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Good evening. It's Friday, July 28. 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, as the war in Ukraine drags on with no end in sight, the spigot of cash that goes directly from the U.S. Treasury into the coffers of the Ukrainian government and the U.S. arms industry continues to flow as lavishly as ever. Given that this money is sloshing around some of the most corrupt and unaccountable institutions on the planet – the Pentagon, Western arms manufacturers, and the Ukrainian government – it is no surprise that very few people, if any, have any idea where these billions of dollars in weapons systems are actually going. For that reason, last year, Republican Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, attempted to impose some basic oversight and auditing provisions on where this money was going and how it was being used. Not only was that effort overwhelmingly defeated, but he was accused by Senate leaders of both parties, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, as well as by the Ukrainian government, of being a Kremlin asset. Obviously, there's no reason why you'd want to have oversight on the whereabouts of American money unless you're working for Russia. A year later, Senator Paul this time has allies in his attempt to impose some basic safeguards in the flow of this money, namely most of the Republican Senate caucus, many of whom are emphatic supporters of Biden's proxy war in Ukraine but believe that some oversight is now necessary on this money, as well as two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff, of Georgia, and Jon Tester, of Montana.
Nonetheless, a proposal to establish an inspector general's office to monitor the flow of money from Washington to Ukraine was just rejected by the Senate: 51 senators voted Yes, in favor of this oversight, while 48 voted No. Democrats invoked what they often referred to as the “Jim Crow filibuster” – at least that's what it's called when Republicans use it – 60 votes rather than 50 were required for passage, leaving the amendment nine votes short of passage. Not only did all but two Senate Democrats vote to sink this oversight provision, but the radical anti-establishment, working-class hero, independent from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, joined the Democrats in doing so. Failure of this amendment, which in this case was sponsored by Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, along with three other Senate Republicans and Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema means not only that the U.S. role in the proxy war in Ukraine will continue at that end, but so too will the oversight free flow of billions of dollars.
We'll examine the key aspects of how Senate Democrats, along with Bernie Sanders, ensured that there will be no real oversight on the billions they continue to send to Ukraine.
Then: the Biden Justice Department filed a brief this week with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, urging it to reverse a decision from a federal district court judge that banned the Biden administration from continuing to pressure Big Tech to censor dissent off of the Internet. That was a decision we reported on at length. On the one hand, this move is unsurprising and, of course, the Justice Department is going to appeal when a lower court rules that the administration is guilty of one of the most grievous assaults on First Amendment free speech rights in years, but on the other, this appeal highlights a core truth of U.S. politics: censoring the Internet of all dissent is a core weapon of the D.C. establishment in the Democratic Party. By appealing, the Biden administration is willing to incur the risk of an even worse precedent, one that could ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court but they are willing to do so because this court ruling endangers one of the most cherished weapons of the U.S. security state in the liberal establishment in Washington, namely, the ability to coerce Big Tech into silencing their critics.
Lastly, we devoted last night's episode to the release of new emails from the House Judiciary Committee, proving how aggressively and continuously the Biden administration and the White House pressured Facebook to censor any and all dissent from its COVID policies and narratives. Still, more emails were released today by Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and we’ll review the most important of those but the reaction of the corporate media to all of this was as predictable as it was repellent. Most of them simply ignored these revelations as they often do when things are incriminating to the Democratic Party, while the few who deign to discuss them did so by mindlessly adopting the White House talking points that absolutely nothing inappropriate was done and all of this is just a right-wing conspiracy. There's no real censorship being exerted by the administration. We’ll look specifically at the so-called “news analysis” from one of the most dishonest partisan operatives in all of the corporate media – CNN's Oliver Darcy – to highlight one of the most surreal facts of American political life, namely the leading activists and most vocal agitators for the U.S. censorship regime is the liberal employees of the nation's largest media corporations, who still use the title “journalists”, and their corporate H.R. departments, even as they agitate ever more explicitly for more and more censorship of all political dissent.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
