Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Friday, January 27, 2023. Going forward, every new transcript will be sent out by email and posted to our Locals page, where you'll find the transcripts for previous shows.
Watch System Update Episode #30 Here on Rumble.
In this episode, we will examine the most important and fascinating – or one of them – new installments from the Twitter Files. Just hours ago, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published a series of revelations about something called “Hamilton 68” which was launched in 2017, and it was immediately obvious that it was an attempt to smear all critics of the Democratic Party as Russian agents by pretending to use complex data analysis and new expertise called ‘disinformation expertise’ to prove which voices and viewpoints are being promoted by the Kremlin.
But there were two very red flags from the start. The first was who was behind it, namely the now familiar mix of Democratic Party operatives, their old neocon allies, led by Bill Kristol and numerous operatives of the U.S. Security State, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the dominant union in the Trump era politics, that era giving itself the right to label what was and was not disinformation. Secondly, they refused to disclose any of the underlying data that they claim compose their sophisticated analysis, so it was impossible to know who they even decided to brand as Russian-friendly outlets. Impossible, that is, until now. Taibbi, using his access to the Twitter Files, has exposed not only the total fraud at the heart of this project but also Twitter's knowledge that, even as they and leading news corporations in America touted this Hamilton 68 dashboard as the authoritative source for knowing who was and was not a Russian asset, everyone in Twitter knew it was fraudulent but never told the country.
We examine both the key revelations and the vital context to understand them and then speak to Taibbi himself about the reporting he just did, reporting which, needless to say, is being ignored by almost every major media outlet, including the ones that so heavily touted that fraudulent framework.
Monologue:
After their humiliating defeat in 2016 to Donald Trump, along with their allies in the corporate media, Democrats decided to blame everyone except themselves. The list of villains is virtually endless: WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, who ended up imprisoned as a result; James Comey, for daring to investigate Hillary Clinton's private email server at her home, even though he ended up deciding not to prosecute her for it; Jill Stein for the crime of running against Hillary Clinton rather than falling obediently into line behind the Democrats – an art of submission, which the Squad ended up perfecting just a year later. Democrats even blame the New York Times because they believed, I swear, that the Paper of Record was too hard on Hillary and not hard enough on Trump. They blamed Russia, of course, and never stopped blaming them. They basically blamed everyone for their loss except Chris Hayes, Amy Klobuchar, Hillary Clinton, and the people Hillary paid a lot of money to, in order to win the election, namely the people whose responsibility it was to win that election.
But above all else, what they really blamed was freedom: freedom of speech, a free press, and, especially, a free Internet. They decided that the real reason they lost was because citizens were too free to spread their views, their ideas, and their information over the Internet. So, they united with the U.S. Security State, which is always concerned about Americans having too much freedom, and they set about trying to rectify this problem by demanding that their Big Tech allies institute a new regime of censorship under threat of being punished for failure to obey. In order to justify this new censorship regime, they needed a way to pretend that they weren't really engaged in political censorship, in part because the First Amendment still makes that unconstitutional and because most Americans, by instinct, still recoil when they hear that people are being censored for their political views – that is still something that Americans by nature believe only happens in those bad countries, in tyrannies.
