Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Democrats Use RFK Censorship Hearing to Again Strengthen Their Censorship Regime. Plus: Cornel West on His Insurgent Campaign
Video Transcript
July 25, 2023
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Good evening. It's Monday, July 24. 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 most of you know, we were up last week for a vacation during which my children and I traveled through the U.S. for a much-needed rest. We are excited to be back for the nightly resumption of System Update at its regular time.

Tonight: House Republicans last week, as part of their ongoing investigation of the weaponization of the FBI and other federal agencies, held a hearing on the U.S. security state attempts to influence the flow of information on the Internet to ensure that dissent to their agenda and their narrative is banned under the guise of combating “disinformation.” Among the witnesses were Democratic presidential challenger Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – whose interviews and videos have been repeatedly censored by Big Tech – as well as Emma-Jo Morris, the reporter who broke the stories for the New York Post about Joe Biden's involvement in his son Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine and China, only to be falsely smeared by the CIA and the media of promoting “Russian disinformation” and then watch her reporting be censored by Big Tech. 

In the days before the 2020 election, much of the focus ended up being on RFK, who has become public enemy number one for the Democratic Party, at least for the moment. There's a good chance our guest tonight will quickly replace him in that position. We were off for a vacation during that hearing and thus won't break it down in detail tonight as we would ordinarily do but we do want to highlight how constantly and almost reflexively the Democratic Party at this point does not deny that it is devoted to using state power – especially the power of the U.S. security state – to foster online censorship, but instead affirmatively justifies such censorship as necessary for the public health and now routinely uses that sensitive power – a combination of state and corporate power – against anyone the party deems to be its enemy. This hearing, designed to show the American people the dangers of censorship, as engineered by the FBI, Homeland Security and the CIA, was instead used by Democrats as yet another opportunity to justify it. We’ll show you the key exchanges from that hearing. 

Then: Cornel West has long been one of America's foremost public intellectuals, often associated with the American left and frequently an endorser of Democratic Party presidential candidates, even while offering scathing critiques of the party. Professor West is now causing a great deal of concern, angst, and even anger among Democrats as a result of his announcement that this year he will run for president on the Green Party ticket. He's a graduate of Harvard College with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton. And during his academic career, he has helped heating positions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth. He's the author of more than a dozen books, including the highly acclaimed 1983 work “Race Matters” and his 2004 treatise entitled “Democracy Matters.” In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, Dr. West supported the Democratic primary challenger, Bernie Sanders. When Sanders dropped out in 2016, amidst well-documented allegations of cheating by the DNC on behalf of Hillary Clinton, West endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, though in 2020, after Sanders dropped out, he endorsed Joe Biden in the general election. Dr. West has for decades been one of this country's most independent-minded and interesting thinkers and, as part of our quest to interview as many presidential candidates as we can on this program, we are delighted to welcome him to his debut appearance on System Update tonight for our interview segment. 

As another reminder, System Update is available in podcast form as well. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms. The episodes are posted 12 hours after they first air, live, here on Rumble and you can rate and review each episode which helps us spread the visibility of the program.

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

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