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Good evening. It's Wednesday, July 5. 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: A court ruling issued earlier this week is one of the most significant defenses of core free speech rights in years. A federal district court judge in Louisiana has barred officials throughout the Biden administration – including top FBI officials and the White House Press Secretary – from continuing to apply pressure to Big Tech platforms to censor political speech they dislike. We know from a spate of reporting over the last two years – including but not only the Twitter Files – that the U.S. Security State and the Fauci-led health policy establishment have implemented campaigns to coerce Facebook, Google and Twitter to ban or otherwise limit ideas and viewpoints those agencies regard as threatening or otherwise uncomfortable.
This week's court ruling is the first to recognize the existence of these systemic censoring campaigns at the highest levels of the U.S. Government. The court additionally applied long-standing First Amendment precedent – that prohibits the government from pressuring private actors to censor for them – to rule that the U.S. Constitution's free speech guarantees have been directly violated by such campaigns. And, most importantly, the court put an immediate stop to it – by barring senior officials throughout the government from continuing to speak with Big Tech companies to press them to censor the constitutionally protected political speech of American citizens.
We'll review the key parts of the ruling, highlight why it is genuinely significant – surprisingly so and we'll show you the highly revealing reaction of liberal corporate media outlets and defenders of state censorship power to this ruling – it took them a few days to gain their footing and figure out how to respond –after all, nobody wants to explicitly admit that they want the U.S. Government to be able to censor the internet for political purposes, even though this is exactly what they want – but they finally have a coordinated script from which they are reading that shows how they intend to defend this and attack the core ruling.
As we have long observed, the central religious tenet of establishment liberalism in the U.S. — and the West more broadly – is suppressing, silencing, banishing and censoring dissent. That is why media outlets directed everyone to ignore the Twitter Files – it's all “a nothing burger,” they united to insist: don't pay attention to it – precisely because they don't want any attention paid to their censorship schemes, because they know Americans instinctively recoil from it. Because this court ruling does exactly the same thing as the Twitter Files – namely, shines a light on their abuse of state power – and then goes beyond mere reporting to ban this censorship as unconstitutional – they do regard this court ruling as a genuine menace and watching them figure out how to attack it in real time reveals a great deal [audio issues].
Even though there is a mountain of evidence now, that these agencies have regularly abused that spying power, the program has been repeatedly reauthorized by Congress with no reforms every time it comes up for renewal. This time, though, a significant number of members of Congress, mostly Republican, but some Democrats as well, are demanding real reforms, vowing that they will not renew this law without those reforms. Yet now it is the very same New York Times, the one that won a Pulitzer for exposing and denouncing this program, along with other establishment liberal venues which are heralding this domestic warrantless fire spying program as vital, as noble and as necessary, and suggesting that only what they call, “hard right” Republicans care about these abuses. The dynamic here is vital to consider, in part because these spying powers have been so abused for so long. It's just important unto itself, but also because it yet again reveals the dramatic shift in political factions when it comes to the U.S. security state. The prevailing view somehow of establishment sectors is that only fascists or Kremlin agents or both are concerned about the abuses of the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, and only such nefarious people would possibly want to reform it. And we’ll take a look at all of this.
Finally, French President Emmanuel Macron, in the wake of massive nationwide protests triggered by the police killing of a 17-year-old boy they caught driving without a license, is now explicitly threatening to shut down social media in France in the event of similar protests in the future. It is hard to overstate how aggressively virtually every Western state is now developing plans to further control Internet use for political speech and organizing. I think there is no more pressing issue in the West.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
