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Good evening, everybody. It's Friday, March 21.
We do have a lot to talk about tonight, including and beginning with the fact that Candace Owens, the extremely popular conservative pundit, activist, and broadcaster who has worked for the last several years at the very popular right-wing outlet The Daily Wire, founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, is out of a job at the Daily Wire. By all accounts, including a lot of reporting that I've been able to do, including speaking to people very close to the situation, the reason is extremely clear there's nothing doubtful or ambiguous about it. The reason is just that the Daily Wire was founded by two people, Ben Shapiro in particular, who are among the most radical, extremist, vocal, and unyielding supporters of the state of Israel that the world has seen, about as extremist as they get. And at the same time, Candace Owens, ever since, October 7, has been increasingly critical of the state of Israel – and not so much the state of Israel as much as the policy that the United States has adopted for many decades, including now, of financing Israel's wars and financing Israel's military. Candace comes from the part of the Republican Party that has defined itself as being an America First party in terms of foreign policy and the like. She has argued vehemently against funding the war in Ukraine on the grounds that we should not be encouraging and fueling foreign countries' wars. Instead of making a sudden exception for Israel, she has applied those arguments consistently to Israel and said the United States should also not be financing Israel's wars or making Israel's wars our wars. She's also been critical of the humanitarian crisis caused in Gaza by the Israeli military.
This has caused a lot of tension at the Daily Wire as her criticism became more vocal, there has been more and more of an effort to demand her firing by prominent rabbis, by the Anti-Defamation League, and you could see it coming. It was only a question of time before the Daily Wire—a media outlet that was founded on values of free speech and free inquiry and opposing cancel culture, things like firing journalists because of disagreement with the views that they expressed—it was only a matter of time before they got rid of Candace Owens because of her dissent on Israel. And that's exactly what has happened. And as a result, she is now out of the Daily Wire. We will examine what happened there, as well as the implications for things like the American right and claims of free speech and free discourse and opposition to cancel culture, and whether or not people can exist in the conservative movement in any meaningful way, and at the same time, question this foreign country or criticize this foreign country or the United States policy toward it.
Then, we will also look at an unfolding news event, which is a major terrorist attack that took place just a couple of hours ago in Moscow at a very popular concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, at a concert for a well-known Russian rock band called Picnic. There are at least 40 Russian citizens, or 40 people in Russia who are dead, and there are at least 180 or so who are wounded. These numbers are almost certainly to increase. There are a lot of horrific images of that scene that have been circulating. It was clearly a terrorist attack, with people just going with automatic weapons and gunning down anybody they could find, deliberately killing them even as they were cowering. It was clearly a classic terrorist attack. There were many claims early on, including from prominent media outlets, that the culprit here was Vladimir Putin, in other words, that he ordered an attack on his own country, that this is a false flag designed to falsely claim that it was Ukraine that did it for him to go then and attack Ukraine in all sorts of unprecedented ways. There is zero evidence for that. And yet already there are all kinds of claims circulating on the internet, including from people who work within mainstream corporate media, who just decided to spread that conspiracy theory. The United States government now says that ISIS is to blame, and we'll look at that as well.
And finally, the ACLU, which had once been a civil liberties organization, an organization devoted to free speech, has become just the latest in a long line of left liberal outlets and activist groups and organizations that have succumbed to almost complete internal implosion because they are filled with people who, rather than focus on the work of the organization, instead opt to run around accusing each other of being racist and harassing each other, and being abusive and toxic and problematic in the workplace, and they end up riven by internal conflict instead of by the mission that they claim they are created to do. In the case of the ACLU, dedicated to protecting constitutional rights, instead, all of their internal resources end up devoted to trying to arbitrate between wars, between various left-liberal employees who are accusing one another of being racist and sexist and all sorts of other bigotries and it causes the organization to become completely paralyzed. The latest case of the ACLU, which was reported today in the New York Times in detail, is almost a caricature that's hilarious if you just look at it on its own in terms of how extreme it is, but it's also such a caricature of what most left-liberal organizations are being paralyzed, what they really are a victim of their creation, just their own Frankensteins that are consuming them and eating it up. We’ll look at this ACLU case as well because, in the case of the ACLU, it actually implicates their core mission, which is the question of free speech. To justify the firing of one of their employees by claiming that this woman, who's an Asian woman, was guilty of anti-Black racism, they need to argue for an expanded definition of the term hate speech, obviously inconsistent with the ACLU's core values. So, we're going to take a look at those three stories.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
