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Tonight: One of the very worst escalations of the online censorship regime now sweeping the West took place just three weeks before the 2020 presidential election when the pre-Elon Musk Twitter and Facebook announced that they were banning or suppressing any discussion or any links to The New York Post reporting about the Biden family businesses and their interests in places like Ukraine and China. Among all of the corrupted aspects of those censorship actions, the rationale that those Big Tech platforms used to justify their censorship was simply false: they claimed that any links to such stories violated their policy that banned any linking to hacked documents but the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop on which that reporting was based were never hacked. Remember, that came from a CIA ally. That banning of that story by Twitter and Facebook weeks before the 2020 election was political censorship as brute as you will ever get. Now, many people are comparing that 2020 incident to the decision by X today to temporarily suspend a journalist on the grounds that he did something similar.  

Earlier today, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, my former colleague at The Intercept, along with his colleague, the national security journalist Bill Arkin, obtained and then published on Klippenstein's Substack a dossier about JD Vance that was compiled by the Trump campaign. Calling it a “dossier” makes it sound very sinister, but it's really just a very common vetting document that presidential campaigns always compile about all of the possible running mates that they might choose to understand the benefits and the downsides of each candidate. 

It is long been reported over the last several months – in fact, we covered this fact – that major media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times and others had received copies of this “Vance Dossier,” but decided not to publish it, in part because they said the CIA claimed (with no evidence) that the documents were obtained by Iran's hacking of the Trump campaign and they cited their policies against publishing hacked documents, foreign governments, right before an election. Also these media outlets said the dossier contained nothing particularly interesting, no real new revelation, merely just information largely available about JD Vance's prior statements and prior work, mostly things that were already publicly known. 

Once this so-called Vance Dossier was published, on Klippenstein's site, the same one that these media outlets had refused to publish. You can see it, there’s almost nothing in that report about Vance that wasn't already previously known and widely reported. The media outlets were truthful in explaining why they didn't publish it. 

Despite all of that, X quickly announced what it called a, quote, “temporary suspension” of Ken Klippenstein's account right after he posted a link to his Substack with that Vance report published on it. X also barred the posting of any links by anybody else to that report on Klippenstein's site. 

At first glance, this action seemed in a lot of people's eyes to be similar in kind to Twitter's banning a Biden reporting four years ago. Namely, both were barring any discussion of documents hacked by a foreign power. As it turns out, there are several important distinctions between what happened then and what happened now. In this case, X quickly made clear today that it had no objection to the publication of the Vance report itself, that Klippenstein just merely uploaded the Vance report in what they considered a responsible way. That would have been fine. It wouldn't have violated any rules. What they objected to, they said, was the failure to redact certain personal information in the dossier about JD Vance, including his home address in Ohio, which appears on the very first page of the report, along with five of the nine digits of his Social Security number, and X said that violates our policy that bans links to doxing, links to people's home address. 

There's a lot more going on in this story beyond the specific question of whether this temporary suspension of Klippenstein is justified and whether it can be compared to the Twitter and Facebook banning of The New York Post reporting in 2020. This entire incident says a great deal about the role that media outlets, the posture that they have assumed and the way in which they have painted them into themselves into a corner in order to justify this new policy they announced in 2020, under a great deal of liberal pressure, that they would no longer publish, but instead would withhold, documents in the public interest if they come from acting by a foreign power. It also has a great deal about the role of Big Tech is and should be and should not be in the policing of content by journalists and others. It says a lot about whether there is any real evidence that Iran did this, as is being widely claimed. It has a lot about what “doxing” really means and does not mean and many more questions like that – which is why we want to delve into it – all of which will likely be increasingly relevant as the 2024 election approaches.

Then: Evan Barker has spent many years as a major fundraiser for the DNC and has been a Democratic Party operative going all the way back to the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign that she ran against Barack Obama when Barker worked for her campaign as an intern and then she progressively worked her way up the Democratic Party ladder through the Obama and Biden years, finally becoming one of her party's major fundraisers and operatives. But earlier this month, after she attended the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, Barker published a very thoughtful and compelling article in Newsweek entitled “I raised millions for Democrats, but at the DNC, I realize they're the party of the rich.” She also went on to argue that she realized that this party has become, in terms of foreign policy, the party of neocons and Bush-Cheney foreign policy. We will have her on to talk about her departure from the Democratic Party, what she meant by a lot of what she wrote in that Newsweek article and how she now sees the two parties and the 2024 election as well. 

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

Watch the full episode HERE

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It's Wednesday, September 25. 

Tonight: One of the most ignored stories of the Trump era has been the complete switch on so many issues between the parties. None is more pronounced than how the Democratic Party has become the party that reveres the U.S. Security State – the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and even Homeland Security – while skepticism about those agencies is now found overwhelmingly among conservatives. The same is true for many issues, including the justifiability of state censorship online and the nobility of NATO wars. But nowhere is more pronounced than one's views on these security agencies, and a new comprehensive Gallup poll today demonstrates just how vivid this shift has become. We're going to analyze that poll and explain the implications. 

Then: One of the most mainstream figureheads of the US Foreign Policy Community is Richard Haass, who spent the last 20 years as the President of the Council on Foreign Relations and in and out of various foreign policy positions with both parties. Earlier this morning, Haass went on Morning Joe – now Ground Zero for mainstream DC ruling class thought – and said things about the war in Ukraine that, up until about a month ago, was a taboo idea, one that if you expressed would immediately subject you to accusations of being a Russian agent or propagandist. Haass announced that it is time for the US and NATO to embrace what he called a more realistic goal for this war, given that it is simply impossible to achieve what had been defined as a victory by the West since the start: namely, that Ukraine will have to cede part of the territory Russia has taken to achieve peace.

Beyond the specific concession – one that has been slowly brewing in mainstream foreign policy circles, preparing the public to have to accept this without realizing that they're now accepting something that they were told they would never have to – we're seeing here the standard pattern for how U.S. elites sell wars to its population. In the beginning, they drown them with tsunamis of maximalist proclamations of inevitable victory – we'll defeat the Vietcong in a year; we'll depose Saddam and restore democracy to Iraq in months; we'll expel every Russian troop from Ukrainian soil, even Crimea. Anyone who points out that these claims are dubious or even deceitful is accused of being a traitor, accused of only saying those things because they're on the other side or they hate their own country. And that happens all the way up until the point where those same elites who wanted that war sold start to get tired of their war, decide that they're bored with it, that they've already done enough with it, and they want to move on to other toys, to new wars. And then when they do, they begin admitting that those initial propagandistic claims are now false, at the moment that they decide it's permissible to say that. We'll take a look at that amazing Richard Haass interview today and how this trend has been going on for quite some time. 

And then finally: few things are more glaring and overlooked than the ongoing massive gap between how elite opinion, on the one hand, understands the United States in the world and how ordinary Americans, on the other, understand that. It is impossible to understand politics over the last eight years, without a fundamental, overarching recognition of this massive gap that continues to grow, and there are few things more entertaining or illustrative than media elites going on some sort of field trip to visit the exotic species they call ordinary Americans whose habitat is in the middle of the country at these little neighborhoods and communities that when they're very brave, they like to go and visit. One of us, an NBC personality named Alex Wagner, made such an excursion to Michigan, and the results were predictably comical as it turns out. Yet again, people who work for a living and have to worry about paying bills and supporting a family with rising prices for things like groceries and everyday needs have much different priorities than media figures who work for major media outlets in New York and Washington, or for celebrities who dominate our political discourse and set the agenda for what matters to them. This recent visit by Alex Wagner, this courageous visit to the middle of the country to talk to the ordinary folk, really illustrates just how wide this gap has become. 

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

Watch the full episode HERE

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It's Tuesday, September 24. 

Tonight: Two very powerful multibillionaires who control social media platforms, X’s Elon Musk and Telegram's Pavel Durov, have repeatedly and publicly vowed to resist unjust censorship orders from various governments and to do everything possible to protect the private data of their users from governments demanding that data. Both have demonstrated a genuine willingness to do that, even if it means provoking conflicts and battles with powerful state officials. But in the last several weeks, various governments that are absolutely determined to re-seize control over the flow of speech and the Internet have resorted to very extreme measures to force those two platforms and their owners, in particular, to capitulate to a reverse course and instead to promise to obey censorship and surveillance orders in the future.  

Several weeks ago, as we amply reported, the French government lured Pavel Durov to Paris and then promptly arrested him, accusing him of being guilty of multiple felonies that were committed not by him or his company, but by anonymous users using his platform to commit those crimes. Yesterday, Durov, who is still detained in France – still prohibited from leaving that country – announced a radical change in his company's longstanding policy by announcing that in the future, Telegram will significantly increase content moderation, meaning censorship, and will promptly turn over data to EU states regarding Telegram's users to any of those EU states who demand it. 

Meanwhile, in Brazil, that country's authoritarian Supreme Court justice ordered X banished from the entire country as a result of Musk's refusal to censor the long list of accounts that the judge ordered banned, a list that included members of Brazil's Congress who were democratically elected by the country's population, including some with the highest vote totals of anyone in the country. With the stroke of a pen, this judge ordered X and other platforms to censor those people. Yet, over the last week, X has begun taking all the required steps to regain entry in Brazil to once again be allowed to be in Brazil, including banning all of those accounts that the judge ordered banished, as well as pledging future obedience to all forthcoming judicial orders. 

All of this raises some valid questions about state sovereignty, just like the U.S. decision to ban or force the sale of TikTok does, but more so, it illustrates the rapidly escalating regime of censorship being imposed for real on online speech, expression, activism and journalism and the increasingly severe weapons being used by these states to ensure that that control continues to be consolidated in their hands. 

Then: as usually happens whenever Israel has a new war, the United States this week announced its intent to deploy even more American military assets and American soldiers to the region in order to protect Israel and deter escalation. 

Whether you agree with that decision or not, it is obviously among the most consequential acts that the government can embrace, namely, to expose the United States to direct combat in any war. We're supposed to have a Congress that approves that, but that practice has been long ago left behind and now the executive branch and the president make those decisions. Beyond the immediate debate over the substantive question of whether American soldiers should be risking their lives to defend Israel in these two wars, there's a real question provoked by these actions beyond the substance, namely, who exactly is running the White House, the executive branch of the United States, and who specifically is making these decisions about war and peace and about the deployment of American troops to the region, given the obvious mental impairment of Joe Biden, something people all admitted after the debate, as well as the expected all-consuming focus of the vice president on winning the election or to replace him. These decisions are clearly not coming from either of those two elected officials who then is making those decisions? It’s remarkable how rarely that question is asked. 

And then finally: Various CNN personalities over the last several days have utterly manufactured from whole cloth an antisemitism crisis scandal by fabricating a quote and then deceitfully attributing it to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan, and then demanding that various officials respond to that false quote. 

Leave aside whatever you might think of Congresswoman Tlaib, the CNN personnel should not be fabricating fake quotes and then demanding that politicians respond to them to continue their fabricated story. 

All of this is part of the broader campaign, as we have examined many times, to invent a narrative that the United States faces some sort of new antisemitism epidemic and then American Jews, of all people, are uniquely endangered and marginalized. We'll show you what CNN did and how it is illustrative of this broader, fraudulent narrative.

In the likely event that we don't have time to cover this segment tonight – just because there's so much other news to talk about and topics to delve into in-depth,  we will put the segment on our Locals aftershow for our Locals members. 

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