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Good evening. It's Tuesday, June 27. 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.
As a programming note, tomorrow, in Rio de Janeiro, the City Council of our city will award my late husband, David Miranda, the Pedro Ernesto Medal, which is the highest honor a resident of the city can receive. David's political career began there in that building, and I will accept the award for him and our children, which means there will be no System Update episode tomorrow night. We will be back at our regular time on Thursday, 7 p.m. Eastern, right here on Rumble.
Tonight: We are constantly told by Joe Biden and most other Western officials that the war in Ukraine, as I said about every award the United States has fought over the last 20 years, is a righteous battle between democracy on the one hand and autocracy on the other. There has always been a very strange claim when it comes to this war, given that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy, has long engaged in classical authoritarianism and even despotism. That includes ordering opposition television stations to shut down a year before Russia invaded Ukraine, banning opposition parties, and even ordering the country's oldest church, the Russian Orthodox Church, to close certain of its churches, based on suspicions of loyalties to the Russian government. But the Zelenskyy’s tyrannical streak just reached a new high or a new low. He announced that he is canceling all elections, including the one that would select the Ukrainian president until the war in Ukraine is over, meaning he has declared himself president of that country indefinitely. Every Western country supporting Ukraine says this war is likely to go on for years, which means that Zelenskyy will remain in power, presumably without any kind of democratic accountability. That is a very odd action from someone claiming to the world to be defending democracy. He is in essence arguing that he must destroy Ukrainian democracy to save it. We'll examine the implications for this as the Biden administration today yet again announced another massive aid package to send to that country to fuel the proxy war. The U.S. is fighting against Russia, using Ukraine as its proxy.
Then, shortly before we went on the air on Friday night, the leader of the Russian mercenary battalion, the Wagner group, led by a very wealthy Yevgeny Prigozhin, began marching toward Moscow. In his speech, Prigozhin ranted against the defense minister, whom he long accused of negligence and other sins in the conduct of the war. Within hours of this very complex event in the middle of the fog of war carried out by all sorts of sketchy characters of all types with all kinds of mysterious motives, numerous Western commentators began issuing definitive pronouncements about exactly what was happening and what would happen. All of which just so coincidentally aligned with their long-held views about the war in Ukraine. Some even said in some of the most viral social media posts that were seen by and endorsed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, that Putin and his closest associates had already fled Moscow on private jets, panicked about what they said was the imminent coup against the Kremlin. As always, when everything collapsed just 18 hours later, they all moved on as if nothing had happened. But we'll review how real disinformation works and who is responsible for its dissemination.
Finally, one of the journalists most informed about the war in Ukraine is the Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinking. He has been covering the war for years, often as a lone voice in the pages of The Nation, The New York Times, CNN and other outlets. We'll speak to him tonight about the latest developments there and, in particular, the concern he has long harbored, that the very significant presence of real Nazis – not the kind who wear MAGA hats, but the kind whose ideology explicitly aligns with Adolf Hitler's defining view – have been constantly whitewashed by the Western press, because Western governments, led by the U.S., want to fund and arm those Nazi battalions. We'll talk to him about this, about the cynical exploitation of antisemitism accusations in this war and in general and much more. He's always worth listening to, and we're genuinely excited about his debut appearance on our program.
As we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, as soon as we're done here with our one-hour live show on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions, comment on your feedback as part of that interactive program to obtain access to our aftershow, simply sign up as a member of our local community. The red Join button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page and doing that helps support the independent journalism that we do here.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
