracey: Why is that?

 

Son: I don't trust Trump. I just don't trust Trump. I never trusted him. 

 

M. Tracey: What don't you like about Trump in particular? Like anything he did when he was president the first time that you didn't like? 

 

Son: No, I don't think I noticed anything yet. (talks to his mother)

 

Mother: You were young, you were just young. 

 

M. Tracey: How old are you? 

 

Son: Nine. 

 

M. Tracey: Okay. So, at the end of Obama and then Trump came in. 

 

Mother: Yup. 

 

M. Tracey: And what do you like about Kamala, if anything? 

 

Son: I don't know. I just… 

 

M. Tracey: You just like her as an alternative to Trump? 

 

Son: Yes. 

 

M. Tracey (To mother): And you just haven’t been following it. 

 

Mother: I just haven't really been following. I didn't have any problems when Trump was in. I thought he was fine before. But I don't really know who's doing what this year. Like who's, you know, what everybody's talking about. I just really don't keep up. 

 

M. Tracey: Have you voted in the past? 

 

Mother: I have not ever. Never in my life. 

 

M. Tracey: And why? You just don't think that there's enough at stake for you to… 

 

Mother: It's not that, I just... I just never have. I really never have. But if I had to pick one, I would go back to Trump. 

 

M. Tracey: Really? 

 

Mother: Just because he did fine before. Like, I just think I would choose him. That's it. 

 

I played that because she's obviously an infrequent voter – she has never voted – but she's saying that she has a preference for Trump. So, this is like the prototypical, modal voter that the get-out-the-vote operations that are run by both parties would want to identify and then try to urge or motivate to vote and it doesn't seem like that's happened with her. I can give you a bunch of other examples of people who fit a similar profile. 

One of my tentative theories here is that there is a fairly sizable untapped pool or voters who could lean Republican. My basic theory is that there does appear in Pennsylvania and other states to be a large, an untapped or seemingly untapped pool of potential Trump or Republican voters who need a bit of extra motivation given their skepticism of the system or their low propensity to vote at all, who could potentially be motivated to vote if they were made contact with by a get-out-the-vote operation. But the Republicans historically have not been as competent at utilizing get-out-the-vote methods as Democrats and so, if Trump does lose Pennsylvania, well, a large share of the reason will be that voters such as this have not been contacted, persuaded or engaged with by these well-funded billionaire-funded groups. So we're told, you know, we're flooding the state with ads, but apparently don't have the wherewithal to identify this type of voter, again, who says that she would prefer Trump but is just not interested enough in the election to go vote.

 

 Okay, so, now we're with Briahna Joy Gray. 


Interview: Briahna Joy Gray 

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M. Tracey: So, Brianna, I wanted to talk to you for a while because obviously we're on, as you may be aware, the eve of the 2024 election, there could be some people out there who are still making up their minds. I would doubt that there are that many watching System Update and Rumble who are undecided, but you never know. 

One thing that I've noted, having gone around and surveyed undecided voters here in Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for an endless bombardment of propaganda – it's actually incredible, I mean, I know this happens every election cycle to some extent, especially post-Citizens United, which basically eliminated all constraints on political spending. But it really is incredible to see just how inundated Pennsylvanians are – I've talked to a lot of Pennsylvania voters who are undecided, partially because they're so alienated from all the endless propaganda that they're being bombarded with, that they kind of just are contemplating potentially not even voting out of spite. And I sympathize with that. 

So, did you get a chance to look at any of the articles that I sent you? I'm trying to basically postulate a certain type of undecided voter who exists out there in the universe who I think is under-examined and it's not somebody who's like making this a last minute impulsive decision between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Most people who are determined to vote already have make up their minds. Those are the quintessential undecided voters. The undecided voters that I most encounter here in Pennsylvania and also around the country are people who are disenchanted with the electoral process. And they may have a mild preference for one or the other. Interestingly enough, they tend to express more of a preference for Trump in my experience but they might not be motivated to actually go and bother to vote. They don't think it particularly matters. 

 

Briahna Joy Gray: That doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, we do this every election cycle, right? What is the stat about there being more nonvoters than Americans who identify with either political party, record high numbers of people who identify as independents, right? And that is largely because people start to get to a certain age, it only takes a few election cycles to start to get the sense that no matter who's sitting in the Oval Office, your life is substantively the same. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that there aren't meaningful differences that come around on a generational basis, that there are meaningful differences in terms of the labor conditions that people have to organize under, or, let's say, Roe (v. Wade) being overturned. But realistically speaking, practically speaking, for most people's lives, the consequences of organizing under Biden's Labor Department being better, it is meaningful, at the same time, fewer than 10% of Americans are in unions, and those numbers have not meaningfully dropped, despite the fact that we have a more pro-labor president in office. And again, that is not to say to diminish those gains. But the fact is, when you have wins that touch the lives, directly touch the lives of so few Americans, you find yourself facing a lot of disaffected voters. 

There are policies that have the potential to touch a lot of people in one fell swoop. Remember, Biden's announced student debt policy was going to affect 44 million Americans, 44 million Americans who are going to get $10,000 to $20,000 of their student debt canceled. Remember that. Remember how impactful the $1,200 checks were back in the early days of COVID. There are voters today still, I'm sure you encountered some of them, who will invoke those checks as long ago as they were, as some of the most meaningful interventions from a government they've ever experienced in their life. And yet Democrats have a tendency to, I would argue, purposefully avoid, but even if you're giving them the benefit of the doubt, set up their agenda, their policy, and did that strive more for small incrementalism, instead of the sweeping programs that I think could really win devoted, committed members of the base for many, many cycles going forward. And then the last point on that, I'd say that's Pennsylvania-specific. It's notable that fracking and Kamala Harris's flip-flopping on a fracking ban has been such a point of contention. She's seemingly willing to completely revise her 2019, and 2020 stance. Why? Well, there are only about 17,000 fracking jobs in the entire state of Pennsylvania. In fact, a majority of Pennsylvania voters are supportive of the fracking ban and are deeply concerned about the health implications of having to drink this luminous light-on-fire water that fracking creates. On the other hand, had she wanted to touch again tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters, she could have focused on the fact that Pennsylvania voters are still operating under a federal minimum wage. That's the federal minimum wage that hasn't been raised since 2009, the longest period in American history since we've had a minimum wage. And then email. There are tens of thousands of minimum wage workers in Pennsylvania who are still on the federal minimum wage rate, you barely hear a peep out of the Democratic Party, about a $15-hour minimum wage, which isn't some far-fetched lefty agenda item. It's a core base item on the Democratic agenda. So, what is really going on here? It feels like many voters are increasingly disaffected because the Democratic Party is pitching their pitch to their donor base who care about things like a fracking ban, the energy companies, the defense contractors, and the like, instead of actually talking to the voters whose votes they need. 

 

M. Tracey: And look at who Kamala Harris is clearly tailoring her message to in the final weeks of her campaign. It's still bizarre to me to even utter this out loud, but it really is centered on Liz Cheney and disaffected, highly engaged, news-attentive Republicans who Kamala Harris apparently wagers that she'll be able to convince to come and vote for the Democrat. I don't know for sure that that is an impossibly crazy strategy. It certainly didn't work in 2016 for Hillary Clinton when she employed a version of it but you could argue perhaps that it might have worked to some extent for Biden in 2020. It's hard to say. I mean, Biden did largely win in the contested states because of major shifts within affluent suburbs, whereas the city centers like Philadelphia or Detroit or Milwaukee, actually trended marginally toward Trump. But that was offset by the major gains that the Democrats made in these affluent suburbs, which are increasingly, increasingly at the forefront of their electoral coalition. 

So, there's been a ton of energy expended on this show and other shows in the so-called alternative media ecosystem in dismantling the Democrats. And I'm always all for that. Okay? I can never get enough of it and I support Trump's principles but I do want to talk about Donald Trump, because one thing that's so maddening to me about this election cycle – and I spelled out in the other article that I wrote about my non-votes in the 2024 election – is that I consider myself, to some extent, a part of alternative media. I think it's a necessary corrective and has been a necessary corrective to the propagation of mainstream narratives and opening opportunities for people who might not have a traditional route to conduct journalism or engage in the media but I'm sorry to say – and people are going to get angry at me for saying this, who are watching – but a lot of alternative media this cycle has basically just been converted into a Republican cheerleading squad. I mean, Donald Trump can hand-pick “whatever podcaster, bro guy” – and I don't even say that derogatorily, I watch some of these podcasts – who he can go and banter with for an hour and a half and they won't ask him a single challenging question. And the list goes on. I mean, there are people who, you know, I would have had a much more respectable opinion a year or two ago who decided that their proper role in the 2024 election was basically just to join the Trump bandwagon. And if you want to vote for Trump, okay, fine but let's actually do some serious critique of his record, of his policy positions and it's just been virtually missing in these alternative media spheres, as far as I could tell. 

I don't know if you watch any of my introduction, but I happen to be at one of the final Trump rallies today in Reading, Pennsylvania. He pointed to Mike Pompeo, who was there in the Trump entourage, camped out on the campaign trail with Trump today, said what a great guy he is. He said on multiple occasions that Mike Pompeo was one of the people who is in consideration for another senior-level administration position. And for all we want to, you know, bemoan the Democrats relying on Dick and Liz Cheney, what's the substantive difference, really, between Trump parading around with Mike Pompeo? 

Tom Cotton was also there, one of the most virulent hawks in the entire Senate. Marco Rubio was in the entourage today. Lindsey Graham is a top surrogate. None of these people have been cast out of the so-called RFK Jr. reformed MAGA Republican Party or MAGA Party. I just think that there's such a torrent of confusion around this and a lack of serious critical examination that I sort of sometimes worry that the overwhelming focus that I have often partaken in, in criticizing and scrutinizing the Democrats has given way to the Trump and the Republicans, at least in these alternative media circles, kind of give being given a free pass. And there's just a flood of propaganda being repeated that is flattering to them without actually examining the record or what they would do a second time. So, am I crazy here? 

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Media Fabricates Trump’s Call For Liz Cheney’s Execution; Slate Writer Demands Usha Leave JD; Darren Beattie On 2024 & Pakistan
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It's Friday, November 1. That means we're four days away from what is called Election Day, probably about ten days away, if not more, from knowing the outcome. But in any event, we will see. 

Tonight: Anyone who has ever watched this show or followed my journalism in any way knows that the esteem in which I hold corporate media could not possibly be any lower. Before today, I honestly thought there was nothing they could do that would surprise me. I've seen them do it all: lead the country into wars, drown the country in fake scandals from the CIA and FBI, refuse to report on documents right before the 2020 election because it would harm the reputation of the candidate they wanted to win, become the leading agitators for censorship and so much more. I really thought I saw it all from them. Yet, maybe, I was a bit naive because today they managed to sink so low, spreading such blatant, obvious lies that I confess the sheer shamelessness of it surprised me a bit.

 Last night, speaking at an event hosted by Tucker Carlson, former President Donald Trump made a point, a good and important point that I have heard liberals make for decades, namely that there are many people in Washington, such as Liz Cheney, who are what Trump called, quote, “radical warmongers”. As a result, they cheer on every war only because the war is abstract to them because they and their family never have to fight in those wars or bear any of the suffering and horrors from them and, therefore, can cheer without any cost as a result, said Trump. Liz Cheney and people like her should be given a rifle and sent to fight in the war she loves so much and then, afterward, we will see whether she still believes that all these wars should happen and whether she's going to support them simply by the stroke of a pen. Then, he said maybe she will have a different and more responsible view of wars if she has to actually go fight in those wars. 

Somehow, from those comments, virtually the entire media, the Kamala Harris campaign and almost every single liberal pundit with a couple of notable exceptions, distorted Trump's clear comments and distorted them into a call by Trump that Liz Cheney should be executed by a firing squad. It just became this self-righteous, melodramatic spectacle today of all of them expressing such fear and outrage and horror that Trump would call for the execution of his political opponents like the noble Liz Cheney. It's such blatant lying but it also tells us a great deal about the Democratic Party, the liberal worship for the Cheneys, for neocons and militarism and, of course, the willingness of the corporate media to deliberately lie for political ends, something most Americans – polls show – believe they do, because that is, in fact exactly what they do. They lie deliberately for political ends. 

Then: The online journal Slate magazine – yes, I know it does still exist I don't blame you if you didn't know that – but it published one of the most rancid articles I have read in a long time. It basically referred to the discourse, the feminist discourse that has been calling on Usha Vance to divorce her husband, JD Vance, due to his politics and his spot as Trump's running mate. The article ultimately concluded that the reason she won't leave her husband as she should is that she does and thinks whatever her husband tells her to do and think and also argues that she benefits too much from his white male privilege and therefore would never give that up by leaving. Most of all, this article said, she has internalized self-hatred and as a result identifies emotionally and romantically with her white oppressors such as her husband, JD Vance. A recent campaign ad from the Harris camp sounds similar themes about the weakness and helplessness of women. There is no racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia more intense than when someone in a marginalized group that Democrats believe they own steps out of line or thinks for themselves in any way and that's why that's worth examining. 

Finally: Darren Beattie is a political scientist at Duke, a former Trump White House speechwriter and a good friend of the show. He's been on many times to talk about his excellent reporting. He will be on with us tonight to talk about the 2024 election, what he expects from it, what themes and principles are being illustrated by it, as well as something I've been wanting to cover for quite a long time and just never found the time, which is the U.S. supported coup in Pakistan and the resulting unrest in that country caused by the United States there and he has been following that very closely. He interviewed Imran Khan, the now imprisoned and formerly elected president of Pakistan and so he has a lot to say on that topic. I think it's really worth hearing. 

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