Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Rep. Dan Goldman Spews Hunter Biden Lies to Jake Tapper, Bill Kristol Sponsors Pro-Ukraine War Propaganda, & Sohrab Ahmari on Right-Wing Populism
Video Transcript
August 21, 2023
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Good evening. It's Friday, August 18. 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: when it comes to the censorship regime, the primary concept on which it all is based is that we are blessed to have major institutions of power that can be trusted to discern what is true and what is false, and we can therefore trust them to censor in order to keep us safe from other people’s disinformation – meaning that which they have decreed to be false. Among these benevolent institutions that have only our best interests at heart and are steadfastly devoted to ridding our society of the scourge of disinformation, are the nation's largest media corporations, the US Security State, Big Tech, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. These are the power centers that have united to set the bounds of what is and is not permissible speech, and, as polling data demonstrates, they have persuaded a large majority of Americans, particularly American liberals, to support their efforts to keep the Internet safe from false claims through their benevolent censorship power. 

One of the problems with this inspiring tale is that absolutely nobody lies more frequently, more glaringly and more deliberately than those very institutions. One major focus of this program System Update – and my journalism generally – is to identify and deconstruct the lies and disinformation campaigns that they routinely disseminate. Doing so is necessary precisely because they deceive so many people with that nonstop tsunami of falsehoods, but also because it is vital to understand what the real functions of these institutions are. When they lie, it is not because they have deviated from their mission or committed some sort of error. The opposite is true. They do that because they are fulfilling their mission. The reason that those who lie most withinside corporate media or the US security state are the ones who are most rewarded within those institutions is because their institutional mission, their institutional mandate, is to propagandize, deceive and thus control the thoughts and then the actions of the American population. 

Their lies are provable and clear, though sometimes they do require some time to demonstrate because oftentimes one must wait for the relevant evidence to emerge from the dark where they've hidden it in secret, as happened with the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks publications, the Snowden reporting, the Twitter Files and so many other instances where we had a sense that they were lying but couldn't yet prove it journalistically because they sufficiently hid the evidence, often making it a crime for the evidence of their lying to be disclosed. That is what classified information, or the classified law, is for. Rarely, though, is their lie so blatant and immediate that one can show it the minute it comes out of their mouths. That, however, is what happened this week when the new rising star of the Democratic Party, Congressman Daniel  Goldman, the billionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, who is from Manhattan, who was part of the Mueller team and who got elected because his family is good friends with the Sulzberger, the other billionaire heirs who control The New York Times – and he happens to have run for Congress in the one place The New York Times endorsement still matters, which is Manhattan, and that's how he won – went on CNN this week and was interviewed by Jake Tapper. The lie that Daniel Goldman told was so obvious, is so easily provable and so undeniable that even though it's not necessarily the greatest and gravest, the most consequential lie ever, we want to begin the show by showing it to you so that you can see just how glaringly and casually they lie. And because I know for certain that nobody at CNN will ever correct or retract this lie, no matter how dispositive the proof is, no matter how many times they see it, and I know they will, yet again, illustrating that their real function and the utter fraud of their claims about who they are and what they do will become so evident. They don't lie by accident; they lie on purpose. They don't lie in isolation; they lie systematically. 

Then, a new and genuinely excellent book was released this week that illustrates the crucial ideological conflicts taking place within the Republican Party and our political system generally. It illustrates a lot of the debates taking place, the vibrant debates within Western politics generally, and it also powerfully documents the way in which corporate power is being aggressively centralized and then weaponized to both impose a very menacing form of tyranny, as well as to abuse and repress America's working class. It's written by Sohrab Amari, who is a former editor with The Wall Street Journal and who ran the op-ed page for The New York Post. And now he's the founding editor of Compact Magazine, which is designed to explore what I think is the ample common ground between political populists of all types. The book is entitled “Tyranny Inc – How Private Power Crushed American Liberty – What to Do About It.” 

The way in which corporatism, along with militarism, is becoming the defining ideology of the American ruling class, it's been that way for decades, but it's gotten so much worse in the past several years in the process, crushing both core political liberties and the American working class is easily one of the most important developments of the last couple of decades. I was excited to blurb the book when I read it, when it was first in its draft stage, and now I'm really looking forward to talking with Sohrab, whom I consider one of the most interesting and independent-minded voices around about this book and his worldview in general. 

And then finally, time permitting, we will look at a new fraudulent political activism group started by supreme neocon Bill Kristol that he is calling Republicans for Ukraine, even though Bill Kristol is not a Republican any longer. He is for good reason, a person who overwhelmingly identifies with the Democratic Party and who continues to engage in all kinds of activism for Joe Biden's reelection and the reelection of Democrats all over the world. But he still uses this branding of him being a conservative because that's what enables him to propagandize. So, “I'm a conservative, and yet I agree with liberals,” that's how he shows how powerful their view is. The purpose of this new group, which has $2 million in funding already, is to run television ads during next week's Fox News Republican primary debate, which is aimed at Republicans, who, the polls now show, are turning against Joe Biden's support for endless war in Ukraine. It's designed to make a Republican argument. It's very patronizing how it does it. With these ads, Bill Kristol thinks they will get Republicans to come back on board supporting his latest war. We will examine the question of who gave Kristol this $2 million and why they're doing that and why Democrats continue to find themselves in bed with the very same neocons who just ten years ago were regularly calling fascist and racist and bloodthirsty Nazis. 

As a programming note, next week, as I indicated, the Republican primary debate, the first of the election cycle, will be held in Milwaukee, next Wednesday. Fox News is the television outlet that has the exclusive rights to air that debate. It will be hosted by two Fox hosts, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, but Rumble has the exclusive rights to stream the debate online. That is, I think, a watershed moment for independent media and independent journalism. The fact that the Republican Party did not turn to Google or Facebook or Twitter to exclusively stream the first presidential debate but, instead, it gave it to Rumble. As part of Rumble’s coverage of that debate, we will be going to Milwaukee to cover the debate, live, both before and after. We hope to be interviewing many of the people present, the presidential candidates and others. So, look for our programming next week. It may likely mean that we will be on the air at different times or more times than we normally are. So, we hope that you will tune in for that. And that's a good segway to the fact that we are encouraging our audience to download the Rumble app, which works either on phones or smart TVs, because that way, if you enable notifications, which we hope you will, the app will notify you the minute we start broadcasting, live, on Rumble at any time. That means if we do it at a time that's out of the ordinary or if we're a little late, you don't have to wait around. It'll be directly sent to however you ask it to be sent. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. You can follow the episodes 12 hours after their first broadcast live, here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. If you rate and review the show, it helps spread the visibility of the program.

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

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