Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Overnight, the Western Press Radically Rewrote the Truth About Ukraine to Serve Biden's Endless War Policies
Video Transcript
June 06, 2023
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First, we are very excited to announce documents from the U.S. security state that prove that the US government completely in the dark and with no democratic debate, indeed, unbeknownst to even high-level members of Congress, converted the Internet into a pervasive system of indiscriminate mass surveillance aimed at the American people. 

That first article is one I published in The Guardian on June 6, 2013, and it revealed a secret order of the FISA court that required all American phone companies to turn over to the NSA detailed telephone records on all American citizens, a deeply invasive spying program that enabled the US government to know of every call we made to whom and from whom, how long we spoke, and the time of day or night, exactly the kind of mass surveillance that millions of Americans which President Obama's senior national security official, James Clapper, just months earlier, had falsely denied to the Senate that the NSA was doing. And that kicked off that article, months, in fact, years, of reporting from this top secret archive. 

To commemorate the ten year anniversary. I will speak tomorrow night to the two people whose work, courage and integrity were the most crucial to do this reporting. Our source, the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom the Obama administration purposely trapped in Russia when he was transiting in order to discredit him and thus the reporting as a Kremlin agent, And Laura Poitras, who had been placed on a U.S. government watch list for her 2004 Oscar-nominated film about the war in Iraq, and whose film about the work we did with Snowden in Hong Kong, Citizenfour, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015. 

The three of us, Snowden, Laura Poitras and I will revisit tomorrow night the choices we made, the climate of threats and intimidation that instantly arose when began reporting the role of the corporate press in defending the NSA in the U.S. government and the entire impact of that reporting. Ten years later, the U.S. surveillance state continues to expand; yet now, with far more weapons in the hands of individuals to combat that surveillance state. I'm really excited to share our discussion with you tomorrow night on this program, live, at 7 p.m., exclusively on Rumble.

 For tonight, a New York Times article today admits what has long been obvious, yet has been hidden behind a taboo, namely, that the Ukrainian military, which the U.S. government is now funding and to which the U.S. is providing huge stockpiles of advanced heavy weaponry is awash in Nazi battalions, Nazi flags and imagery, and Nazi ideology. 

We'll show you how in real time the U.S. corporate press completely rewrote history and the facts about Ukraine in order to align with the U.S. security state's agenda, overnight, simply denying facts they had been reporting and affirming for a full decade before Russia invaded, and how big tech radically rewrote its own censorship policies to ensure that speech, which affirmed U.S. government narratives thrived while speech that dissented from U.S. government policy was censored. Whatever your views on Joe Biden's war policies in Ukraine, his commitment, which is supported by the establishment of both parties to fuel this increasingly unstable and dangerous proxy war, whatever your views on that are, there are few things more dangerous than having the corporate media create false and propagandistic worlds that have no purpose other than to shield government words from dissent and critical scrutiny. 

Yet, as we will break down tonight and demonstrate, this is exactly what the U.S. corporate press, and the Western press more broadly, has been doing, in full cooperation with the security state agencies of Western governments. For as bad and oppressive as the media propaganda was surrounding the Iraq war – and it was bad – I would submit that the media propaganda to maintain support for the proxy war in Ukraine has been far more extreme, repressive, dishonest and shielded from any meaningful dissent. 

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


There are really few things more dangerous than having the corporate media create propagandistic worlds in which one minute a fact that is affirmed, overnight becomes a fact that gets denied. To have decade-long narratives about a country like Ukraine get completely rewritten, revised and whitewashed with a specific and clear goal of having their reporting align with the security state of the United States and its war policies – and yet that is exactly what the US media has done. There is a new article in the New York Times today that very begrudgingly acknowledges a core truth about the situation in Ukraine, one that the Western press had spent a decade warning about. But then, overnight, as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine and the United States government, other Western governments sided with Ukraine in that proxy war, just disappeared from public view. In fact, what had been long affirmed by the Western press for a decade became banned to prohibit, to express on the grounds that it was Russian propaganda or evidence somehow that you were aligned with or loyal to the Kremlin, if you simply acknowledged it, a tactic that has become increasingly common and that is, in fact, the go-to tactic of the Western press to stigmatize dissent and to propagandize the public, to label all dissent, disloyalty, or proof of allegiance to the Kremlin, almost to the point of caricature. And yet, allegations of disloyalty to your own country, your own tribe, are inherently potent. And it has really been effective in keeping this flow of information about this war in Iraq, which, remember, even Joe Biden himself says has brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than any time, since 1962, to keep the flow of information about that war completely closed off from dissent. 

Now, let's look at what the New York Times acknowledged today, the fact they acknowledged it is significant, the way in which they acknowledged it and tried to frame it though is incredibly revealing in how propagandistic the Western press is when it comes to this war. The headline reads “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” The subheadline reads “Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate.” So they are admitting that there are all sorts of Nazi emblems spread throughout the Ukrainian military, we have all seen them. They aren’t just posted from random trolls but even Ukraine’s government and NATO and Western media outlets have repeatedly got caught posting glorifying the photos of Ukrainian military battalions and soldiers, only to be embarassed when they learned afterward that the image that they were spreading and glorifying contained classic Nazi symbols. And I don’t mean MAGA hats. I mean the real deal Nazi flags, imagery, and symbols from battalions who are explicitly loyal to neo-Nazi idealogy. For a decade, the Western press has warned that the dominant faction, the best faction fighting force in Ukraine are the Azov and allied groups that have explicitly adopted the neo-Nazi idealogy. Now, maybe you are someone who doesn’t care about that. Maybe, you are someone that is happy to see neo-Nazi groups in Europe armed again. Maybe you think this time that will work out well unlike the last time Nazi idealogy took root in Europe and began to be flooded heavy weaponry. Regardless of your views on Ukraine and the war, we should want our media telling the truth, not rewriting history to suit government war policies and that’s exactly what this propaganda has been about. Let’s take a look at the article. 

 

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench, and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck.

 In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups. The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

Let me just stop there. Let's look at this phrase. Let’s savor it. The Ukrainian military has a “complicated relationship” with Nazi imagery! Do you think that if it came to any other group on this planet, especially when the New York Times was seeking to vilify instead of glorify, they would describe that group's relationship with Nazi imagery as “complicated”? We generally don't regard an embrace of Nazi symbols and Nazi flags and Nazi mottos and Nazi slogans and Nazi ideologies as “complicated”. In fact, it's one of the simplest things when it comes to a moral framework and a geostrategic one. We ought to avoid arming militias and battalions related to Nazi imagery. But in this case, the New York Times needs to justify it, needs to mitigate it and so now it becomes “complicated.” You're going to see this kind of moral relativity throughout the entire article. 

Again, if someone in the West wears a MAGA hat, that becomes instant proof they’re Nazi. They have to be destroyed. They're not entitled to free speech. They're not entitled to due process. You can imprison them for months with no trial, and it's all justified because they're Nazis. But then when Western institutions meet actual Nazis, like the real deal kind, the kind that admired Nazi Germany and view classic Nazi collaborators as heroes and inspirations, neo-liberal institutions in the United States want to arm and fund them and turn them into heroes. So, here we see the “complicated relationship” that Ukraine's military has with Nazi imagery, 

 

[…] a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II. That relationship has become especially delicate because President Vladimir Putin of Russia has falsely declared Ukraine to be a Nazi state, a claim he has used to justify his illegal invasion. […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

The fact that Russia asserts a particular thing to be true does not make it immoral to acknowledge its truth if it's actually true. If what the Russian government is saying is factually correct, the fact that your view aligns with the Russian government does not make you a Russian propagandist or Kremlin agent. It just means that you're both acknowledging the same fact and the claim that Putin made when originally announcing his invasion – namely that there is a significant faction in the Ukrainian military and in Ukraine composed of Nazis, and that therefore part of that military operation is designed not to fight the Ukrainian state – is one that has been made over and over and over again by almost every major Western media outlet before this war, including, as we will show you, The New York Times. And yet, now, what The New York Times is essentially saying is the only reason it's a problem for Ukrainian militias and battalions to be enamored of Nazi ideology is not because it's inherently problematic that they're Nazis, but because it fortifies Russian propaganda – it makes Putin's claim seem valid. Do you know why? Because in this particular case, it happens to be. And the only thing you need to do to see that is to look at what the Western press has been saying for 10 years before the invasion when they changed their story overnight because that fact became too inconvenient to admit any longer. The Times goes on:

 

The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

Try that. Try that! Go out on the street, if you're a conservative in the United States, proudly wearing Nazi symbols and Nazi ideology, and when your photo is taken and The New York Times publishes it, and every liberal journalist in this country demands that you get fired from your job and excluded from the financial system, try this excuse that The New York Times is accepting from Ukrainians wearing Nazi symbols: “Oh, I don't interpret the swastika or the black sun or these other Nazi symbols as Nazism. I just interpret that as American sovereignty and American pride.” Let me know if that works out or if The New York Times is sympathetic to that claim when it comes from conservatives in the United States or in the West as opposed to the Ukrainian battalion Joe Biden is dead set on arming into for all of eternity, it seems. 

The article goes on:

 

In the short term that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin's propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” – a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023) 

 

Let me stop again here. What The Times is trying to tell you, is that you don't have to worry about the fact that huge numbers of Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian people and Ukrainian battalions are openly embracing Nazi ideology because the president of Ukraine is Jewish. 

Now, what I want you to do is the next time somebody says that the United States has a problem with systemic racism or that the United States is a country founded on white supremacy – claims that are extremely common, in fact, gospel in liberal discourse – I want you to say in response: “Well, of course, that cannot be true, because after all, the president of the United States, from 2008 to 2016, Barack Obama, is black. Therefore, it cannot be true that the United States is founded on an ideology of white supremacy or that that ideology continues to be the predominant ideology in the United States.” Or you can point out that not only is President Obama, who was elected and then reelected, black but also the current vice president, Kamala Harris, as well. And therefore, that is a negation of the claim that the United States is a racist country. It seems to work here from The New York Times when it comes to Ukraine – I don't think that you would be very successful in arguing that when it came to similar claims about the United States. 

The article goes on. 

 

More broadly, Ukraine's ambivalence about these symbols and sometimes even its acceptance of them risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate. […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

 Okay, so The New York Times is acknowledging that Ukraine is ambivalent about Nazi symbols, and sometimes even accepting of them seems like a pretty big deal to admit, given that’s the country that we are turning into one of the most well-armed countries on the planet. What is the concern the New York Times has about the fact? Is it that Nazis are being armed and that might lead to very dangerous outcomes in the future? No, the concern is this “risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.”

 

“What worries me, in the Ukrainian context, is that people in Ukraine who are either in leadership positions, either they don't or they're not willing to acknowledge and understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine,” said Michael Colborne, a researcher at the investigative group Bellingcat who studies the international far right. (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)



 Are you surprised that the first expert – the apolitical, neutral expert – cited by The New York Times in this article happens to be somebody from Bellingcat who, in a report that we broadcasted two weeks ago – that has been watched by almost 2 million people – was one that we documented is funded and shaped by the security state agencies of the West, the very governments that are behind the war in Ukraine? And here he is trying to say the only problem with it is not that these ideologies are pretty dangerous –  Nazism, that is – but that they have bad P.R. in the West. And it's really important to maintain good PR in the West so that the West continues to fund and arm Ukraine. 

In other words, the problem isn't that the Ukrainians are Nazis. The problem is they're being too candid about it. 

 

“I think Ukrainians need increasingly to realize that these images undermine support for the country.” (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)



 Shouldn't they undermine support for the country? Shouldn't the fact that the leading fighting forces in Ukraine are filled with Nazis and people who have allegiance to Nazi ideology? Again, when I say Nazi ideology, you have to be very careful because, in Western discourse, that phrase has been so overused – That Trump is a Nazi, that Trump is the new Hitler, that the Trump movement is fascist, that they're based on white supremacy has been asserted over and over that those words have lost their meaning. You call someone a Nazi now and it pretty much means that someone is a conservative or dissents from establishment orthodoxy, whether from the right or the left. But it does actually have meaning. There are real Nazis. There is such a thing as Nazi ideology, and these are the real adherence to it. And the only problem, according to The New York Times and their partners at Bellingcat, is that it creates bad PR for Ukraine. It's important to keep good PR from Ukraine so we can keep weaponizing them and funding them. 

 

So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war […] 

 

Why not? Why hasn't this imagery of what The New York Times describes as a regular or frequent invocation of Nazi ideology and Nazi symbols by the Ukrainian military, why hasn't that eroded international support for the war? I should also point out the international support for the word the United the New York Times basically means the United States, Great Britain and several Western European allies. Not very much beyond that. 

 

So far, the imagery has not eroded international support for the war. It has, however, left diplomats, Western journalists, and advocacy groups in a difficult position: calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda. Saying nothing allows it to spread. (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

Okay. You would think by “difficult position” what the New York Times means is that these diplomats, Western journalists and advocacy groups are advocating that neo-Nazi groups be funded and that's the difficult position. That's not what they mean. That's not the difficult position. What is the difficult position that they're in? “Calling attention to the iconography risks playing into Russian propaganda, saying nothing allows it to spread.” In other words, it might be helpful to Russia to point out the truth. The truth – which is what journalists above all else are supposed to reveal so that you can decide what policies you support – because that might help Russia, Journalists are in a difficult position about whether or not they should admit these facts. 

This is the part that is most mind-blowing. Even Jewish groups and anti-hate organizations that have traditionally called out hateful symbols have stayed largely silent. Privately, some leaders have worried about being seen as embracing Russian propaganda talking points. 

The ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, used to be very open about the fact that they regarded the Azov Battalion as an extraordinarily menacing neo-Nazi group. They said it over and over. And now suddenly, because pointing that out might undermine the agenda of the U.S. security state, groups that ostensibly exist to defend the Jewish people from antisemitism, but which in fact are really about advancing the interests of the Democratic Party, will no longer denounce actual neo-Nazi groups or raise concerns about arming them because to do so would undermine Joe Biden's policy. 

In case you think this is just some isolated cases of Twitter trolls on Ukraine, on Twitter or elsewhere, The New York Times says: 

 

In April, Ukraine's Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring the skull and crossbones, known as the Totenkopf or Death's head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II […] (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

 The Ukrainian Defense Ministry posted a photo, glorifying soldiers wearing the exact symbols that Nazi units wore while they committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II. 

 

The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small number 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death In June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.” (The New York Times. June 5, 2023)

 

 So, you see, all the ingredients for what normally gets people destroyed are all present now. The Nazi ideology and Nazi symbols are so pervasive in the Ukrainian military – the military that the United States government, with your money, is funding and weaponizing and arming – that they don't seem to be able to find photos of soldiers that don't have them. 

I mentioned the ADL, which according to The New York Times, the Times didn’t name them but it is among the Jewish groups that are reluctant now to denounce for fear that it will undermine U.S. foreign policy, but in 2019, September 2019, the ADL had no trouble acknowledging what was widely acknowledged throughout the West. 

 

This Ukrainian extremist group, called the Azov Battalion, has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Our latest report on international white supremacy details how they try to connect with like-minded extremists from the U.S.: adl.org/resources/repo. (@adl Sept. 23, 2019)

 

 And then, there you see Mike Levine, whose own tweet says:

 

The FBI has arrested a member of the U.S. Army, who allegedly discussed plans to bomb a major U.S. news network, discussed traveling to Ukraine to fight with violent far-right groups, and allegedly distribute info online on how to build bombs. He also allegedly mentioned @BetoORourke. (@MLevineReports)

 

This is just 2019. This is not 20 years ago. It was four years ago. This is three years, two and a half years before the Russian invasion, where this fact about the Azov battalion, that they are a neo-Nazi group and the dominant fighting force in the Ukrainian military went from widely acknowledged fact to taboo unmentionable truth because Vladimir Putin also happened to be saying it. 

I can spend all night showing Western media accounts that have stated over and over that it's a huge danger in Ukraine, that the leading fighters, the most sophisticated and experienced fighters are Nazis. 

It doesn't mean that all Ukrainians or most Ukrainians are Nazis. That's not what any of this means. It's very similar to what happened in Syria, where the Syrian revolution began with a lot of regular Syrians fighting against the government of Bashar Assad but when the fighting really broke out and erupted into very serious combat and a proxy war, as usually happens, the regular citizens could not participate in that level of combat and it was absolutely true that the leading fighting forces, fighting against Assad, were assisting al-Qaida on whose side the United States ended up fighting. ISIS and al-Qaida wanted to remove Bashar Assad and so did the United States. So, it doesn't mean Syrians, including opponents of Assad, are adherents of al-Qaida or ISIS. But it means that if you want to flood Syria with weaponry in the name of removing Assad, a lot of those arms are going to end up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaida. Remember al-Qaida, the group that justified a 20-year War on Terror that we then ended up arming in Syria? The government reports say that many of our weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria. 

So, who do you think are the leading fighters in Ukraine? Do you think they're just ordinary Ukrainians who are conscripts in an army that sometimes has to continuously increase the punishments for deserting because they don't actually want to fight because they know they're being used as cannon fodder in this war? Or do you think it's the highly trained neo-Nazi militias that the West has been warning about for a decade because those are the leading fighters? 

Here's The Guardian in 2014. And there you see the article “Azov Fighters Are Ukraine's Greatest Weapon and Maybe Its Greatest Threat.” 

There was no sense that, “Oh, it's just a few isolated cases of some Nazis.” This was the leading fighting force and still is in Ukraine. “The battalion’s far-right volunteers’ desire to “bring the fight to Kyiv” is a danger to post-conflict stability.” They don't like the Kyiv government. They don't like democracy. Because they're Nazis. Their plan is to first fight the Russians and get the Russians out of their country and then turn against the democratic rule and the government that originally was installed by Victoria Nuland in the United States in 2014 – and they hate Zelenskyy and the Kyiv government as well. 

Here's what the Guardian article said. 

 

But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine's most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government and perhaps even the state when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members. (The Guardian. Sept. 10, 2014)

 

As I mentioned before, The New York Times – which today claims you can't call these Azov battalions Nazis, because that will fuel the propaganda of Vladimir Putin –  who says the same thing and had no problem saying it over and over because it was the truth prior to the war. This is what I mean when I say the Western media has completely revised and rewritten history right in front of your eyes because the truth impeded the Biden administration's war policies and NATO's war policies. And again, even if you support the Biden administration and NATO's war policy in Ukraine, you don't want the media serving as propagandists to deceive the public by concealing relevant facts or disseminating false claims because they're acting as agents of the security state. But that is the role of the corporate media in the United States. And that's why I think this is so critical to focus on. 

Here is just one of many articles of The New York Times talking about the dominant factions in the Ukrainian military from 2015. It's about Islamic battalions, including Chechens, who are helping Ukraine in the war with the rebels and that created conflict because neo-Nazi battalions tend to dislike Islamic fighters. Here's what the New York Times said:

 

Apart from an enemy, these groups do not have much in common with Ukrainians – or, for that matter, with Ukraine's Western allies, including the United States. Right sector, for example, formed during last year's street protest in Kyiv from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian national groups like White Hammer” and the Trident of Stepan Bandera. Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi […] (The New York Times. July 7, 2015)

 

Let me say that again – this is The New York Times, which today told you that only Putin propagandists say this:  

 

Another, the Azov group is openly neo-Nazi using the “Wolf's Hook” symbol associated with the SS. 

To try to bolster the abilities of the Ukrainian regular forces and reduce Kyiv's reliance on these quasilegal paramilitaries, the United States Army is training the Ukrainian national guard. The Americans are specifically prohibited from giving instructions to members of the Azov group. (The New York Times. July 7, 2015)

 

 That's how widely known and proven it was that the Azov were Nazis – that the U.S. government, which does not have a problem historically with supporting Nazi factions when it suits their agenda. In fact, after World War II, a lot of those top Nazis were embraced by the CIA, even by NASA. A lot of the NASA scientists came from the Nazi space program because the U.S. was perfectly comfortable working with neo-Nazi or proto-Nazi groups in its fight in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But even within that framework, in 2015, the Azov Battalion was a bridge too far for the U.S. government and the U.S. military, which was explicitly prohibited from training the Azov Battalion and other comrade aligned groups, even though they were trying to train the Ukrainian army to fight against the Russians. 

So that was the New York Times talking about it up in 2015. Listen to how that changed in 2022 when it no longer was convenient to admit that. Here's the headline “Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine.” 

Remember, this is the same paper that itself was warning, in 2015, that the Ukrainian military was filled with Nazi battalions like Azov. And now they're saying only Vladimir Putin thinks that. Why would he invoke Nazis to justify his invasion of Ukraine? Here's what the Times said after the war began: “The language of Russia's invasion has been dominated by the word “Nazi” – a puzzling assertion about a country whose leader is Jewish.” That's the subheadline. We're back to that same argument about Obama and Kamala Harris. How can Ukraine possibly have a Nazi problem when the president is Jewish? 

 

With Ukrainian nationalist groups now playing an important role in defending their country from the Russian invasion, Western supporters of Ukraine have struggled for the right tone.

 Facebook last week said it was making an exception to its anti-extremism policies to allow praise for Ukraine's far-right Azov Battalion military unit, “strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard. (The New York Times. March 17, 2022)

 

 We're going to get to what Facebook did in just a second: they completely rewrote their censorship policies. Before February 2022, it was prohibited on Facebook to praise Azov Battalion. Based on the. Facebook’s censorship policy prohibits praising Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion. Facebook made an exception once the war began, as we're about to show you. But the amazing thing is noting how in The New York Times parlance, what had long been Nazi and neo-Nazi groups the Azov Battalion has now morphed into far-right or even Ukrainian nationalist groups. They just completely change their parlance. So, what they had been previously stating for a decade – along with The Guardian, Time magazine and the BBC as we're about to show you – overnight got transformed into a different vernacular. 

Here, let me just show you a report from the BBC, in 2012. I'm going to show you just a few samples of what the BBC was saying about the Azov Battalion. Signal a tone, a sense of the tenor with which this group was spoken about, the group that the West is now arming before it was necessary to deny it. 

 

(Video. BBC. 2012)

 

OFF: The whole bar was a shrine to Far-Right extremism. They had Celtic crosses, swastikas and white power symbols. There was also an unhealthy obsession with Nazi Germany. 

But it was harder to pin down exactly what Faddin believes in. 

 

Faddin: No, we’re not Nazis. No, no, neo-Nazis, no.

 

BBC: But you support some aspects. 

 

Faddin: Some aspects, Yes. Some positive aspects, of course, because Germany would not be German right now without Adolph Hitler. 

 

BBC: Faddin is a recruiter for a group called Patriot of Ukraine. This is a Patriot video, but they claim to be rounding up illegal immigrants, that they want to deport.

 

Faddin: One race, one nation, one fatherland. We must prepare for... Sometimes we think it's a civil war. Of course, nobody wants to have some war or otherwise somebody dies. Some may not, you know. But we must be prepared for everything. 

 

BBC: Do you recruit from the stands? Do you try and find new members? 

 

Faddin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

 

BBC: I could see why football terraces could be fertile recruiting grounds for the Patriots. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, right-wing politics and hooliganism have gone hand in hand. At this match, I spotted two fans with Patriot logos on their t-shirts and it wasn't long before the fascist-style salutes began. It was a gesture I would see at every Ukrainian game I went to. 



I mean, what more do you want? He said, “At every single Ukrainian game I went to I saw people doing this.” Not wearing Trump signs or Trump t-shirts, but giving Nazi salutes, decorating themselves with swastikas, and talking about the positive aspects of Hitler in Nazi Germany. And again, maybe that doesn't bother you. That's your right to say ‘I don't mind that.’ ‘I'm happy that the United States armed those groups.’ But it's the role of the media to at least acknowledge the truth and tell you about it. And they used to do so until doing so became incompatible with the agenda of the United States government. 

You may say that's 2012. The New York Times article is from 2015. The Guardian Article is from 2014. This has been going on all the way right up until the start of the war in Ukraine. 

Here is a Time magazine, a mini-documentary on the Azov Battalion that essentially over and over called them neo-Nazis, white supremacists, 2021. They posted it on Twitter, it viralized. Everybody loved it. “Oh, my God, these are real Nazis dominating the Ukrainian military. This seems like a huge problem.” This was, you know, less than a year before Russia invaded Ukraine and then this became a prohibited fact to point out. Anyone pointing out this what Time magazine – that most mainstream outlets was saying in 2021 – became a Russian propagandist overnight. 

That title is “The Azov Up Battalion – Inside Ukraine's White Supremacist Militia.” It's 8 minute-long. It's more and more of the same. Again, you're talking about TIME Magazine here. It does not get more mainstream than TIME Magazine. 

We referred to the fact earlier that big tech completely always aligns its sensitive policies with the U.S. security state. Always, and not just the U.S. security state, but the U.S. establishment in general. It was prohibited from the start of the COVID pandemic until more than a year later to question whether or not the COVID pandemic, in fact, came from the way Dr. Fauci and that Lancet letter claimed, which was through natural species jumping at Chinese wet markets. You are not allowed to say that you believe the evidence demonstrated that it was more likely to have come from the Wuhan lab through U.S.-funded research in the lab – it was barred. You would get either your post removed or you would get banned entirely from Facebook and other social media platforms. And it was only once the Biden administration – even the Biden administration – acknowledged uncertainty over that claim – because, as we know, its leading most elite team of scientists in the Department of Energy now believe it's more likely, not just possible, more likely that COVID came from a lab leak in the Wuhan lab, a view that was barred by social media because the U.S. government wanted it barred. 

I hope you can see the extent to which you live in a censorship regime. I know we don't think about ourselves that way. I know we think censorship might happen here, there. We live in a culture of censorship. You can find dissent if you look hard enough for it on the Internet. But from most mainstream platforms where most Americans get the flow of their information, it is tightly controlled what you can and cannot say and so often what is banned on the grounds that it's disinformation is, in fact, the truth. The question is not whether it's true. The question is: does it advance or impede the interest of the agenda of U.S. power centers? Big tech censors in alignment with it. 

So, when the war in Ukraine started, Facebook policy, as I said before, was that you are not permitted to praise the Azov Battalion because it was deemed a Nazi group, and on Facebook, praise for Nazis is prohibited. But that created a problem for Facebook and the U.S. security state, because, as soon as the war in Ukraine began, the Azov Battalion became heroes. They were the group we were arming. How could Facebook possibly ban praising the Azov Battalion when they were so central to us? You would need a war policy in Ukraine. And so, overnight, Facebook changed its censorship policy to create an exception to its ban on praising Nazis to allow praise for the Azov Battalion.

From The Intercept – and it's got widely reported, in February 2022, so, near the start of the war – “Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion.” Here's the sub-headline: “The reversal raises questions about Facebook's blacklist-based content moderation, which critics say lacks nuance and context.” 

 

Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the country's Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy […] (The Intercept. Feb. 24, 2022)

 

I just want you to internalize that for a second. Facebook has something called the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. And this is a list of individuals and organizations that Facebook deems too dangerous to allow you to praise. On that list appeared the Azov Battalion. But then they changed their policy. 

 

The policy shift, made this week, is pegged to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and preceding military escalations. The Azov Battalion, which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement, began as a volunteer anti-Russian militia before formally joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014; the regiment is known for its hardcore right-wing, ultra-nationalism […] (The Intercept. Feb. 24, 2022)

 

That's a long way to work around Nazism. But then to its credit, Sam Biddle, The Intercept reporter, adds, 

 […] and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members.

 

Though it has in recent years, downplayed its neo-Nazi sympathies, the group's affinities are not subtle: Azov soldiers march and train wearing uniforms bearing icons of the Third Reich; its leadership has been reportedly courted American alt-right and neo-Nazi elements; and in 2010, the battalion's first commander and a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, Andriy Biletsky, stated that Ukraine's national purpose was to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen [Sub-humans]. 

With Russian forces reportedly moving rapidly against targets throughout Ukraine, Facebook's blunt, list-based approach to moderation puts the company in a bind: What happens when a group you've deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault? (The Intercept. Feb. 24, 2022)

 

In other words, this Intercept article suggests sometimes Nazis are good. Nazis are good when they're fighting against the U.S. enemy. This has been long-standing U.S. policy. We used to arm and fund Nazi groups and Nazi battalions and Nazi governments throughout the Cold War who would engage in all sorts of war crimes and massacres against their own people, neighboring countries – and the U.S. to be funding and arming them. This is just an extension of that mindset. 

That wasn't the only censorship change – change to its censorship policy Facebook made to accommodate the Biden administration toward policies. From Reuters, the next month, in March 2022, “Facebook Allows War Posts Urging Violence Against Russian Invaders.” Facebook long has a policy like most big tech social media platforms that prohibits advocacy of violence against particular individuals. You're not allowed to advocate violence on most big tech platforms but Facebook also changed that policy to make it permissible to advocate violence against Russian individuals, not against Ukrainians or any other country, just Russians. 

 

Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy. (Reuters. March 11, 2022)

 

Do you see how malleable these terms are when wielded by them? Who is a Nazi? Who's a white supremacist? What is hate speech? They just literally rewrite the definitions whenever it suits them right in front of you and then expect you to trust the reliability of these concepts, even as they manipulate them so flagrantly to advance whatever their agenda is. 

 

The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to internal emails to its content moderators. “As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders’; we still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. (Reuters. March 11, 2022)

 

Do you see the extreme control being exercised over what you are and are not allowed to say, that billions of people get their information from? This is why, as we've reported before, whenever there's legislation pending that is designed to break up the monopoly monopolistic powers of big tech, the first people to rise in defense of their monopolistic powers, to argue against that legislation are leading members of the U.S. security state, are former operatives of the U.S. security state, because they know one of their greatest weapons is the concentration of information on these big tech platforms. And as long as they get to exercise control over what is and is not permitted to be said on big tech platforms, which they absolutely control. That was the point of the Twitter Files. They then have the power to propagandize billions of people on the planet. 

This whole idea about banning TikTok, which I know a lot of you support – every time we discuss that, there's a portion of our audience that supports it – because you've been convinced that TikTok is engaging in unique and unprecedented spying on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party that no other big tech platform does. What that really is about is trying to pressure TikTok to censor on behalf of the U.S. security state just like Facebook and Google and Twitter used to. Facebook and Google still do. That's all it is about. It's about leverage, saying, if you do not censor in accordance with our goals, our foreign policy aims, the way Facebook and Google do that, then we will ban you. And increasingly, that's exactly what TikTok is doing. Their CEO has basically said ‘We will turn over content moderation to you.’ He doesn't care. The capitalists who control TikTok, they're profit-motivated about which political opinions are banned and permitted. They want to stay in the United States and they're willing to allow the U.S. security state to dictate their content moderation policies the way Facebook and Google do. That is what makes big tech censorship so dangerous as they can create entire worlds of false information, they can rewrite definitions and have them bind what billions of people on the planet believe. 

Here from Reuters is an article about the Azov Battalion, in May 2022. And I just want you to listen to how Reuters speaks of the Azov Battalion, which, as we showed you, Reuters and many other outlets spent a decade calling Nazis but now that they speak about them: “Ukraine's Azov commander says civilians heavily wounded, evacuated from Mariupol plant.” 

 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Mariupol’s last defenders – regular soldiers, as well as members of the National Guard, to which the Azov Regiment belongs – are national heroes, and that he hopes they can be exchanged for Russian prisoners. Moscow calls the Azov regiment Nazis […] (Reuters. May 20, 2022)

 

 Do you see what they've done? They took a fact – that the Azov Battalion are Nazis – and now it's only Moscow that calls them that. 

 

The unit, formed in 2014 as a militia to fight Russian-backed separatists, denies being fascist, and Ukraine says it has been reformed from its radical nationalist origins. (Reuters. May 20, 2022)

 

When was it reformed? This is May 2022. I showed you the late 2021 Time Magazine mini-documentary calling the Azov Battalion Nazis over and over. 

Here's Reuters itself, which now says only Vladimir Putin and the Russians called the Azov Battalion Nazis in 2015. The title there was “Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Battalion Gears Up For More Fighting.” And here's what Reuters said:

 

The 1,000-strong ultra-nationalist militia has a reputation as a fierce pro-government fighting force in the almost year-old conflict with the Russian-backed rebels in east Ukraine and is disdainful of peace efforts. But the radical views of the commanders of a group affiliated to Ukraine's National Guard, which works alongside the army, and the use of symbols echoing Nazi emblems, have caused alarm in the West and Russia and could return to haunt Kyiv’s pro-Western leadership even when fighting eventually ends. (Reuters. March 25, 2015)



That's Reuters calling them Nazis and now turns around and says only Moscow calls them Nazis. And in fact, Reuters publish articles calling the Azov Battalion heroes. Heroes of Ukrainian nationalism. 

Now, just to show you how pervasive the propaganda is, in April of 2022, one of Poland's most renowned journalists, quit his newspaper because he wanted to call the Azov Battalion neo-Nazis. The way that paper and every other paper in the West has always called the Azov Battalion. But he was told he wasn't allowed to: he had to refer to them instead as merely far right, something much more innocuous. Here's what the article says

 

One of Poland's most prominent journalists, Konstanty Gebert, said he is quitting what many regard as the country's newspaper of record after it demanded that he describe Ukraine's controversial Azov Battalion as “far-right” instead of “neo-Nazi.” Gebert, who is Jewish, announced his resignation Thursday in his weekly column, “The Weather Forecast,” which has penned for many years and published in Gazeta Wyborcza, a left-leaning publication. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency. April 15, 2022)



In case you think that this is some kind of new topic for me that I'm suddenly raising, I just want to show you an article I wrote – in 2015 – after James Clapper explicitly urged President Obama to send arms to Ukraine. And the article I wrote was, “Who would that actually empower?” And the sub-headline was “Demonized as Putin propaganda, claims about the fascist and even neo-Nazi thugs leading the fight for the Kyiv government are actually true”. And I documented that at length. All of the Western media reports and the government reports that demonstrated this is not Kremlin propaganda, that in fact the Azov Battalion and other leading battalions in Ukraine embraced a Nazi ideology. That was back in 2015 when I was reporting that. 

I mentioned earlier Bellingcat. They've weighed in on this topic. They are now vehement supporters of Biden's war policy in Ukraine and vehement supporters of the proxy war in Ukraine. But, in 2019, they were one of the many outlets warning about the neo-Nazi groups dominating Ukraine's military.

Defend the white race: American extremists being co-opted by Ukraine's far-right” – that was the title of the Bellingcat article in 2019. And it read:

 

Newly uncovered evidence going back to 2015 suggests that the Ukrainian white nationalists Azov movement has been systematically co-opting American right-wing extremists to advance the former's own international agenda. In audio statements uncovered by Bellingcat, this agenda was summarized by the International Secretary of the political wing of Azov, the National Corps, as a “world conservative revolution aimed to “defend the white race.” These new findings are separate from the recently reported ties between Azov and the American violent neo-Nazi group, the Rise Above Movement, and members of the American alt-right.  

Bellingcat has confirmed that in January 2016, Azov, via its online podcast, was in contact with the late Andrew Oneschuck, an eminent member of the violent American neo-Nazi organization Atomwaffen Division. On the Azov podcast, Oneschuck discussed issues facing Americans that wanted to join Azov and expressed interest in learning methods of attracting youth to nationalism in America. He was encouraged to try to join Azov. (Bellingcat. Feb. 15, 2019)

 

If you say this today you get called a Russian propagandist. They just rewrote history overnight. 

Here's an article that's incredibly interesting, from Max Rose, who was a veteran of the Iraq war, became a Democratic member of Congress for one term from Staten Island, and he co-published it with Ali Soufan, who was a FBI agent who was central to several FBI War on Terror operations. The title of it was “We Once Fought Jihadis, Now We Battle White Supremacists. The truth about so-called domestic terrorism? There is nothing domestic about it.” The article was essentially designed to say that the American right is linked to neo-Nazi groups all throughout the world, including the Azov Battalion. This is an op-ed for The New York Times in 2019 by a Democratic member of Congress and Jewish American, Max Rose, writing with a Muslim former FBI agent. And this is what they said:

 

As a former soldier and FBI agent, we both risked our lives to fight al-Qaida. But the enemy we currently face is not a jihadist threat – It's white supremacists. In the United States and overseas. One American group, The Base, peppered a recruitment video with footage of our faces, intercut with shots of masked men machine-gunning a spray-painted star of David. The Scandinavia-based Nordic Resistance Movement called us out by name, referring to us in a recent statement as “the Jew Max Rose” and “ Arab FBI agent. Ali Soufan.” Defenders of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, which the FBI calls a paramilitary unit “notorious for its association with neo-Nazi ideology,” accuse us of being part of a Kremlin campaign to “demonize” the group. 

The Australian, who, in March last year, murdered 51 worshipers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, claimed in his manifesto that he had traveled to Ukraine; during the attacks he wore a symbol used by the Azov Battalion. The FBI director recently warned that American extremists, too, are traveling overseas for paramilitary training. Almost twice as many foreign fighters have traveled to join the civil war in Ukraine than to Afghanistan in the 80’s – a conflict which birthed al-Qaida. The government is aware of the threat. In 2018, the Trump administration warned of violent foreign neo-Nazi groups forging ties with organizations in the United States. (The New York Times. Feb. 11, 2020)

 

This is, again, a 2020 New York Times op-ed that essentially is designed to say that Azov is at the center of a neo-Nazi organization. 

Again, maybe this doesn't bother you, but it is shocking to watch how what was once, very recently, asserted from every sector and every corner as a grave warning has now become disappeared from our discourse and rendered taboo.  

I’ll show you an amazing interview that was conducted by the German journalist, Tilo Jung, who interviewed the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, and the interview was conducted in German, but it has English subtitles, and Tilo Jung interrogates this Ukrainian ambassador about the way in which Stepan Bandera, who is a national hero in Ukraine – many times, if you see interviews on CNN with Ukrainian officials, they will have a picture of Stepan Bandera on the wall of their office. He's a national hero, like George Washington, to Ukrainians. Stepan Bandera was an aggressive collaborator with the Nazis. He helped round up Ukrainian Jews and send them to concentration camps. And the Ukrainian ambassador was questioned about the fact that Ukrainians in large numbers revere a well-known Nazi collaborator who participated in war crimes with the German Nazis. And watch this interview and what he said

(Video. July 2,   )

 

Tilo Jung: There have been several massacres of Poles in Eastern Ukraine, carried out by Bandera troops. 

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Yes, but there were the same massacres of Ukrainians by Poles. Also, tens  of thousands of Ukrainians… 

 

Tilo Jung: But that doesn’t make it better.

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Tens of thousands of Ukrainians… There was a war and Poland is now trying to politicize this story.

 

Tilo Jung: Is Israel wrong? Is Israel wrong that Bandera and his troops were involved in the killing of 800.000 jews? Do they make up a story?

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: I don’t know what they are making up but we’re talking about Bandera.

 

 I just want you to stop and think about this. What he's saying here is Israel has repeatedly complained about the Ukrainian reverence for Stepan Bandera. Because the Israelis say that he is a well-known Nazi collaborator, who participated in Nazi war crimes. It was very disturbing to the Israelis that the Ukrainians worshiped and revered him as a national hero and not a collaborator. When asked about this, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany said Israel is lying. “They're making that up.” “I don't know why they're lying and making that up.” 

Can anyone else in this world get away with saying that about Israel? That the Israeli government's objections to the admiration of an individual on the grounds that he is not a war criminal, it is just a fabrication and a lie, and they have no idea why the Israeli government is lying. Tell me who else can survive saying something like this? This Ukrainian ambassador to Germany after saying this caused some controversy but I want to show you what happened to him as a result of saying this. Listen to the rest:

 

Tilo Jung: The whole world recognizes that Bandera was involved in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Except for Ukraine.

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: There is no evidence that Bandera troops killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. There is zero evidence. This narrative is being pushed by the Russians until today and that is being supported by Germany as well as Poland and Israel…

 

So, he's saying –  I'm interrupting here because, for those listening by podcast, we have the English subtitles on the screen – but he's essentially saying this idea that Stepan Bandera is a Nazi collaborator is a lie being spread by Germany, Poland and Israel. They've made that up. And so now the host says, “Are you saying the Jewish community has invented this lie about Stepan Bandera?” And watch what he says. 

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: I don’t know where they take this data from but I am willing to talk objectively with the Israeli community, at least if they don’t repeat what has been told for decades.

 

Tilo Jung: There were leaflets spread when the Germans entered Lviv. They said: “People. What you have to know: Moscovites, Poles, Hungarians and Jews are your enemies! Destroy them! This is what you have to know. Your leader, Stepan Bandera. 

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: What kind of leaflets?

 

Tilo Jung: When the Germans invaded. They were given to the population who was under different (Soviet) rule at that time. They aligned with the Germans. This is a FACT. I wonder… I mean, I understand…

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: I will not tell you today that I disassociate myself from this. That’s it.

 

Tilo Jung: That’s your decision…

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Yes, this is my decision. This is my decision and you can’t understand that but…

 

Tilo Jung: I can’t understand how can someone call a mass murderer of Jews and Poles a hero.

 

Ukrainian Ambassador: Bandera wasn’t a mass murderer of Jews and Poles. He wasn’t a mass murderer.

 

 I mean, there's just nobody else who could get away with saying any of that, let alone all of that, the way that he did. 

Unsurprisingly, after that interview, that interview made a lot of people upset. Among the people that it upset are some people whose voices tend to be, in any other context, pretty powerful. 

Here is Poland: Stepan Bandera collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating a large number of Poles. They did not appreciate the Ukrainian government through their ambassador to Germany explicitly defending Stepan Bandera and claiming that these were lies and fabrications because Poland was one of his victims. So, despite the fact that Poland has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine in this war, the Poles in July 2022 objected. There you see an article from the outlet “Notes from Poland”, NFP: “Poland Intervenes After Ukrainian Ambassador Denies Wartime Massacre of Poles And Jews.” 

 

Poland's foreign ministry has intervened after Ukraine's ambassador to Germany denied that Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was responsible for the mass murder of ethnic Poles and Jews, and also sought to justify his collaboration with Nazi Germany. 

Melnyk's comments quickly drew condemnation. In a widely shared post, pianist Igor Levit – who was born to a Jewish family in Russia but has lived in Germany since childhood – called the remarks a “shameful denial of history.” Last night, Poland's current foreign minister designate, Zbigniew Rau, announced that he had spoken with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmitro Kuleba, about Melnyk's false statements. (NFP. July 1, 2022)

 

It wasn't just Poland that objected. It was also the government of Israel, as you might expect. The Ukrainian ambassador accused the Israeli government of lying and making up claims about the Ukrainian national hero, Stepan Bandera, and when Israel objected on the grounds that the Ukrainian ambassador was praising a Nazi collaborator, Ukraine told Israel “Stay out of our business, you have no right to comment on who we make our national heroes.”

 Tell me what other countries can get away with that. Telling Israel to stay out of our business is none of your business whether we honor and treat as a national hero – a Nazi collaborator. But the Ukrainians can get away with anything including his openly revering Nazi collaborators, the history and current Nazis today. From the Times of Israel: “Ukraine tells Israel to stay out of the debate about honoring Nazi collaborators. Ukraine's ambassador to Israel says honoring of Stepan Bandera is an internal issue, calls Israeli envoy's comments against it “counterproductive.” “

 

Ukraine's ambassador to Israel has told Jerusalem to butt out of the debate about the honoring of Nazi collaborators. (The Times of Israel. Jan. 11, 2020)

 

As I said, it's important to know what happened to this Ukrainian ambassador. After this controversial interview condemned by Germany, Poland and Israel was his career destroyed the way almost anybody else's would for saying something like that? It was not. 

Here is Deutsche World, in November 2022, reporting on his plum new job in promotion. There's a headline: “Kyiv's Ex-Envoy To Berlin Takes Deputy Foreign Minister Post. Ukraine has appointed its foreign ambassador, its former ambassador to Germany, Andrijj Melnyk, to a new post as deputy foreign minister. His outspoken brand of diplomacy has made waves in recent months in Berlin and beyond. 

 

A senior Ukrainian official announced Friday that former ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk, would become Ukraine's deputy foreign minister. (DW. Nov. 19, 2022)

 

Tell me what other country in the world can have an official explicitly praised Nazi collaborator tell Poland, Germany and especially Israel to butt out of its affairs; that if they want to have a national hero, be a Nazi collaborator, that's their business, and then, not only not get destroyed, but get promoted to the position of deputy foreign minister of Ukraine. 

One of the Ukrainian activists, journalists, whatever you want to call him, who was turned into an overnight celebrity in the West, Ilya Ponomarenko – he now has 1.3 million followers, he's followed by every Western liberal who adores him and worships him. He has explicitly praised the Azov Battalion, back when Western media outlets were saying over and over they were a neo-Nazi battalion, proclaiming himself to be a member of that group, a brother in arms. And you have Western liberals, American liberals who think that everyone who votes against Joe Biden is a Nazi and deserves no constitutional rights in the United States, worshiping this guy, even though you see postings like:

 

Brothers in Arms.

It was a fine day in August 2017 when Azov guys consecrated me an artillery guy. (2019)

 

All kinds of tweets from him explicitly praising Azov even back when the Western media were saying they were neo-Nazis. 

Just to show you how kind of common it was for this claim to be made, here is the now deceased and formerly beloved liberal Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, who in 2016, as part of the defense appropriations bill, stood up and insisted that no U.S. funds ever, not even a penny, find their way to the Azov Battalion because they're Nazis. Let’s hear what he said. It wasn't even controversial at the time. 

 

Rep. John Conyers: […] That I propose this evening limited arms training and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion. Foreign Policy Magazine has characterized the 1000-men Azov Battalion as “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascists.” Numerous other news organizations, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Associated Press, have corroborated the dominance of white supremacy and anti-Semitic views within the group. Yet Ukraine's interior minister recently announced the Azov Battalion will be among the units to receive training and arms from Western allies, including the United States. Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky organized the group the social nationalist in 2008. Azov men used neo-Nazi symbolism on their banner. These groups run counter to American values, and once the fighting ends, they pose a significant threat to the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people. And as we've seen many times, most notably within the major Mujahideen in Afghanistan, these groups will not lay down their arms once the conflict is over, they will turn their arms against their own people in order to reinforce their hateful views. I urge support of our amendment and make it a U.S. law that we will not equip this dangerous neo-Nazi militia. 



Okay. John Conyers, he was elderly. I think he passed away a short time after, maybe, I don't remember exactly, but it was not very long. You could tell he was addled there reading from his statement, but everything in that statement was true. It was totally conventional wisdom in Washington, every word that he said about the Azov Battalion, about the need for the United States to avoid letting any arms fall into their hands. The example he cited historically was exactly the right one, which is the United States flooded Afghanistan, the Mujahideen, with advanced weaponry to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. And then once that fighting was done, once they were done fighting the Soviet Union, the Mujahideen became al-Qaida, and they were stocked full of very sophisticated Western weapons that the United States and NATO had furnished them with. And that is the point. 

Again, even if you support Joe Biden's commitment to an endless proxy war in Ukraine, surely there are serious implications from funding this group and groups like it that are all over Ukraine. That was the point of the New York Times article today – that it was not an isolated case here and there, but a pervasive problem, which is what I showed you has always been true, according to the Western media, that these are the leading groups, the pervasive groups in Ukraine, not marginalized or fringe ones. And as John Conyers said there, as we saw with the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, you could openly espouse this ideology in Ukraine – and unlike in the United States or the West, where you are instantly destroyed for doing so, instantly destroyed, in fact, for not even getting near any of that, in Ukraine, you thrive. You get appointed to the position of deputy foreign minister after you tell a German journalist that the Israelis are lying and fabricating when they're objecting to the reference of a Nazi collaborator, and, in fact, either way, it's none of Israel's business. It's a matter of internal Ukraine's internal affairs, whom they want to worship. 

It is true Ukraine can revere whomever they want. I don't really think it makes much difference to us, except for the fact the United States and the West are pouring increasingly sophisticated weapons into that country, including F-16 fighter jets, tanks, and all kinds of missiles. What's going to happen to those weapons? Where are they going to go, and into which usage are they going to be put? We're probably going to hear five years from now or 10 years from now, that we need to go to war against Nazi groups in Ukraine because of the fear that they will spread their ideology to other white nationalist groups in Europe, and other places. That's how it works. We constantly fuel our own wars by arming the entire world and then claiming that those groups are now dangerous and we have to go to war against them. 

We talk too often about how Ukraine is the most corrupt government, so, pouring $100 billion or more, as the Biden administration has done into that country means that money is going to disappear into Swiss bank accounts and offshore bank accounts, the way the Pandora papers and other reporting has revealed that Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian oligarchs who support him have already been beneficiaries of. But what about the weapons? Where are these weapons going to go? 

Here from CNN, in April 2022, near the start of the war, with an admission: “What happens to weapons sent to Ukraine? The U.S. doesn't really know.” 

 

The U.S. has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry that is sent across the border into Ukraine, sources tell CNN, a blind spot that's due in large part to the lack of U.S. boots on the ground in the country – and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems now pouring across the border. 

It's a conscious risk the Biden administration is willing to take. 

In the short term, the U.S. sees the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to be vital to the Ukrainians’ ability to hold off Moscow's invasion. 

A senior defense official said Tuesday that it is “certainly the largest recent supply to a partner country in a conflict.” But the risk, both current U.S. officials and defense analysts say, is that in the long term, some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the U.S. did not intend to arm.  “We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” said one source briefed on U.S. intelligence. “It drops into a big black hole and you have almost no sense of it all after a short period of time.” (CNN. April 19, 2022)

 

I understand that this Russian invasion of Ukraine has elevated excitement and passion levels in the West to a great extent and it is absolutely true that there is enormous support for the Biden administration's war policies in both political parties. The Democratic Party is unanimously in support – unanimously–  and the Republican establishment is overwhelmingly in support as well. The only dissent you here in DC is from the populist wing in the Republican Party, 70 votes, 59 in the House, all of it in the Senate. The last time there was a vote on whether to continue to fund and arm Ukraine, you have several Republican candidates like Donald Trump and Vivek Ramazani who are opposed to this ongoing funding; you have Robert Kennedy Jr. at the Democratic Party who are also opposed, but overwhelmingly, as they always are, Washington, the establishment wings, are fully in support of this war. That's fine if you're somebody who supports that policy, you can make those arguments. But what I think we should all be able to agree on is that we do not want the Western press, the Western corporate press, with the ability and the willingness to just completely overnight do a 180 on the claims that they say are true and to take claims that are clearly true and that they have spent a decade endorsing, and the minute it impedes U.S. foreign policy to affirm it, turn it into Russian propaganda and anyone who affirms it a Russian propagandist, while at the same time, big tech rewrites to self-ownership policies to ensure that there is no ability to dissent. No matter what, you have to be deeply uncomfortable. You should be deeply uncomfortable with the way in which this flow of information is being so aggressively and rigidly managed in exactly the way that we're told happens only in our oppressive regimes. And when you break down how the media treats these claims in real-time, their willingness to completely reverse on a dime the minute it suits some institution of power or the other, the way they've done it on every crucial issue from Russiagate to COVID to the war in Ukraine. The more we see that, while the U.S. government is claiming we're fighting for democracy abroad, what we have at home is far, far from it. 


That concludes our show for this evening. As a reminder, we will have a special episode tomorrow night at 7 p.m. to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden reporting, which began with a June 6, 2013, article in The Guardian about how the NSA was collecting huge amounts of surveillance data on every American. Exactly what James Clapper, three months before the reporting began, falsely denied to the Senate. My guess for that will be the source for the courageous stories that enabled that reporting. Edward Snowden, my journalistic colleague Laura Poitras, who won an Academy Award for her documentary Citizenfour, documents the work we did together in Hong Kong to kick out that reporting. If you haven't seen that documentary, I highly, highly recommend it. I'm very excited for tomorrow night's show where we're going to delve into what that reporting entailed, the choices that we made, and the implications of it. 

As a reminder as well. System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, we have an aftershow that is designed to be interactive with our audience, which is available exclusively to our subscribers on the local platform, which is part of Rumble to join our community, which entitles you to have access to that show, to written journalism, to transcripts of the show and much more. It also helps the journalism that we do here. Just click the join button and you can become a member of our Locals community. 

For now, thank you so much for watching. We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively on Rumble. 

Have a great evening, everybody.

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System Update #500

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

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

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Welcome to episode 500 of System Update, which means that over the last two years, ever since we launched in December of 2022, 500 times I have sat my ass in this chair, and we have done a program for you. Today is number 500. 

System Update, of course, is our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

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Every Friday night, as we're doing tonight, we take questions solely from our Locals members. We try to answer as many as we can.

 You may have noticed as well that, inspired by Donald Trump, all art today in commemoration of 500 shows is in gold, not our typical green and black. No, everything is gold. We went all out for tonight. So, I really hope you enjoy it.

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The first of which is from @alan_smithee. And he asked this:

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One of the reasons why I didn't talk about it, despite obviously being extremely interested in all three of them and the subject matter that they cover, I obviously am a longtime friend of Tucker’s. I used to be on the show, I think more than anybody else, when he was on Fox News, and now, on his podcast, I'm on frequently, maybe the guest who's been on the most as well, not really sure. It's not a competition. I don't know why I have to keep saying I'm at the top of the charts, but just to indicate the frequency, and he's been on our show before. So, I definitely consider him a friend of mine. Candace, I have a good relationship; I would describe it as friendly. I've chatted with Nick over the years a little bit, certainly not near the same level of interaction. 

I had this issue with Matt Taibbi. I was recently on Briahna Joy Gray's show, but also, I might have even been on a different show, where people were trying to ask me about Matt Taibbi and some of the criticism of him. Yeah, we've gotten questions about Matt Taibbi here as well over the past few months about things like his refusal to comment on Israel and Gaza, his infrequent commentary on the First Amendment issues raised by deporting students who speak critically of Gaza, the imposition of hate speech codes on American campuses by the Trump administration to shield Israel from criticism. 

I'm very honest about the fact that when someone is your friend, when you consider someone as your friend, at least for me, I really don't feel comfortable publicly criticizing them. It's actually one of the reasons why I go out of my way not to be friends or have any social ties with the people I'm supposed to be covering in Washington – politicians, major journalists. I've always thought the fact that I don't live in New York or Washington to be one of the greatest benefits for my journalism because I'm not in the middle of their social scenes. I don’t owe any social niceties to them. I don't feel as though if I criticize them, it's going to affect my social life or put me in uncomfortable positions. I take the obligation of friendship seriously. If you're actually somebody's friend, it comes with loyalty, and part of that loyalty is that, if you have problems with what they do and say, you go to them privately. It would take a lot for me to publicly criticize or down someone I consider my friend.

 I'm just being honest about that. Maybe that's not even the right thing to do. I'm not praising myself. I'm telling you how I feel personally. But again, I think if you live in New York, if you live in Washington, and you're integrated into that political media world, that is one of the reasons why it's so incestuous, why they constantly cover for each other, why there's so much groupthink within it. 

They're always talking to each other, for each order. To be part of these social scenes on which they depend, you have to be welcome. Part of being welcome is that you don't stray too far from their dogma. And I've always aggressively kept a very distant arm's length from people in positions of power, from major media figures, so that I don't feel constrained about giving my honest views or critiques or analysis or reporting on them. 

Occasionally, you do become friends with people almost by accident, who then end up in positions of power. Tulsi Gabbard is a good example. I have no problem criticizing Tulsi Gabbard because, whatever good relations I've had with her before, she's now the director of National Intelligence, and I'm not going to pull punches when I have critiques of Tulsi and I am also going to praise her only because I feel the praise is warranted. 

So, sometimes you just have to accept the fact that somebody has risen to a particular position or entered a type of power position, and there's just no getting around the fact that your job requires honest critique. I don't feel like that's the case for any of the people involved here, Tucker, Candace, or Nick Fuentes. I don't feel like any of them is a government official. Obviously, they all do have a great deal of influence in very different ways. So, I don't want to side with any one of them, nor do I want to necessarily say that I think insults or criticisms that they've launched at each other are warranted, but it is an extremely important conversation, so I also don't want to avoid it entirely, because for one thing these are three people, and obviously people understand how influential Tucker and Candace are. They're arguably the two most prominent conservative journalists/pundits, influencers. Maybe you could put Charlie Kirk in there, maybe Ben Shapiro, but Tucker and Candace are both bigger. I mean, Tucker hosted the most-watched show in the history of cable news for five years at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox. He's been on TV for 25 years before that. And Candace is just a powerhouse. She's a force of nature. Whatever you think of her, whatever you think of the Macron stuff, whatever you're thinking for Israel stuff, whatever, I'm leaving that on the side, I'm just saying. 

The fact of the matter is that when Candace left The Daily Wire, which, of course, is founded and run by Ben Shapiro after she had a falling out with Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the other co-founder, over her criticism of Israel, which at the time was very mild – she was basically saying, “I don't think we should be bombing and killing children.” – that was pretty much the extent of it which caused this massive upheaval. A lot of people wondered, well, what is she going to do? Just like people wondered what Tucker Carlson was going to do, and they both went on to become, in my view, far more influential. 

I'm not saying that Tucker's position in the mediocre system now is necessarily larger than it is at the 8 o'clock spot on Fox News, but being at the 8 o'clock hour on Fox News comes with a lot of constraints, as he found out when he got fired, despite being the highest rated host on all of cable news. And he's completely liberated of those constraints now, I mean, completely. Completely. He's financially set. Fox is still paying this gigantic contract. He also now has a very successful platform. I mean, he's not worried about saying or doing whatever he wants. I know he feels – he said this before, publicly, not just in our conversations – that there were a lot of things he did as part of his career that he deeply regrets. Just being part of the Washington Group. 

I think he was raised there. I mean, he wasn't raised physically in Washington, but he eventually went there. But his father was very integrated into the U.S. deep state, that we could call it, ties to the CIA, he ran the propaganda arm of the U.S. government, Voice of America, was very, very integrated into that world. He grew up with a lot of wealth and privileges as he will tell you, and so when he got to Washington and got on TV very early on, he really was just immersed in this subculture that led him to believe, or at least not even necessarily to believe but to say a lot of things that he didn't really fully believe, or maybe that you can get yourself to believe things that you don't really believe because you just feel like it's what everyone around you expects you to say. 

Unlike a lot of people who are guilty of the same thing, Tucker has probably more than anybody else been extremely candid about what he regrets, and not only what he regrets, I'm not just talking about support for the Iraq war, I'm talking about the whole support that he gave for George Bush, Dick Cheney, neoconservative ideology, and not just on foreign policy, but also on economic policy and I think it's often overlooked. Everyone sees his head in foreign policies. Even when he was at Fox, he was criticizing Trump for doing things like assassinating General Soleimani, saying, “This is not in our interest. This might be in the interest of neocons or Israel, but why would we risk a war with Iran when that's not in our interest?” He was saying things like that even on Fox. He probably was the single most influential figure who took a lot of MAGA people, a lot of people on the right, and turned them against the war in Ukraine every night. 

I was on his show dozens of times talking about that war to the point where when he got fired from Fox, a bunch of Republican lawmakers ran to Politico or Axios anonymously and celebrated his firing and saying, “Oh, now our lives are going to be much easier. We can now fund the war in Ukraine without as much public pushback.” And that trajectory was because not just that he regretted what he had previously advocated and acknowledged his wrongdoing, but he was and is really determined to kind of repent for it. And he feels like the way to repent for it is by never again allowing himself to be blind. 

He moved out of Washington, used to live in the middle of Georgetown, where Victoria Nuland lived, I think, down the street or the other street. I mean, that's where they all lived. Now, he lives in rural Maine. He also lives on an island in Florida. He purposely took himself to very isolated places that are completely detached from that world, for the same reason as I was just describing. Not only do you feel less constrained, but you see things more clearly. You don't wake up every day and immediately get surrounded by people who are just part of this blob of groupthink and so, you're able to analyze things from a distance. It’s sort of like if you go into a big city and you're on a street corner, the vision that you have of what the city looks like is radically different than if you fly over it because that distance from what you're looking at gives you a better perspective, or at least, maybe not even better, but different. And the same thing happens when you move out of Washington or New York, and you purposely stay away from it, you start to see things more clearly because you're not immersed in it. And I do find that extremely valuable. 

I find that trajectory very, very positive. It's one of the reasons why, probably more than anything else that I've ever done, what caused much of the left turn against me, not all, but much, was number one, my refusal to get on board with Russiagate, but number two, my association with Tucker. I saw early on that there was a real movement within parts of the populist right, which you're now seeing in lots of different ways, not just questioning Israel and foreign policy and war, but also corporatism and the idea of economic populism. And yes, there are lots of deviations from it, but I mean Tucker and a few others were what made me see how real that was and how much of an opportunity there was, and not just to keep yourself in prison in the Democratic Party. 

So, I do believe Tucker's trajectory is real. I do believe that he's sincere and genuine in what he's saying. You never know what's fully in a person's heart, not even your own heart. You can't know for certain. You can deceive yourself about your own motives, your own thoughts and even the people you're closest to, your friends. But I have enough confidence in how well I know him, not just professionally, but personally as well, the time we spent together, the time that we've talked, that I do believe that he's very authentic in what he's saying. I think his trajectory is continuing. I don't think he's stopped at the point where he's going to be. And I think it's been very positive on almost every level. 

So that’s Tucker over here; then let's kind of put Candace in a similar position. I don't know Candace as well, so I can't comment to that degree of confidence about who she is and why she's doing what she's doing, but, two years ago, Candace worked at The Daily Wire, four years ago, she was in Jerusalem with Charlie Kirk celebrating Trump's move of the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, a long-time pipe dream, what seemed like a pipe dream of the furthest, most radicalized Greater Israel fanatics and their supporters in the United States. And there was very little criticism coming from Candace about Israel. In fact, the opposite was true. 

In her case, she's a lot younger than Tucker, she's only been around for not all that long, and I know personally that when you start off doing this work and you're able to spend full time digging into things, if you're minimally a critical thinker, if you're minimally open-minded, your views are going to morph the more you learn, the more you dive into things, the more you experience things. That is healthy and normal. And I do believe that her views, which she most passionately expresses, to which she pays the most attention, are genuine, which isn't the same thing as saying I agree with them all and they're all positive. I'm just saying I believe she also believes the things she's saying. I don't think it's calculated. I don't think it's about grifting. If it were, she could have stayed at The Daily Wire. There are easier ways to make a popular path than doing what she does. 

She defends Harvey Weinstein. She took up that case. There was hardly a public clamoring for that, especially among the audience that she cultivated. Also, the Macron stuff, all the stuff with Israel – she's been excluded from a lot of mainstream corporate media circles to which she used to have complete access and in which she could have risen without limits, obviously She’s very talented, like Tucker, she is a communicator, and she chose a much harder path, and I think that was through genuine conviction. There are many differences between Tucker and Candace, but for that purpose, you can put them together. 

And then you have Nick Fuentes. And just for those of you who haven't seen it, I'm just going to give you this summary of what's happened in the past few months, not going back years. The short version of this is that Nick Fuentes is often very critical of people who seem like they're the closest to him politically. So, he spends a lot of time criticizing Charlie Kirk – I was going to say Ben Shapiro, but I don't think Ben Shapiro is remotely close to Nick Fuentes – but Charlie Kirk on the surface could be. He spent a lot of time criticizing Matt Walsh. And he has also hurled a lot of criticism and might even say insults toward Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. 

In response, Candace Owens invited him for the first time on her podcast. Although I do think they have far more views in common than differences, the podcast was a bit hostile. I would say it's, in part, because Candace had some acrimonious points to raise with him, but also because – and she played some of these clips, I mean, Nick Fuentes had very harshly attacked her and criticized her, calling her a bitch who doesn't know what she's doing, and if you're going to do that, the people who are your targets are not necessarily going to love you, and so this was really the triggering event. 

She invited him to her podcast. He got a huge audience – between Candace and Nick Fuentes, who has a gigantic following online, in some ways you could argue he's as influential these days as Candace and Tucker, and maybe headed for even surpassing them, which again, generationally is natural – but because that interview was acrimonious and brought out a lot of tensions and personal conflicts, it kind of spilled over online because Nick left that interview and started really condemning Candace, accusing her of sandbagging him in the interview and the like, and then they had a big fight online. 

And then, before you knew it, Tucker asked Candace to come to his podcast. So, you're now talking about Candace Owens on Tucker Carlson's podcast, obviously a gigantic interview. And both of them, I don't know if they planned it, but both of them talked about Nick Fuentes in an extremely derogatory way. I mean, Tucker did acknowledge that, which you cannot deny. It's kind of like you can hate Trump all you want, but there's no denying his charisma, his skill in communicating, and the fact that he's very funny. 

For a long time, it was like heresy to say that, but there's no denying that that's true. I have no trouble admitting that people I can't stand are smart. I think Dick Cheney is very smart. I actually think Liz Cheney is very smart, just to give two examples, a lot of other ones as well. You can acknowledge the skills and assets that people have who you dislike or even despise. It’s not inconsistent. So, Tucker did acknowledge, like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. He is like a very rare, generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention and be charismatic. But he's not like a ranter and a raver. Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren't a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes does. It's very impressive. And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading and thinking and critical evaluation, it's very potent. That's the reason why he's becoming so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can't really ignore it anymore. 

They talked about Nick Fuentes as though he were just sort of some loser, like Tucker was saying, like, “How did he become so influential? He was just this gay kid living in his mother's basement in Chicago.” And I don't think Tucker quite meant it that way, but that is how some of it came off. Both agreed that he was some sort of psyop to destroy the right, that he maybe was a Fed working for the CIA. 

That led Nick to do a series of shows, a couple of segments, where he just tore into Tucker and Candace, particularly Tucker, in a way that suggests that he was: “How can you possibly call me this, Psyop, or this operative, or this person who works for the CIA, when you spent your whole life inside these circles? Candace Owens was the one working for Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson was working for Rupert Murdoch, making millions; Nick Fuentes wasn't. 

Nick's basic point was, like, you’re all very late to this game, like criticizing Israel, talking about the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States. You've only started doing this last year, whereas I've been doing it for years. This is what I think is at the heart of the matter: there are people who have been talking about Israel in this way for a long time. Noam Chomsky did, Norman Finkelstein did. 

One of the most important events was in 2007 when two of the most prestigious political scientists and international relations scholars in the United States, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wrote a book called “The Israel Lobby.” First, it was an essay in the London Review of Books, and then it turned into this massive tome, this 700-page book. It’s footnoted to the hilt because they're scholars, and they wrote the book that way. At the time, nobody on the mainstream was willing to say that. It was pretty much confined to the left, where you were free to say it. 

So, at the time, I was more associated with the left, perceived as being on the left. So, I was saying all these things for many years, but it wasn't all that risky for me because of the political camp that people perceived that I was in. I've always had one foot in that left-wing camp back then and one foot in the kind of libertarian, more independent camp, but in both of those camps it was totally fine, totally even welcome to talk about why we do so much for Israel, the evils of Israel, how they control our politics, how we go to war for them, how much money we spend to support them. 

So, I wasn't taking any risks – I've taken risks in my career, but I don't consider that as one – but Nick Fuentes, when he started doing it, was 18 years old, and he had this very promising future inside conservative media. At 18, he'd already been spotted as a talent. He had small shows, but he was making connections with and networking with some of the people who were very influential inside corporate media. People now forget, because now there's a lot of space for talking this way about Israel, but at the time, there was basically none. 

Before Donald Trump, there was almost nobody on the right willing to talk this way about Israel. You had Pat Buchanan, who did it for a long time, going back to the ‘80s, and he was viciously smeared as an anti-Semite. You had Ron Paul, who did the same thing. And then you had Trump kind of come in and create this space, and Nick Fuentes started really looking into it. I'm going into this not because of the personalities, but because I think they raise very broader issues about how all of this has evolved, not just for them, but for the broader discourse. 

Fuentes started off in conservative politics. At first, he thought Israel was our greatest ally and we have to support them: all the standard Republican and conservative views that have dominated both Republican and Democratic Party politics for decades. But then, the more he started questioning it, the more he started becoming vocal about it. And the more he became vocal about it, the more he became shunned inside the conservative media world, in which he had a very bright future. And rather than shutting up, as he was told to do, knowing that that might be better for his career, he couldn't. He just doesn't have that personality type. And he just had to keep examining it and keep saying it, and to say that Nick Fuentes paid a price for that is an understatement. Nick Fuentes has been excluded and booted out of every conceivable precinct of conservative media, even ones that consider themselves radical, dissident and far-right ones. I was playing on the mainstream ones. 

He was physically banned from going to Charlie Kirk's “Turning Points USA” and lots of other conferences like that. He was fired from the media platforms he was starting to develop. He was shunned by the friends that he had made, younger people on the side of the conservative movement. Then, it escalated from there. He got banned from almost every social media platform, including X. Elon Musk eventually reinstated him once he bought X, where he now is, but the only platform where he could be was Telegram. Now, he's on Rumble because Rumble is a genuine free speech platform. He has a show on Rumble that he does, I think, every night or four nights a week, and has found a good-sized audience. But really, it was on Twitter that he got his most attention, and that's why they banned him from Twitter in the pre-Musk era. But it wasn't just that. 

He wasn't just silenced and banned throughout all social media; he was also debanked. He had bank accounts closed, because of his political views, by major banks in the United States. He would get rejected for banking applications. He was put on a No-Fly list, which is the first time I really spoke about Nick, when I raised serious concerns about No-Fly lists being used in this way. His career has been severely impeded, not from what people believe are his racist views about Black people or immigrants; tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel. It just wasn't said. It was just a taboo. It was one of the third rails of American political discourse that would get anybody fired or destroyed for talking about it. 

Now, a lot of people talk about it, and it's become almost mainstream, but back then, especially on the right, almost nobody did. He paid a huge price, personally, financially, for his career, for his reputation, for his friendships, for his ability to get bank accounts. The government even put him on a no-fly list. And then last year, let's not forget, a homicidal maniac came to his house to try to murder him; shot two of his neighbors and killed them, and showed up at his house with a very large automatic weapon. This person eventually ended up being killed by the police. Another woman showed up at his house, a crazy liberal woman whom he had to pepper-spray. So, he's paid a big price for this. 

I don't want to speak for him, but I definitely identify with this mindset. I've had it too, sometimes, which is that if you are the first person or one of the first people to kind of get out on that plank and you're taking the shots because of it and very few other people are willing to join you,  and then at some point, it becomes a little safer to do it – I'm not saying it's safe; Tucker has also paid a price for it. I mean, half his audience has turned on him. He's now widely attacked by conservatives as being an anti-Semite, a Qatari agent, and Candace as well. So, it's not cost-free at all and Tucker didn't have to do it. He could have just ignored it. So, he's paid for a place too. 

But there's a big difference between Tucker Carlson in his mid-50s with a gigantic multimillion-dollar-year contract with Fox News, coming from the family that he came from, versus Nick Fuentes as a 22-year-old enduring all of that, and he comes from no wealth, no privilege. I think the idea is Nick feels like he was out on that plank, taking all these arrows and punishments, and then, in part, I do think that he helped open the space on the right to start talking more about Israel in a more honest way. It is true that Tucker and Candace, for the most part, hadn't really ever talked about it until after October 7, when, as Nick says, it almost became inevitable. They could have both ignored it. They could've both just spouted a few light lip services to it, but both of them made it very central to their cause, which they didn't have to do. It was not in their interest to do as well. But they did do it. 

But I think he feels like, I'm the one who actually paid the price for this. I was the one who was doing this earlier. Then the two of you come and now start doing it when it's a little bit safer, and also you're more protected because of your platform and standing in wealth, and you want to basically throw me in the garbage and declare me off limits, like, be the gatekeeper that says, you can go up to this point where Tucker and Candace are, but you can't go to Nick Fuentes; he's way too hateful or radical or dangerous or whatever. He feels like they're very late to the game, that he was braver, that he paid a bigger price and then they came along at an easier time and decided that they were the outer limits of where you can go on these discussions about Israel and the like. I'm not saying that's what I think, I'm saying that's what he thinks. I identify with that view. 

I think he would be fine if they would get there and say Nick Fuentes is one of the first people doing this, let's welcome him on our show. But the fact that he's still excluded, to the fact that they called him gay, loser, basically, in his parents' basement, implied that he was working for the CIA or was an agent, probably of Qatar, to destroy the right. I think that's what made him start being resentful, and also, there is this class issue here, which is very real. It's not his fault; Tucker's mother left them when he was very young. Then his father married an heiress from the Swanson fortune. And although she wasn't his mother. It was his stepmother. Obviously, he was living with his father and his stepmother, and they had a very good relationship. She was very good to him. And he ended up having all these benefits from a very young age. First, great wealth and privilege, and then some amount of fame, and then more fame, and then more wealth. And that's more or less been his life. 

Candace, I'm not sure about where she came from, what her family situation was, but once she got very big, she became very wealthy, and then she went to work for The Daily Wire, had a very lucrative contract there, and now she's married to, I heard Nick saying he's British royalty. I don't know if he is, maybe he is. I don't know one way or the other, but I know he's extremely wealthy. And I think there's a class issue there, too, which is like, you two purport to be the kind of warriors for this group of which you're not a part, which has kind of disaffected working-class white people. And Nick's saying, “I actually came from there and now suddenly you two, from your great mountain of wealth and privilege and lifelong or at least in Candace's case, years long, financial power and privilege and status and wealth, whatever, are coming in and trying to talk about me like I'm some loser and yeah I'm a loser in the sense that lots of white people have become trampled on by the United States and that is supposed to be what right-wing populism cares about.” 

So, I thought it was very telling. I do think, if I’m totally honest, it's more personal than substantive. I think Nick feels a lot of resentment for how he's been treated. 

I think Candace and Tucker feel resentment that they put a lot on the line to go where they went and one of the people who has a big influential audience, especially among young conservatives, have kind of gone to war with them. So, I think there's a lot of personal animist and personal resentment driving this, but there's also something very substantive here as well, which is about how people who are a little bit further along on the extremist train sometimes get attacked by the people who are less so, where they want to draw a line and kind of cut off the plank and have you fall off, even though you are on the plank first. I think Nick feels like that's being done to him, and I also think that there is a real class conflict that is driving a lot of this which is very much a part of the conservative world. I mean, huge amounts of conservative influencers, conservative pundits, conservative operatives who claim that they're there to speak for the working-class, for disaffected white people in the United States, are hanging out with billionaires every day and being funded by billionaires and meeting with billionaires and getting invites to the White House and to every center of power. And a lot of compromises are required to do that. And Nick's not willing to make them, and a lot of them are, and that is a substantive issue as well. 

Tucker and Candace, I do think, and they don't get very many invites to those circles. Tucker more than Candace. Tucker because he's been around for so long. He's good friends with people in the Trump administration. He campaigned for Trump, Trump likes him, even though Trump repudiated him and insulted him because of his opposition to the war in Iran. But there are a lot of tension points inside the MAGA movement that are very real, even if some of them are personally driven. We're human beings, we all harbor jealousies and vindictive sentiments and resentments. It's a Herculean effort to try to exclude those as much as possible. We all have to try; some of us do better than others. But none of us is immune from that. So, I'm not suggesting that it's a huge character flaw. I'm just saying I do think that's part of it. But I also think, at least as big of a part, if not bigger, are some of these ideological and class issues who's sort of keeping one foot in decent society and who's willing to say fully what they think without it. And the last thing I'll say is, and this is sort of what I began by saying, which is you can like somebody or not, but it doesn't mean you should lie about their skills or their successes. 

Nick Fuentes, I had a big online following for a few years, but it was very much a kind of online following that was almost like a cult following. It was like a very idiosyncratic group of people. They called themselves the Gropers. They didn't have a lot of cachet or influence outside of their circles, in part because Nick Fuentes wasn't invited anywhere into those more mainstream circles, or even less mainstream far-right circles. He kind of built his entire world himself. 

There are tons of successful podcasters and influencers who really don't have an original thought. They know what they have to get up and say to validate their audience, to show their loyalty to a particular circle. They may even have some talent in terms of rhetoric and communication, some charisma, but they're not very critically minded. They don't do a lot of reading. I can't tell you how often I listen to some of the podcasters of the biggest audience, and you're just like: How are you so ignorant? How do you think about these things? Do you ever stop and breathe and reflect, or read anything? Like read anything substantive in or bound like a Wikipedia page? So, there's a lot of that. 

But go listen to Nick Fuentes, if you haven't. And if you have preconceptions about what he is, I'm not saying that he doesn't say things that are provocative and deliberately cross lines on purpose sometimes, when he doesn't need to, just to cross them. Though I do think it's often purposeful, it's not just about a teenage transgressive instinct. 

So, there are definitely things he said that are offensive. Genuinely so, and not offensive in that, oh my god, you've offended me. But things that I think he would even acknowledge, he often says he doesn't really mean it, he is prone to rhetorical excess, and it's part of the whole presence. But everything that he talks about, he is extremely knowledgeable about and well-versed in. 

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Next question is from @edonk77, who says this:

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All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story just for anyone who doesn't know it: out of nowhere in the ‘90s, in the Clinton administration, bombs started being sent to mailboxes. They were pretty sophisticated bombs, and they injured and even killed people. It was taking place across the country, and the FBI, the Attorney General, who at the time was Janet Reno, had no idea who was doing it. 

The person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed by the New York Times and the Washington Post, saying, “I will stop if you publish my essay about my ideas and what's motivating me.” And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, “We’re not going to give in to your terrorist tactics,” which in classic terrorism is kind of what it was: it was violence directed at civilians to induce political and social change.  But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have a first clue about who was doing that. It was like really the perfect crime. They agreed.

So, the Washington Post, maybe the New York Times, too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski. The reason the Justice Department was willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would help identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was kind of just such lunacy, madness, that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention. And also, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, the terrorist bombs, killing civilians or injuring civilians. They just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say. 

On one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right, because publishing this essay caused, eventually, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, “I think this is my brother. His writing seems familiar. His ideas are familiar.” That's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down. 

Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy, recognized by everybody, as being brilliant – graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics. He then went to a PhD program, I think at the University of Chicago, at a top school, and then ended up teaching at Berkeley. And he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professor. He was a genuinely brilliant person, not brilliant in the sense that David Frum or Ann Abelbaum gets called brilliant, but genuinely brilliant. 

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay, that nobody would connect to any of his ideas, and that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, would make people refuse to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously. At first, that was true, but over time, people started turning to it and saying, “You know what? This seems quite important. There are a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.” 

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay. It's very complex. It's highly worth reading. You can find it free online. It ended up being published in a longer-form, book format. You can read the essay in its long form or the book. But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives. And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then, how technology has advanced more and more. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities. They were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family and they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years. We're political and social animals. We need a connection. Without connection, human beings are going to go crazy. 

Eventually, we got to the point Charles Dickens was talking about: the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as factory workers, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay. It is breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally, and that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road. 

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we come, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are. What it means to be human will be consumed by technology and turned into even more exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as humans, arranging our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is taken away. 

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called “Happiness,” which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary and what isn't? And what they found is that a lot of what data reflects is that in many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than in much wealthier Western countries. 

This documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why, oftentimes, technological expansion and wealth expansion undermine human happiness. Ted Kaczynski also warned that, as technology evolved further and further, our societies are less humane, less fulfilling and less connected. And clearly, all of that is true. That is exactly what has happened. I'm not saying we need to dismantle it, but he actually lived those words, he dropped out of the whole matrix basically, when he was, I think 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid, read, wrote, and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thoughts. The more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability of humans to be free and happy. 

Of course, that started resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy. All the things he was describing as to why, and the role technology plays in that, would obviously exacerbate all that. Remember, this was 1995. I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere near as dominant in our lives. 

Obviously, with the internet, we often talk to people on phones or on screens. We have our phones everywhere. So, a lot of the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones. You go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends, who talk a little, and they both pull out their phones. And before you know it, they're both staring at their phones, and especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly, in a very dangerous way. 

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem: spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection. Obviously, there are benefits to technology. We have cures to diseases that we would otherwise die from. The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, etc. etc. There are a lot of benefits. But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least, that offsets it and keeps it in balance. Whatever: fame, wealth, career, success, it all comes with a cost. I definitely think that's the case of technology, and Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out. So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here. 

You might ask why he goes to the scene to kill people? He had an academic pedigree. He probably could have gotten this published. I don't really know. I haven't paid much attention lately to this whole episode, so I forgot what the rationale was for that. But in any event, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself. That probably was true. But, sometimes, being mentally imbalanced or at least mentally alienated, in a way, is necessary to produce insights. Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or a sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly. I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself completely. 

One of the things the question asked about is left-wing politics. And the person who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but a lot of his critiques of what left-wings politics is about and the flaws in it, I must admit have validity. And basically, what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us we're all propagandized to revere it to believe it's all good to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it. And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of culture war fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

 Compact Magazine, which is I think a really interesting magazine, it kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism had an article on June 16, 2023, which I really recommend. The headline of it was: “Ted Kaczynski Anti-Left Leftist.” 

Obviously, this vision he's presenting in some ways is left-wing. It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, and technology, that has a left-wing ethos for sure, but he was also scornful of modern-day, leftist political expression. 

A week or two ago, Ryan Grim as on our show and we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Bari Weiss and The Free Press. There was supposedly a heterodox and dissident when, in reality, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement. And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power. It's like catnip. They're happy to have you fight about racism, feminism, yeah, they love racism. They love feminism. Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video? They centered like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had neurodivergence. And she was just like, “I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically” as a Latino non-binary immigrant, whatever. They're so happy to have that. “Hey, look at our Black generals. We're going to celebrate our Black military officials. We're the Pentagon. Hey, with the FBI, look at all our cool badass women agents or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now.” It's like, “Oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.” It's that famous cartoon where a Muslim family in Yemen are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, “I hear the neck bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.” 

It's just like, here's Hillary Clinton. She's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before, because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than she. So, you vote for her. You feel like you're doing something really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy, because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status-quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere, because she presents this illusion that you've done something historic or subversive, when in reality you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against. 

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well. There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot to the essay. I just can't do that justice in the time we have, even though I took another hour. 

I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay and I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it, and remember it was written in the early to mid-1990s, and so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution. There are not very many better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking, then to go read that essay. 

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All right, here's a few questions on Gaza. 

First from @CatRika:

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@Lightwins2028:

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It actually is incredible that I come here and sit here every night and do this show more or less every night 500 times. I will accept that as well and agree that it is kind of incredible.

And then from @johnmccray:

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I will confess that what we've seen in Gaza over the last 20 months is not just some horrific tragedy or even war on the other side of the world; it is a genocide that involves some of the most twisted cruelty and sadism I have ever witnessed in my life –  obviously, I wasn't alive in World War II, which is why I say ‘in my lifetime.’ However, when you announce that you're blocking all food from entering an enclave that you fully surround and control – and yes, there's a small border with Egypt and Gaza, but the Israeli military is on the other side of that, controlling egress and ingress into it and out of it (besides, the Egyptian dictator is U.S. supported and always has been for decades because he's there to take marching orders from the U.S. regarding Israel).

When you take this concentrated open-air prison enclave, where people can't leave, can't come in, you ban the media from coming in, and you announce to the world you're putting a blockade on any food from entering it, and you knowingly starve them to death, you knowingly blockade food from entering on top of what they're already experiencing – endless bombing, people burning alive in their churches, in their tents, every hospital, every school, all of civilian life being destroyed… The doctors who are there don't have basic medicines. They don't have antibiotics, they don't have feeding formula for babies, they don't have painkillers or anesthesia for the children who come in with their limbs blown off – just the absolute, worst nightmares that human beings could possibly endure for a sustained period, and on top of that, you start starving them to death and then, instead of letting food distribution in from the actual organizations that are experienced in it and actually want to feed the people, you create some new entity that you control – American military contractors that are, for profit, doing the bidding of the IDF, purposely set up so that it barely gives out any food and then it's a death trap – so, you lure starving people in there and you murder them and massacre them regularly, daily… That is a new kind of evil. 

When you’re starving people to death and then saying, “Hey, here are some grains of flour, come here and get them,” and murdering them when they do, when you purposely set up the centers so they barely stay open for more than 15 minutes. People get noticed right before, and they have to trek miles, very dangerously, to get there. They're not allowed to stay there, waiting for the next time to open. They have to go back, and they're killed on the way there. So, they're faced with this Sophie's choice of either having to stay at home and watch their kids starve to death or knowing they risk their lives and their teenage son's lives to go there and try to get food, knowing that a lot of them are going to be murdered, that is a sick new kind of evil. 

And because of how ubiquitous cell phones are, we have to watch it, and we know it's been streamed live every day, throughout the world. We've all seen just the absolute most sickening, hideous human suffering imaginable, a level of sadism that's almost hard to fathom that people are capable of. And while some Israelis are protesting some more now about the end of this war, for the most part, the view of the Israelis has been, I don't care how many civilians we kill, I don't care how many babies are killed. The babies are terrorists. They'll grow up to be Hamas, so I don't care to kill them. 

These are evils that are difficult to endure, even if your work is journalism, even if you look at some of the most horrible things people are doing, you still have to report on them. Even for that, I mean, it's hard to fathom and express, and I know so many people, and I just thought about myself including in this, that you feel so impotent, so your rage is so purposeless, even though it's all-consuming, because the Trump administration doesn't care. It's filled with Israel fanatics, and it's going to support Israel until the very last Gazan is killed. Can you give them all the weapons, all the money, all the diplomatic cover? 

And then of course, the Israelis themselves are so deranged and fanatical that they don't care either. And short of having the world go in and militarily intervene against Israel or arming Hamas, which is not going to happen, there's not a lot you can do. There definitely has been serious measurable changes for the better in how Americans now look at Israel and look at the Israeli action in Gaza, how they look at American funding of Israel. That's not going away. That's a big, big problem for Israel. 

Once you open your eyes to that, you can't unsee it. And you have a lot of people, as we talked about in that first question, fueling it constantly. I hope I'm one of them. I certainly do what I can to do that. But that doesn't mean that any of that is going to stop this war. 

Even in Europe, and I really despise the Western European political elite and media class, they're utterly supportive of Israel. They are loyal to Israel, they arm Israel, fund them, not as much as the United States, but to a great degree. A lot of those historical reasons, guilt over World War II, which Israel expertly exploits – not that it's difficult to exploit the guilt and psychological fragility of Western Europeans, but they do a great job of it. 

So, you're starting to see things like Macron comes out and recognize a Palestinian state, not unimportant, but still a symbolic step. Keir Starmer, he's probably the most despicable politician from a character perspective, an utterly empty, vapid belief-free politician – he's despised in his own country, despised. – He didn't even go that far. He said, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel starts letting food in.” So, Palestinian statehood is not something they're entitled to. It's like a threat that you make to Israel that you're going to give them if the Israelis don't let food in. You see the Germans, who are always the worst for obvious psychological and historical reasons when it comes to standing up to Israel, sort of saying now, “We're going to cut off arms.” 

We'll see how long any of that lasts. The one group of people you do not want to put your faith and trust in to stand for a cause, to hold firm on beliefs, or convictions and values is Western European political elites. They're pathetic. Pathetic. Obviously, there are some exceptions, but as a class, they're nauseating and pathetic. 

I used to think the British elite class was the worst elite class on the planet. While I still think they are definitely in the running, I'm starting to actually think the Germans are more psychologically warped and sickening. I mean, the Germans were also fanatics about the war in Ukraine – fanatics. You put Germans in power, and they don't think about anything other than going to war with Russia. It's really a bizarre repetitive pattern. 

So, I don't want to pretend that there's some quick solution. I do give as much money as I can to them, you can find Palestinian aid and Gaza aid organizations. There's no shortage of verified GoFundMe accounts from people in Gaza telling their stories. And obviously you have to be a little careful not to give to fraudulent ones, but there are easy ways to verify those. Look for trustworthy people on Twitter who vouch for them, things like that. You can donate to that. Even like $50 at a time, whatever you're capable of, $10, $15. Everything is so high-priced in Gaza that sometimes even if they have food available, they can’t afford it. And I think it's also a good way of showing the people in Gaza that the world actually cares about their plight. 

Earlier today, I talked about how Marjorie Taylor Greene has become very outspoken about refusing to serve the agenda of AIPAC and that AIPAC is now on the march against her. They're going to do what they've done to all sorts of politicians which they are now doing to Thomas Massie as well: try to find some fraudulent, politician who lives in their district, who seems demographically appealing to that district, who has the same politics, except they're going to know that AIPAC paid for their political career, paid for the seat in Congress, and they're going to be supremely loyal. 

One of the worst examples – I mean, I can barely look at this person because of how pathetic and sad it is to watch him. They wanted to get Cori Bush out of Congress. If you're conservative and you dislike Cori Bush, AIPAC doesn't dislike her for any of the reasons that you dislike her. They only care about the fact that she's raised questions like, “Why are we sending so much money to Israel when my whole district is filled with people financially struggling, who don't have healthcare, don't have access to education, have no public safety?” Why are we giving all this money to Israel? Why is AIPAC forcing us to do that?” And they were so determined to take Cori Bush out because of her Israel questioning that they found some utterly craven Black politician, nice liberal, nice Democrat, of course. You have to get a liberal, you have to be a Democrat, and probably have to be a Black politician. His name is Wesley Bell, and they paid $15 million – 15,000 million –for one Democratic primary seat in Congress in St. Louis, to replace Cori Bush with somebody exactly like her, except that he's an AIPAC loyalist. And you can just see him on social media and in speeches, standing up for Israel. You know exactly why $15 million was his price tag, and he knows if he wants to keep that seat, he's going to need AIPAC doing the same. And they're going to try to do the same with Thomas Massie. They're going to try to do the same with Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

They're not always successful. They've tried it many times with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, even, to a smaller extent, AOC. They made some inroads, but for the most part, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are too popular in their Democratic primaries and their Democratic constituencies for that to work. 

In 2022, Ilhan Omar almost lost the Democratic primary. I think she won by a few points. So, she's not invulnerable. They never quite spent the money on her that they spent on people like Cori Bush or Jamaal Bowman. But they have a long history of doing this. And they're clearly doing it to Thomas Massie. If you look at the three top billionaires donating to AIPAC to remove Thomas Massie, they're all Jewish billionaires who are extremely loyal to Israel. 

That's the whole point of this effort that Donald Trump supports. One thing you can do is just look at who AIPAC is trying to remove from Congress and just donate to whoever they want to take out of Congress as a way to thwart them because even if you're a conservative and you see them doing it to some left-wing member of Congress that you don't like, it's not like the person they're going to replace that person with is going to be any more appealing to you. There's no difference, except that that person is going to be bought and paid to be an AIPAC agent, who is going to be devoted to Israel and never question Israel. That's the only difference. 

AIPAC's not taking Cori Bush out of Congress or Jamaal Bowman because they're too left-wing. The only thing they care about is if the person is devoted to Israel. The same with Tom Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. If they're going to take out members of Congress as punishment for not being loyal enough to Israel, donate to the people they're trying to remove on both sides. If you're on the left, you're not going to agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie, obviously. But the people who are going to come in their place are not going to agree with you politically anymore. The only difference will be that those people will be fanatical Israel supporters, like many in the Republican Party, instead of being among the few to question them. So, that is another way I think you could work. 

I know this is thankless work. There's no immediate gratification, but it does work. Public opinion changes. It really does. And especially with independent media with a free internet, with the deconcentrating of power over the discourse no longer in the hands of a few tiny number of gigantic media corporations controlled by people who are all the same basic political outlook, with the same interests, but now huge gigantic people with big audiences who influence a lot of people completely removed from those circles and that dogma. That is also a big reason for optimism. And if you see the polling change in a pretty substantial way as you do on the Israel question and the Gaza question, keep contributing to that. You don't have to have a gigantic platform. 

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Last question, this is from @coldhotdog:

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All right. The U.S. is sanctioning Brazil, Brazilian officials, and also imposing tariffs on them, not for the reason that Trump has been imposing tariffs on other countries, mainly because he thinks there's unfair trading practices causing a trade deficit. The opposite is true. The United States has a significant trade surplus with Brazil. There's not a trade deficit. So, the tariffs are more – and it was kind of explicit – used as punishment against Brazil for their violation of free speech, their violation to due process, their persecution of political opponents. And obviously, that is not the U.S.'s real goal. 

I wrote an article about this in Folha, where I do reporting, and I'm a columnist in Brazil. And it basically said, Okay, I hope no one takes seriously when the U.S. government says we're upset about the infringements on free speech or the erosions of democracy. It was like a month before Trump announced sanctions on Brazil and tariffs on Brazil, that he went to the Persian Gulf region and heaped praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the leaders of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, heralded them, hugged them, and not for the first time. While I think Brazil is very repressive and I think Moraes is an absolute tyrant, it's in a completely different universe than what happens in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. It's not even close. 

So, any country that's heaping praise on and embracing, hugging and propping up the governments of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Qatar, or the Egyptians, or the Jordanians, of the Bahrainis or whomever, the Philippines, Indonesia, obviously, is not a country that cares about repression inside other countries. Obviously.

The United States doesn't go around the world fighting wars or intervening in other countries because they care about repression. That's the pretext. They love dictators as long as dictators are pro-American. They only have a problem with dictatorial regimes if they defy America, like Cuba or Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, and then you hear “Oh my god, we're the United States, we go and fight for democracies. That is why we have to protect Ukraine.” Even though, arguably, Ukraine has become as repressive as Russia. So, whatever drives the United States, it's not a love for democracy, it is not a contempt for an erosion of liberty, it is not a defense of free speech, obviously, I hope there's no one in my audience who believes that. So, when Trump says, “Oh, we're punishing Brazil because it's become repressive, it’s attacked the free speech,” it's obviously not the reason. 

Then the question that our Locals member is raising, which is a good one.

I don't support the U.S. embargo of Cuba which is now 65 years old. The idea of that was that we're going to change the government of Cuba and free the Cuban people. Obviously, it has not done that. The only thing it's done is make life in Cuba utterly miserable for the population. Same with Venezuela. Same with the sanctions on Iran. So, I don't think that's the role of the United States to go try to change other governments, even if they're pretending, they're changing them out of concern about their oppression when obviously that's not the real reason. 

The reason is they want to replace it with a regime that's more compliant to the United States. And obviously I don't think Trump is intervening in Brazil with punishments and the like because he's concerned in the abstract about free speech. I mean, aside from all the dictatorial regimes we embrace, there's also the attacks on free speech in the United States, which we've gone over many times, including last night, that the Trump administration is spearheading, that the Biden administration before that spearheaded. 

So, the question then becomes, well, what is the real reason? And I want to say, while I view Alexandre de Moraes as a serious menace, as one of the most tyrannically minded people on the planet, even if he's not, say, as powerful or dictatorial as Mohammed bin Salman, just because Brazil is not that kind of society that permits that level of overt, absolute, autocratic tyranny, the way a lot of other countries do that we support prop up, I do think he's a genuine evil figure. Obviously, one of the reasons I talk about it is because I live here. My family is Brazilian. My kids are Brazilian. So, it's something I care about for that reason. And of course, I think the reason why Trump is doing it is because it's not actually a left-wing government in Brazil. Lula is the president. And he was a leftist in his earlier life. He was a labor leader, but he ran for president three times as a leftist, lost. And then finally, in 2002, he was sick of losing. And he wrote this famous letter called Letter to the Brazilian People, where he basically said, “I understand that if I want to be president, I have to moderate. I have to get along with financial centers. This is important for prosperity.” He basically promised not to be a fallaway left-wing dogma to be much more moderate. And then to prove it, he chose a billionaire banker as his vice president, to make clear to financial markets, banks, big corporations inside Brazil that he wasn't going to be a threat. 

They're not leftist at all. But I'm sure in Trump's mind, in the eyes of Marco Rubio, the people who are influencing Trump, he sees a little like basically a communist regime, like a left-wing regime, like from the Cold War, even though it's not remotely that. And I'm not suggesting they're conservative or right-wing. They're not. But they're not communists or even socialists. And part of what Trump's doing is he just looks at Lula and the Brazilian government as an enemy and is convinced, okay, they're our enemy. Let's punish them. If I had to find a justification – I'm not saying I support it, I'm not saying I justify it – but if I had to find a justification, I would say that the real only justification for any of this is the fact that Moraes and the Supreme Court have been now targeting not just America's social media companies. 

So, this is reaching into the United States threatening the free speech rights of American citizens or people legally residing in the United States, attacking and threatening and trying to bully American social media companies. And that is, I believe, an invasion of American sovereignty and an attack on the rights of American citizens. I do think the government, the U.S. government, is duty-bound to draw a very firm line and say, “No, you're not going to cross that line. And if you cross that, we're going to take action against you.” That's the only justification I can think of. 

So, I'm not defending the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes, or even the punitive tariffs against Brazil. I've basically been arguing that if there's anyone who truly is tyrannical in his mindset, who's just absolutely, like, mentally unstable and just an authoritarian tyrant with no limits at all, who's been just vindictive and drunk on his power, it is Alexandre de Moraes. And I do think there's this one justification for the U.S. to cite, to justify taking retaliatory and retributive action against Brazil. 

Obviously, Trump likes Bolsonaro. He strongly identifies with any claims that a politician is being victimized by politicized lawfare because Trump believes as do I, that he himself was the victim of that and he sees when he looks at Bolsonaro a very similar thing happening to Bolsonaro, and I think he feels personally angry by that. So, I think there's some complex motives as well, but other than what I just articulated, I'm not defending the U.S.’s use of sanctions, the exploitation of the dollars in reserve currency to punish the economies of other countries because we don't like what they're doing internally. It's all obviously a fraud and a pretext to say, we're doing it because we care about free speech or due process or whatever. But I think there is a foundation to it, not a very strong one, but a foundation to it that I do think is legitimate. And you know what? I guess, just looking at it from a less principled perspective, I do think Alexandre de Moraes is a completely out-of-control monster. And everyone in Brazil is too scared to stand up to him or too supportive of the fact that he's imprisoning and exiling and silencing Bolsonaro supporters, that there is nobody in Brazil that's capable of stopping him or willing to do so. And the only thing that has really undermined and disrupted him is what Trump just did and now is threatening to do even more with even more invasive sanctions against his wife, against other officials in Brazil. And that is something they have to take very seriously and are taking very seriously. And it's the first time there's been real limits put on it. 

So, from a very kind of instrumentalized, results-based perspective, I confess that I'm happy about where that is leading, even if I do have genuine, really real concerns about the use of American arms and weaponry to do this.

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The Pro-Israel Meltdown Over Mahmoud Khalil's NYT Interview: When is Violence Inevitable?; Why is FIRE Suing Marco Rubio: With 1A Lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick
System Update #499

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

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

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The case of Mahmoud Khalil made national headlines – even international headlines – because he was the very first student who was snatched either off the street or out of his apartment by ICE agents under the Trump administration's brand new policy of expelling Israel critics, who they deem supportive of Hamas, which is basically anyone who criticizes Israel whether they're PhD students on green cards or anything else. 

On June 20, a federal judge ordered Khalil, who is a green card holder, released from ICE detention facilities pending the deportation proceedings on the grounds that he had never been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, and presents no threat to anyone or to the public in general. That release has enabled Khalil to make rounds giving interviews to various outlets, and he gave one last week to the New York Times' columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein. One excerpt of Khalil's interview went viral, largely due to Israel supporters, of course, who claimed he was apologizing for, if not actively supporting, Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. We'll examine his comments to see if he did say that, but also to examine the important questions raised about who has the right to use violence and when, who is a terrorist or who is a freedom fighter, and whether anything Khalil said remotely poses a danger to the United States. 

Our guest was Conor Fitzpatrick, a lawyer from FIRE.org, the free speech group the ACLU once was: a group of lawyers and activists passionately devoted to defending free speech against any and all attacks on it, regardless of whether the censorship target is on the right, the left, or anything in between. FIRE announced this week that it was suing Marco Rubio and the U.S. State Department under the First Amendment, arguing that the government has the right to deport foreign nationals, but not to do so as punishment for their political expression. 

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Foto preta e branca de rosto de homem visto de pertoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

We have covered the case of Mahmoud Khalil many times on this show. He was the sort of test case, the canary in the coal mine, showing that the Trump administration intended not to deport all foreign students or most foreign students or just foreign students who expressed a political opinion and engaged in political activism. That's not the Trump Administration's policy at all. They don't even have a policy of deporting foreign students on U.S. soil for criticizing the United States. What they do have is a policy of deporting foreign students in the United States or at American universities who criticize Israel or protest against that foreign country. 

Mahmoud Khalil was detained in his apartment, where he lives with his American wife. She was eight months pregnant; their newborn infant was born. And she's an American citizen. His newborn infant is an American Citizen. And he's a green card on the path to American citizenship. 

Since then, there have been many other cases of students being snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents and unmarked cars, including a Tufts PhD student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who the Trump administration admits, did nothing other than co-author an op-ed in the Tuft's student newspaper, where she called on the administration, along with three other students who were co-authors, to implement the student Senate's decision that the administration should divest from Israel. That's all she did. Nothing against Jews, nothing in favor of Hamas, any of that. She just criticized Israel and urged divestment because the student senate had voted for it. It was essentially saying abide. She, too, was snatched off the street, put in ICE detention, and now has been released. And there have been many other cases since. 

In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the federal court said you can continue the deportation proceeding, but there's no basis or justification for keeping him in a detention prison while all of this proceeds. If you win the deportation process, you can obviously deport him, but there's no reason why he should rot in jail rather than being at home with his wife and child while this process proceeds, because he's never done anything remotely to suggest that he's a threat to anybody. He was never arrested as part of the student protest or any other time in his life, never convicted of a crime, never the subject of a complaint with the police. 

And so, he's now out and he's giving interviews, as is his right. He's given several interviews. One of them was for The New York Times columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein

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Should Obama Admin Officials Be Prosecuted for Russiagate Lies? Major Escalations in Trump/Brazil Conflict
System Update #498

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

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

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The Russiagate fraud is receiving all sorts of new attention and scrutiny thanks to documents first declassified and then released by Trump's Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. As we reported at length last week, these documents were quite incriminating for various Obama officials, such as former CIA Director James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director Jim Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as they reveal what was a deliberate attempt to weaponize intelligence findings for purely partisan and political ends in 2016, namely, to manipulate the American electorate into voting for their former Obama administration colleague Hillary Clinton as president, and more importantly, defeating Donald Trump, and then repeatedly lying about it to Congress and the American people. 

Yesterday, it was reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi is not only investigating, which is kind of meaningless, but what's not meaningless is that she's also apparently empaneling a grand jury to investigate whether there was prosecutable criminality at the highest levels of the Obama administration. We'll examine that obviously important question. 

Then, we’ll examine what's driving all his complex escalation of Trump’s decision for 50% tariffs on Brazilian products and what's at stake, and the potential consequences for all sides. 

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I believe it's been obvious, pretty much from the very beginning of the Russiagate hoax, the Russiagate fraud, which I'll remind you, again, was driven by the core conspiracy claim that the Trump campaign officials collaborated and colluded and conspired with the Kremlin to hack into the DNC email server as well as John Podesta's email and disseminate those emails to WikiLeaks and by the broader conspiracy theory that Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with sexual material, compromising financial information, personal blackmail as well, and that therefore the Kremlin was basically, once Trump got elected running the country, was a completely unhinged and deranged conspiracy theory from the start for which there was no evidence. 

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