Watch the full episode here:
https://rumble.com/v3d1ncs-system-update-show-139.html
Good evening. It's Tuesday, August 29. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, at 7:00 pm Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight: When the Internet first emerged in our lives in the mid-1990s, it was primarily used for discrete tasks: researching obscure topics, sending emails to relatives, buying books. Very quickly, however, it turned into something vastly greater: the central means that human beings throughout the West, and increasingly on the globe, use to communicate with one another, disseminate information and organize. And the original promise of the Internet – what all its triumphalists championed above all else at the start – was its liberatory nature, its ability to enable human beings to do all of that – communicate, disseminate information and organize freely, meaning without the mediation of centralized state and corporate power. That’s what made it revolutionary.
And that was what the Internet was at the beginning. And centers of power became petrified by it. They have at first gradually – and now rapidly – sought to commandeer it, to limit it, to control it, and above all to destroy the core freedom that once shaped it. The fears that this device would be too emancipating – too liberating – were accelerated by many magnitudes by the events of 2016: first when British voters decided they no longer wanted their country to be part of the EU and governed by distant Eurocrats in Brussels, and then, by the defeat of the ultimate establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, at the hands of the vulgarian menace known as Donald Trump, that shocked and shook at the foundations of the establishment power centers throughout the West.
Those power centers and the media corporations they control explicitly blamed the internet for those debacles and then increasingly blamed the Internet for all social ills – as they told us, Brexit and Trump happened not because citizens validly came to hate the establishments that told them what to do. No: that couldn't possibly be the explanation. The establishment and centers of power could not acknowledge any blame for what they regarded as those cataclysmic events. Instead, it was all blamed on the Internet: it was too free, it allowed too much disinformation to circulate – Russia and other bad actors could "divide" us with self-serving lies and turn us against our noble leaders by tricking us into distrusting them. People were simply too subject to manipulation and our democracies too fragile to permit the Internet – and Western populations – to be free any longer. We needed their protection, which came in the form of their controls, and ever since then, core freedoms in the West – on the Internet and off – have been rapidly eroding.
The core goal of all of this is simple: to stigmatize, banish, outlaw and even criminalize dissent from establishment pronouncements. That is not hyperbole. That is the goal and it’s easy to demonstrate they are rapidly moving towards it. One of the most insidious forms of this control has been around for at least a decade – only rarely used back then and noticed by very few people – but has recently become as commonplace as it is genuinely terrifying: exclusion from the digital financial services system for anyone whose dissent becomes too threatening. On Monday, the increasingly politicized fund-raising site GoFundMe notified the anti-establishment and anti-imperialist news site Grayzone that their account was being closed effective immediately, with its funds that were donated by their readers being frozen.
We will speak to Grayzone's founder and editor Max Blumenthal about all of this in just a bit, but first we will examine the trajectory of this truly repressive weapon being used against dissidents of all types.
Then: the actor Sean Penn was, for some miraculous reason, in Ukraine, in Kyev, on the day that Russia invaded, with a full film crew that was filming his interactions with that country's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Penn had spent months working on a propaganda film to glorify the Ukrainian leader and tis fight with Russia, and he has now released his must-see-to-believe trailer for his soon-to-be-released documentary that is nominally about the war in Ukraine, the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, and the profound generational greatness of President Zelenskyy but it is actually about Sean Penn, Sean Penn's heroic role in this war, and most of all Sean Penn's courage and integrity.
The trailer is worth marveling at in part because it is the glaring type of war propaganda that Hollywood has been producing in conjunction with the U.S. Security State for years. You may recall that in June we interviewed the director of the documentary called "Theaters of War," Roger Stahl, who described how so many of Hollywood's most mass-marketed films – not just about the military and war but even standard, benign super-hero films – are and can only be made in partnership with the CIA and Pentagon, which gives them script approval over these films.
Penn's film has a very touching moment where the one-time left-wing firebrand supporter of Hugo Chavez and Fox Host Sean Hannity come close to spontaneously hugging on the set of Hannity’s show when they realize how fully in agreement they are in support of President Zelenskyy and the need for the U.S. to infinitely fund this war until the end. But the film is worth examining to see how much propaganda has been drowning the West when it comes to this war from the very beginning and to question how it is that Sean Penn has been working on this documentary well before the war that involved the Russian invasion in February 2022 commenced.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting now.
