Watch the full episode here:

Good evening. It's Thursday, April 4.
Tonight: although it's rarely talked about, the U.S. and NATO-funded war in Ukraine is still plodding along. Earlier today, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood next to the Ukrainian foreign minister at the foreign ministers meeting of a NATO summit and proclaimed: “Ukraine will become a member of NATO.” That all Russians—not just Vladimir Putin—view NATO membership in Ukraine as an existential threat has been recognized for decades at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The current CIA director, William Burns, stridently warned senior Bush officials in a 2008 memo that even threatening expansion of NATO to include Ukraine would force the Russians to attack eastern Ukraine and annex Crimea. Yet, despite knowing that, the U.S. foreign policy community continues to threaten Russia with exactly that, and now has definitively stated that Ukraine's membership in NATO is inevitable, meaning that American citizens and citizens of other EU countries would be obligated to fight and die in a war to defend Ukraine. We'll examine all of the implications of this announcement.
Then: the fallout from Israel's fatal attack on a convoy of aid workers with the World Health Kitchen continues to escalate. A document recently obtained by the Israeli journal 972 magazine reveals highly unusual—and extremely disturbing—calculations by the Israelis about how many civilians they're willing to kill each time they kill just a single Hamas operative. We'll examine this revelation and what it says about the ongoing war in Gaza and the U.S. role there, yet another conflict financed and armed by the U.S. government.
Finally, though largely ignored by most of the media, the Twitter Files continue to produce highly relevant and deeply alarming revelations. Yesterday, the independent journalist Michael Shellenberger released a mountain of previously unknown documents showing how extreme the censorship regime in Brazil has become and how it is led by a single judge, a single member of the Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, on whom we have reported many times and often have warned about, who issues his silencing decrees with no due process or limits of any kind. And this gives a vivid look into how he pressures Big Tech companies to silence critics.
As always, it's important to point out that what happens in a large and ostensibly democratic country like Brazil is important in itself. Just the fact that it's such a big and important country is reason enough to report on it. But it's also vital for Americans to watch because it's so often a harbinger, a laboratory for how free speech will be infringed inside the United States for Americans as well. So, we will speak to Michael Shellenberger tonight about all of his findings and what they mean.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.