Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Elon Musk Goes to War with Brazil’s Censorship Regime. PLUS: 19 Republicans Defy Speaker Johnson to Kill Renewal of Domestic Spying Bill
Video Transcript
April 11, 2024
post photo preview

Watch the full episode here: 

placeholder
 

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google


Good evening. It's Wednesday, April 10. 

Tonight: a virtual war has erupted between Elon Musk and X on one side, and virtually the entire Brazilian establishment and the Brazilian left with which they're united on the other. As we have been reporting for two years now, the censorship regime that has been imposed in Brazil—the world's fifth most populous country—all centralized in the hands of a single Supreme Court judge, is more extreme, more repressive, and more lawless than anywhere in the democratic world. And that's saying a lot given how much censorship has spread. That's just one indicator of how extreme the Brazilian censorship scheme is. 

This platform Rumble decided last year that they would rather block Brazilians from viewing its content, despite having built a large and growing Brazilian audience, rather than face massive fines and even criminal threats of prosecution for failure to comply with the avalanche of censorship orders they were receiving virtually daily. 

H0sTO4njiaXEmS0x9Z1zaIVJWfr7igkP5oxfTGS6bzeskCmiQSD6UIpdXjA2bkgLhvrHrqrK1RoE-gEWssbALkuDIRqlmqQZqa-T7-ncaR5Beaqd3SWK5OEUGvWxK0b-2-Xf9IWY3_zE

That message is what people in Brazil now see when they try to access Rumble, a message saying Rumble is not available in the country because of censorship orders. Rumble announced that it would no longer serve as a weapon in the censorship regime and would block access for all Brazilians, at least for those who don't use VPNs, pending its judicial challenge of the censorship laws that it has now brought.

Last week, the independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, working with two separate Brazilian journalists, released the Brazilian part of the Twitter Files. It documented how internal Twitter lawyers in Brazil were growing increasingly alarmed at the politically motivated censorship orders from the court that they were being drowned with routinely, and they were worried about the consequences they might face from failure to comply. We interviewed Shellenberger last week about his reporting. He was in Brazil at the time, and he was interviewed by multiple media outlets in Brazil, usually in a very hostile manner, far more interested in attacking his character and methods than addressing the substance of his revelations. 

Elon Musk saw all of this—obviously, he pays attention to the Twitter Files—and responded to all of that over the weekend by launching a series of very vitriolic attacks on this one Supreme Court judge overseeing the censorship regime, calling him a tyrant and urging his impeachment. Musk also vowed that X would prefer to disobey unjust censorship orders and even leave Brazil than continue to be used as a weapon in service of this regime. The same decision that Rumble made concerning Brazil last year. That, in turn, provoked very aggressive threats from this judge. He declared Musk to be a target of a pending criminal investigation involving fake news and disinformation. He just inserted Musk into this pending criminal investigation as one of the targets of the criminal probe. He also ordered X employees in Brazil to be questioned by the federal police and explicitly threatened them in writing, with arrest and prosecution if X permitted any banned voices to return to the platform. All of this demonstrates the severity of the growing censorship regime, not only in Brazil but throughout the democratic world. Precisely because Brazil has been so extreme is why it's so relevant to Americans, because it's being used as a laboratory to see how far control over the Internet and online speech can go. Europe and the United States have embarked on their own online censorship regime. We have been reporting on that extensively to the point that it's now at the Supreme Court. What is being done in Brazil is a harbinger of what is coming to the West. We will report on everything that happened here and explore its quite significant implications. 

Then: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a vocal and steadfast opponent of the U.S. Security State, generally in its attempts to censor the Internet and spy on Americans in particular. Shortly before becoming a speaker, we interviewed him on this show, and he was very clear about his views on these questions. Yet since being elected Speaker, Mike Johnson has seemingly changed his views in quite radical ways on many key issues. He was a longtime opponent of providing more U.S. aid to the war in Ukraine, yet now is working to ensure that Joe Biden's $60 billion request for Ukraine is approved in the House, even if that means relying on Democrats and Democratic protection to do so. Earlier today, Speaker Johnson tried to bring to the floor a vote to renew the domestic spying powers of the NSA and the FBI and to do so without allowing even a single reform, safeguard, or warrant requirement. In other words, Speaker Johnson worked hard to give the Biden White House and the U.S. Security State what they were demanding for renewal of their domestic spying powers and spying on Americans, which was originally enacted during the Bush administration in the name of the War on Terror, and to renew it without any reforms or protections at all. But Mike Johnson had a serious surprise today: his own caucus delivered a major and quite unusual defeat to the House Speaker, with 19 members defecting and preventing the speaker from bringing the bill to the floor. It is likely that some domestic spying bill will eventually pass, though it's not guaranteed and we'll explain what happened today in Congress that dealt a serious blow to the efforts suddenly led by Speaker Johnson, to hand the FBI all these spying powers they want without a single reform. We also will have various members of Congress on over the next week or so to talk about the war in Ukraine, to talk about the FISA law and related issues as well. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
22
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

00:11:10
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Discusses Mahmoud Khalil on Fox News
00:08:35
Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

Hi Glenn-- I had lost all confidence in Gabbard's integrity long before yesterday's final, decisive, shameless capitulation to Trump & the warmongering uniparty deepstate.

That said, the fact that she chose personal ambition over principle -- with the highest possible stakes on the line -- is no less disappointing for being so unsurprising.

So I'm not here to criticize you for having held out hope that she might stand up when it counted. I trust you implicitly and I trust your rationale for believing this might have gone differently.

But as always I am eager to hear more of your thoughts about this!

post photo preview
QUICK: Ask Questions for Today's Mailbag!

Glenn will be discussing the Israel-Iran conflict and a Trump Administration official who is in an awkward political predicament, so questions on other topics are more likely to be chosen.

Listened to Tucker Carlson's podcast with Sen. Ted Cruz. It is truly stunning! Cruz proved that individuals like himself should never, ever be elected to positions of consequence in the U.S. Government. One extremely disheartening takeaway from this exchange is that the pompousness and irrationality exhibited by Cruz is prototypical of nearly all elected representatives in the U.S. Congress, imho. He's a sleazy huckster posing as a United States Senator.
Worthy of a listening, for as long as one can tolerate it.

post photo preview
Trump Declares the War in Iran to Be His Own; Journalist Ken Klippenstein on Trump's War Plans, DC Dems, and More
System Update #470

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

AD_4nXenaRUShX16c-8ECc5F7vr3o6g11DYk7RV5pH8U-qyBXy-zYmuW7z-wzaxDuUQpIyLzcKQkC0YU8HhJoikoXpgvcmZuo0-zubGScgwcsRiz81y2Xid4-t20jRk9xtc5TzLC_nvn6hzSs8GJ6-nJHqo?key=BBSJ3M5xBKO2EWGYp7BseA

Ever since the Israelis attacked Iran on Thursday night, many of Donald Trump's most passionate supporters have raised questions about the extent to which Trump knew or was involved in this new war. In one sense, that concern is understandable. Many of them believe Trump's repeated promises for years to keep the U.S. out of new wars, especially new wars in the Middle East, and they did not want to believe that he had violated that promise so radically and so quickly, less than five months in office by sanctioning and involving the United States in a new war with Iran. 

But those denials have grown increasingly implausible every day as Trump has now boasted of his involvement and repeatedly made clear the central role that he and the United States played in the planning, launching and coordinating of this war. Whatever remaining doubts still lingered about whether Trump's role was as significant as he claimed were completely crushed by Trump himself today, as the President issued a series of tweets – one more unhinged and war-drunk than the next – proclaiming that we – "we" meaning the United States – now dominate and control the skies over Tehran. He also ordered the Iranians to accept the deal that he told them to sign, threatening them with serious devastation if they refused. 

We’ll also talk to the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who breaks many stories, genuinely breaking stories on his Substack, where he went after wisely deciding to quit the Intercept last year. He receives many leaks from sources inside the intelligence community – not the official and authorized leaks: those are for Barack Ravid at Axios – but he gets the unauthorized ones from mid-level or even low-level employees of the U.S. Government. 

Ken has a new story out tonight about war plans of Trump for Iran that were leaked to him, regarding the Israelis and the Americans' designs on Iran. We’ll discuss that as well as a variety of other issues concerning this brand-new war, various happenings in Washington, and more. 

AD_4nXenaRUShX16c-8ECc5F7vr3o6g11DYk7RV5pH8U-qyBXy-zYmuW7z-wzaxDuUQpIyLzcKQkC0YU8HhJoikoXpgvcmZuo0-zubGScgwcsRiz81y2Xid4-t20jRk9xtc5TzLC_nvn6hzSs8GJ6-nJHqo?key=BBSJ3M5xBKO2EWGYp7BseA

AD_4nXedPOPXABw2AyO5MpGM1pvqg9021WUEs0aICXKUuhKfXxoA2SLhFgi-itdRHV3kUFFMX26GgzRFJDbBb3ZRxgG4iJhWmenMtpIRs5PDzUUmFlUKvltb8awGWtbXtfuMRztR5HN8nMzNJo8rkeA6PR0?key=BBSJ3M5xBKO2EWGYp7BseA

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars
System Update #469

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

AD_4nXeYkVcgzcgVgwTH4HsgQ-PsjfJnkkerEMKzJUBNbex49ctiCfUGCSwgs9h6Vn3qKESfxyvgEpfVQz8nobvNvfVrE9z8iBrAZvKRdf7iPZ-2Qov6I426kA0Sqc0Yy6Oh5amLisL1-RzSK5ykf5mGHyE?key=aMiM9imCrTsNamRKd6Vfew

The war initiated by Israel against Iran last Thursday was dangerous from the start and has each day only become more dangerous. President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel. He's now even re-deploying aircraft carriers in the Pacific, where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy – China – now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war. 

Just a few minutes ago, President Trump ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m. 

With Israel, as always, demanding more. Now, they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them. The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump in the U.S. that it's our obligation to fight this war with them. And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war. 

There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting –and we will do so throughout the week – but tonight we want to focus on the amazing ease the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it. Over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the U.S. political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine – a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight – and overnight huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced without having ever said so previously that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative as well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens of the United States. 

No matter how debunked, discredited and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then, apparently, that same script just works like magic all over again. You just haul it out, fearmongering, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, "Yes, let's go to war, let' kill people." 

We'll examine all of that, as well as the standard bipartisan unity in support of new American wars and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously, either staying quiet or praising President Trump, with just a few exceptions from both parties. And we'll look at that as well. 

AD_4nXeYkVcgzcgVgwTH4HsgQ-PsjfJnkkerEMKzJUBNbex49ctiCfUGCSwgs9h6Vn3qKESfxyvgEpfVQz8nobvNvfVrE9z8iBrAZvKRdf7iPZ-2Qov6I426kA0Sqc0Yy6Oh5amLisL1-RzSK5ykf5mGHyE?key=aMiM9imCrTsNamRKd6Vfew

AD_4nXdXi3PHhIfI5UY5jue2s_VN_Dre1s5GH_qzxPS39EBWpyASwtOnszEASDMpdRuJzVlrD4idh5uDoPcdU38-w-kpHnSvAo9rtxSpcN4lW-sAiALyp2wxVRGqfHoLUqaYrKPxb_-HZMv3-aKzQLw90g?key=aMiM9imCrTsNamRKd6Vfew

If you're an American citizen as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war. Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of wars and that's after the Iraq war, which is now 22 years ago. Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war. 

After World War II, there was a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning. They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal and enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or finance some other country to go drop bombs for it. Then, after six months, a year, or two years, or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war that they were convinced to support. Going back to the war in Vietnam, throughout the 1980s’ wars, the War on Terror in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, bombing Yemin and now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in, in lots of different ways and we're only on the fifth day.

You just see so many Americans on a dime the minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans lived through watching proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people. You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing. Not all, a very substantial minority oppose it, I think if the U.S. overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even perhaps prolonged bombing of Iran as well through U.S. jets and bombs, as President Trump has indicated and Israel has demanded, maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode. But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it. And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it; then it's just already done. All the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run, why that would be appeasement, etc., etc. All the same scripts all the time, used over and over, and even though they get proven to be discredited, or unpersuasive, or full of lies, you just use the same ones each time. And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.

We've been hearing a lot of people saying, “Look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran, as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war, we don't enter it, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.” But, of course, the entire Israeli military is funded by American taxpayers. Every time Israel has a new war, the weapons that it uses come from the United States, transferred to Israel. We pay for their wars, we arm their wars, we support diplomatically those wars and we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus to support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing. We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump. They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation. President Trump openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran: "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved," the president said. (ABC News. June 15, 2025.)

That all depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ We're paying for the war, we're arming the war, we've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran, based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons, just weeks away, something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times, same thing that was said in 2002. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
U.S. Involvement in Israel's Iran Attack; the View from Tehran: Iranian Professor on Reactions to Strikes; CATO Analysts on Dangers and War Escalations

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

AD_4nXd1VoS9xg7si8ZviLBfSqd9c5_FMQdODz9RYxLWVBvtebHFOs0oWtttaWP_7qvL_VZdS0enruALLjYbkU-CdLQUDxNECHRbc5Y9OjrLuK-6y6Uq602-Q9fTzTYkN5_S0oVACoqvAhTWU86eCRc8vZU?key=lmRJixp6Jlz5wRA3fSBDAg

Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

We’ll speak to Professor Mohammad Marandi, who is in Tehran and has heard and witnessed a lot of what happened but also has some unique analysis from his role as an American Iranian scholar of foreign policy and to scholars Justin Logan and Jon Hoffman, from the Cato Institute, one of the very few think tanks in the United States, which has long counselled restraint and non-interventionism in U.S. foreign policy. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals