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Good evening. It's Wednesday, September 13th. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our Nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight: Polling data about Joe Biden continues to alarm Democratic operatives – that's putting it mildly – as they not only show large majorities of Americans do not want Biden to be the next president but also show, perhaps even worse, that they regard the economy as bad and getting worse. That voters' perceptions of the economy play perhaps the most vital role in presidential elections is hardly some sophisticated insight – Clinton advisers became widely celebrated in the nineties for pointing out “It's the economy, stupid.” – and it tends to be conventional wisdom that the economy determines election outcomes except in times of war, meaning the United States involved in a direct war. All the chatter about January 6, Vladimir Putin, insurrections, democracy, and indictments appears unlikely to change that.
As a result, Democrats have been adopting a strategy that they have continuously employed yet, which seems – recognizing that I'm not a political strategist – highly unlikely to succeed. They keep sending out the richest, wealthiest, and most condescending media elites to chide Americans – to lecture them, to berate and hector them – for failing to appreciate how good they have it, for refusing to give Joe Biden the credit and even gratitude that he deserves, and to essentially insist that their view that their economic situation is precarious is due to their own stupidity, not their valid perception of reality. We were treated last night to one of the most extreme examples of this yet – courtesy of Christiane Amanpour, the CNN host and New York Times pundit and economist Paul Krugman – and we'll take a look at what this reveals about media and liberal elites, as well as the economy heading into the 2024 election.
Then: As President Zelenskyy perceives, accurately, that war support is eroding both in the U.S. and the West, he's becoming increasingly brazen and even unhinged in some of the threats he is issuing toward the West about what will happen if Western cash stops flowing to Kyiv. At the same time, Ukraine is using some extremely odd and disturbing spokespeople to issue similar threats, even more unhinged ones, including ones that seem to promise death or life in prison for critics of Zelenskyy or that war. We'll take a look at that as well.
And finally, last night, I was on a program on “NewsNation,” the relatively new cable network that's designed to compete primarily with CNN and MSNBC, and the discussion I had about Elon Musk and whether he had a duty to obey orders from the Ukrainian military – one that we covered on Monday night's show [ https://rumble.com/v3gv862-system-update-show-146.html ]– is a topic I discussed, and I think it's really worth reviewing what happened in this interview.
As a few programming notes, because I will be appearing on the 8 p.m. Eastern Fox program with Jesse Waters, immediately following this program, we have to be a little bit more disciplined with our time management than we normally are – not that we're not extremely disciplined ordinarily – but we're going to be even more disciplined tonight because we have to finish the show right about exactly 8 p.m. so I can go and do that show.
As another reminder, System Update is available in podcast and you can follow us on Apple, Spotify, and all other major podcasting platforms 12 hours after each episode first is broadcast live here on Rumble – and if you rate and review each program, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
As a last reminder, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble every Tuesday and Thursday night, we move to Locals for our live interactive aftershow. Locals is part of the Rumble platform, and that show is designed to have a dialog with our audience to take your questions and comment on your feedback. The aftershow is available exclusively for our subscribers to our Locals community and membership there also gives you access to the daily transcripts that we post of each show as well as the original journalism that we produce there – and, in general, it helps the independent journalism that we do here.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.