Glenn Greenwald
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Servants of Power: WaPo & NYT Hunt Down Ukraine-Docs Leaker—Doing the FBI’s Work for Them
Video Transcript: System Update #70
April 19, 2023
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The FBI arrested a 21-year-old whom they claim is the person who leaked dozens of classified documents on the Internet showing far greater U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine than had been previously acknowledged by the Biden administration. But it was not the FBI that hunted down and found the accused leaker, Jack Teixeira, of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Instead, it was two newspapers – The Washington Post, which early this morning provided every possible detail about the leaker to enable the FBI to identify and find him, and then, The New York Times, which named him, outed him before the FBI could find him itself. They've now arrested him as a result of the work of those two newspapers. It was their work in conjunction with the site Bellingcat, funded by both the United States government and the EU, that enabled the FBI to find and apprehend the alleged leaker. 

The idea of journalism, ostensibly, in theory, is to bring transparency to what the most secretive and powerful institutions are doing in the dark. Exactly what this leak did. Why, then, would self-proclaimed journalism outlets do the job of the FBI and hunt down the leaker and boast of the fact that they were the ones who found him even before the FBI did? Why would a 21-year-old with the National Guard, whom the BBC describes as holding the rank of airman first class, “a relatively junior” position, have access to what media outlets have been claiming are the government's most sensitive and potentially damaging secrets? 

As we have been reporting and demonstrating since Trump was inaugurated, the function of the U.S. corporate media has always been to act as propagandists and messengers for the U.S. Security State. But in the Trump era, this relationship even intensified further as the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security became the most valuable allies – the leaders of the ongoing attempt to sabotage Trump and his movement.

 Still, the only thing more bizarre and twisted than watching journalists turn themselves into the leading advocates for Internet censorship is watching them so eagerly and explicitly dedicate themselves to doing the work of the FBI by hunting down and exposing leakers of classified documents, handing their head on a pipe to the U.S. government. And yet that's exactly what media outlets did. We’ll examine all of the implications of that. 

 

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

 


There aren't many ways to define the function of a free press and what journalism is without referencing the way in which journalists are supposed to bring transparency to the most powerful institutions. Nobody needs a free press to bring to the public the messages of institutions of authority and power. They're very capable of doing that themselves. There would be no value to a free press if that's all they did. If every day you picked up the New York Times and The Washington Post and read what you, in fact, read in those newspapers, which is X, Y, and Z happened, according to government officials. That's the framework - the standard metric for how media outlets report. But if they don't expose government secrets that the government doesn't want you to know, there's really no value to a free press because it's not serving as a check and adversarial check and institutions of authority, which is the foundational reason why a free press matters. 

If you read the Founders, the entire idea of checks and balances included what they called the fourth estate, which, though not part of the government, is nonetheless a crucial part of the framework to maintain a balance of power between various institutions, knowing that there are people out there who are doing journalism, who are using what was then the printing press, and now as all kinds of other technology, to check what institutions of authority are saying to you, what you can reveal, what they're trying to hide. It was one of the most crucial ways to keep these institutions of authority honest. One of the ways, arguably the only real way, that we, as journalists, now have to show the public what these institutions of power are doing in the dark is through leaks. Leaks of the things that they don't want you to see oftentimes being classified information. 

Classified information is not some sacred text. Classified information is nothing more than a document or a piece of information that the government has stamped on that word “classified” or “top-secret,” because they want to make it illegal for you to learn about it. That's the effect of calling a document classified or top secret. And one of the things I learned in working with many large archives of government secrets and classified material is that, more often than not, when the government calls something classified or top secret, it's not because they're trying to protect you. It's because they're trying to protect themselves. They're trying to make it illegal for anybody to show what it is that they're saying and doing in the dark because what they're saying and doing in the dark is composed of deceit, corruption, or illegality. And that's why the most important journalism over the last 50 years, beginning with the Pentagon Papers, through the WikiLeaks reporting, the Snowden reporting, and all kinds of other major investigations have taken place when people have been able to show you, the public, documents and other information that people inside the government wanted you not to see and made it illegal for anyone to show it to you. That's the dynamic between actual journalism on the one hand and powerful institutional state actors on the other. That is always supposed to be what that relationship is about. 

But along the way, over, not since just Trump, but over the last many decades, the largest media corporations in the United States – The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN – have become the opposite of adversarial to intelligence agencies. They have become the leading propagandists, the leading messengers, whenever the CIA or the FBI or Homeland Security wants to disseminate propaganda, they go to those their favorite media outlets, their favorite journalists. They tell them what to say. And those journalists then go and say it.

Oftentimes, it's presented as a leak to make you feel like it's unauthorized. They'll refer to anonymous sources to make you kind of evoke that sentiment of Deep Throat meeting the Watergate reporters in a garage and passing information, even though that kind of original transaction that is supposed to have that image pop into your mind itself is highly suspicious. But that's what most leaks are when they're given to places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. They have the theater, the appearance, the costume of being unauthorized but, in fact, they're completely authorized. So, the CIA goes to Natasha Bertrand, now at CNN, and tells CNN and tells her to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation or that Trump has been found to have a secret server with the Russian Alfa Bank, or that Russians have put bounties on the heads of American soldiers and Trump is doing nothing about it, all of which turned out to be totally untrue. Or the FBI goes to Ken Dilanian or the CIA goes to Ken Dilanian, NBC News, and tells him that the Russians are using some kind of super-advanced machine to attack the brains of service members and diplomats in Havana and around the world, the Havana syndrome, to make you think that Trump is allowing Russia to attack our service members without doing anything about it. This is propaganda and deceit. These are authorized leaks in the government and that's, of course, where Russiagate came from. it's how the Bush and Cheney administration sold the country on the lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction by going to The New York Times and The Washington Post and ABC News and feeding them instructions about what they should say and then, those newspapers mindlessly put it on the front page of the newspaper. And so, we learned from the Iraq war, from the War on Terror, and then from the Trump years, including Russiagate, that the real function, the actual function of these media outlets is not to be adversarial at all to intelligence agencies or to the U.S. government but to be their servants, their messengers, their allies, their propagandists. And oftentimes they'll go so far as they did in Russiagate, to even give themselves Pulitzers when they publish information and disseminate information to the public that came directly from the CIA and the FBI, even though it turned out to be totally false. 

So, the fact that this relationship, on the one hand, between the largest media corporations in the country and, on the other, the intelligence community, in particular, is one of subservience and collaboration is something that we have been writing about and reporting on and talking about for many years. But what happened in the last 48 hours is really a new manifestation of it. It's a completely new escalation. What they're really telling you is they don't even want to pretend anymore what their real function is. They are basically acknowledging to you that their role is to act as servants for the FBI and the CIA. 

As you know, we've been covering it on our show. There has been a leak of dozens of classified materials, some of which have been labeled top secret. But as we reviewed, there's really nothing particularly dangerous about any of these revelations. There's no even viable argument that it's putting people in harm's way. They don't contain any names of undercover agents in the field. There's nothing in there that is even particularly sensitive. And we try to dissect these documents to demonstrate to you, based on my experience of many years of working on many different archives of classified information with WikiLeaks and the NSA, that these are not the kind of documents that are really the most sensitive secrets. That's clear and obvious. But that doesn't mean that they are bereft of important revelations. They do have some important revelations. Some of them show, for example, that the United States, contrary to the claims of the Biden administration, has deployed U.S. Special Forces inside Ukraine and there are other NATO countries, including the U.K. and Latvia and others that have done the same. Of course, that's something we ought to know if the government is more involved in the war in Ukraine than they've been telling us. And we'll go through some of the other important revelations, including the fact that the United States government is saying there will be no resolution to the war in Ukraine through 2023. There will be no negotiations, there will be no diplomatic settlement, there will be nothing but ongoing grinding, endless war that you will pay for beyond the $100 billion already authorized. That was the purpose of this leak, to show people that the Biden administration has been deceiving the public about the role that we're playing there and about what our objectives are. 

And there are other important revelations here as well. And yet The New York Times and The Washington Post, instead of protecting sources, which is the role of journalists, instead, has led the way to hunt down this source, to hunt down the leaker, to dig in an investigative way to find out who this leaker is and hand that information over to the FBI. They're handmaidens now of the FBI. I've never seen anything like it before. As journalists, we're supposed to rely on leaks. That's what we need and use in order to do our reporting. The idea that a journalist would be the one to actually go and find out who this leaker is and then reveal it publicly to the FBI is something that, honestly, I didn't even think I would see, notwithstanding that, there are few people who hold them in greater contempt than I do. 

Let's look at what's really going on here. First, what they did and the broader context of what the corporate media has become in terms of its relationship to the intelligence community. So, as I said earlier this morning, The Washington Post published a lengthy article, the title of which was “Discord member details how documents leaked from closed chat group.” It was out last night and so, a lot of people saw it first thing in the morning. This was essentially a blueprint for the FBI to find exactly who this leaker was and where he was. It penetrated the Discord group, the small Discord group, where these documents were first leaked. They spoke on tape to a 17-year-old who was part of the group – and they stressed they did it with his parents’ permission – and the 17-year-old described in detail who this person was, who was the leaker, that he was a young man in his early twenties, that he was a member of the military and gave all the digital breadcrumbs for the FBI to find him. I was shocked when I saw this article. I really was. It was focused not on the substantive revelations of what these documents show but, instead, on painting the perfect path, kind of leading the FBI down the path with breadcrumbs directly to the door of this leaker. It was incredibly obvious. Soon, as you saw in this Washington Post article, it was just a matter of hours before the FBI find the leaker because The Washington Post led the FBI to him on purpose. And I watched all day today as not a single journalist in corporate media stood up and said, “Wait a minute, is this really our role now, to act as law enforcement? We're going to expose leakers to the public and ensure they go to prison? Isn’t it supposed to be our role to work with leakers and encourage them to come forward and give us information about what the government is doing in secret that is the truth rather than what they're telling the public? 

Journalists played the role of wanting to see punished leakers and people who disclose classified information. But evidently, that is not just the role of The Washington Post, but the understanding of the role of almost everybody in corporate media, because virtually nobody stood up and said, “Wait a minute, we shouldn't be doing this. This is the opposite of our role.” Everybody cheered The Washington Post and said, wow, this is an incredibly important and intrepid scoop that they got. 

It wasn't the FBI who found where those breadcrumbs got first. It was instead The New York Times. They obviously felt annoyed that The Washington Post had scooped them and they went one step further. They went and found the name of the leaker and announced it to the world and described the proof that they had that he was actually the leaker. So here is the New York Times article that was just out this afternoon. And the headline is: “Here's what we know about the leader of the online group where secret documents were leaked. Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested on Thursday.” 

The article tells us,

 

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Republican Debate 2 Was Dreary, Undignified, & Unwatchable. PLUS: Outlook Significantly Worsens for Ukraine (and US Taxpayers)
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Good evening. It's Thursday, September 28. 

Tonight: The second Republican presidential debate was held last night in the Reagan Library, sacred, hallowed ground for all of us, and to say that the participants in this debate, moderators and candidates alike, failed to do justice to this glorious setting is to dramatically understate the case. It was close to unwatchable. At times it was literally unwatchable by which I mean that even though I had all sorts of unique incentives to watch the debate beyond what the ordinary voter possesses – I knew I'd have to talk about the debate on tonight's program, I was scheduled to appear in other programs throughout the day to discuss the debate, my work as a journalist kind of requires me to watch it and, in general, I usually like political debates and think they're important to watch  – I battled continuously against the growing temptation to just turn it off until I finally couldn't take it anymore. I made it through the first 50 minutes or so with decreasing levels of intense attention until I finally just checked out and only went back this morning to watch the rest of it because I was forced to by the commitments I had made today, otherwise, I most definitely would not have. 

I don't think there was a single good or interesting point to the entire debate, except for when Chris Christie said that from now on we're going to call Donald Trump… Donald Duck –  and then look at the camera with an intense amount of obvious self-satisfaction after unleashing this pre-prepared insult only to find that the only laughter came from a few uncomfortable audience members who made noises slightly resembling laughter, but mostly out of pity for Christie, who was standing up on the stage with silence enveloping his big joke. It reminded me a great deal of when liberals in 2016 genuinely believed that they had finally found the way they were going to take down Donald Trump after the HBO host, John Oliver, reminded everybody that his family name was actually Drumpf and that from now on we should all call him Drumpf. And Liberals were earnestly certain that this would be so embarrassing for the Republican frontrunner, that young people and working-class people and older voters would all unite in contempt for Trump, now that John Oliver had attached to him a difficult-to-pronounce surname. 

Several of the Republican candidates unveiled brand new personalities that were directly contrary to the personality they used for the first debate. The host from Univision asked all of the questions, almost every last one that every Republican voter obviously and viscerally hates or doesn't care about. The candidates spent the entire time talking over one another where you could barely hear them and really didn't want to. We will spend some time talking about a couple of parts of the debate in an attempt to extract meaning from them, mostly because I just feel like… I should, rather than just ignoring the whole thing. 

And then: at exactly the point when you didn't think it was possible the war in Ukraine has gotten worse for all of those in the West who are its chief sponsors to say nothing of the Ukrainians who are actually the ones dying in this war. You may have thought that it was impossible to surpass this week's low point, which happened on Friday in the Canadian Parliament when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood by the side of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and led a robust, enthusiastic and prolonged standing ovation for an elderly Ukrainian gentleman. They all held this heroic and noble in unison, only for it to turn out that the person they were all flamboyantly honoring was someone who was an actual soldier who, during World War II, fought in a Ukrainian SS unit that answered to German Nazis and Adolf Hitler. The videotape seen of Prime Minister Trudeau and President Zelenskyy leading one of the West's great parliaments and lavishing a standing ovation upon an actual Nazi SS soldier ended up upsetting quite a bit, it turns out, various Canadian Jewish groups. Trudeau ended up kind of apologizing, though he somehow managed to attach his apology to some babbling warnings about the dangers of Russian disinformation. The speaker of the Canadian House of Commons fell on his sword, and resigned his position, noting correctly, I guess, that it would be difficult to carry out his duties after having invited someone who never really hid his Nazi past to be heralded and celebrated and honored by the Canadian Prime minister and the Ukrainian president while all the world watched. 

Notably, President Zelenskyy has yet to apologize for his role in awarding a fighter with the Nazi SS. That is likely because, as the Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin explained on our show on Tuesday night, many, if not most, of the most fanatical fighters in Ukraine whom Zelenskyy is now relying on have various connections too – if not outright embraces – of very similar ideologies, and they would likely be hurt and angered to watch their leader apologize for having applauded one of their brethren. But the worst of the news in Ukraine involves new data reported today from The New York Times, in graphic form, literally in graphic form, that vividly shows the front line in Ukraine – namely, the hundreds of miles of the front line of deeply entrenched Russian troops and defensive positions that allows Moscow to now control roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory – has barely budged at all since the beginning of the year, more than nine months ago. That means that the United States and the European Union have spent hundreds of billions of dollars this year alone and thousands upon thousands of young Ukrainian men have died over the last nine months in huge numbers for no benefit of any kind – including teenagers and other conscripts who are desperately trying to flee that country finally realizing that Western psychopaths and neocons are using them as cannon fodder for their own selfish purposes, having nothing to do with the well-being of Ukrainians. It's the kind of senseless and horrific trench warfare we last saw in World War I: countries send their young citizens to certain death in battle that barely moves the line of fighting for months or even years at a time. 

Things are so bad in Ukraine that the American transwoman Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, who was fired two weeks ago by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry after she made comments that were too deranged even for Kiev, was rehired quickly, only to be fired again after she got caught on video by two Russian pranksters who pretended to be a Ukrainian former president, where she admitted everything about this war that the Western press and the Western state leaders who support it have done their best to hide. We'll show you this new data as presented by The New York Times today, as well as the admissions of this Western American, the spokesperson for the Ukrainian military just to get a sense of how absolutely senseless and sociopathic this war and the West feeling of it has really become. 

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

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Bill Kristol’s New War Propaganda Reveals the Real Goal in Ukraine. PLUS: Trudeau, Hillary, & Fox Blame Russia, w/ Lev Golinkin; & Update on Govt/Media War on Rumble
Video Transcript

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Good evening. It's TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26. 

Welcome to a new episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, at 7:00 pm Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

Tonight: From the start of the massive U.S. role in the war in Ukraine, the overarching - and still unanswered - question has been: why? Why do U.S. leaders see Ukraine as a country so vital to the security and prosperity of the United States that they are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel it, willing to deplete its own weapons stockpiles, and even willing to risk escalation or nuclear exchanges with Russia? 

It has been clear from the start of the war that – as is always the case for American wars – the pretexts offered are just that: pretexts. We are there because we are good and benevolent people who believe deeply in the virtues of democracy and the need to defend it when it is under attack. Literally, everything about U.S. foreign policy for the last 70 years gives the lie to that propaganda. Just like the excuse offered for the War on Terror was a blatant fraud – remember that? "they hate us for our freedoms" – along with the excuse offered for the invasion of Iraq ("we must fight them over there so we don't fight them over here"), the claims about why the U.S. is so deeply entrenched in the war in Ukraine have been more laughable than anything else.

This week, the long-time neocon warmonger Bill Kristol – who now understandably identifies as a pro-Biden Democrat – launched a new ad campaign to strengthen support for Biden's war policies in Ukraine. In doing so, the remarkably candid ad sheds light on the real reason the U.S. sees the war as so vital: it’s not to save Ukraine and Ukrainians but rather to destroy Ukraine to advance its only real goal of weakening Russia. An accompanying report from “60 Minutes” on Sunday night detailed that the U.S. is not only spending tens of billions of dollars to prop up the Ukrainian military, but also spending tens of billions more to prop up Ukrainian businesses, industry, and internal infrastructure - the kind of support that Americans can only dream of from their own government.

All of this happens as that small little problem – that Nazi ideology continues to be dominant among large sectors of Ukraine, including the military – the same military that we are drowning in sophisticated offensive weapons – continues to rear its ugly head. The Speaker of Canada's Parliament resigned today after he led a very unfortunate incident: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, alongside President Zelenskyy and the entire Canadian Parliament, leading a standing ovation in honor of someone they called a Ukrainian hero – who, it turns out, was an actual fighter for the Nazi SS during World War 2, fighting against not only Russia but also against Canada and all other enemies of Nazi Germany. Prime Minister Trudeau, in order to explain this embarrassment, began babbling about how this was all the fault of the Kremlin and Russian disinformation – a tactic used by multiple U.S. political and media outlets this week to explain away all sorts of things of other flaws as we're going to show you, that still was their go-to excuse.

We'll speak with the Ukrainian-American journalist Lev Golinkin, who from the start of the war has been loudly objecting to the whitewashing of Ukraine's "Nazi" problem about the broader meaning of this standing ovation for an actual SS Ukrainian fighter and why such embarrassing incidents continue to happen every time the West goes to praise Ukrainians and yet ends up instead applauding actual Nazis, not the kind that wears MAGA hat in Oklahoma or in Texas, but the real deal being found throughout Ukraine.  

Then: Last night we documented in a two-hour, highly watched episode, the multi-pronged war being waged on Rumble for the crime of refusing to follow orders from the West's censorship industrial complex, both in general and when it comes to their demands about cutting off the income of Russell Brand, even though he's not been charged with any crime, let alone convicted of one.  We'll have some updates on that war against Rumble today, and the reasons it matters.

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

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Using Russell Brand as Pretext, UK Govt & US Media Launch Multi-Pronged War on Rumble
Video Transcript

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Good evening. It's Monday, September 25. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight: So crucial is the online censorship regime to Western power centers that one thing is certain – any individual or company that even thinks about defying it will be severely attacked and punished, often with weapons we have long been taught to regard as despotic when used by our nation's enemies. And that is exactly what is currently happening to Rumble – the video platform and YouTube alternative that we chose to leave Substack to produce our show here precisely due to its simultaneous ability to reach large audiences while proving its willingness to defend online free speech even if doing so means confronting some of the world's most powerful institutional actors. What attracts us to Rumble and makes us regard it as so important is what makes it so threatening to these institutional actors now launching a war – there's no other way to describe it – against the platform.

Although we've been long expecting and warning that Rumble would come under sustained attack if it were really serious about its refusal to bow to this censorship industrial complex, and even though we have been warning that the attacks are likely to be extreme, we are shocked by how quickly and aggressively this escalation has happened over the last week and how extreme are the legal threats and other forms of punishment that have already arrived with almost certainly worse ones on their way.

Last week, as we covered at length on Monday night's show, the comedian, actor and political commentator, Russell Brand, was accused through media outlets by four anonymous women of various acts of alleged rape, sexual assault and other types of emotionally controlling behavior. 

All of these alleged acts took place at least a decade ago with the most recent one being in 2013, ten years ago. None of the alleged victims filed any police complaint at the time or as of the time of these media accusations, at least none that we know of. And our argument on Monday was as simple as it was – we thought – self-evident:  nobody should assume the truth of these unproven accusations; both Brand and his accusers are entitled to full due process, including adversarial scrutiny of their claims, and that no punishments are justifiable against Brand until such an investigation has concluded and a reliable finding of guilt or innocence has issued by a competent judicial body. 

That's all basic, uncontroversial stuff. Or so we would have thought. As we have repeatedly seen, however, most liberal institutions of power in the West no longer even pretend to affirm basic precepts of due process, just as they barely feign support any longer for foundational concepts of free speech. The day following the emergence of these allegations against Brand in the media, Google's YouTube announced that it was demonetizing all of Russell Brand's future videos and past ones, in other words, denying him the ability to earn a living the way he's been earning a living, producing video content primarily for Rumble but also for YouTube, without any warning, let alone a hearing of any kind or any adjudication of guilt. In the following days, an absolute caricature of a British elite absurdity a Tory MP named Dame Caroline Dinenage, who is also the Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, wrote to multiple media outlets and tech platforms, including Rumble and TikTok, demanding that Brand be banned and or demonetized – a government official demanded punishment against a subject of the crown who has never been accused formally of anything, let alone convicted. The dame also demanded answers to a variety of questions about how Brand is compensated and what plans exist to cut up all of his revenues, again, all based on nothing, even an accusation brought in court, just ones expressed anonymously by people through the media. Most media outlets and tech platforms, predictably, though, alarmingly complied with the demands. Indeed, YouTube did so before she even asked but Rumble chose a very different course. It publicly and emphatically refused to comply, noting that Brand had never been convicted of any crime and that Rumble is not competent to adjudicate his guilt or innocence, just like it's not competent to adjudicate truth and falsity in our nation's most complex political and scientific debates and that, in all events, Rumble is little more than a free speech platform that permits citizens to speak and express themselves, provided that they abide by the law when doing so. Rumble did not just reject the Baroness's demands but made clear how dangerous and despotic they viewed her implicit threat. 

For that defiance, that very public defiance, the British government, the U.S. corporate media and the British media have launched a full-on assault on Rumble, obviously determined to punish it and make it an example for its refusal to obey the West censorship regime. Articles from liberal outlets like the Associated Press instantly appeared citing its usual self-proclaimed disinformation experts, claiming Rumble was a vector of hate speech and dangerous disinformation. The Times, of London, the first to circulate the accusations against Brand, published an article warning that the nation's new online Safety Act could be used to banish Rumble from being accessed in the UK altogether. The Guardian and liberal activist groups like Media Matters working in partnership have always boasted of their success in pressuring corporate advertisers such as Burger King to disassociate itself from Rumble and cut off all ads again based solely on unproven accusations against one of the users on Rumble's platform. And perhaps most amazingly of all, one of the most influential British tabloids warned today that Rumble’s executives face the threat of arrest under this new online safety if they try to enter the UK without fully complying with these new censorship orders. 

We cannot emphasize enough, even though we try, that the central priority of liberal power centers in the West is this censorship regime that they have imposed. There is no greater priority for them, as they know they can no longer command trust from the public and not see a closed information system – one free of dissent – as vital to their power maintenance. Seeing what they are now doing to Rumble for the simple refusal of Rumble to comply with their censorship orders over Russell Brand when the platform did nothing more than invoke very basic and long-standing precepts of due process – and we are quite certain, by the way, that we are only at the beginning of the cycle of reprisal, not the end when it comes to both Russell Brand and Rumble – looking at all this is really vital to understanding how this regime is functioning and most importantly, how increasingly repressive they are becoming. 

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

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