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

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

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

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

REN’s Latest song.
Just about Sum’s up the UK for me right now. 🤣👍💯🙏👏….

VINCENT’S TALE - REN….

US special forces vet, who assisted with food distribution in Gaza, relates story of a little boy who thanked him for the food, and was then shot dead by IDF troops:

"And he sets his food down and he places his hands on my face on the side of my face on my cheeks. These frail skeleton emaciated hands, dirty. And he puts them on my face and he kissed me. He kissed me and he said, 'Thank you' in English. Thank you. And he collected his items and he walked back to the group and then he was shot at with pepper spray and tear gas and stun grenades and bullets shot at his feet and in the air and he runs away scared."

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/us-veteran-alleges-gazan-child-who-thanked-him-for-food-was-shot-dead-moments-later-by-idf/

Glenn, I think this may be up your street. I know that you like to talk about the goings-on in Brazil, but it's worth remembering that Australia seemed to be a testing ground for authoritarianism during COVID, so what happens in Australia could quickly make its way to the US. Now, we do not have a first amendment here, so this is truly terrifying. I'm not even sure that the claimed antisemitism is real, since at least a few of the incidents have been demonstrated to be hoaxes, but it IS being used as a pre-text to crush pro-Palestine protests.

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tulsi's Russiagate Revelations, Columbia's $200M Settlement, and More
System Update #492

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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Once a week, we devote the show to a Q&A session. We take questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community and answer as many as we can. As is typically the case, the questions tonight are wide-ranging and very provocative on a diverse range of news stories. 

 Our “Mailbag” is not intended to be just a sort of yes or no, but instead to give my viewpoint, my analysis, my perspective, my commentary on whatever it is that interests you. A lot of times, it ends up being topics that we might have wanted to cover anyway, that we just haven't had a chance to yet. Other times, they are topics that, on our own, we may not have covered. It's usually that kind of perfect mix that always makes me excited to do. So, let's get right into them to make sure we cover as many as possible. 

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The first is from @ChristianaK, and the question is very straightforward: 

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There's actually a second question here and let me get to it now, because it was going to be part of what I was about to say. It’s from @kevin328:

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I actually think Tulsi Gabbard's revelations on their own are substantive, meritorious, important and deserve a lot of attention but I do think, at this point, anything that the Trump administration is doing is intended to feed their base that is still very confused, upset and angry, for the most part, by this increasingly bizarre posture that they've taken on the Epstein revelations, namely not to make any, led not by Pam Bondi, Kash Patel or Dan Bongino, but by Donald Trump. 

Anything that they're suddenly unveiling is presumptively an attempt to distract people from that anger, that confusion and that growing suspicion about what they did with Epstein. The problem for them is the suspicions that have emerged – that I don't even think were that present before – that Donald Trump fears that his name is in the files and therefore wants to make sure they're not released, and even if his name isn't in the file in any way particularly incriminating. 

I've always thought the Epstein case has important questions to answer and I still think the Epstein case has important questions to be answered, including the ones I've outlined at length, such as whether he worked with or for any foreign or domestic intelligence agencies, and what was the source of his massive wealth, and why were these mysterious billionaires embedded in the military-industrial complex so eager on just seemingly handing him over huge amounts of wealth in exchange for services that seem very amorphous at best. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions that are important to say nothing of whether there's evidence that very powerful and important people participated in the more sinister aspects of what it was that he was doing and whether any blackmail arose from that. Of course, Donald Trump's name is going to be in some of these files for so many reasons. He was a very good friend of Jeffrey Epstein at one point. They spent a lot of time together. It seems like most or all of that time took place before the conviction of Jeffrey Epstein in 2007, which has its own very odd set of questions around why he got such an incredibly lenient deal for crimes that most people are sent to prison for a very long time. 

There's actually an excellent discussion on all of this that if you haven't seen I want to recommend which is Darryl Cooper's discussion on Tucker Carlson's show about the Epstein case, Darryl spent huge amounts of time putting together the entire history of Jeffrey Epstein, where he came from, how he emerged on the scene, who his key contacts were, where his wealth came from, the questions that have arisen, the way in which they've been buried. Despite what people have tried to depict about Darryl Cooper, in large part because of his unconventional views on World War II, but more so his harsh criticism of Israel, that he's some deranged, unhinged fabulist, who doesn't understand history, he's actually one of the most scrupulous and meticulous commentators and analysts I've seen, by which I mean, he really does only very strongly-cling to facts and has no problem admitting, which he often does, that there are certain things he doesn't know, that there are holes in his understanding, holes in the information, and there's zero conspiratorial thinking or even speculative thinking in this discussion or very little. It's all just a chronicle of facts laid out in a way not just to understand the Epstein case, but the reason why it's captured so much attention about the behavior of our elite class. 

So, I do think Donald Trump's name appears in these files the way The Wall Street Journal has reported it did. Trump was explicitly asked outside the White House by a reporter, just like two weeks ago: Did Pam Bondi give you a briefing in May in which she indicated to you that the Epstein files contain your name?” And to that, he explicitly said “No.” And that's exactly what The Wall Street Journal is now reporting had happened. Most journalists know that that happened. There were leaks inside the Justice Department and the White House that this is what happened. And again, I would be shocked if Donald Trump's name did not appear at some point in the Epstein files in some capacity, because of his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; they were in the same West Palm Beach social circles, which is a very small set of very rich people who compose that society. The U.S. attorney who ended up being appointed, who oversaw Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal, ended up being appointed by Donald Trump as Secretary of Labor. He has positive feelings for Ghislaine Maxwell in that notorious interview. He said, “I wish her well,” something that Donald Trump doesn't say about most criminals, let alone ones imprisoned on charges that they trafficked underage girls. 

But the climate that has been created – in large part by his closest followers, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and his personal attorney, who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, at least for a little bit longer, and some of the leading and most influential MAGA influencers – is that if your name is even remotely associated with Jeffrey Epstein, your entire life and your integrity and your character are instantly cast into doubt. One of the first times I really noticed this was when The Wall Street Journal reported on a series of contacts between people that no one knew had known Jeffrey Epstein, one of whom was Noam Chomsky. And the reason that happened was because Jeffrey Epstein had a very specific and passionate interest in academic institutions in Boston, especially the two most prestigious, Harvard and MIT. He funded various research projects. He gave $125,000, for example, to Bill Ackman's wife in order for her to have some sort of research project. And he had two or three dinners with Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky was very contemptuous of the questions in the Wall Street Journal. I guess that's what happens when you're 92. You don't take any kind of smear campaign seriously. You don't really care. And he just said, “Yeah, I had dinners with Jeffrey Epstein. He was a very well-connected and wealthy person.” 

Now, oddly, Jeffrey Epstein was very close friends with the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who obviously knew Chomsky would have a great deal of animus towards, and Jeffrey Epstein was very connected to the Israeli government in all sorts of ways, including through his primary benefactor, the multi-billionaire Les Wexner, who handed over to Epstein billions of dollars, it seems, and assets. It is an odd person for Chomsky to know, but at the same time, if you're one of the most intellectually heralded professors and scholars in the Boston area at one of the most prestigious schools in the world, MIT, where Chomsky spent almost his entire life as a professor of linguistics, that is the kind of person that Jeffrey Epstein tried to target and befriend to make himself feel important, to make him feel intellectually relevant. And yet, you would have thought that that revelation by itself proved that Chomsky had gone to that island multiple times and had sex with underage girls and was a pedophile. So, there has been a lot of speculative guilt by association and hysteria that has surrounded this story, such that anyone whose name appears in those files is likely to have suspicion and doubt cast on them for the rest of their life, even if the connections were innocuous. 

I'm sure part of what Trump wants to avoid is any indication that his name appears in those files because of that climate that will spill over him, including by many of his own followers. Then there are likely things in there that might, one of the reasons why investigations are typically kept secret, including grand jury proceedings, is because there are a lot of unverified accusations, but if they're published, they may seem like they have credibility. That was part of what we had to deal with the NSA, with the Snowden documents. A lot of the archives contain documents where they wanted to spy on certain people and they would speculate that those people might have ties to terrorist groups, or al-Qaeda, or Islamic extremism, or engage in other kinds of crimes unrelated to terrorism, but they were never charged with that. There was no evidence for it. It was just speculation about why the NSA thought they should spy on these people and had we published those documents with their names, we would have destroyed their reputations forever, based on accusations that were completely unvetted and just appeared in these documents. 

Clearly, Trump panicked when he learned that his name was in there. Not only did he order no more disclosures, the investigation closed, but, out of nowhere, he began asserting that the Epstein files are all a fake, are all fabricated, or at least much of them are fabricated and claimed that they were the same kind of hoax that Obama, Hillary, Biden, Jim Comey and John Brennan manufactured for Russiagate and the Steele Dossier. All of a sudden, the Epstein files went from the most pressing and significant matter, the disclosure of which would be the key ingredient to deciphering the sinister globalist elite that runs the world, to a hoax, a bunch of fake documents that never should see the light of day.

 Obviously, the only reason why Trump would suddenly concoct that excuse was because he was fearful that it would harm his reputation or the reputation of people very close to him and whom he cares about. and so he said, “No, this should never see the light of day; this is just another Democratic Party hoax that you idiots are falling for.” And that behavior obviously fuels suspicions even more, as has the subsequent reporting from The Wall Street Journal about that birthday greeting that Trump sent to Epstein, which he denies, but The Wall Street Journal reported, and then the subsequent reporting that Pam Bondi briefed him that his name appears in these documents. 

So, anytime anyone thinks about the Epstein documents for even one second, that kind of loss of faith and trust in Trump is something that, once it breaks, is very difficult to put together again, and they are desperate. I mean, the day after the Epstein files, they said, “Hey, here's the Martin Luther King files.” It's like, I guess it's good to see the Martin Luther King files, kind of like the JFK files, in that these are documents that should have been released a long time ago.” There's zero reason for secrecy. It was one of the most consequential historical events of the last 70 years in the United States. We should be able to understand what our government knows about that event. But it wasn't like anybody was so eager, anyone thought that that was the key to deciphering much of anything. It was an important historical event. From all appearances, nothing particularly surprising, shocking, or informative about any of those documents that was clearly a way of saying, “Here's a new shiny toy that you can go look at and try to forget about Epstein. 

The revelation by Tulsi Gabbard, especially in the time frame in which it occurred, most definitely, unfortunately, because as I said, they're consequential, is being contaminated by this perception that anything that the government is now throwing at you as disclosures are designed to distract you from the big whale that they've been covering up that they themselves made into the most pressing matter – JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. as well – but also the idea that they want to regain your trust by showing you that they're redirecting your attention somewhere else. So, yes, unfortunately, it does have the stench of that, but at the same time, let's talk about these documents because they are extremely revealing. 

I know Aaron Maté spent a good amount of time yesterday – he was one of the very, very few people who weren't a MAGA journalist or pundit, weren't a Trump supporter, who, from the very beginning, said, “This whole story seems journalistically dubious at best.” There were very few of us at the time doing that. Jimmy Dore was another person who did that. Matt Taibbi was another one. There were very, very few of us and we all got called fascists and Trump supporters and Russian agents for having questioned these sensationalistic conspiracy theories about the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia or the role Russia played in the 2016 election that never had evidence for them, that were all fueled by very familiar anonymous leaks from the CIA and the FBI and the rest of the national security state that hated Trump, to the papers to whom they always leak when they want to manipulate the public, which is The Washington Post and The New York Times, which then gave themselves Pulitzers for having done so. But of all those people, I think Aaron has the most granular, detailed knowledge of every document, of every form of testimony. It's something I haven't looked at in several years. We haven't spent a lot of time on Russiagate was basically debunked when Robert Mueller closed the investigation while arresting nobody on the core conspiracy that they criminally conspired with the Russians, saying they couldn't find any evidence for it. Of course, there's been no accountability; those very same people lied in 2020 when they said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, exactly in the same way. No accountability for any of that. But I haven't spent that much time engrossed in Russian documents, like I used to do all the time when I was reporting on it. But Aaron has a very still-trap memory, especially for this particular story. So, I was very glad to let him come on and talk about it in my absence. That's one of the reasons why we asked him to guest-host last night. 

So, I know he did a lot in this, but I do want to say that what was so obvious from the very beginning was that this was a very coordinated, politicized theme that emerged out of nowhere in the middle of 2016, something that the Hillary Clinton campaign, out of desperation, invented out of whole cloth. I will never forget the day when it was sort of circulating in the air. You had people like David Korn trying to insert the Steele Dossier reporting before his disclosure. “Oh, there's a document out there that everyone in Washington knows about that contains shocking revelations of Trump and Russia.” And that was all part of the effort to try to lay the foundation for this. But the Hillary Clinton campaign released this ad with this very sinister baritone, this very dark music and these very grainy photos saying, “What are Donald Trump and the Kremlin doing in secret? What is this relationship that they have?” 

I was just so amazed because not only was there no evidence for it – zero, none – it never even made sense on its own terms. Why, if the Russians wanted to hack the Podesta and the DNC emails, would they have needed the assistance of the Trump campaign? How would the Trump campaign have helped in any way in that hacking? Why would they need to do that? Why would they collaborate with Trump's campaign that way? There was never really even any evidence that Putin actually wanted Trump to win that race. If anything, a lot of people assumed that Hillary was the overwhelming favorite to win, was almost certainly going to win it. No one wanted to get on her bad side, and no one thought Donald Trump could win. The idea that the Russians would go so heavy never made much sense, but even more so there was never any evidence for it that it came from Putin, that even if the Russians had been mucking around in the election, that it came from Putin, that was sort of a big master plan that had any effect on the election; there was never any evidence for this. 

The intelligence community went all in because they were petrified of Trump. They hated Trump. They saw, correctly, that Hillary Clinton would be a very safe guardian and continuation of the status quo, which is what they saw in Biden and Kamala Harris as well. Trump, for whatever else is true about him, is very unpredictable. Sometimes, he will go to bat for the military-industrial complex and the intelligence community more aggressively than anyone else, as he's done many times, but he's also unpredictable and they want predictability, continuity, stability. The Democrats represented that, and Trump didn't. That was why they were so eager to destroy him, both in the campaign and then, sabotaging his presidency once he was inaugurated, and that's exactly what they proceeded to do with this fake story that ended up getting completely debunked and everybody just walked away from it as though it never happened. 

What these documents reveal is what we assumed at the time, which was that the Obama administration, obviously, was desperate to help Hillary. It was the CIA under John Brennan, an extremely politicized, corrupt, and dishonest actor whom Obama first had as his national security advisor and then installed as CIA chief, that led the way in concocting evidence. They had James Clapper there, too, with a history of lying. Those are the people running the national security state. And they were open, partisan. Remember, these are the same people who ended up among the 51 intelligence officials in 2020 who lied with that letter, blaming the Russians for the Hunter Biden laptop and calling into question its authenticity right before the election because they were petrified it would help Trump win and Biden lose. Their politicized motives are beyond question. 

Same with James Comey at the FBI; his hatred for Donald Trump has become legend. These were the people who took the best assessment of the U.S. Intelligence community, the analysts and the spies who were saying there's very low confidence that Russia really did anything here. We're not sure that they were the ones who did the hacking. There's no evidence that Putin even has a preference, let alone that he's pursuing some master plan to implement that preference. 

Obama basically ordered Brennan and Clapper to go back and take another look, meaning to revise what their own intelligence professionals were telling them. Exactly what happened, by the way, with the Iraq war, when there were all sorts of analysts inside the CIA telling Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, that they did not believe that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. You may remember the very bizarre story in Pat Leahy's memoir, where he says he was jogging on the street with his wife or walking on the street with this wife and these two guys who he didn't recognize came up to them as joggers and kind of whispered in Pat Lahey's ear like, hey, take a look at file number 14 in the CIA briefing that you have in the Senate.

He went and looked at it. It was filled with documents raising serious doubts about the WMD claims. And then they did it again, a few days later, and they said, “Have you taken a look at file 6?” He went there and found even more convincing evidence. He did end up voting against it but never revealed to the public that those documents were there, let alone that any of that happened, because he was too much of a coward. But he did write about it in his books. 

So, there were parts of the intelligence community, the parts that were the actual professional analysts, who resisted the idea that they were weapons of obstruction. That's when they got George Tenet, the CIA director, to say, “Oh, it's a slam dunk.” They created their own intelligence teams who were ideologically driven, who would give them what they wanted. They had Colin Powell go to the U.N. and use his credibility, squander his credibility to represent that fake evidence, that fake intelligence. 

This is exactly what happened here: the intelligence professionals with no real stake in the game, career intelligence officials, were saying, “There's really not much here, not very much at all, that we could actually provide you to bolster these conclusions.” And they just went back and found whatever they wanted and concluded whatever they wanted and started leaking it to The Washington Post and The New York Times and it became something that was considered not just possible, but basically proven truth. 

The idea that Trump and Russia were in bed together, that Putin had blackmail leverage over Trump, became the leading narrative of the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency for the first 18 months through the Mueller investigation, drowning out all of our other politics in utter and complete fraud and hoax. We now see the actual details of what happened, which, for me, at the time, were extremely obvious, extremely visible, but the rest of the media – other than the few exceptions I named, there were a few others, some right-wing reporters were doing excellent work, Molly Hemingway and Chuck Ross doing real day-to-day reporting, a couple of others as well – but most of the media just didn't tolerate any kind of questioning of the Russiagate narrative. There was no place other than Fox News to go and question it or criticize it, not in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times, or The Washington Post, not in any of the other cable shows, and anyone questioning the Russiagate narrative was expelled from left liberal precincts. It became some sort of heresy to even question it when the whole thing was a scam and a fraud from the start. 

I do not think there will be any accountability for this, in large part because, let's remember that that Supreme Court immunity case that liberals raised hell over and said was some kind of newly invented precedent to immunize Donald Trump to allow him to commit crimes in office, as I pointed out at the time, was neither new nor radical. But what it also did was immunize every other president besides Trump, past, present and future, from crimes they committed in office as well, as long as it's in the exercise of their Article II powers. That means Biden got immunized. It means George Bush got immunized. It means Barack Obama got immunized. It means whoever follows Trump got immunized. 

Whatever else is true, clearly, everything that Barack Obama is accused of having been doing was in the exercise of his Article II powers, namely, overseeing and directing the intelligence agency. Even if he did it corruptly, even if he did it criminally, the scope of the immunity from the Supreme Court was so broad that even manipulating intelligence is not subject to criminal prosecution because that would be a violation of the separation of powers by having the judiciary punish presidents for the exercise of their Article II powers. That's what the Supreme Court decision was. 

Theoretically, John Brennan or others in the intelligence community, James Clapper, people inside the Obama White House could theoretically be prosecuted, but the history of the expanded Article II powers that long predated this immunity decision that led to it, as I pointed out at the time, as they documented at great length, despite it being picked up as some brand new, radical new idea just to protect Trump, in fact, it was the logical conclusion of the expansion of executive power. The immunity provided to them makes it extremely unlikely that any of these people is going to be held criminally responsible. There are questions of Statute of Limitations, even if they could be held criminally liable, for example, for perjury, we're talking now about nine years ago, events from nine, eight, seven years ago, a lot of the Statute of Limitations have already elapsed. 

But at the very least, this should be considered a nail in the coffin, not just of the fact that this was a fraud perpetrated on the American people for a long time, using the abuses of the intelligence community to do so, but that it was very deliberate, it was very knowing, it was very conscious, by the people at the highest levels of our government. It's just yet another case where the most damaging and the most extreme abrasive hoaxes happen when the intelligence community, the White House and their media partners unite to disseminate lies to the American public day after day, week after week, month after month, that they constantly reinforce. 

And yeah, some of them are trying to draw this distinction between “having Russia hack the election” in terms of whether they hacked the voting systems and altered the results versus whether they hacked the election metaphorically by hacking the DNC and Podesta's emails and then changing the course of the election. But at the time, that distinction was never drawn. There was a reason they repeated over and over and over; there are montages people have made, of every major media outlet, of every major figure of politicians in the Democratic Party, over and over, obviously through a coordinated script, saying the Russians hacked our election. And the message got to the American people: 70% of Americans two years later in polling believed that Hillary Clinton was the rightful winner of the 2016 election, but that the Russians had hacked into our electoral system and changed the voting outcome. 

You may recall the very notorious incident at The Intercept: a person inside the government named Reality Winner leaked to The Intercept a document and The Intercept handled it extremely carelessly. They allowed people to believe that I was the one who did it and oversaw it and, in fact, I hated this story from the beginning. I didn't even believe it should be worked on because the document was so unreliable. But they mishandled it to such an extent because they were so eager to get it published, to show the media that, despite my constant skepticism, vocal, vehement, constant skepticism about Russiagate, that they were going to join the real part of the media, and impress The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NBC News, by showing that they were willing to do a major story, bolstering the Russiagate, fraud.  

The whole point of that document was a very speculative memo that had been written, suggesting that the Russians had succeeded in tests on how to tap into our electoral system to basically bolster the idea that the Russians succeeded in changing vote totals to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. That was what the big, huge, important disclosure from Reality Winner was, that The Intercept fell lock, stock and barrel because they wanted to. 

But even on the question not the weather they hacked the election in terms of the electoral system and changing vote totals, but in the metaphoric way, they're now trying to mean that they intended it to be, namely, that the Russians played a key role in that election, that it was Vladimir Putin's determination to help Trump win, that they hacked the DNC and Podesta emails to help that Kremlin goal that there was very little to no evidence for that either, and the intelligence community was extremely reluctant and dubious to endorse it, basically were forced to, when Obama ordered them to go back and make sure that they had released something before his leaving that allowed the media to believe that this was the overwhelming consensus of the intelligence committee. 

That is a gigantic scandal. It's not surprising. Something I believed for a long time is exactly what happened. It seemed so obvious at the time. Probably, other than the Snowden story, maybe the big investigation we did here in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that resulted in Lula being freed from prison, I can't recall any story, any reporting I did that generated more contempt and hatred and pushback because it was a religion to the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. And not just the partisans of the Democratic Party, but most of the liberal left part of the party, though they deny it now, bought into this Russiagate story as well. And I do think it's so refreshing anytime you get disclosures of classified documents that are concealing, not information that might harm the American public or the national security of the United States, that they're disclosed, but that will harm the reputation of people in charge because it shows corruption that they abused the secrecy powers to conceal. 

Unfortunately, there is this skepticism that it's being done to distract from Epstein and partially it probably is. And there's going to be very little coverage of this because the media outlets that would cover it, that should cover it, are the ones who are the leading perpetrators of it. How can they without admitting massive guilt? They're never going to do it, they still haven't done it to this day, despite being caught lying repeatedly that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a much more straightforward lie that they got caught disseminating over and over before the election. So, I don't expect this to do much. 

You can see the only people who are talking about this are the people who were skeptical of the Russiagate story from the start. A lot of vindication is definitely deserved. People should claim it. It's an important story to explain to the public. But the people who really deserve accountability for this probably aren't going to get any and that's one of the major problems of our system. And until about a month ago, that's what the MAGA movement was saying was so important about the Epstein files as well, that people engaged in wrongdoing will face no accountability because these documents have been hidden. It seems like these documents are going to remain hidden, even more so because of the new determination by President Trump, for whatever his reasons, to keep them hidden and even to disparage their reliability or authenticity, even if they did get released. 

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All right, Columbia University and the White House announced a major new deal with the Trump Administration to restore their funding. The Trump White House cut off all research funding for Columbia, threatened to punish it in all sorts of other ways based on alleged claims that they tolerate antisemitism, that they allow Jewish students to be harassed, all those claims that the Trump administration has been making gain greater control of the curriculum at colleges, speech codes at colleges, faculty hiring at colleges. Columbia capitulated as it was clear they were going to do and they made this big announcement today.

@samsonite about that deal asked this: 

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God, you must be very well-spoken, very polite if you have to apologize for “what the hell is going on here” and say, “pardon my language.” For a lot of people, that is actually very elevated language, so congratulations on that. 

And then, there's a related issue that I'll get to with this next question, but the Columbia deal basically doesn't make sense on its own, because the idea is it's a deal to restore financing of the U.S. government to Colombia, even though part of the deal is that Colombia has to pay $200 million to the Trump administration, kind of as a punishment or a fee, they're accepting that they'll lose $200 million for all that naughty and bad things that they did in allowing too much criticism of Israel, and allowing protests to get out of control in the view of the Trump administration – in general, just allowing too much antisemitic thoughts and ideas and expression to the point that Jewish students are being endangered. There are also lawsuits brought by Jewish students against Columbia that Columbia is now agreeing to pay millions of dollars in order to settle. 

So, congratulations to the very put-upon, marginalized and oppressed Jewish students at Columbia who are now going to get major payoffs for all the hardship and the harassment and the oppression and marginalization they had to endure from seeing protests that made them uncomfortable. 

You can believe that Columbia University allowed the protest to get out of hand if you want. We've gone over this many times before. The history of student protests in this country has been an iconic part of the college experience. The protest against the Vietnam War in the ‘60s were infinitely more disruptive and radical than the protests throughout 2023, mostly into 2024, at most campuses where the resistance was largely symbolic. The campus protests at almost every school, including Columbia, were filled with Jewish students themselves, despite all the speech about how these protests were dangerous and harassing for Jewish students; huge numbers of Jews composed these protests and these encampments. We interviewed several of them to the point that every Friday night, inside the Columbia encampments, supposedly the most antisemitic one, the most dangerous one, with a history at the school of antisemitism, there were Shabbat dinners for all the protesters where Muslim, Christian and Jewish students, as part of these protests, would all get together for Shabbat dinner. They celebrated Muslim holidays and Christian holidays together. 

So, there was a huge exaggeration, which there always is, of any threat anytime the government wants to seize power over our private institutions or academic institutions. There's also a lot of misconception about the funding that comes from the U.S. government to these universities. The government doesn’t fund universities and just say, here's $500 million for you to use how you want. They task these universities who can attract the greatest minds from all over the world to pay for research facilities and labs, to research cures and treatments, to research all sorts of technology, including military technology. That's where a lot of military technology comes from. It's not a charity. It's being done to keep the United States competitive. A lot of the research ends up being done in our elite universities and never before has this money come with attachments about what views can be heard on campus or what kinds of professors can teach certain things and how they have to be approved by the government. 

So, two of the things that Columbia University has done that jeopardize free speech rights and academic freedom, not for foreign students and not in ways that pertain to the right to protest, it has nothing to do with the protest, it has nothing do with foreign students, it's purely about the expression of ideas, the peaceful expression of ideas in a classroom, in a student newspaper or what can be taught in schools. Part of it is that the curriculum for certain departments, obviously beginning with the Middle East Studies Department, which is the one of greatest interest to the government because that's where Israel can be criticized and discussed, now has to be subject to the review of the federal government. And on top of that, and even worse, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia adopt what Harvard has already adopted under government pressure and other universities as well, which is a radically expanded hate speech code that outlaws and bans ideas that have always been permissible to express at our leading universities under the First Amendment and the basic notions of academic freedom, but that are not outlawed. 

You're not allowed, for example, to call Israel a racist endeavor, even though you're allowed to call the United States a racist endeavor, even though you're allowed call any other country a racist endeavor, just not Israel. You're not allowed to say that Jews played a role in killing Jesus, even though Christians have believed this for centuries: not allowed to say. It's not like you can say it and then other people get to debate it. That's now deemed antisemitic. You can't subject Israel to criticism that you can't prove you subject other countries equally to the exact same criticism. So, like if you criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide, but you haven't said the same thing about some faction in the Sudan that does the same things, you can be guilty of antisemitism. Even you may not talk about the Sudan because your government has no role in it, while your government funds and arms what's happening and what's being done in Gaza. 

Suddenly, you have this burden of proof when you criticize Israel to show that you criticize other countries in exactly the same way. You don't have that burden to prove for any other country. You can criticize China without having to prove that you criticized other countries in the same ways. The burden is only for Israel. You're not allowed to say that certain Jewish individuals seem to have more loyalty to Israel than they do to the United States, even though it's so clearly true. People like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss and so many others, you are not allowed to say that anymore, not allowed to express that. If you do, you're now in violation of the expanded hate speech code. And the whole point of this is to severely chill what can be said to young people about Israel, what young people can say about Israel on college campuses, about risking punishment. 

I want you to think about that for a minute. How unbelievably severe that is, how seriously grave an assault on free speech that is, not in defense of marginalized American groups, which is bad enough, but in defense of a foreign country and its interests and those who are loyal to it. Remember, the Trump movement spent a decade viciously mocking the idea that marginalized groups, minority groups and college campuses were intended to feel safe by banning ideas that make them uncomfortable. Now, that's exactly what the Trump administration required Columbia to do in exchange for having its research funding restored – and Harvard as well. 

What's happening is everybody sees the same polling data that we've shown you, that huge numbers of people in the United States have dramatically revised toward the negative side, their views of Israel and the U.S. relationship to Israel. And there's panic over that among Israel and its loyalists in the United States, who are reacting to that by trying to squash and destroy any place that allows criticism of Israel. Remember, the reason why the TikTok ban passed was not because of the China issue, which never got enough votes or near enough. It only got enough votes after October 7, when enough Democrats got convinced that one of the reasons why so many young people had turned against Israel and were against the war in Gaza was because TikTok was allowing too much anti-Israel pro-Palestinian sentiment to be expressed and they wanted to either force TikTok to close because of that or to force it to be transferred to a corporation that would be much more aggressive about censoring material that the government wanted suppressed. 

Right now, there's this amazing thing happening where Paramount is involved in a major merger. That's the parent company of CBS News and other networks, as well, and the idea of the merger, basically, is that Larry Ellison's son – Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who's worth $30, $35 billion – his son, the heir to the Ellison fortune and the Ellinson family are fanatical supporters of Israel, are buying CBS News, with “60 Minutes” being one of the examples and “60 Minutes” has been widely criticized for having broadcast a lot of reports that are very pro-Israel, but also some that were critical. And not only is he now taking control of CBS, but he's negotiating with Bari Weiss to buy her Israeli government state outlet, the Free Press, for something like $200 million. And not only will the Free Press then become part of CBS News, but she will have some sort of ombudsman role or even a correspondent role at “60 Minutes.” 

So, you see this change in public opinion about Israel, and then you see the response, which is attacking all of our major institutions, imposing censorship on them, and using billionaire wealth to buy up these media outlets, and then installing within them people who are going to ensure that the content is completely pro-Israel. I hear all the time, they ask, like, “Why do you talk about Israel so much? Why are you so obsessed with Israel?” Obsessed with Israel? These are the people who are passing laws and bills and doing things every single day on behalf of Israel. The people inside government, in the largest corporations, and now in our academic institutions. 

Of course, I'm going to report on it. I'm going to focus on it a lot more when our government is paying for what I think is the greatest atrocity in humanitarian crime of the 21st century, which is the genocide and mass starvation in Gaza. But beyond that, it has all kinds of repercussions here at home. And they never stop. And here's just one more example. 

This is from someone called @YourLastUberDriver trying to think of what the implications of that might be. But I guess it's inspiring in the sense that if you're afraid there's a disappearance of Uber drivers, this person who asked this question will be there toward the end. They're going to be your last Uber driver. And they seem very wise, very reliable, so perhaps that's good. 

@YourLastUberDriver says this: 

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Yes, there is bipartisan legislation designed to impose greater censorship powers over the internet, over Big Tech, which we all agreed, I thought, was a terrible thing. It has bipartisan support. It's led by Congressman Josh Gottheimer of New, who's a fanatical supporter of Israel, he's a Democrat from New Jersey, as well as Don Bacon, who is a Republican from Nebraska, who is also a fanatical Israel supporter. And it comes from the ADL, whose job is to censor American discourse on behalf of Israel. 

Here's Congressman Gottheimer and Congressman Don Bacon at a George Newt conference, heralding their censorship legislation to force Big Tech to censor what they regard as antisemitic. 

Video. Josh Gottheimer, Don Bacon, AD. July 24, 2025.

I want to just emphasize that last point. He's talking about his legislation and then he says what he's particularly proud of. Wow, that's something to be so proud of. You're introducing a censorship law for American citizens, and you have the approval and background of a group with a long, aggressive tradition of demanding that people be fired or censored if they become critical of Israel. Congratulations. 

The Republican Congressman Bacon is a member of Congress who receives massive funding from AIPAC, needless to say, people are offended by his views. He's a public figure and he gets criticized on Twitter, and he sees it. People are calling him a Zionist, someone who's too loyal to Israel. He doesn't like it. And now he wants to enact a bill drafted by the ADL to force Big Tech to censor what he considers antisemitism. We don't think there's anti-black racism all over Twitter. Go look at Ilhan Omar's tweets and things that people say to her in response, or Jasmine Crockett. Go look at what Pete Buttigieg gets. You don't think there are all sorts of very anti-gay animus directed at him. Every single person in public life, no matter who you are, deals with that. Most of us are adults. We understand that it's actually healthier to allow free speech. I mean, if we hear things we really dislike, that are really ugly, it's in our bloodstream as Americans to kind of believe that about free speech, that yes, you get insults and all sorts of vituperative comments about things about you and who you are. But most of us don't have the impulse to go and censor that. And it's especially important to allow the public to express criticisms of political figures, elected officials in Washington, who are doing something like financing and arming a war. You're allowed to speak aggressively toward them, even if they don't like it. He's not even Jewish. Josh Gottheimer is Jewish. Congressman Bacon is not even Jewish. He's like, “I'm getting so much antisemitism in my Twitter feed.” Who cares? Stop reading it if it really bothers you. But passing a bill to force Big Tech to censor the stuff that you think is unpleasant!

Why is antisemitic speech more disturbing to you than anti-Black speech or anti-Muslim speech or anti-LGBT speech or anti-immigrant speech, which is also all over the place? My view on all of it is the same, which is that it's not the role of the government nor Big Tech to censor any of it. But this is what's happening throughout the democratic world. It's particularly happening in the EU, Canada, and, worst of all, in Brazil. 

We have a First Amendment that makes it more difficult, and that's why they're trying to outsource it to Big Tech. This is exactly what I thought we were all so angry about: what the Biden administration did when they forced Big Tech to censor dissent on COVID, on the 2020 election and on Ukraine. And that's what I mean. I'm the one obsessed with Israel when you have everyday members of Congress like this standing up and introducing new bills on behalf of a foreign government that attack our free speech rights as Americans. Yeah, I'm going to talk about that a lot. 

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All right, here is @AntiWarism who says: 

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Yes, this was the idea of “cancel culture” and the objections to it. It wasn't about government attacks on free speech, which is a violation of the First Amendment. It was the ideal that if you express views that are disliked by mainstream thought, that now you get fired, you get canceled, and it happens not just to people in prominent positions, but also to people on lower-level positions. 

So, here's the example. Honestly, I hate this whole format that has become popular, this Jubilee format. I can't stand how Mehdi Hassan debates. He wrote a book saying, “I'm the greatest debater” and really all he does is just filibuster and talk over people. Maybe you get out four or five words until he starts speaking over you and he thinks that's somehow an effective way of debating. 

But here's the person who basically self-identified as a fascist when Mehdi accused him of being one; he then lost his job. I think it's like a 21-year-old kid, all these people at this place were quite young and here's what happened. 

Video. Mehdi Hassan, Connor Estelle, Jubilee. July 30, 2025.

Can I understand why an employer would want to disassociate themselves from that person, saying that in that manner? Yes, I can understand that.  But I also think that if we have this climate where people cannot say what they believe unless it's completely acceptable to power factions or mainstream forces, that even though we have a First Amendment that restricts what the government can do in theory, oftentimes, cultural repression and social ostracization are much more potent and effective tools for controlling ideas – in fact, George Orwell has wrote a preface to Animal Farm, where he basically said that although the Soviet Union has very overt forms of repression and censorship, if you criticize Stalin, the KGB shows up at your house and takes you away and sends you to a gulag, in Siberia or whatever, that actually the British form of censorship is much more effective. It's basically diluting people into thinking that they're free, but making sure they get fired, they're unemployable, they don't get heard in the media, if they express any opinions outside the very narrow range of accepted opinions. Ironically, his preface couldn't be published because it was too sensitive. It seemed like almost too pro-Russian at a time when the West was entering the Cold War. His preface was censored, but it's now available; you can go read it online. I think it's absolutely right. 

There were all these examples in the Black Lives Matter movement, or Me Too, when low-level workers got fired for any kind of questioning or deviation from the right language. They had a truck driver who supposedly made the okay sign at a traffic stop, which was interpreted as a white supremacist message, and he got fired. Media outlets were doxing people for comments they were leaving to get them fired. That climate is incredibly repressive, intimidating, but after October 7, huge numbers of people in media, Hollywood and politics and journalism were fired for expressing criticism of Israel and their destruction of Gaza in academia as well. And suddenly, all the concerns about cancel culture disappeared. 

So, if you're 21 years old and you basically say “I want Trump to be a king and an autocrat and that's because I'm a fascist, self-identifying as a fascist is going to fall rather shockingly on the ears of a lot of people in the United States. And if you're an employer who deals with the public and you're a private company, especially if you are in a certain community and deal with a certain group of people, it might be very harmful to your business interests to have somebody like that employed. So I understand why that could happen. 

Again, if this were an isolated case, I would say: when you live in a society, you do have to kind of think about how you express yourself and what effect it has on others; if you decide you don't, then you probably are going to suffer consequences. It’s just a lesson you learn in life, living in a society; you have to accommodate, to some extent, how you're perceived.

But I also think that it can be very dangerous if it becomes too much of an automatic reaction, which, in a lot of different ways, I think it became, and a lot of the right was very opposed to these sorts of things when it was conservatives who were largely the target of it, and then, after October 7, a lot of that changed. People started applauding much more draconian forms of cancel culture like Bill Ackman, spearheading and organizing a blacklist among the most powerful law firms, Wall Street banks and hedge funds to vow never to hire undergraduate kids, 18 to 22, who sign a letter condemning Israel for their use of indiscriminate violence in Gaza, trying to make sure they're unemployable and having mass firings of people who express similar views. I noticed the disappearance of the concerns over cancel culture when that happened. And so, if you're going to be concerned with cancel culture and you don't apply it equally, it's like anything, not really a principle. 

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All right, last question is from @KCM71, who says this:

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Let me say, I find this dynamic so fascinating that whenever the American left is faced with a nominee from the Democratic Party that they hate, they are Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or countless senators or whomever, they're told it's your obligation to support and vote for whoever your party nominates, whether you like them or not. But the minute there's a nominee of the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party nominates who the establishment hates and the left likes, that obligation disappears. 

I still believe, in 2016, had the DNC not cheated and Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination, Democratic Party elites absolutely would have done everything to prevent him from being president, even if it meant electing Trump because what party leaders typically fear the most is the loss of their prerogatives within their own party. They would rather lose and keep control of the party than win if it means this shifting to some new group or some new generation. 

We especially saw that when Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party and the vast majority of Blairites and people in the center and the center-right of that party, overwhelmingly and overtly sought to destroy him, not to get a new party leader in, but to ensure that he lost the election. They would rather have lost to Boris Johnson, had Boris Johnson become prime minister, which is what happened, than lose control of the Labour Party by winning under Jeremy Corbyn. 

This is why I don't think that the Democratic establishment and elites believe they can stop Zohran at this point, in part because the alternatives are just so weak. I mean, you have Andrew Cuomo completely plagued by all sorts of scandal, just old, not really having anything to do with New York City, clearly not even wanting to be mayor; you have Eric Adams who caught red-handed taking bribes from Turkey and was only let go because he did a deal with the Trump administration to allow ICE to operate in New York City and then Curtis Sliwa, who's not a serious candidate, but are going to divide the vote enough to ensure that Zohran will win – not 100% sure anything could happen, but I think they're kind of resigned to it. 

But they also are afraid, more so – you see this with Hakeem Jeffries: Zohran Mamdani won Hakeem Jeffries’ congressional district by 12 points and yet, Hakeem Jeffries, the head of the Democratic House caucus in New York, refuses to endorse Zohran Mamdani. Left-wing people to this day got angry that Bernie Sanders didn't endorse Hillary Clinton quickly enough. He went around the country campaigning for her, but they say he didn't do it enthusiastically enough. 

But look at the prerogatives they take for themselves and there's never a point at which the left says, God, these people hate us so much. Like, why are we giving them our support when they so blatantly subvert and sabotage our candidates. You would think they would just have some dignity and finally leave. Jeremy Corbyn finally left the Labour Party, but only this week. He and a much younger, leftist member of parliament whose parents or grandparents were Pakistani immigrants to the U.K. – but she was born in the U.K. as her parents were third generation now, U.K. citizens – the two of them are the co-leaders of this new party in protest of the Labour Party's support for Israel and other policies as well because they concluded that there's no way within the Labour Party to actually reform. They will sabotage you if you try. 

And this is something we saw with AOC, when AOC was running and won her primary, in 2018, against a very senior member of the Democratic leadership, Joe Crowley, who was really in line to become House Speaker once Nancy Pelosi left, she sounded all these radical notes. I interviewed her. I was amazed at how thoughtful she seemed to be about making sure that her primary criticisms are directed mostly at the Democratic Party, how she understood that her main job had to be to go in and change the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party, so that there were two actual parties with two different sets of views. She gets in and she understands that to play the game, to get ahead, to gain power, you have to compromise constantly, become a good Democrat. She's barely distinguishable from Nancy Pelosi at this point. Remember, AOC just voted last week to send $500 million in military aid to Israel while calling it a genocide. Even while four members of her own party, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Al Green, all voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene's amendment to block that money from going there. AOC voted to send $500 million to Israel. 

One of the things that got my attention about her in 2018 was when she said – this was at the time when the Palestinians were doing their peaceful march up to the border fence, and the Israelis started just sniping them to death – and AOC said, “It's time for the Democratic Party to stop supporting these grotesque human rights abuses by Israel.” And I thought, OK, that's interesting to me. And now, here she is just a few years later, sending $500 million to Israel while pretending to believe that Israel is engaged in a genocide. 

So, there is the very real question of whether somebody who's very politically ambitious, as Zohran Mamdani is, can possibly change anything with any party system that is designed to destroy any challenge to its leadership, to its core dogma, to its donor base. And you see him making some concessions already. And while I still hope he wins given the alternatives, I mean the part of the debate alone where they said, “What's your first foreign trip going to be? And they all said, “We're going to go to the Holy Land and we're going to go right to Israel and we going to take our first trip to Israel” and he said, “I'm going to stay at home and work on the affordability issues facing the people of our city.” That alone, that kind of politics – as mayor of an American city, my job is to focus on the American people and not go pay some homage to Israel or to some other foreign country or that he understands that affordability and economic populism is the key issue, not culture war stuff, which is what he ran on in his campaign – those are the kind of things, that populist messages, that I think we need more of, both on the left and the right. But if you ask me, do I think he's going to immediately start compromising? Then my answer is probably going to be yes, because he's going to have to work with the Democratic Party infrastructure to get anything done. 

I think I might have talked about this before, but I'll just tell this quick story. When my husband got elected to become an elected official and got into elected office, first as a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro, and then as a member of the Brazilian Congress, I saw this firsthand. He wanted to go and introduce packages and laws and projects to help the people of his community, the people who voted for him, and whom he felt an obligation to serve. The only reason why he was interested in politics was to try to change people's material lives for the better. And then you get there, and you hear like, “Oh, that seems like a good bill. We're not sure we can get it to the fore, though. But if you're willing to support this project of mine, it's kind of corrupt, like just about greasing the wheels, then, maybe, you'll be able to get your bill to the fore and we support you.” You're suddenly faced with this choice: do I now start compromising and becoming part of the system in the hope that I can actually get the things done that I want to get done or do I just stand on principle and say, no, I'm not going to play your game, even if it means I can never get my things to the floor? Maybe in 10 years you can use your charisma and ability to get a platform. 

When you first get there, you're faced with these huge obstacles where, if you want to do anything, you have to play the game. And then, at some point, you have to consider how much are you really compromising to serve your original goals, or how much are you now compromising because you want to get on the key committees, and what are the motives that you want to get on the keys committees, is it because that's a better path to power? It's a very, very difficult road to navigate. Even if you arrive with the best of intentions, you find yourself in this corrupt, sleazy system constructed to co-opt you and to basically get you to play the game that you were running to destroy and it's very hard once you're immersed in it to see what the real principles are and what the real compromises are that are going to actually undermine what you set out to be. I think the only way to do that is by avoiding the structures that are already so fundamentally rotted and so fundamentally corrupt that they're going to contaminate you the more you attach yourself to them. 

I think being part of the Democratic Party is going to guarantee that you end up on the AOC to Pelosi path. Remember, Nancy Pelosi, when she started a career from San Francisco, was considered way to the left in the Democratic Party and by the end, she had no ideology. She was just a manager, like a technocrat, supporting wars and Wall Street and finance, insider trading. That's the path that you end up on and that the system is guaranteed to lure you into. You have to be someone who just has a personality that's very combative, very willing to sacrifice your own ambition and self-interest in career pursuits to combat. 

And if you ask me if that's Zohran Mamdani, I don't know him well enough to say one way or the other for sure, but it doesn't seem like that's what he is to me. Kind of like what Obama pretended to be and then wasn't. Every 10 years the Democratic Party offers a new person like this: here's the exciting one, here's a new one, here's the one who's really going to be on your side. We know you hate our party, we know you hit our dogma, our leadership, but look, we found something really new and exciting for you and it keeps people, young people and people identified as the left, on that path to identifying with the Democratic Party. 

Oftentimes, the Democratic Party changes very little; usually, that's the case. Everybody likes to keep up hope. Nobody likes to be defeatist or nihilistic but wants to believe that there's something hopeful. I'm the same way. Why would I wake up and focus on these sorts of things every day unless I believe that there were prospects and hope for positive change? 

I've seen positive change. You look at history, you look at current politics. It can happen. Changes in public opinion can happen. You want to believe that if you didn't believe that you would go do something else, if you thought it was all futile. But the road of being lured in by outsiders to the Democratic Party who seek to get into the Democratic Party and assume power within it is one fraught with almost nothing but disappointment, defeat and betrayal, ultimately, a draining of any belief that that continues to be the correct path. And people want to believe that. So, they keep kind of being vulnerable to that sales pitch. 

Maybe Zohran will be different. It's possible. But I certainly won't be shocked sitting here six months from now or a year from now if someone comes and shows me or I see for myself all the evidence that he's basically morphing into AOC and then Nancy Pelosi, that will not shock me in the slightest. 

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Aaron Maté on More Russiagate Fallout, Protests in Ukraine and Israel's Strikes on Syria with Special Guests John Solomon, Marta Havryshko, and Joshua Landis
System Update #491

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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I'm Aaron Maté, sitting in for Glenn Greenwald. 

Tonight, we'll be looking at three major stories: the latest in Russiagate and the latest as well in Ukraine and Syria. There's a through line to all three of these stories. That's the CIA. That is right. From Russiagate to Ukraine to Syria, a lot of the mess that we're still dealing with after so many years in all these major stories runs through the CIA. 

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Interview: John Solomon 

During Donald Trump's first term, the dominant story of his presidency was the allegation that he had secretly conspired with Russia as part of a massive Russian interference campaign to install him in office. A lot of this story was fueled by intelligence officials who fueled the Russiagate conspiracy theory with anonymous stories to the press. Well, now we all know, after multiple investigations, that a lot of it was a scam and we continue to learn more. The new Director of National Intelligence under Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, has been declassifying critical information on the Russiagate story and unveiling a brand-new batch of newly disclosed records. Tulsi Gabbard accused Barack Obama of being a part of a plot against Trump. 

Video. Tulsi Gabbard, White House July 23, 2025.

So, that's Tulsi Gabbard accusing Barack Obama and other officials in his administration of being part of a coup against Trump. 

I think the language is a little bit too strong. I also think that the administration has messed up some of the messaging here in putting out the Russiagate documents. They've conflated, for example, vote hacking and email hacking. Email hacking was the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate and if you listen to the messaging that Tulsi Gabbard has been putting out, she's conflating the two. 

So, there have been some mistakes in putting out this story, and it also comes out of time when there's a lot of anger at the Trump administration for reneging on their promise to bring disclosure to the story of Jeffrey Epstein, which Donald Trump is very much implicated in. However, that does not negate the fact that there are really important disclosures in these new Russiagate documents. 

I have a brand-new article at RealClear Investigations talking about what I think is the essential story here, which is that the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate, along with the conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots, which nobody believes anymore. But the other major story was that Russia waged a massive interference campaign, and the heart of that supposed interference campaign was that Russian stole emails from the Democratic Party and released them via WikiLeaks. 

Well, if you read the new documents, you will see that U.S. intelligence officials who lodged this Russian email hacking allegation buried the fact that there was dissent at the highest levels that Russia was responsible for the hack and release of these emails. The NSA and the FBI, two premier U.S. intelligence agencies, expressed low confidence in that Russian hacking allegation. That assessment from the FBI and the NSA, which was suppressed until now, until Tulsi Gabbard just released it. 

So even though the messaging has been screwed up, the disclosures are important, and transparency is paramount because whether you want to think this was a coup or not, this was an attempt to frame Trump and his campaign as Russian agents and accuse Russia of a massive interference campaign that was aimed at destroying American democracy. There have been many consequences to this Russiagate scandal, including fueling tensions with Russia, and I think helping to lead to the current crisis we're in inside Ukraine. 

To discuss all this and more, I am joined by one of the premier journalists on the Russiagate story. John Solomon is the founder of the website, Just the News, a veteran reporter who's previously worked for The Washington Post and Associated Press, and he's been on the Russiagate story since day one. 

Aaron Maté: John Solomon, thanks so much for joining us on System Update. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, great to be with you. Great to join you. 

 

Aaron Maté: You have covered Russiagate extensively, and we've just gotten a series of really important document releases declassified by the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. For people not following this story as closely as you and I have, what do you think is most important to know, and what revelations stand out to you? 

 

John Solomon: What we now know is that both our intelligence and our law enforcement communities were hijacked by political operatives in the 2016 election to take the normal process of how you would evaluate election interference, which goes on, by the way, in every election with multiple countries, and tried to turn it into a political weapon and to create the perception in the public that Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton. 

That concept starts with Hillary Clinton herself. The intelligence committee intercepts a conversation indicating that Hillary personally approved a plan in mid-July to hang a fake Russian shingle on Donald Trump's campaign house, basically, play a dirty trick and make it look like Vladimir and Donald were together in the election. The President of the United States at the time, Barack Obama, was personally warned about this on or about July 25 by John Brennan. Then, five days later, the president does not stop the FBI when the FBI decides to open up on that allegation. Between July and November, there's a concerted effort to get an FBI investigation going, to get a FISA warrant going, to then leak the information to try to get voters to believe this false story that was an illusion of the Clinton campaign. 

Donald Trump still wins the election, not with Vladimir Putin's help, but with the help of the American people. In December, with Hillary Clinton chastened by her loss, the intelligence community, working with John Brennan, tries to create a plausible explanation that Hillary only lost because Vladimir Putin had hijacked the election for Donald Trump. And they do this over the objections of career CIA officials. They do this in violation of the Intelligence Committee's directive rules; they do it by relying on a document that, by December 2016, the Steele Dossier, we all know it now, had been fully discredited, yet is used to drive a conclusion that Vladimir Putin was trying specifically to help Donald Trump win. It's really dramatic how it happens. 

On December 8, 2016, after the election, the Intelligence Committee was going to come to Barack Obama and say, “Hey, we assess that Russia, like it always did, gotten meddled in the election a little bit, but it did not have a favorite candidate.” In fact, it so much didn't have a favored candidate that it dropped out of its active measures, its “dirty tricks,” its intelligence, in October, the very month, if you were going to try to influence the election, you would most be active, right? If you wanted Hillary or Donald Trump to win, October's the month when people are making up their minds: that's when you would do your most active things. Putin pulls out of the election in October. 

On December 8, they were going to tell Barack Obama that that briefing had been canceled. The next day, Barack Obama orders a new review, led only by John Brennan, James Comey, and the NSA director, and within a few short weeks, they flip-flop the conclusions and say, “Oh, we've now decided, magically, that Vladimir Putin was specifically trying to help Donald Trump.” The only way they can get there, by today's explosive revelations that Tulsi Gabbard gave us, is because they have to use the Steele Dossier, which by that time has been discredited over and over again. Bruce Ohr told them in August that it was not to be relied on. The CIA warned the FBI in September that Steele's network of sources had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence. He needed to be reevaluated. The FBI fires Christopher Steele after catching him leaking the existence of the investigation and his dossier in November, and by December, the FBI has completed a spreadsheet of every sentence of the Steele dossier and concluded they can't corroborate it, or they've debunked every sentence. And despite all that, they decide to use it over the rules of the Intelligence Committee to plant this dirty secret or to plant a lie on the American people that Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump win the election. 

 

Aaron Maté: I'm personally skeptical that there even was any kind of serious Russian meddling operation at all. There were some Facebook ads, we know about that, and some memes, but in terms of the email hacking, I am even more skeptical now after seeing the newly declassified intelligence. But before I get into that with you, I want to go back to July, because it's really important what you discussed initially. 

So, in July, we learned years later, that the Obama administration got a warning that Russia was aware of a plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia and despite that, as you explained, the Obama administration still let the FBI go ahead with its collusion investigation. And what we also learned way later was that weeks before the FBI opened up its fake collusion investigation into Trump and Russia, Victoria Nuland, who was then a senior State Department official, authorized the FBI to go and collect the Steele dossier, which is the Clinton campaign-funded collection of conspiracy theories. But yet the FBI wants us to believe that it had nothing to do with their decision to open up Crossfire Hurricane, the Trump-Russia occlusion probe. But on the issue of this warning by Brennan, of the so-called Clinton plan intelligence… 

 

John Solomon: Let me stop here, just for one second, because you just said something pretty profound. It's really important to realize that after they're warned that Hillary Clinton's going to plant the dirty trick, the FBI's FISA warrant relies on the direct evidence of that dirty trick. The Steele dossier was a big part of the dirty trick that the Clinton campaign was planting, along with the fake Alpha Bank story. The FBI takes the very fruit of what they know to be a dirty trick because they were warned, and they use it to predicate the investigation. That's what makes it more than just bumbling and stumbling. That's why a lot of people like Kash Patel, who's now open to conspiracy case, believe it was criminal in nature. 

 

Aaron Maté: Absolutely. Okay, speaking of criminal, in early September, weeks after John Brennan shared this information that Russia is aware of a Clinton plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia. All of a sudden, John Brennan sends a criminal referral or an investigative referral to the FBI, to James Comey, to Peter Strzok, warning them about this Clinton plan intelligence, this Clinton plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia. And yet nothing happens, and in fact, years later, James Comey is asked about this in Congress, and he claims it doesn't ring any bells. 

What do you think is going on here? So, Brennan received his intelligence, he warns Obama about it, then in September, why does he all of a sudden send a referral to the FBI? Do you buy James Comey's claim that it doesn't ring any bells? He doesn't remember receiving that referral. 

 

John Solomon: On multiple instances over the last four or five years, including this week when Barack Obama said, “I don't know how they can say I was part of a conspiracy,” I kept thinking back to the figure on the old Hogan Heroes TV show, Sgt. Schultz, who always used to say, “I know nothing,” even though he knew everything that was going on in the camp. 

It's important to realize that these statements are not true, based on the emails, text messages and other evidence we have. Everybody was read into these different developments as they were happening. There's no chance that James Comey can't remember that he was warned that Hillary Clinton was going to hang a dirty shingle on Donald Trump's house called Russia collusion. You just would remember something that important. If it didn't get to him, it would be one of the greatest failures of the FBI. You'd tell your director things of this importance. 

Everybody claims a lack of knowledge, even though they're present for the moments when these happen. Let's take Barack Obama's denial this week, because it can be disassembled so quickly. Barack Obama is basically like, “This is a political weapon; I didn't do anything. I don't even know what they're talking about.” He's in the meeting with Brennan in July when he's told Hillary Clinton's going to do this. In December, he orders the re-review after the Intelligence Committee comes to a conclusion that's different. In January, just 15 days before Donald Trump was going to take office, he presided over the meeting in the White House with Joe Biden, where they were trying to figure out how they can keep the investigation of Mike Flynn open, the incoming national security advisor. 

That is so significant, because one day before, on January 4, the FBI had decided that Mike Flynn had not engaged in a single act of criminality and that he should be cleared in the investigation against him that was launched during the election, it should be shut down. And there is Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the FBI gang trying to figure out how we can keep this going. When they leave that meeting, there's an FBI agent so disturbed by what happened in that meeting. What he witnessed, he writes down, is our mission here to get the truth for the American people, or are we just trying to trip up Mike Flynn to lie so we can charge him with something? That's what a senior FBI official witnessed the President of the United States engaging in. Barack Obama, I can refresh your recollections pretty quickly. Stop lying to the American people. Own up to what you did. 

 

Aaron Maté: And then you have John Brennan, who testified under oath that the Steele Dossier played no part in the formation of that intelligence community assessment that Barack Obama ordered in December 2016, and that was released to the public in January 2017. John Brennan said to Congress that the Steele Dossier was in no way used for the intelligence community assessment that accused Russia of a sweeping operation to try to elect Trump. 

Now we know that that's false. We've seen the new report by HPSCI, the House Intelligence Committee, that's just been declassified by Tulsi Gabbard, which says that the Steele Dossier was explicitly referenced in the body of the ICA and that John Brennan himself personally argued in favor of including it over the objections of some senior CIA analysts. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, and by the way, Brennan gets very similar testimony to what you show, again, in 2023, which is in the Statute of Limitations right now. There are four bullets upon which the key conclusions of the ICA that was produced in December 2016 rest on one of those bullets, which is the bullet that helps back up the argument that Donald Trump was aided by Putin. Putin's goal was to help Donald Trump win. That bullet refers to Annex 1, which is the annex that we now know to be the Steele Dossier. So, it was used as an analytical product to come to the most contentious of the analytical conclusions, which is that contrary to what the government had been saying for months, now, we're going to say that Putin was trying to help Donald Trump and that rests on the Steele Dossier, which by December, as we've said, was completely debunked by the time. It was not a reliable intelligence product. It contradicts everything you just heard in that clip from John Brennan. 

 

Aaron Maté: Alright, so on the issue of Russian email hacking, which was the core Russiagate allegation – it's actually what triggered Russiagate when CrowdStrike, a firm working for Hillary Clinton's campaign, came out in June 2016 and accused Russia of hacking the DNC. We've learned since then that the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics, even though CrowdStrike redacted its own reports and refused to let the FBI examine the DNC's servers for itself. Just as the FBI relied on the Steele Dossier, I've always flagged this as a major investigative lapse because you're relying on Trump's political opponent for such a critical component of this investigation and now, we've gotten more information that I think bolsters skepticism of this Russian hacking allegation. 

So, even if Russia did hack into the DNC servers which is quite plausible and it seems as if the intelligence community had a basis to believe that the actual evidence that Russia took something from the server and gave it to WikiLeaks remains very thin and now you have, newly released by Tulsi Gabbard, in September 2016, an intelligence community assessment that says the FBI and the NSA had low confidence that Russia actually hacked the emails and gave them to other actors, including WikiLeaks, for publication. We only got that now, this low confidence. Somehow, the FBI, the NSA go from expressing low confidence to going along with the John Brennan-led judgment that actually it was Russia that hacked and leaked the DNC. 

And what happens? Well, the timeline is, after the election, as you mentioned, Barack Obama orders a brand-new assessment and at a December 9 meeting, they decide ‘we're going to make an attribution to Russia.’ Now, missing from that meeting are James Comey and Mike Rogers, the respective heads of the FBI and the NSA, who had at that point still been dissenting on this Russian email hacking claim. What I'm speculating here is that it was at that point that they were told to fall in line, and James Comey, having been blamed for Hillary Clinton losing because of his handling of the Clinton email server investigation, he goes along with it. That's what I'm speculating here. 

What do you think? And what do you make of this very assessment that there was low confidence here? 

 

John Solomon: So, listen, you've done such a great reporting, Aaron, you know, as well as anyone, how elaborate this dirty trick was. I believe that that probably will be what the evidence shows when we're done. This is the time now where we have the contemporaneous documents, but we haven't compelled people to go before a grand jury and find out the truth on this. And I think the next moment, the moment we'll know whether this is going to be a serious move towards accountability or just another great set of Fox News revelations that go away in a few months, is whether Pam Bondi follows the normal procedures for the Justice Department. 

As you laid out, and we've laid out for the last 20 minutes, this is a conspiracy case now. And by the way, Kash Patel opened a predicated conspiracy case in April, looking at the events of 2016 through 2024 as one ongoing conspiracy. Clear Hillary Clinton, hang the Russian shingle on Donald Trump, Hunter Biden's got a Ukraine problem, start Ukraine impeachment, Joe Biden's got to classified documents problem, let's raid Donald Trump's house and find classified documents problem for him. They're looking at that as one continuous conspiracy, which by the way, winds back the statutes. You can now start taking events in 2016 and make them part of the conspiracy. 

If in any other case, a conspiracy case is open, the usual step that the FBI and the Justice Department take is they create a federal strike force. If this was a drug kingpin for the cartels or a godfather for the mafia, the next step is, the FBI predicated a case, you now create a Federal Strike Task Force and you take your best prosecutors and your agents, you make them one team and they look at every overt act and try to tell you whether this rises to the level of a criminal conspiracy. If Pam Bondi does that in the next few days or weeks, then something serious is going on. If she doesn't, then all we have is a lot more detail, but still a very short lack of accountability for the people who are involved in this. 

 

Aaron Maté: One more question on the email hacking. You reported years ago that there were talks with Julian Assange between Assange and the FBI, the Trump administration, where Assange was talking about providing some technical evidence that would rule out the role of state actors, including Russia, in the hack and leak. It was James Comey, I believe, that killed those talks… 

 

John Solomon: That's right, according to, I think it was Adam Waldman, the lawyer for Julian Assange at the time. That's where we learned that information. Yeah, that's what happened. And we have text messages that were going on. You can see in real time, I think Mark Warner and Comey were the ones who seemed to put the kibosh on it. That needs to be looked back now, in light of these other events, because it could be another overt act, another act of cover-up, to try to keep the lid on the dirty trick that started with Hillary Clinton. That's where a strike force and a grand jury could be potentially very helpful because there are still missing pieces of this puzzle. For instance, why didn't the FBI grab the servers? In any other investigation, you wouldn't rely on someone's private vendor and say, trust us, by the way, a private vendor who worked for a client that had a vested interest in the case, Hillary Clinton's and the Democratic National Committee, that's who they're working for at the time, you would grab the servers yourself… 

 

Aaron Maté: As they're framing Trump as a Russian agent…

 

John Solomon: …just like when they got the five thumb drives with all of Hillary Clinton’s exfiltration, you would normally look at that, but they didn't. All of the basic requirements of the FBI DIAG, all of the basic requirements of the U.S. attorney's manual, all the basic requirements of the Intelligence Communities directive, which is the Bible for how you do assessments, all of them get abandoned during this hour and during this window. All of them take all of their training and they cast it aside in order to come up with this ruse. The answer to why they did that will probably determine whether this is criminal in nature or not. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yeah, what did Comey say when he was asked about this by Congress, he said, Well, CrowdStrike, which is working for the Clinton campaign, was a highly respected firm, so nothing to see here. I suppose he could have said the same thing about Christopher Steele, a highly respected agent whom the FBI was also relying on. So, the fact that you have the FBI relying on a Clinton campaign contractor for not just one but two of Russiagate's core allegations, collusion and email hacking, the fact that we're only still getting transparency about this now, eight years later, really is mind-boggling. So you've laid out the fact that we're looking at a conspiracy case here. What are you expecting to happen in the coming months? More document releases? Who do you think they're looking at when it comes to building a criminal case? 

 

John Solomon: Well, listen, you got to have the apparatus to do it. It's one thing for the FBI to open the case and gather the evidence that's currently available, but for the evidence that hasn't been produced and needs to be forcibly produced, you need grand jury power, you need grand jury’s subpoenas. Conspiracies are typically applied to drug cartels and mob cases and things like that. If this is treated like every other case, the next step is to create a strike force and then give that strike force the ability to use a grand jury, maybe you name a special counsel because Donald Trump is the alleged victim for some of this, he creates some independence. Whether they do that or not, if they don't create the strike force, they're not following the normal procedures that a Justice Department would use for a conspiracy case like this. So, the ball is in Pam Bondi's court. The question is, is she going to shoot the three-point shot or not? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I will tell you, the way the Justice Department normally would work, the strike force would be the very next part of the process that you would see unfold in the next week or two. 

 

Aaron Maté: This conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots was so dominant, so widespread and so mainstream. I mean, The New York Times and The Washington Post gave themselves publishers for advancing this conspiracy theory, that I'm not expecting very much accountability from them. But I am wondering if you have thoughts on, first of all, the way Tulsi Gabbard rolled this out, there is a criticism that she conflated in her messaging, vote hacking and email hacking. And I think that criticism actually is correct. I do think she conflated it. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, I think it's right. I agree with you. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yeah, it doesn't change the fact that she revealed important stuff, but the messaging I think has been off. And then you have the fact that Trump is dealing with this Jeffrey Epstein controversy, and there's anger even among some of the MAGA faithful that there have not been the disclosures that they were promised. I'm wondering, do you think that the fact that Trump has been hesitant to address the Jeffrey Epstein issue and told people to move on, that that might undermine the ability to get out and to convince people that this Russiagate stuff really is important? Because what critics will do here is say that Trump and Gabbard are just releasing this to deflect from the Jeffrey Epstein mess. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, yeah, listen, Donald Trump has been worried about Russia collusion since 2017. So, it's going to be hard to say he suddenly got interested because of Epstein, right? He has cried about this and rightly so for eight years and he's done everything in his power to get the American people the truth because he felt victimized and he felt the American people were victimized. He said that to me several times in interviews and he doesn't want another president ever to face what he faced. So I don't think you can say, “Boy, Donald Trump ramped this up because he to make the Epstein thing.” The Epstein crisis exists because of bad messaging. Pam Bondi was more interested in getting in front of the camera before getting her facts straight before she got in front of the cameras, and so she messed it up. 

I think, in some way, Tulsi Gabbard's rollout on Saturday and some of the messaging in the Friday, Saturday, Sunday time frame was a little messed up. But at the end of the day, they have released really significant evidence. And we, elitists inside the beltway, worry about all the messaging and stuff. The American people just want to know, were they defrauded? And I think in Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, President Trump and the others. We now have a body of evidence that could answer that question for history, could answer that question for the courts and it would be a crying shame if the normal processes of the Justice Department aren't followed in this next step. There are grounds for a criminal conspiracy case and a strike force to be named. Let's see if that happens. I think history will not judge the Epstein matter and this matter in Tulsi on the fumbles, they did make fumbles. I don't disagree with you, I totally agree with you. They'll judge them on, did they handle the evidence right and did we do the right thing? That judgment will come in the next few weeks. We'll know whether Pam Bondi and Tulsi Gabbard get us to the right place or not. Kash Patel has started the process. Let's see if it gets to the right place like every other person who's been accused of a crime would face in similar circumstances. Let's not treat it differently. If they treat it the same way as other criminal scales, I think the American people will be forgiving and remember this as a good period. 

 

Aaron Maté: John Solomon of Just the News, thank you so much for joining us. 

 

John Solomon: Aaron, great work. You are such a great reporter. I read you all the time and congratulations for the work you've done in this story. 

 

Aaron Maté: Well, likewise, you've been an essential voice understanding this whole Russiagate mess and I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your insight with us. 

 

John Solomon: Anytime. Great honor to be on the show. 

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Interview:  Marta Havryshko

We’re turning now to Ukraine, a crisis that was very much fueled by the Russiagate controversy. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy is facing the biggest protests he's seen since Russia invaded more than three years ago. 

To discuss Zelenskyy's current turmoil, I spoke to Marta Havryshko. She is visiting assistant professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. 

 

Aaron Maté: So for people who want to know what's going on in Ukraine, you have these massive protests now outside Zelenskyy's presidential residence calling out him cracking down on an anti-corruption bureau. What should people know? What's going on in Ukraine? 

 

Marta Havryshko: So, yesterday, for the first time since the Russian aggression in February 2022, the mass protest took place in major Ukrainian cities. Yesterday, they were in Kiev, Dnipro, Lviv, and other cities. What were the demands of protesters? They started to go out to the streets and protest with the hope that Zelenskyy will put a veto on the law adopted yesterday by the Verkhovna Rada. Actually, people call it an anti-corruption law and according to this law, the main anti-corruption bodies in Ukraine, NABU and SAPO, are losing independence and they have become subjected almost entirely to the prosecutor general, which is the person appointed by Zelenskyy. So, what does it mean? The entire activities of those structures are now paralyzed and Zelenskyy can use it as a tool to reward his loyal politicians, and to punish this loyal. That's why many, first of all young people, many students, they go out to the streets, and they started to shout and demand to veto. 

And while they were protesting, they found out that Zelenskyy very quickly signed this document and it was the big outrage. And nowadays, even in more numbers of cities, we have similar demonstrations. People are so angry. Why? Because Zelenskyy is constantly talking that Ukraine is a part of the European family, that Ukraine will join NATO and the EU, and one of the preconditions of joining the EU is the building of an effective anti-corruption system. And what is going on? Zelenskyy is destroying the whole system. That's why many people believe that the EU can even put sanctions in Ukraine, could stop this move of Ukraine to the European nation. That's why they are so angry. And mostly those people are young people, they are students. 

Aaron Maté: And Zelenskyy says that he's just cracking down on what he calls Russian influence, that somehow this anti-corruption bureau was corrupted by Russia. What do you say to that? 

 

Marta Havryshko: Actually, many observers, many experts, many anti-corruption activists say it's bullshit. In other words, it's not true, because those charges are very suspicious. First of all, some of them were accused of connections with the previous president Yanukovych and because Yanukovych is  now not a important person in political life, not Ukraine, not Russia. Some of them were charged with some offenses connected to traffic offenses that happened several years ago, and some of them were accused with direct cooperation with Russian security service. So these charges are very serious. And we know that SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, in the past days, they made approximately eight raids across offices and homes of NABU agents, without court warrants, which makes them suspicious, debatable, controversial and basically illegal. So, but many experts say that the main reason is because NABU that was created by Western powers, predominantly U.S., was financed by U.S., inspired by U.S., agents were trained by U.S. Basically, they say that in recent days, they wanted to open investigation against the closest allies of Zelenskyy, for example, Timur Mindych, who was and is his long-term business partner, the owner of  Kvartal 95, his entertainment company, together with Zelenskyy. Also recently one of the criminal investigation with very serious charges of great corruption was opened against one of the closest friends of Zelenskyy, Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Chernyshov. And we know that Minister Oleg Chernyshov left the country, and there were so many rumors about his desire to return; he was afraid that he will be put in prison. So Mindich went to him, presumably, and argued that you can go, because you will be free, you will be not put in jail, and basically it happened, despite this massive damage to Ukraine budget, which cost approximately one billion hryvnia, to Ukraine's budget, he wasn't dismissed, and he wasn't put in trial. He paid enormously big bail, approximately $3 million, which for Ukraine's settings is an enormous sum and he's enjoying his office. He's still in place. 

But Mindych never returned to Ukraine. Why? Because he was afraid that he would be the next Oleg Chernyshov. So, experts say that by cracking down on anti-corruption bodies, Zelenskyy wants to protect, basically, his friends, his closest friends. So, he's not caring about the anti-corruption system, about the European future of Ukraine, about the effectiveness of anti-corruption struggle in Ukraine, which is one of the biggest problems in Ukraine from the very beginning of its creation, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to some polls, it's even a bigger problem than Russian drone and missile attacks because corruption kills, and many protesters hold signs, “Corruption kills.” 

And another reason: some investigative journalists say that NABU was closely investigating the so-called army of drones. It was and it is still one of the biggest projects in this security service where millions of dollars – including Western aid and the taxes of Western people – are going, supported by the Ministry of Defense, supported by the general staff, supported by a crowdfunding platform, United 24, with these celebrities from around the world. So, this army of drones has a lot of speculations, and the great corruption is there, and who is involved in this? The closest people to Zelenskyy: Arakhamia, who is the leader of Zelenskyy’s party in the parliament, and Yermak, who recently became a celebrity, I would say, in Western press, because so many articles were written about him, about his power… 

 

Aaron Maté: Andriy Yermak, that's Zelenskyy's chief of staff, yeah. Yes. I mean, hearing you talk about just like the key role of U.S. funding and all this, U.S. influence, it speaks to one irony of this whole conflict, which is that, in the name of fighting supposed Russian influence, Ukraine's been consumed with U.S. influence. And Zelenskyy feels empowered to be doing these things because he wants to curry favor with the U.S. But let me ask you about the war here. 

There's an article in The Spectator, which is a British publication, that's been a huge cheerleader for the proxy war, but even they are now being forced to admit that the war is not going well for Zelenskyy and they quote a former senior official in Zelenskyy's administration who says this: “If the war continues soon there will be no Ukraine left to fight for” (The Spectator. July 20, 2025.)

 And this person goes on to say that Zelenskyy is “prolonging the war to hold on to power.” The Spectator also spoke to a Zelenskyy ally named Mariia Berlinska, who is head of a prominent Ukrainian volunteer movement, who said: “We are hanging over the abyss” and ‘Ukraine is an expendable pawn in an American game.” (The Spectator. July 20, 2025.)

How much discontent is there right now with Zelenskyy because of the war and because Ukraine continues to lose so many of its people in this horrible conflict? 

 

Marta Havryshko: Actually, this point is very common nowadays in Ukraine, it's very widespread. That's why there are so many draft dodgers, because people don't believe that they own their lives and they can make their own decisions because even when we take into consideration this mineral deal, we observe, and many members of the Ukrainian parliament, they were very open, that they didn't even read these documents, they were provided only this general paper, this general document, but two others were hidden from them. So they can't even learn the details and they just were “strongly advised” to vote for this. Some of them were threatened by Zelenskyy and his inner circle that they risk be stripped of Western/U.S. and we know that many of them have property in the Western countries, so they were really afraid of these sanctions, probably, by U.S. and they just voted for this mineral deal. 

The problem is that this mineral bill, in general is even against the Ukraine constitution because, according to the Ukrainian constitution, all minerals belong to the people, but nowadays, they are stripped even of those resources. So, many Ukrainians ask themselves, “What I'm dying for? Why should I go to the front line, to lie in these trenches, to be hunted by Russian drones, to gather remains of my comrades, to bury them, to visit their family members and to talk to their wives? Why should I suffer when I not even own those minerals? I have nothing. 

Ukraine nowadays is perceived as a colony of the West. Everything in Ukraine is influenced by the West. Every single decision: military decision, financial decision, political decision, who will be the prime minister, who will be the head of the SBU security service. From the Western media we’ll learn that Budanov attempted to dismiss 10 times, but because he has a protege in the U.S. and it is believed that he is very close to some U.S. military circles, Zelenskyy wasn't allowed to dismiss him. So, basically, Zelenskyy and his team are not independent decision-makers. That's why many people who are now protesting against this anti-corruption crackdown ask the EU, the World Bank, the White House to put pressure on Zelenskyy because they know that all leverage is there in the West. 

We learned from some investigative journalists that some people say that this decision is already being done, that Zelenskyy is not needed anymore. His popularity is going down. And after yesterday's decision, it reminded people of Yanukovych’s time so much because, during the Maidan protest in 2013-2014, Yanukovych was associated with the massive corruption, but also with this break of this European dream of Ukrainians, because he refused to sign this association with EU. And nowadays, many EU members, Ursula von der Leyen, G7, other bodies, Macron, EU, Marta Kos from EU, they express their deeply concerns about this law and many people are afraid that this will be another case when Ukraine will be prevented from entering EU and will be stopped by their own government, prevented by their politicians. That's why many people compare Zelenskyy to Yanukovych, and in the memory of many Maidan protesters, it's the biggest […], pro-Russian, bloody murder of peaceful protesters. That's why the climate is very hot nowadays in Ukraine, and we shouldn't underestimate this protest.

The main question, for me, nowadays, is: Will Zelenskyy get this other Maidan? And will he be the next Ukraine president who will be forced to leave the country and his post? 

 

Aaron Maté: And if he is forced to leave like what does this leave groups like Azov, the Azov Battalion, which is a paramilitary force with neo-Nazi ties, led by some really extremist people, they've endorsed his crackdown on this anti-corruption bureau. So if he's forced out of office, does that mean they take even more power? Would their power be reduced? Where would they stand in a post-Zelenskyy Ukraine? 

 

Marta Havryshko: I was very struck when I read statements from Bielanski, the leader of the movement. Several of his deputies and other members, not only from the Azov movement but close to the Azov movement, who are also far right like the leader of C14, Yevhen Karas, who is the extremist and far-right neo-Nazi and others, basically, those neo-Nazis who are in close alliance with Zelenskyy and heavily rely on his support, are very critical of NABU and basically support him, started to disseminate this talking point that, “Yes, there were Russian agents, assets, they are in NABU, that's why this decision was very good.” 

We should keep in mind that all these far-right in Ukraine, are proponents of the cult of a strong leader. And they really believe that one person in the state should hold the maximum power like Führer, like Mussolini and other strong leaders. That's why they supported him. And I believe – and for many NGO activists, for many human rights activists, they were surprised because many of them didn't follow their agenda. So they were very surprised, how can you? It's about the European future, it's about the democratic future of Ukraine. But those guys have nothing to do with these democratic views. They are proponents of this strong authoritarian state with a strong leader, that's why. And we observe how they enjoy the state support, support from the security service, support from military intelligence, support from oligarchs close to Zelenskyy, and they join everything. 

So, they want this war to prolong, to go on, and they support Zelenskyy. That's why I believe it could be a civil unrest if they will support this strong position of Zelenskyy. Those anti-corruption organs were created and inspired by the Biden administration mostly, by Democrats, and now Trump allegedly is not interested in fighting corruption, he's not interested all this internal politics, he just want to leave this Ukraine cause, everything, and to just concentrate on other problems, so he doesn't care about this, and Zelenskyy believes that he can get away with these actions. And Europe needs him because he's a proponent of war, he's the proponent of these radical decisions. That's why he believed that he can do whatever they want without any resistance. 

But I believe that this potential for violent resistance inside the Ukraine country – I'm talking about even civil war, yeah, civil unrest. – it is very possible because there are even more radical far-right who are not in alliance with the state. For example, this White Phoenix who is allegedly involved in the killing of this SBU Colonel Voronych and others, they are very radical, white supremacist, and they are against even the Azov movement because they believe that Azov nowadays is in conjunction with globalists and Zionists, all this conspiracy and so on and so forth. 

 

Aaron Maté: Which is why it underscores why it was not a wise decision to block the Minsk accords, block opportunities that were out there a while ago, to avoid all this bloodshed and to not empower the most extremist elements of society. 

Marta, final question for you. I recently signed an open letter in your defense that was put out because you faced a lot of threats yourself for speaking out as a Ukrainian, as a scholar of the Holocaust, against Zelenskyy's government, against the influence of the far right. Very briefly, because we only have a few minutes, talk about the threats that you faced and this open letter that a bunch of us have just signed in your defense. 

 

Marta Havryshko: Thank you, Aaron, for the support, and I invite everyone to visit my Twitter, for example, and you can sign this letter too, because the general idea of this letter that was drafted by scholars, journalists and human rights activists, is about basically free speech and academic freedom in Ukraine, because not only me, but many scholars in Ukraine face pressure. They face pressure to ally with the state agenda, to obey all these ethnic, national agenda and not criticize the rights of the far-right in Ukraine. And I started to receive those death threats more than one year ago when I criticized for the first time this Azov exhibition, the 3rd assault brigade exhibition about the Waffen-Nazis division, Galicia. During this exhibition they compared themselves to Nazi collaborators basically and I asked them: is it okay when Putin is using this denazification talking point to justify his aggression against Ukraine? What are you doing, guys? Why do you need those Nazi symbols to fight Russians? You have beautiful Ukrainian symbols. 

Then, I started to do more research and I understood that they have basically freehand in Ukraine and they are in cooperation with the state authorities and political elites. And they are so unhappy about my activity and about my research exposing all these problematic developments that they send me rape threats, death threats, they openly discuss in their channels how they will kill me. I'm cooperating with the Massachusetts State Police and FBI in this regard because they have connections with many far-right neo-Nazis group here in the U.S., Atom Weapon Division, Misanthropic Division, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other, because they have a similar agenda. 

As you know, many American neo-Nazis nowadays are in the war in Ukraine, fighting for Ukraine. So, basically, they are trained, they are armored to the teeth by American weapon, by NATO weapon, and I was strongly advised to be conscious about those threats and to do whatever I can to protect myself and protect my child because the very important thing and most important for me is to save my child from that threat. That's why my friends supported me, and I encourage everyone to protect freedom of speech, even despite all those challenging developments and troubling times. So, free speech is a core stone of democracy, human rights and freedom. 

 

Aaron Maté: Marta Havryschko, you're a very, very brave person, and I'm very grateful, too, for joining us on System Update. Marta Havryshko is a visiting assistant professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Marta, thank you so much. 

 

Marta Havryshko: Thank you so much. 

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Interview: Joshua Landis

Aaron Maté: Turning now to another part of the world that's been turned upside down by a CIA proxy war: Syria. When Syrian President Bashar Assad was overthrown last year, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, openly took credit for the regime change in Damascus. 

Video. Benjamin Netanyahu, X. December 8, 2024.

So that's Netanyahu last year, taking credit for Assad's ouster, and in Assad's place came a new government led by the former leader of al-Qaeda in Syria named Mohammed al-Golani, who since changed his name to Ahmed al-Shara. But now Netanyahu, who, after taking credit for installing this al-Qaeda offshoot, is bombing that new government as well. Just recently, Israel bombed Damascus after sectarian clashes broke out with a lot of Druze, members of the Druze minority in Syria, being killed and Netanyahu claimed he was acting on their behalf in their defense. So, what is going on in Syria? Why is sectarian killing still going on? And why is Netanyahu intervening after helping to install the new government that he is now bombing? 

Well, to discuss that, I spoke to Joshua Landis. He is the Sandra Mackey Chair and Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. 

 

Aaron Maté: Joshua Landis, thanks so much for joining me. 

 

Joshua Landis: Aaron, it's always a pleasure. 

 

Aaron Maté: So, what's going on here with Israel bombing a government that it took credit for installing? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, Netanyahu did say that it was because he had destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon, or larger, decimated it, that Syria and Assad fell because there was no support for him; they'd also bombed Iran and that clipped the normal support for the Assad army. But he very quickly decided that he did not like the new ruler of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, because he had been head of al-Qaeda for many years, and he's very closely attached to Turkey. And Turkey, of course, had welcomed Hamas leaders in Istanbul and had spoken out against Israel. So, in a sense, Iran was out, but Netanyahu said that Turkey is our new big enemy, and is dangerous, if not more dangerous than Iran. 

 

Aaron Maté: The pretext for this, according to Israel, is that there were atrocities being committed against the Druze in Suwayda, which was happening. There were atrocities. So what happened there? And then why is Israel getting involved on their behalf, or purportedly on their behalf? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, the Druze situation. Druze are 3% of Syria. They're a small minority, heterodox, Shia, like the Alawites or the Ismailis. They did not trust this government because the government had persecuted the Druzes in the past. Ahmed al-Shara had killed about 20. He apologized and made up for it, but their shrines were blown apart. ISIS had forced many to convert, and Shara had been a member of ISIS before he was just al-Qaeda. They didn't trust him. And the Druze freed themselves of Assad's rule a year ahead of the taking of Damascus. So, they had set up their own autonomous regime. When Shara formulated his new constitution several months ago, an interim constitution for five years, it gave all power to him. There is no democracy. The parliament is appointed by him, a third directly, two-thirds indirectly. He appoints all the judges in the Supreme Court. He is everything in that country and there is a Druze minister, who's resigned, but they don't have any power. They are things like transportation, or various things. So, the real central figures are all from this al-Qaeda organization and very close to Shara, whether it's the interior or defense or foreign ministry and so forth. 

So they didn't trust him. They said we want some kind of federal arrangement. The Kurds are saying the same thing. The Alawites are saying the same thing. They don't want to just put down their arms, because that's what he was asking. He said, “I'm the ruler, I'm going to have a monopoly on power. All the minorities should put down their guns and trust us.” And they said, “We don't trust you.” And so it became a classic standoff. And that's the important background to this assault by the state on the Druze Mountain. It's a mountainous region. It is in the south, near the Jordanian border and not too far from the Golan. But there is a big Arab city, Dara, that sits between the Jabal Druze and the Golan Heights, which makes it impractical for Israel to move its troops in and protect them directly. So it used bombing, and Israel stepped in to defend the Druze. 

Israel has, it's important to know that they have 150,000 Druze who've served loyal in the military and are an important lobbying group that's not to be sneezed at. I know many Israeli Druze and they were frantic to get Netanyahu to step in. Now, Netanyahu was much bigger fish to fry than just the Druze. He has got a strategic vision, which is Israel being the predominant power.  And we've got to say that Israel has established not only complete air power over Lebanon, but now over Syria, over Iraq, and today, Iran as well. It doesn't want a strong Damascus, a Damascus that's armed by Turkey, that has a real army, that spreads its power over the border. So, Netanyahu said it very early on, we're not going to allow Damascus to deploy its troops South of Damascus City, not going to allow Shara to deploy his troops. 

The first day that Assad fell, Israel bombed Syria 400 times, destroying its entire navy, every missile depot, any airplane that was still existent. It erased everything it could find of the old Syrian army so that Shara would not have anything. And it's continued to bomb various airfields that Turkey is trying to resurrect, because it's very worried that Turkey will send its planes down there, build up the military, and that they'll have Turkey on Israel's border. That's what Netanyahu says. They said they're not going to do it, over our dead body. Of course, America doesn't like that, but that's the situation with the Jabal-Druze and Israel's entrance into this war. 

 

Aaron Maté: So, Israel claims to be fighting the sectarian oppression, the sectarian atrocities backed by the government, but it seems to me actually that they want to foment sectarianism in Syria. I mean, they were supporting the insurgency that was sectarian. I was reminded of a quote from way back, in 2013, by an Israeli official named Alon Pinkas. He's the former Israeli Consul General in New York and he said this about Syria, back in 2014. He said: “This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win – we'll settle for a tie. Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.” (Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria. September 5, 2013.)

So what he was basically saying back then was, as long as Syria is divided, as all sides are fighting each other, then Israel is dominant. And my question to you is, do you think that is still basically Israel strategy? 

 

Joshua Landis: Israel wants a weak and divided Syria, one that cannot present any challenge to Israel whatsoever on the Golan or anywhere else. In that sense, sweeping in and being a defender, having this human rights position and having the Druze actually want the Israelis to come and defend them fits perfectly into this larger strategic vision of a broken Syria that can't get back on its feet. 

 

Aaron Maté: And I don't want to minimize the atrocities the Druze have suffered. So talk to us a bit about what you know happened. For example, there seems to be a documented massacre that occurred at a Druze hospital in Syria.

 

Joshua Landis: Yes. The National Hospital in Suwayda. It was taken over by regime forces; they shot doctors, nurses and patients. They threw people off the roof. They were jihadists who went in there to wreak vengeance on the Druze. We've got to say that this came on the heels, already in May, there had been a dustup between the Druze and the Central State, because the Druzes had refused to make these concessions to the Central States. So, Shara, who wants to spread his military control over the country, is looking for ways. What happened in May was that this tape came out, a recording of a Druze Sheik – theoretically, the Druze denied it, said it was fake – of the Sheik saying something bad about Muhammad, the Prophet and they said, this is unacceptable. Students began to attack Druze students in dormitories in Hama. There were demonstrations in the street and very quickly it escalated into a situation where the Druze were being attacked from one end of Syria to the other, and particularly in two towns, Jaramana and Sahnaya, on the outskirts of Damascus towards the Jabal Druze. Many jihadist types and irregulars poured in, as well as regime troops, in order to attack the Druze, and Israel came into their defense, which of course, caused many Syrians to say, these are traitors, they're siding with Israel, look what they're doing in Gaza, this is terrible, and we've got to kill these Druze. So that was the background, and it was festering. 

A local story happened just on July 13, in which Bedouin, who make up 3% of the city of Suwayda, the capital city in the Jabal Druze, kidnapped a Druze merchant. And then it was tit for tat. It exploded. Over 10 people were killed. But the regime Shara said, only the central police and our security soldiers can bring calm to the Jabal Druze, we're sending them in. And so they attacked. And many people felt that the Bedouin situation was really a pretext to allow the regime to try to impose its will over the Jabal Druze. And this turned into a major conflagration because the Jews resisted. Regime elements came into the city, took over this national hospital, killed everybody in it, dozens of people. We don't know how many, but you look at pictures of body bags and there are probably 50 or 60. 

The videos are really horrendous. I published one of the videos very early on and my X account was inundated with regime supporters saying, This is fake news. These are not real things. They've either been doctored or the Druze were killing themselves because [   ], one of their leaders there. They've tried to demonize him and said that he's evil and he's shooting all these Druze because they really want to be part, they give up their guns to the government. 

It was very hard to tell what the truth was in those first moments, but there are major narrative campaigns going on in social media to defend the government, to defend the Druze, this sort of thing. But a lot of Druze have been killed. We don't have a sense so far, but it's probably going to approach a thousand. Whole families have been mowed down in their houses and so forth. Now, a bunch of Bedouins got killed and the Druze were very brutal to the regime troops that they later captured. And there were executions on both sides. And I'm not saying that – but this is the way that the government has been treating minorities. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yes. Well, that's what I was going to ask you about. So this follows the documented sectarian killings against the Alawites. And the death toll there is unknown, but it's believed to be very, very high. And that was also by forces linked to the government. Talk about what happened there and what a recent Reuters investigation newly confirmed. 

 

Joshua Landis: Right. Well, about 2,000 Alawites were killed. The government is claiming that – it came out with a report just the other day and said it was about 1,465, just under 1.5. But it's probably closer to 2,000. The government has closed down a lot of its bureaus for registering deaths along the coast. I know that because my father-in-law, an Alawite, died recently, and the family is still unable to record his death because all the offices are saying come back later, we're closed on this, you can't register the deaths. So, there's a lot of sleights of hand going on here, but 2,000 Alawites were killed on the coast, roughly. And this started with an attack on regime soldiers by some Alawites, and about 16, 17 Alawite soldiers were killed in one incidence, and it spread to two other places. 

The Alawites claim this is because we're being terribly mistreated, and this little convoy of troops was coming to a village to drag people out, claiming that they are regime remainders, and that they were coming to drag them off for transitional justice. The trouble is transitional justice is dragging people off and shooting them. There haven't been court trials. It's unclear. Many innocent people have been killed, people have never served in the military, houses have been robbed. So, the Alawites were beginning to feel that this regime is just going to kick us to the curb and mistreat us. 

So, it's hard to tell. The regime said this is a big conspiracy with Iran to bring back the Assad regime. The Alawite said, No, this is completely false. This is a self-defense thing. But the point is, once it began, the regime called for a general mobilization. Tens of thousands of militia members and militias began to swoop down onto the coast in long, that evening, in long, big lines of trucks and everything else. And many of them put hate in their hearts. They had their jihadist principles of we're going to kill all the Alawites. who are unbelievers, calling them pigs, making them bark like dogs. And we got this outpouring of videos, of whole families being lined up and just shot against walls, being made to bark like dogs and being shot. So, some villages, over 200 people were killed and then just laying all over the village. So, it was very brutal. Five of my wife's cousins had their houses broken into. People asked them, “Are you Alawite?” And then they proceeded to steal everything in the house, their car keys. One of their sons, Haidar, who grew up with my son, was dragged to – he never served in the military. He was an only son. You don't have to serve in the military if you're only son, he's the breadwinner for the family because a father had died of a heart attack and the mother didn't work – and he was dragged out to the step and just shot summarily. And this happened in family after family, up and down the coast. And so, it just put terror into the whole minority, and they'd begun to flood out of the country. 

As a result, the statistics from the U.N. show that about 100,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon have returned to Syria since the fall of the regime, the Assad regime, mostly Sunnis. But 100,00 have fled into Lebanon since the fall of the regime, mostly minorities and mostly Alawites who are looking for safety. So, the shoe is on the other foot, and the regime is increasingly using force and a good dollop of terror in order to try to subjugate the minorities who've been recalcitrant. And they're a problem, but they don't feel that there's any protection for them. They don't have any buy-in, and they don't trust this ex-al-Qaeda guy, who has a very low regard for these minorities as unbelievers and so forth. The language that's used by officials is a very religious language and it really marks them out for persecution.

 

Aaron Maté: Well, so on that note, how did the government respond recently when there was a suicide bombing in Damascus at a church? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, the Christian church. Well over 20 people were killed, a bunch were wounded. The priests and so forth said, “We didn't get a visit from the president”. So, the president did finally call them, the minister, the Christian minister, the woman minister, did immediately go there and in the subsequent days, some other ministers went. But this is after Christians began to complain that they felt like they weren't treated the same as other people and that the president didn't really want to address the issue properly. So, the Christians feel that the government is begrudgingly recognizing their pain but not doing it in a serious way. And so, all the minorities are feeling like they're being kicked to the curb. And it must be said that the minorities were spoiled by the French during the first half of the last century. They were overrepresented in the military. Bashar al-Assad and his father were Alawites, and they privileged minorities because they needed minority support. So, many Sunnis feel like the West has supported this, has put up with this, and they've been mistreated for a century, and that the minorities are always spoiled. Therefore, they're getting their comeuppance. 

 

Aaron Maté: Well, but the minorities were also protected from sectarian atrocities and that's why some of us just, I'm speaking for myself here, we're opposed to regime change on top of the fact that I don't think we have the right to flood a country with weapons and fuel and arms and all kinds of dominant insurgency. It's also a disaster for groups like the ones that are being attacked now. And I think we're seeing an ongoing reminder of that with all these atrocities. That chant that was attributed to some of the early protests, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave,” the protests against Assad, I mean, that's proved to be prophetic. They are sending Alawites now to the graves. So, whether you want to call that previously Alawites being spoiled or just being maybe protected from sectarian murder. 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, you didn't have to go very far. When al-Qaeda takes over, even an ex-al-Qaeda guy who's trying to fly right, and he's surrounded by all these al-Qaeda guys, that's what's going to happen. We saw it in Iraq. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that minorities are going to get persecuted. And they are being persecuted, and they're being robbed, they're having their houses taken over. Yes, America was concerned about Iran. They wanted Iran out of Syria. They wanted Iran to stop funding Hezbollah. That was the primary concern of America: if having al-Qaeda take over, that was the price and, in a sense, that's what's happened. 

 

Aaron Maté: That's why Jake Sullivan said in that infamous email to Hillary Clinton, “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” 

Final question for you. All this is happening at an awkward time for the Trump administration, which is moving to lift sanctions on Syria, the sanctions that helped achieve regime change by basically crippling the country and preventing reconstruction. But just as Trump is asking for these sanctions to be lifted, we're still seeing all these sectarian atrocities. So, talk to us a bit about the debate that's playing out right now in Washington over whether or not to lift these sanctions, which, in my opinion, again, should never have been imposed in the first place. We don't have the right to destroy another economy to regime change their government. But I think they're sadistic and should be removed. But now there's a problem because of all these sectarian murders that keep happening. 

 

Joshua Landis: Right. The first article I wrote after the fall of Assad was about the time to lift the sanctions. Sanctions are a brutal force that hurt the most vulnerable, no doubt about it. But the United States, and understandably, Trump made his deal with the Saudis and the Turks when he was visiting Saudi Arabia, and he said, I'm going to lift all sanctions. He embraced, Shara. He said, yes, he's a tough guy and he's done tough things, but sometimes you need a tough leader to rule a country. He said, Make Syria great again. We're not going to be in the business of regime change anymore. He really slammed George Bush, the son, and said all that regime change stuff was a big waste of time and what have we gotten out of it? Nothing. Make America great again, let the Syrians be Syrians. 

That was translated then into policy by our ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, Ambassador Barak, who said, “We're lifting everything. We're not demanding anything in exchange.” He did say we want to see Syria fight ISIS, get rid of all the Palestinian groups, join the Abraham Accords, get rid of chemical weapons, and there were a few other little items on there. But mostly, he didn't say anything about human rights. He didn't say anything about minorities. He didn't say anything about democracy because America's finished with democracy promotion in the Middle East. And in a sense, America threw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, these are unreasonable expectations, but you want to give some guidance. And this might not have happened if the United States had been a little bit firmer, saying, You can't do this, you can't use force to just crush the minorities. There's got to be some kind of representation and you can work that out. They're beginning to say it. There's just a movement in Congress to lift the Caesar sanctions. There are tons of sanctions on Syria. The president can lift many of them because they're presidential sanctions. But the major package, the Caesar sanctions, was put on by Congress. And those are the ones that give secondary sanctions. So, if companies go in and help rebuild Syria, they can be sanctioned. Most Republicans voted against lifting those, even though all the Syrian opposition who are in favor of the Shara regime said, We've got to lift them, we're against Assad, now we're good. And Republicans have been loath to do that. I think that's because a lot of their minority constituents have been screaming bloody murder and saying, you've got to hold this regime to account. So, they haven't all been lifted. They've been changed to a certain degree. It's still unclear what they mean. But they aren't completely gone. 

 

Aaron Maté: It's such a mess and this is what happens when you try to regime change a country: you end up creating a monster that is really very hard to roll back. The sanctions regime and now the fact that it's ruled by an offshoot of al-Qaeda. I'll just say, on the issue of chemical weapons, as someone who's been skeptical of these chemical weapons allegations, especially after they destroyed their stockpile in 2013-2014 under a deal with the OPCW, the fact that they haven't been able to find a trace of Assad's supposed chemical weapons stockpile in the more than seven months since he was ousted, I find that very interesting. And to me, it bolsters the skepticism that I've had of those allegations, which were also bolstered by things like the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked documents. 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, let me add, on your point about regime change being really just a terrible thing to do, most of these countries in the Middle East were established after World War I at the Paris Peace Conference: Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, so forth. They're very young. Various groups of people who didn't necessarily want to live together were stuck together in these newly drawn nation-states and told to get along. It's been very difficult. Almost all of the Middle Eastern countries have had a dictatorship almost from the beginning because they don't get along and they're fighting over who's going to be on top and so forth. 

So, there's been a lot of coercion in order to keep people from fighting each other, when you're trying to do state building, that's going to create a common citizenship and a political community where people will trust each other enough to vote on a constitution and follow the laws. That's what's basically required for democracies. You've got to have some common game rules that everybody buys into. That isn't present in most Middle Eastern countries, which is why there remain either kings or dictators. And it's very difficult to keep people from breaking into civil war. 

So, when America goes into these new countries that are still trying to reshape their citizenry and kick over the state, which was weak to begin with, maybe a little bit muscle-bound with military dictatorship, but unable to tax their people, unable to really get people to buy in, it turns into civil war. And that's what happened in Iraq. That's what happened in Libya. That's what happened in Afghanistan. That's going to happen in Iran if we try to overturn the regime there. And it's certainly what happened to Syria. And you get very long and bloody civil wars with tons of ethnic cleansing. It's not a good thing. And people need to just put regime change out of their minds because Western regime change isn't going to produce democracy. It's going to produce civil war in societies that are trying to find a way to live together and build a common political community. 

 

Aaron Maté: Joshua Landis, Sandra Mackey Chair and Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Thanks so much for joining us. 

 

Joshua Landis: Always a pleasure, Aaron. Love your show.

 

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Semafor Editor Ben Smith on Epstein Saga; How do MAGA Supporters Really Feel About Trump's Foreign Policy? Eddington Movie Review: Reflections on 2020
System Update #490

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!

AD_4nXfT_BDy4ZmCv7YowmlpimI3uiq7dVGVrebs2HL5mg4ECkvfhs3Y9eBAUpJII2f7KX_c0cHmCe_nJBq8K854h7KfY2o0T-_oXaV3vkUdy7KoA6IgnNWbT7_2jA5tfHRgXGATMZsLGqoQcnMQKCpn6Fk?key=4MGSGk-P8UsiVP_KGEUadw

Michael Tracey: Good evening, everybody. I'm Michael Tracey, and Glenn is somewhere. So, this is where I triumphantly storm in and anger parts of the audience who would prefer not to have to see my face, which I have to say, on some level, I sympathize with. 

Tonight, an interesting show. We'll be joined by Ben Smith, who is the editor-in-chief of Semafor and a longtime political observer, journalist, editor. And we will probably, I think, provide you with a slightly counterintuitive for different perspective anyway, on the meaning of the whole Epstein saga that continues to engulf American politics and media, seemingly. 

We'll also bring in somebody who works on this very show, and who you often don't see on camera, she stays behind the cameras but today, we're going to pry her out because Meagan O'Rourke, who I often do interviews with, and she's a producer on the show, I'm sure should be a fan favorite anyway. We're going to do actually a review of a new movie. This is a little out of left field based on typical System Update content, but there's a new movie that I happened to see last night, partly at the adamant urging of Meagan, called Eddington. And I think it's an incredible movie and an incredible window into a lot that's going on politically and culturally. So we're going to a movie review tonight. 

And we are also going to show some footage that she and I collected, actually back on the Fourth of July, earlier this month, that has been available on Locals for you subscribers for several weeks. But what we wanted to do was go to like an area that is sort of ground zero for salt of the earth, Joe six-pack style supporters of Trump voters and ask them about his foreign policy record thus far, particularly the bombing of Iran, which may seem like eons ago at this point, but it was only last month, and the full ramifications have not really been settled. 

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Michael Tracey and Meagan O'Rourke

Okay, so we're going to go a little bit off the beaten path tonight because I know my mind has been largely occupied by this movie that I saw last night. And if it was just a well-crafted drama, or if there were just some sterling acting performances that were put in, I'm not sure that I would necessarily have been compelled to discuss it on System Update. 

However, there's like an interesting synergy going on in the universe where we have this Epstein story that keeps embroiling the American political and media worlds with some new developments on that score even just this afternoon and we have the opening of this movie which really gets to the beating heart in a very unparalleled way for like a cinematic experience of what drives the contemporary kind of like internet addled American political psyche. 

It's called “Eddington.” I guess we'll try to steer away from spoilers. We'll play the trailer for those who are not familiar. 

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