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Good evening. It's Monday, August 19.
Tonight: the Democratic National Convention is set to begin in Chicago and it will culminate with the acceptance speech of Kamala Harris on Thursday night. She's the person who has somehow become the Democratic nominee without having to campaign for or obtain a single vote and without having sat for a single debate or a single interview with any journalist with barely more than two months to go before the election begins. The strategy of Kamala and her operatives could not be clearer at this point, indeed, many of them are saying it explicitly: they're trying to avoid her having to speak without a script or teleprompter and giving as few interviews as possible, if she gives any, so that nobody knows anything about what she actually thinks, and instead there's some sort of inchoate cultural excitement that will lead her to the presidency in lieu of any actual substantive beliefs.
The Democrats’ convention, unsurprisingly, perfectly reflects this strategy of substancelessness. While our program received press credentials with ease to attend the Republican National Convention, we were unable to obtain credentials to enter the Democratic convention hall. That was true of so many journalists in independent media who had failed to demonstrate complete fealty to the Democratic Party and or to Kamala. It was almost impossible for people who had been critical of the party to get into the hall with credentials.
In lieu of actual journalists, they have handed out their credentials instead to hundreds of painfully vapid, empty-headed partisan TikTok youth who have chosen to spend their early 20s not involved in any radical political or subversive and transgressive cultural projects – sort of the point of being young – but instead, they have formed their identity based on blind but very excited loyalty to the Democratic Party and its leaders, to the establishment dogma that party represents and to do so in the most brainless and embarrassing establishment revering ethos possible.
Despite not being credentialed, we have once again sent our roving independent reporter, Michael Tracey, to the convention to report on as much as he can along with our producer, Megan O'Rourke. That duo teamed up for a lot of great interviews in Milwaukee when the Republicans had their convention. They've already conducted some provocative and enlightening interviews with Democratic officials, which we’ll show you throughout the week, including some tonight, but they have also amply documented the dreary, vacuous spirit of joy – joy that is achieved by thinking about nothing – that permeates this political party and their grand gala in Chicago this week.
And then finally, Elon Musk over the weekend announced that he was closing all of X’s physical offices in Brazil, the planet's fifth most populous country, as a result not only of endless censorship demands from its Supreme Court but also explicit threats that Twitter executives would be imprisoned if the platform did not immediately censor the accounts of multiple elected officials and journalists were all ordered banned with no trial or due process of any kind. Musk and X have been thus far resisting that banning and the response from the Supreme Court, and specifically the Supreme Court judge that has become notorious around the world for his authoritarian censorship scheme, is that you either immediately silence these people – who have been charged with nothing and no reasons are provided as to why you have to silence them – you either do it instantly, or we will not only impose massive fines on your company, but we will arrest the executives of X who are in Brazil now. All of that comes as the censorship regimes that we have been reporting on for two years around the world are now starting themselves more visibly and more menacingly than ever.
The EU, for instance, continues to flex its censorship muscles by issuing endless threats to Musk for his failure, in their view, to censor more, the UK is on what can only be described as a completely mad binge of criminalizing speech, even going so far as to explicitly threatened to extradite people from other countries around the world to the UK to stand trial on the ground that posts they posted to social media, of an anti-immigrant nature, helped inflame and incite that country's recent riots. And the reaction to our ongoing reporting in Brazil – we publish a new story pretty much every day, since we began last week, on the front page of Folha de São Paulo, the country's largest newspaper, that comes from a gigantic archive of six gigabytes from the chambers of that censorship judge – has really provoked an extraordinary reaction from that judge and his supporters. In fact, given that he is now in charge and has been in charge of what is called the body of anti-disinformation, the body that he often used to persecute political dissidents and to silence people from the internet, he has used that same language, saying essentially that our reporting is not only disinformation but aimed at weakening the state and threatening Brazilian democracy. You can really see in all of this just how vividly the dangers are when you allow these frameworks to take hold. We've been reporting on these dangers for a long time and they are finally now coming to manifest very expressively and without many limits in many parts of the democratic world or at least what is the democratic world now.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
