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Good evening. It's Monday, June 26. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our Live Daily Show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

Tonight: if forced to identify the single greatest danger the West faces, I would almost certainly choose the ongoing institutionalization of censorship. Or, put another way, the incremental yet aggressive erosion of free speech, both as a legal right and as a social value. There are multiple ways a censorship regime is being implemented. We know from the Twitter Files and from other reporting both before and since that U.S. and Western security state agencies apply enormous pressure on Big Tech corporations to heavily censor online political discourse, largely by banning dissent from establishment orthodoxies on virtually every consequential debate. From reporting on Joe Biden to the integrity of elections, from COVID to the war in Ukraine, all of those issues have ushered in extreme levels of censorship, invariably aimed at those who question or dissent from establishment narratives. We have reported on such efforts many times. Then there is the truly pernicious attempt to stigmatize or even criminalize political dissent by depicting it as “too dangerous” to allow, based on the theory that this dissent is the primary culprit that inspires violent attacks. After a white supremacist shooter murdered people at a grocery store in Buffalo, in May 2022, for instance, established media outlets instantly created the narrative that the real criminal with blood on his hands was not the shooter but instead, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose speech was blamed for inspiring the killer even though there was no evidence the shooter had even heard of Tucker Carlson, let alone watched this show, let alone was inspired by him to murder. This theory, of course, is never applied the same way to establishment voices. When a rabid fan of Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders tried to murder GOP Congressman Steve Scalise and other members of the Republican House caucus, in 2017, based on his view that Republicans are racist, traitors and Russian agents, nobody seriously tried to claim that Maddow or Sanders had blood on their hands, nor did anyone claim that about an environmental activist, when a climate activist murdered the Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, in 2002, just nine days before a general election, which could have made Fortuyn the new Dutch prime minister. This media narrative is, again, yet another weapon designed to suppress and ultimately lead to the outlawing of dissent against establishment parties on the grounds that such dissent is too dangerous to permit. Then there are these social pressures designed to marginalize or silence establishment critiques in many countries. 

In the democratic world, major societal sectors barely pretend any longer to value or defend free speech. At most, they may pay lip service to free speech, but then immediately offer a mountain of other values that they insist are more important, and that justified the restrictions on free speech. Increasingly, the phrase ‘free speech’ is depicted as a far-right or even a fascist cause. Even though every fascist in history has embraced censorship and not free speech. And the demands are now intense for establishment critics to be silenced or censored. We saw just last week that liberal media figures demanded that nobody, neither Joe Biden nor Professor Peter Hotez M.d., Ph.D. debate RFK, Jr. on the grounds that RFK, Jr.'s ideas are simply too harmful to allow to be heard. Google has repeatedly censored RFK or even mentions of him from YouTube, and that should not be surprising. Seemingly every day new theories are invented as to why one should regard dissent not only as wrong but also as too dangerous to allow. That is the pernicious theory that is leading in many democratic countries throughout the world, from Brazil and Canada to Ireland and Germany. A spate of new censorship laws, regulations and judicial rulings is based on the view that dissent either constitutes “hate speech” or “disinformation,” terms that intrinsically cannot apply to establishment defenders, but only to their critics. 

There is a topic we want to focus on tonight, which is the direct legal attacks on free speech. In the U.S. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights imposes serious obstacles in the way of the ability to censor to criminalize dissent but a recent series of judicial rulings, including the attempt to indict former President Donald Trump for the political speech he gave on January 6, along with a case now making its way through the federal judicial system that it tends to hold Black Lives Matter leaders, including DeRay Mckesson, liable for the violent acts of others whom they are accused of inspiring, are making significant inroads and undermining and even erasing some of the most important landmark Supreme Court rulings from the 20th century, which have safeguarded our free speech rights when it comes to political debate. Because these kinds of legal attacks are often carried out under the darkness of technical-sounding debates about obscure legal dogma, they rarely receive media coverage but that is something we want to fix tonight because of all the ongoing attacks on free thought and free debate, this legalistic one now being carried out through the American court system is among the most threatening, and it's vital that it be reported on and explained in a way that is easily understood. We'll review those developments tonight. 

Then for our interview segment, we will speak to the former Trump speechwriter and current investigative journalist at Revolver News, Darren Beattie, who, among other things, has done some of the most important journalism surrounding January 6. We'll speak to him about these free speech attacks, about the latest developments in that January 6 investigation, about the recent revelations of the two IRS whistleblowers, about the investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, which we covered on Friday night here, about the posture of the Republican establishment and the Republican presidential primary and more. Darren has become a somewhat regular guest on our program and always has important and unique insights that one cannot obtain anywhere else. 

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