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Good evening. It's Thursday, July 13. 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 new streaming service called Kick is offering tens of millions of dollars – in one case, $100 million – to some of the world's most popular streamers to leave Twitch, the Amazon-owned platform that has long been the industry leader. The extraordinary amount of money that it is lavishing on these content creators is enabled by the fact that the platform is owned by StackCommerce, which has numerous shady interests, including a major interest in online crypto casinos where people around the world gamble their paychecks on blackjack, roulette and other games of chance as they fall into gambling addictions, online. All of this would be somewhat ordinary and banal. All sorts of sports celebrities and other influencers are now frequently paid by gambling sites to encourage their followers and fans to gamble their income online.
I think that adults should have the right to decide how to spend the money they earn, including gambling, if that's what they wish to do, but what makes Kick so uniquely pernicious, even kind of creepy and repulsive, is that the popular creators that are lavishing with many millions of dollars to stream are known for having very young audiences. filled with young adults and even teenagers under 18, and what many of these creators are doing, and the contract often requires it, is spending hours streaming online to very young audiences while they engage in online gambling at the crypto casino owned by Kick’s parent company and thus, intentionally or otherwise, luring all sorts of their young followers into a life of gambling and online casino addiction, which can and has often destroyed people's lives.
There may be more shameful and degenerate ways to earn a living than getting paid tens of millions of dollars a year to influence young people, including minors, to become gambling addicts but if there are more shameful and degenerate actions than that, there aren't many. This site is now booming. It is becoming a major player in the world of online streamers, many of whom have enormous amounts of fame and followers, similar in size to those of pop stars or A-list Hollywood actors. And so, this company needs some light shined on it and some journalistic certainty. And we're going to start tonight by laying out the basics of what we know.
Then, in 2018, a very radical leftist shocked the political world when she launched a successful primary challenge to one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, Joe Crowley, long touted as Nancy Pelosi's heir, apparent due to his talent in raising lobbyist money. He was expected to become House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi finally retired after exhausting herself with successful stock trades. The challenger's name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her 2018 campaign was primarily predicated on a vow to undermine and subvert the dastardly oligarchical Democratic Party establishment. A mere five years later, AOC has grown up and she has become one of the earliest endorsers of Joe Biden's reelection bid – not even pretending to consider other candidates running against him or even pretending to extract any promises in exchange for her support for the incumbent president. Symbolizing the complete subservience of the left wing of the Democratic Party, generally led by Bernie Sanders.
Politico recently heralded AOC for being a great, great, great team player. We'll talk to one of the best and most independent left-wing commentators, Nick Cruse, of the Black Revolutionary Network, about the current state of the Democratic Party and the mainstream wing of it that calls itself the left, and the implications for how these two factions have all but merged entirely.
After that, NATO has just concluded its annual meeting, pledging more unity than ever in support of Ukraine and its war against Russia, and even committing a deliberately vague way to NATO's membership for Ukraine, which would essentially guarantee endless war, eternal war, with Russia. Given that Russia has repeatedly said that NATO membership on its border with Ukraine is a red line for it, it will never accept it. We attempted to obtain press credentials for that conference so that the independent journalist Michael Tracey could report on it for our show but that application was rejected under very cryptic circumstances. We'll talk to Michael about that process as well as the latest developments with the U.S. role in the proxy war in Ukraine, which, although the media barely talks about it, is now going on a year and a half with no end in sight.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all major podcast podcasting platforms where you can follow and listen to the episodes 12 hours after they are first broadcast here live on Rumble. If you write and review each episode, that helps the visibility of the program.
As a programming note, we want to remind you that we will be off tomorrow and then, all of next week. My family and I are taking a much-needed and I think deserved vacation. We intended to have a show tomorrow night, which we would have taped today, but we were unable for logistical reasons to do that. So, we'll be off tomorrow night and all of next week, and we will be back the following Monday at our regular time at 7 p.m. Eastern.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
