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Good evening. It's Wednesday, June 21st. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is consistently receiving between 15% and 20% among Democratic voters, while Marianne Williamson is receiving 6 to 8%. That's close to one-third of the Democratic Party electorate, which, before the campaign is even underway, is saying they intend to support a candidate other than Joe Biden. Nonetheless, the explicit position of the Democratic Party and its operatives – and MSNBC personalities – is that Joe Biden is already the Democratic nominee and that he will not even consider debating any Democrat running against him for the nomination. But this insistence of ignoring RFK extends far beyond the Democratic primary. It includes the liberal corporate media outlets. 

Last week, RFK sat down for a remarkable 4-hour discussion with America's most popular podcast host, Joe Rogan. Their discussion was wide-ranging, though mostly focused on what RFK argues are the decades of lies about the help from the health policy establishment about vaccines, including the COVID vaccine, as well as – and this is crucial – the extent to which the health regulatory agencies, including the NIH and the CDC, have been completely captured by industry interest. In other words, the government agencies that are supposed to exert oversight of the pharmaceutical industry are instead controlled by that industry's richest and most powerful corporations.  

As part of that discussion, Rogan and RFK discussed a physician named Peter Hotez – or Prof. Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., as he calls himself – who became one of the leading stars of liberal cable TV and social media during the COVID pandemic. Over the last several years, Hotez expressed some truly alarming and ultimately false views, including demanding for months that everyone has the supreme moral duty to stay at home in order to stop COVID only for a densely packed street protest movement to emerge months later that he liked ideologically – the Post-George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests – at which point he urged everyone to participate. He also equated skepticism over vaccines to terrorism and depicted it as a “Kremlin plot” and thus urged highly militaristic and despotic efforts on the part of the U.S. government to, in his words, aggressively suppress such ideas. Hotez also relentlessly mocked the notion that COVID came from the Wuhan lab – and he still does that even while the most elite scientific units in the Department of Energy and the FBI now believe a lab leak is the most probable cause of the COVID pandemic. 

During that interview with Rogan, RFK said that Professor Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., was one of the most dishonest people in public life in the U.S. and that he had repeatedly requested that Hotez debate him. But Hotez – while giving countless adoring, uncritical interviews to MSNBC, CNN and even TMZ – refused to respond to RFK his debate request. 

After that program, Rogan offered to donate $100,000 to a charity of Hotez, his choice, If he would simply debate RFK in Rogan's programs about all the differences they have on these rather crucial issues. Others jumped on board this call for debate, including Elon Musk, and soon the amount reached was over $1 million to be donated to a charity of Hotez, his choice, simply for appearing for this debate. 

One would think that a debate between a highly informed environmental lawyer who spent decades suing corporate polluters and health agencies RFK and one of the most influential and beloved COVID preachers in liberal media, Professor Hotez, M.D., Ph.D., would be of great value for the country. It would be yet immediately people who call themselves journalists – those who should most seek debate on the most consequential policy debates – instead intervened and began demanding that Hotez not lower himself to debating RFK. They published articles and cable monologues on why Hotez should not put himself in a position where his views would face critical scrutiny and accountability, even though those views have long been intended to influence American public opinion and foreign policy. 

Watching journalists try to stop debates is like watching them become the leading advocates for censorship, which, in turn, is like watching a cardiologist extoll the virtues of cigarette smoking. It is completely contrary to the values that are supposed to define journalism. Yet it is as unsurprising as it is repugnant to watch these employees of media corporations do exactly that. 

Why are liberal establishment loyalists so eager to ensure that nobody engages with or debates RFK, Jr? And why are they particularly desperate that the pieties and orthodoxies they peddled to the public about COVID and lockdowns and the pandemic's origin and vaccines never be openly debates? We'll examine those reasons tonight.

 Then, a major leak of top-secret information occurred again, this time to the Wall Street Journal, which reports that U.S. intelligence has discovered that the governments of Cuba and China have agreed to have a Chinese military base station on Cuban soil. That raises this question: Does Cuba, a sovereign country, have the right to host the Chinese military on its soil if it wishes to do so? When it comes to Russia, the position of the U.S. government, especially those who support endless proxy war in Ukraine, is that Russia has no say of any kind over what happens in Ukraine - if the Zelenskyy government wants to host U.S. military and intelligence officials on its soil, if wants to be part of NATO, if it even allows the U.S. to change its government as it did in 2014, then that is no business of Russia's. Russia has no right to object to what the Kyiv government does on the other side of its border.

So, does this same reasoning apply to Cuba, the United States, and for that matter, the U.S. is currently encircling China with multiple military bases in multiple countries, including some that have nuclear-tipped warheads and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers? If the U.S. is justified in regarding Chinese bases in Cuba as deeply threatening and provocative – and many are calling for the Biden administration to take aggressive action to expel China from Cuba – does China have the same right when it comes to U.S. bases in Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and Australia? Does Russia have the same right regarding a massive NATO new presence on the other side of its border in Ukraine? 

We'll examine those vital foreign policy principles tonight – or whether there are any identifiable principles at all in play. 

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