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Good evening. It's Tuesday, September 5. 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: The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 and its central mission was as clear as it was noble: to combat the spread of antisemitism and the accompanying false demonization of the Jewish people on which antisemitism has always depended. Over the last century, the ADL has built a reputation as a credible and serious group that fought against one of humanity's longest and most toxic bigotries, while also steadfastly defending core civil liberties and in particular, the virtues of free speech.
However, like so many institutions of authority in the United States after 2016, which entailed the dual traumas of the UK's departure from the EU, and then the far more traumatic defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, the ADL has now radically transformed into something much, much different. Indeed, in many ways, it has become an utterly fraudulent organization. Its work now has very little to do with combating antisemitism. That's just the marketing costume or the pretext it uses to wield power. The real mission of the ADL could not be clearer. It's to advance the interests of the Democratic Party to ensure the empowerment of Democratic Party leaders and to protect and preserve the dominant ideology that the establishment wings of both political parties are devoted to – in particular, to protect the status quo ideology from meaningful dissent and populist anger.
The ADL is in the news this week because it all but demanded the power to dictate to X – formerly known as Twitter – and to its owner, Elon Musk, what political views can and cannot be heard on the platform. And that is not some pipe dream, as the ADL itself has previously boasted. As news accounts confirm, it is already playing that central censorship role at numerous companies throughout Silicon Valley, determining, for instance, who has views that are sufficiently extremist that require them to be banned from PayPal and from the financial system in general, or who spouts what the ADL and its leaders consider to be hate speech or disinformation and thus must be silenced and banned from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The tactic of the ADL is thuggish, but it's also now common among liberal institutions. Namely, they explicitly threatened that these companies either obey the censorship demands or stand formally accused by the ADL of being anti-Semites or somehow promoting other strains of bigotry that can destroy the reputations of anyone they so accuse and destroy their ability to attract corporate advertisers necessary to the survival and prosperity of these platforms. In other words, like most liberal establishment institutions, the ADL has cynically weaponized and thus completely trivialized what ought to be serious concepts relating to bigotry, and, in doing so, they are attempting to seize the power to dictate what you can and cannot say, which political opinions you may and may not express over virtually every consequential online platform with very severe real-world consequences if you violate their decrees.
The Union of State and corporate power to uphold and implement this new censorship regime is one of the topics on which this show and my journalism primarily focus. It is vital to understand how it functions and what weapons it utilizes. Understanding what the ADL now is and what they are doing is vital in its own right but is of particular importance for understanding the regime of censorship rapidly enveloping political discourse in the West.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
