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Good evening. It's Thursday, June 13.
Tonight: Serious escalation of the conflict between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine – remember, that has again taken place in response to Joe Biden's permission for U.S. missiles and other weapons to be used by Ukraine to attack targets inside of Russia. Moscow has deployed several of its most sophisticated submarine weapons NATO has long bragged about off the coast of Cuba to lurk right near the southeastern coast of the United States. In response, the U.S. has deployed its submarines near its military base in Guantanamo, which many of you will recall is also located in Cuba. All of this comes as the U.S. today announced it was signing a ten-year security guarantee with Ukraine that President Zelenskyy said puts Ukraine on the path to NATO membership.
While would be a clear exaggeration to equate what is already happening now with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, where let's remember the world and the human species came very close to nuclear annihilation, there's obviously a tense and potentially dangerous confrontation, especially given the utter lack of communication between Moscow and Washington, as well as the sustained and serious tensions between those two nations arising out of a NATO-backed war right up to Russia's border. The question that will never disappear and cannot be rationally answered is why is this level of risk and danger worth it? Why is it wise and justifiable to put Americans, and ultimately all of humanity, in such obvious danger all over the question of who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine, many of which prefer Moscow and Putin to Kiev and Zelenskyy?
Meanwhile, yesterday, the U.S. government's official Twitter account responded to obviously accurate accusations from the foreign policy activist group Just Foreign Policy. The group pointed out that the United States, now, by law, has lifted restrictions on arming and funding the exact Ukrainian militia group – the Azov battalion – which the U.S. government itself, as well as most of the Western press, had spent a full decade denouncing as a monstrous neo-Nazi group. That's why there was a ban in place on the U.S. arming them. The U.S. government's justification for this, for why they're not actually arming a neo-Nazi group, is so transparently false and so easily provable that one has to see it to believe it, and to help us examine that, we will speak to the Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin, who has been on our show before and writes frequently about U.S. policy in Ukraine and the war that has been raging in it for two and a half years now.
Then: there is this fascinating aspect of the media ecosystem that many of the people who have the largest audiences to speak about politics, people who speak to millions of other Americans, are often completely unknown to people who work within corporate media, including those with far less of an audience size. That's because they are listened to by millions of people who are not on traditional media channels but instead places like TikTok, YouTube and Rumble. One such person, who has become a TikTok star and one on Instagram as well, is John McEntee, a former Trump White House adviser who has millions of followers on TikTok. They daily listen to his relentlessly conservative and right-wing perspectives about news and culture but what he says on many issues is not what one would expect if listening to prominent conservative pundits and analysts on more traditional media platforms. Among other things, he vehemently opposes the bipartisan bill to either force the sale of TikTok or ban it altogether, often attacks the GOP establishment as much as he does the Democrats, has extreme doubts about very standard features of U.S. foreign policy, including the wars that we are currently helping to wage and is an ardent advocate of free speech as well – in fact, he has become one of the leading voices on the right against the TikTok ban – and he's a free speech advocate not in the way that many Republicans are, where they immediately justify censorship the minute it comes to the views they hate most, but seems to be a principled and consistent advocate for it. We will speak to him about this ecosystem that has become incredibly influential, and the ways in which it is different from more standard and traditional means of communicating.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.