All Episodes
Previous Next
March 28, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
54:48
Who Radicalized the Nashville Shooter? Plus: New “Anti-TikTok” Law Could Censor ALL Social Media

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
.
Good evening.
It's Monday, March 27th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, police have identified the suspect who carried out a gruesome mass shooting spree at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.
The massacre resulted in the deaths of six people, including three young children.
Police say the likely killer, 28-year-old Aubrey Hale, attended the school as a biological female and now identifies as a transgendered male.
We have repeatedly condemned the now pervasive media practice of leaping to instant conclusions before the bodies are even cold about the motives of killings of this type in order to heap blame on their political opponents, always by claiming that right-wing ideology inspired the shooter to act.
We will do the same tonight.
Condemn that.
But, in order to illustrate how rotted this tactic is and in the hope that one day it will cease being used, we will apply that framework to this now, to this massacre in order to ask the following question.
Who and what radicalized this shooter in Nashville to carry out such an atrocity?
What ideology was responsible for it and which advocates of that ideology tonight have blood on their hands?
Then, We'll revisit the topic we reported on last week, the Biden administration's demand that it be vested with the power to ban the social media app TikTok.
We won't repeat the various arguments for and against that ban, but we will instead urge you to really consider the implications of the actual law that they are trying to enact, one that extends far, far beyond TikTok.
As well as to look at the possible First Amendment implications of banning an app which 150 million Americans are voluntarily choosing to use.
We'll also examine MSNBC's bizarre exploitation of anti-Semitism last week as a means of barring discussion of George Soros' very ample political donations.
As well as look at a highly revealing new video from 2014 from Jen Psaki when she was the State Department spokesperson about the role of the U.S.
in facilitating Regime change in Ukraine.
As a reminder, every episode of System Update is now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform.
In order to listen to it in that form, which airs 12 hours after our show airs live here on Rumble, simply follow us on those podcast platforms.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There was a truly horrific attack today carried out at a private school in Nashville, Tennessee.
The facts are still emerging, but what is known is the following.
There were six people, innocent people, who were murdered by the mass shooter, three of them young children, two of them nine years old, the other eight years old, as well as three employees of the school, including a custodian, And a substitute teacher and apparently one of the heads of the school.
According to the Nashville Police Department, they know who the killer is who died as part of the police operation.
There you see from the local newspaper, The Tennessean, the headline, Nashville School Shooting Updates.
School shooting suspect identified.
The article reads, quote, Metro Nashville Police say a former student carrying two assault rifles and a handgun killed three students and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville Monday, March 23rd.
The suspect, who police have identified as a 28-year-old transgendered man, entered the school through a side entrance and began shooting.
Shortly before 10 30 a.m.
police responded to the school and were able to locate the suspect on the second floor of the school in a lobby where they fatally shot him.
Now we have a video we want to show you from the Chief of Police of the Nashville Police Department talking about the incident, the episode, and who they identify as the person responsible for this incredibly tragic massacre.
Yes, we have identified the suspect.
It's a 28 year old female white, actually a Nashvilleian or lives in the Nashville area.
We have an ongoing investigation as it pertains to her at this time.
Have you located her place of where she lived?
Do you have officers there?
We have.
Was she wearing body armor?
Was she wearing body armor?
I can't say that far into the investigation.
I don't remember seeing it, but I can't say for certain that she had body armor on or not.
Does she have any connection to the church?
From my initial findings is that at one point she was a student at that school, but unsure what year, all of that.
But that's what I've been told so far.
Did she give any word on social media or have her social media been examined at this point?
The investigations are still ongoing at this point.
Our federal partners, our state partners, we're all looking into that to see exactly.
This is still fluid at the time, but we're looking at everything.
Now you notice in that clip the police chief repeatedly referred to the killer as she and as her.
That appears to be what is commonly known as misgendering because later in the press conference the police chief acknowledged that the shooter identifies as a male, identifies as a trans male.
Numerous social media postings and other profiles from the person who's the shooter also identifies himself as A trans man.
Now, one of the most despicable media practices, which we have condemned very often, is that every single time there's a shooting of this type, the media instantly seeks to politicize it in accordance with their own agenda.
And that means one of two things happen.
If there is some way to suggest that the shooter is in any way an adherent to or a believer in conservative political ideology, before anything is even known about the motive, the media narrative will instantly arise that it isn't just the killer, but also people who identify or who advocate that ideology
Who are the people to blame for the massacre?
This has happened over and over and over again to the point that we have written about it many times before.
If we can pull up an article, I think there's one coming.
Yeah, here is the article where back in May of last year, you probably remember that a white shooter went to a neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he knew that there was a large population of black people and walked into a grocery store and shot up the grocery store and killed several innocent people.
And overnight, or even before the night was over, the media had decided that the person to blame was not only the shooter, but also Tucker Carlson, the Fox host, as well as a variety of other conservatives who have expressed concerns about immigration,
In the United States and the levels of it and the argument the rationale that they used was the shooter had left the manifesto in which he invoked what he referred to as the Great Replacement Theory namely the concern in his view that the United States was being radically and purposely Fundamentally altered because there was an attempt to import into the United States non-white immigrants in order to replace the white population.
And since he believes that there is no such thing as a legitimate non-white American citizen, he believes he was justified in murdering those that he regards as illegitimately in the United States, namely all non-white people.
Now, what was so despicable about the attempt to heap blame on people like Tucker Carlson and those who have expressed concerns about immigration in the past, or even people who have noted the truthful observation that Democratic Party strategists
Democratic Party strategists have long celebrated the fact that immigration was demographically changing the United States in the favor of the Democratic Party, as they perceived it, because non-white voters were more likely to vote for Democrats.
That was the argument of Democratic strategists.
They wrote books about it, that immigrants were replacing the prior demographic makeup of the United States, and that would lead to a permanent Democratic majority.
Anybody who noted that that was what Democrats were saying They wanted to do was instantly blamed for that shooting in Buffalo even though the killer in Buffalo left a manifesto identifying by name the people who he said had influenced him in his worldview that caused him to go and do that shooting and it was a very long list
Not one person on Fox News or any conservative and mainstream American conservative politics was on the list.
The only mention of Fox News in that manifesto was one that criticized and blamed Fox for being part of the establishment the killer in Buffalo thought was responsible for all of those problems, but none of that mattered.
There was at least a week-long coverage of an attempt to say That Tucker Carlson and those who thought like him were the actual murderers because he and those like him radicalized the Buffalo shooter.
And so we wrote this article and you see the headline there.
The demented and selective game of instantly blaming opponents for mass shootings.
And the sub-headline there says, all ideology spawns psychopaths who kill innocents in its name, yet only some are blamed for their violent adherence by opportunists cravenly exploiting the corpses while they still lie on the ground.
Because that's exactly what happened in Buffalo, and it's what happened in many other cases.
Now, the reason I said it was selective is because every political faction produces people who carry out violent acts.
I reviewed the case of James Hodgkinson, who in 2017 went and deliberately shot as many Republican members of his Congress as he could, almost murdering Steve Scalise.
And it turned out he was an ardent fan of Rachel Maddow and of Bernie Sanders and carried out those attacks explicitly in the name of the arguments which both of them regularly advance.
That the Republican Party is racist and fascist and a white supremacist party and is connected to Russia.
He left all kinds of documents explaining why he wanted to murder Republicans and they were verbatim practically What comes out of the mouth of Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders and yet nobody serious sought to blame Rachel Maddow or Bernie Sanders for inspiring him to go and do that because they've never once suggested that people should go murder Republicans.
It would be preposterous and disgusting to try and place the blood that was spilled on that day at their doorstep.
And yet every time there is a shooting by someone who either is or who they perceive to be conservative, they instantly apply that framework and start blaming everyone they can find who are their political enemies.
in order to say that conservative ideology or right wing politics is to blame for these mass shootings.
So it's not only a disgusting and a dishonest framework, but it's one that is applied very, very selectively based on whatever suits the needs of the moment.
In the event that they can't identify an ideology to blame, they then default to blaming the lack of gun control.
And they'll say, it's still the Republicans' fault, or still the conservatives' fault, because by rejecting gun control, they've made guns so prevalent that anyone can get a gun, and therefore, they're to blame for opposing gun control.
So these kinds of things are instantly politicized, one way or the other, By a media that obviously is seeking to demonize their political enemies by exploiting these bodies that are on the ground.
Now, one of the times that this happened was just a few months ago when there was a shooting spree in a gay bar in Colorado Springs.
And before anything was known about the killer, about who he was, about what his motives were, The highest political officials in the United States instantly decreed that anybody who questions any part of the new LGBTQ dogma was responsible for that act.
So here from Yahoo News on November 22nd, 2022, just two days after the shooting, you see Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary, blames Colorado Club Massacre on political attacks on the LGBT community.
Quote, don't you dare act surprised.
And the article explains, quote, "Two days after the fatal mass shooting at an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg heatedly denounced the ongoing political attacks on the LGBTQ community that he feels led to the physical ones.
Quote, 'It was a place of belonging.
It was a place of community.
And it came under attack at a time when the entire LGBTQ community is coming under attack.
Buttigieg, who is gay, told CBS' national correspondent Chris Van Cleave about the Saturday night shooting at Club Q that left five people dead and 17 injured.
And if anybody claims to be surprised that political attacks on a community that doesn't hurt anybody are sometimes followed by violent physical attacks on that same community, I just don't think they're being honest.
That was as explicit as it could get.
He was saying, if you are somebody who questions any part of the LGBTQ agenda, then it necessarily means that you're to blame for that shooting because verbal critiques of a community inevitably lead to violent assaults.
on that community.
That was Pete Buttigieg's argument for why his conservative political enemies were to blame for that shooting.
He instantly exploited the corpses, despite the fact that as the New York Times acknowledged, and there you see it on the screen, on November 20th, where you see the news report, Patron subdued gunmen who killed at least five at Colorado Springs at Colorado Club, quote, "The motive Patron subdued gunmen who killed at least five at Colorado Springs at Colorado Club, quote, "The motive behind the And the police maintained that the motive was unknown for many weeks, if not months.
And over and over and over and over and over again, this has happened.
And so, if we wanted to do that tonight, if we wanted to take that standard and apply it here, we would obviously ask the obvious question, Which is, who is it who radicalized Audrey Hale, the person the police say carried out this shooting?
According to the police, they apparently left some kind of document or manifesto or some indication about what their motive actually was.
Here from NBC, just a couple of hours ago, are all the details that we know.
Quote, Nashville's Christian school shooter was a former student, police chief said.
The shooter, Aubrey Hale, 28, of Nashville carefully planned the attack with detailed maps and surveillance, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said.
Quote, the shooter who gunned down three children and three staff members at a Nashville Christian school on Monday was a former student who carefully planned the attack with detailed maps and surveillance, police said.
Quote, we have some writings.
that were going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident.
Chief John Drake told reporters hours after the shooting at the Covenant School, quote, we have a map drawn out of how this is all going to take place.
The shooter, Audrey Hale, 28, of Nashville, identified as transgender and had no previous record.
According to the chief, Drake said his investigations are working on a possible motive, but he declined to reveal that on Monday afternoon.
Quote, there's right now a theory That we may be able to talk about later, but it's not confirmed, the chief said.
Asked specifically if Hale's identity could have factored into the killer's motives, Drake said, quote, there is some theory to that.
We're investigating all the leads.
So it certainly seems as though the police are actively investigating the obvious possibility
That the reason a transgender person went to a Christian school and murdered six people was due to some kind of political anger over their identity as a trans person, particularly since Tennessee is a place where trans issues have been very vibrantly debated as a result of what I regard as a wildly excessive bill enacted by the Tennessee legislature.
That would, in a very kind of vague and excessive way, ban all sorts of drag entertainment and drag shows, even in places where children are not likely to be found.
But regardless of what one thinks of the bill, only someone very morally broken would suggest that anger over a law like that is any kind of a valid reason Or even an excuse of any kind to go murder six innocent people, including three young children.
And yet, already on social media, we have seen that argument being presented.
That it's actually, even this, is the fault of Tennessee Republicans, either for opposing gun control, or for enacting anti-trans legislation that causes trans people to become so angry That they would actually go and commit mass murder.
In other words, the fault doesn't lie with the shooter, but yet again, with the ideological enemies of the media.
It really is that repulsive.
Now, here you see just one of the social media profiles of the person the police say carried out this killing.
NBC has confirmed the shooter is Audrey Hale, 28, from Nashville.
All social media has been scrubbed, except LinkedIn.
And there you see Audrey Hale identifying with the pronouns he, him.
In the Nashville area.
Now, again, I think this whole attempt to politicize these shootings in this way is repulsive.
Especially when it's done when virtually no facts are known about who the killer is or why they did what they did.
And yet, this is how every one of these mass shootings are treated by the media.
They instantly seek to find a narrative, to construct a narrative that places the blame, the culpability for the attacks, not on the person who carried out the shooting, but on their enemies in politics.
So, if that framework were to be applied, if this person were not a trans person, but say an anti-trans activist, And instead of going to a Christian private school and murdering six students and employees, they instead went, say, to a drag show or an LGBT bar.
The narrative would instantly be that conservatives are to blame because through their rhetoric against the LGBT community, they inspired sufficient levels of hatred to motivate people to go murder LGBT, innocent LGBT people, which is exactly what Pete Buttigieg said about that killing in Colorado Springs before he had any idea of what the motive actually was.
He saw someone that he assumed was a conservative and heterosexual, going into a club and murdering six people or five people.
I don't recall the number of people.
It might have been, I think it was five.
It ended up being five.
And he instantly affirmed this narrative with no facts being known at all.
And then the question became, who specifically radicalized that person?
Who taught them to hate gay people enough to want to go murder them?
Leading to the question here of who radicalized Audrey Hale.
Who told Audrey Hale that It was justified for them to go and murder people in the state of Tennessee at a Christian school.
People who he did not know at all.
Who, certainly with regard to the children, he had absolutely no reason to blame for anything.
And you can find all sorts of things in the ether that Suggests that if you're a trans person, you are essentially being targeted with genocide, with people who want to build camps, who are spreading the kind of rhetoric that could create a climate in which a trans person might go do this.
Here's just a sample video of a public hearing in which people gathered, including students, to say that about Governor Ron DeSantis.
Listen to this two minutes of the kind of material I have no doubt Audrey Hale was regularly exposed to.
Hi, I was once a trans youth and now I'm a happy 22 year old trans adult student at New College of Florida.
This is my healthcare.
Ma'am?
Okay.
Don't tread on it.
Senator Yarbrough has militarized the Florida GOP into the genital Gestapo.
Ron DeSantis wants trans people dead.
You are committing genocide.
I grew up in Germany.
So the aftermath of Nazis and what you people are doing is no different.
This is transphobic.
It is true and you really should be ashamed.
So there's often a debate about if you could go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby would you do so and And people generally say, of course, it would avert the Holocaust.
So rhetoric that suggests that Standard members of the Republican Party are conservatives, like Ron DeSantis, are actual Nazis, are Gestapos, are committing genocide against trans people, obviously has the potential to inspire someone to go and carry out violence.
I don't think, though, that people who are saying these things are responsible for what happened today in Nashville, even if these ideas are the ones in whose name the Nashville killer carried out those attacks.
Because you have to separate advocacy of ideas and those who commit violence and the name of those ideas.
This is fundamental.
If we blame people for violence carried out in the names of ideas that they advocate, everyone eventually will have blood on their hands because every political faction produces their Dylann Roofs or their Audrey Hales.
Every political faction does.
But what is most intolerable is to apply that standard only selectively against one political faction.
Either you apply it to everybody, in which case questions like who radicalized Audrey Hale, to whom was he listening, which books did he read that taught him this level of hate, who has the blood of these young school children on their hands as a result of telling people like Audrey Hale that those that they went and murdered We're some kind of a threat to them, sufficient to justify violence.
Either you do it in this case and all other cases, or we just stop doing it at all.
Stop trying to exploit peoples who are murdered in mass shootings in order to demonize your political adversaries, in order to suggest that ideology with which you disagree is somehow now murderous because someone, one person or two people or three, Carried out gruesome violent acts in its name.
It can't be you get to do this sick rotted Anti-intellectual tactic only when it suits you politically and then you get angry when it's done when someone on your side to carry doubt violence My preference would be this stop entirely but if it doesn't
Then these kinds of questions, these kinds of arguments should be applied not just to the cases where the media's enemies are implicated, but to the cases like today in Nashville where their allies are as well.
So we'll certainly find more out about who this person is who did this killing and what motivated them to do so.
According to the police, there's already evidence that they have in their possession that sheds significant light on that.
According to them, it involves their identity.
So we will cover this story as it unfolds.
I want to turn now to what has become a major controversy, which is the question of what to do about the social media app TikTok.
We devoted a show, I believe, last Thursday night to covering the very heated hearing held in Congress in the House in which, in a very bipartisan manner, a very bipartisan manner, almost unanimous, members of both the Republican and Democratic parties on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were united in denouncing the CEO of TikTok
For being responsible for all kinds of social ills and all kinds of evils here in the United States.
And we examined whether or not that was rational, whether TikTok is really some sort of a unique threat.
Whether it makes sense that the Chinese are using that as a spying device when it would be very easy to purchase on the open market, enormous amounts of data about American citizens collected by Google and Facebook, and virtually every tech company that then sells it and packages it for commercial uses.
So, if you haven't seen that episode and you want to understand our views on the subjunctive question itself, Which we really raised in order to just urge a little bit of caution on the grounds that giving the government the power to banish an entire social media app, one which 150 million of your fellow citizens are voluntarily choosing to use, is a draconian measure.
And at the very least, That show is designed to say there's serious questions to consider about what that would entail before we rush headlong into doing it simply because we're all united in our view of China as a threat.
That was the lesson of 9-11, in my view.
After 9-11, we were all united in valid rage at Al-Qaeda.
And as a result, every single power the government said it needed and wanted And that it justified in the name of fighting terrorism, we said yes to.
And the government ended up with an enormous mountain of previously unthinkable authorities and powers that many people, according to polling data, have come to regret.
Things like the Patriot Act and warrantless spying and mass surveillance.
And had we taken a deep breath back then and not been let around on a leash due to our united rage at Al-Qaeda and instead asked the questions that our show last week encouraged people to ask about this desire to ban TikTok or other measures in the name of fighting China, I think we would have been much better off as a country because many of those measures had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, starting with, for example, the Iraq War.
and all these spying systems that were constructed.
No one worries about Al-Qaeda anymore.
And yet, 22 years later, everything that was justified in the name of having to temporarily fight this threat is still in place.
So before we start handing the government a whole new set of radical powers, like banning an entire social media app from existing in the United States, let's at least make sure we're thinking in a reasoned way about that.
So I encourage you, if you haven't seen it, to go watch that episode where we raise questions about the underlying substantive questions.
But I just want to make sure that we understand the law that is being presented as well.
So many times during the war on terror, we were told that a law was necessary in order to combat a particular threat.
And it turned out it not only on its face was allowed to be used far beyond that particular threat but in fact was used more often than not for reasons other than that threat.
The Patriot Act being the most important example where we were told in the days and weeks after the 9-11 attack when the rubble still was on the ground in Manhattan That it was urgent that we give the FBI and the CIA and the US security state previously unimaginable new surveillance powers to fight Al Qaeda in more cases than not over the next decade.
Those powers were used not in terrorism investigations, but in financial fraud investigations, or in RICO investigations, or in everything else other than terrorism.
When I did this Snowden reporting based on the NSA, what amazed me the most was that so many of those programs justified in the name of fighting terrorism were so often used for purposes that had nothing to do with terrorism.
So the emotions around terrorism were exploited to vest the government with powers that ended up getting used for all sorts of other things.
Had we been more reasoned about it, had we created more space for people to question the Bush-Cheney government after 9-11?
Instead of accusing everybody who raised questions of being pro-terrorist or now saying that anyone who questions what the Biden administration wants to do about China must be pro-CCP or on their payroll, the way the Democrats did over the last six years with regard to Russia, that kind of discourse that squelches reasoned inquiry and scrutiny of our own government, the better off we'll be.
So this law That is being proposed in Congress that the Biden administration advocates.
There are two of them.
One is called the Restrict Act.
The other one is called the Data Act.
These are the two laws that have been written that, if they pass, would give the power to the Biden administration to ban TikTok.
The problem, among many others, is that this power is not applicable solely to TikTok.
It is not a law about TikTok.
It is a law about a new power that the government has in their hands.
One that will allow the government, the Biden administration in this case, not only to ban TikTok, but any other social media platform or technological device that it, in its own unreviewable discretion, determines is a national security threat in some way to the United States.
So if, for example, The United States government, which we know from all kinds of reporting, including the Twitter files, is eager to get its hands on the internet, has already had its hands on the internet to control the flow of information, decides that, say, Twitter, under Elon Musk's management, is not censoring enough, enough foreign disinformation, enough fake news, and has become a national security threat.
This bill would empower the Biden administration To severely limit Twitter, to impose all kinds of restraints on it, or even to banish it completely the way it is now being proposed to be done with TikTok.
That's what this law would actually do.
So they're trying to exploit your anger toward China, your fear of China, and your dislike for TikTok.
To enact a law that will allow the government to do far, far, far more than just ban TikTok.
Exactly what we saw over and over in the War on Terror.
Now I'm gonna be on Tucker Carlson's show in just a few minutes talking about exactly that question, the scope of the law.
And I believe his view, though I don't wanna speak for him, is that he hates TikTok.
hates the CCP, I don't think would mind necessarily seeing TikTok disappear, but nonetheless has grave concerns about the scope of the law and the powers we're about to vest on the government and asked me to come on the show to talk about exactly that.
So here is an article from Lawfare, which I'm using on purpose because it's a blog written by people very close to the USA.
security state.
These are people who were the leading Russiagators who endorsed everything James Comey and the CIA and Homeland Security didn't do during the Snowden reporting.
These were the people who were essentially advocating that not just Edward Snowden but myself and the journalists who worked on that story were criminals.
These are the people who are as close to the U.S.
security state as you can get and even they are very worried.
That this law is far too excessive and subject to abuse.
Here is the title, quote, two new bills on TikTok and beyond, the Data Act and the Restrict Act.
It's by Justin Sherman, and he writes, quote, perhaps this approach is better, comparing the two laws.
The Restrict Act focuses on broad risk categories that can encompass a range of ever-changing techniques for digital sabotage, subversion, espionage, and influence.
It does not pigeonhole itself into putting the exact tactics of the day into law, which are sure to change and which a foreign actor could then easily dance around.
Simultaneously, the risk categories are incredibly broad, meaning the categories the Biden administration gets to identify as risky and therefore subject to the powers of these laws are incredibly broad.
While the definition of something like election interference could be relatively scoped, the fourth risk category, including trying to steer policy and regulatory decisions in a foreign government's favor, is potentially boundless.
It is also easy to imagine industry concerns about the broadness of these categories.
So, some of the categories that allow the government to ban Apps, not just TikTok, but others, include the view that the app is being used for foreign interference in our elections, the way the Biden administration believes Russia did using Twitter and Facebook.
It could force Twitter and Facebook to start censoring.
It has this gigantic club in its hands now that says, we have the power to actually banish you from functioning in the United States as a result of this new law.
And if you don't start censoring more, We will conclude, the executive branch, that you are now a national security threat because you are allowing election interference.
Or worse, you are allowing, the language here is, trying to steer policy and regulatory decisions in a foreign government's favor.
So if you're somebody using a social media app like Twitter or Facebook, To steer, or rumble, to do something that the government deems is steering policy and regulatory decisions in a foreign government's favor.
For example, if you're against the US proxy war in Ukraine, and use rumble to argue against it, or use Twitter to argue against it, that platform could be deemed To be allowing the steering of policy and regulatory decisions in a foreign government's favor and therefore ban it on that ground as a national security threat.
After everything you've seen over the past six years, with Democrats repeatedly trying to get the internet censored on the grounds that fake news and disinformation is being disseminated by the Russian government, they banned President Trump, Twitter did, And Facebook did.
They prohibited any discussion of the reporting by the New York Post about Joe Biden and China and Ukraine on the grounds that that was disinformation.
After everything we've seen from the Twitter files proving that the U.S.
security state is not only eager to, but has in fact achieved the power to determine what is and isn't permitted on the Internet.
After all of that, do you actually trust the government?
With the power to ban entire social media apps simply by decreeing that they constitute national security threats, don't you think that power is going to be radically abused?
Either by threatening social media apps that they better start censoring more if they don't want this punishment being imposed on them, or by, in fact, banning apps like, say, Rumble that refuse to obey and comply.
I know there's a lot of animosity toward the Chinese Communist Party.
I understand all that.
And I also realize that the Chinese have become more aggressive in competing with the United States for hegemony over regions that the United States was previously unchallenged in, including Africa, Latin America, and now even the Middle East, where they just forged a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
But just like our anger at Al-Qaeda was repeatedly exploited to give the government powers we should not have given them, I think we need to be very careful not to let this bipartisan unity against China, valid or not, be used to get you to agree things at least without thinking them through.
Just the minute something is called a measure to protect you from China or anti-China, you immediately say yes without anything further because we're acting on our emotions and our anger and our rage to Beijing as opposed to being concerned about our own country and our rights here at home.
Now, there's a op-ed in the New York Times that is by one of the best free speech and First Amendment lawyers in the country, Jamil Jaffer, who worked at the ACLU for many years when it was still a free speech and free press organization.
And the headline of his op-ed is, there's a problem with banning TikTok.
It's called the First Amendment.
Now, some of you may be asking, how can it possibly be the case that the First Amendment has anything to do with the ban on TikTok, given that it's a Chinese company or a subsidiary of a Chinese corporation, ByteDance, and a Chinese company doesn't have First Amendment rights.
That's true.
They don't.
But the 150 million American citizens who are using TikTok Not only to express themselves, but to receive information.
They do have First Amendment rights.
And whether the government can just float in and take this app away from them...
That they use to communicate and to get information is at the very least a serious question under First Amendment law, given that the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment guarantees you not only the right to speak in an unfettered way, but the right to obtain information.
For example, at the very start of the war in Ukraine, The EU made it illegal for platforms to carry RT or Sputnik or any other Russian state media.
So if you were somebody who wanted to hear what Russian leaders were saying, simply because you think it's a good thing to hear as much information as possible rather than only hear the information your government wants you to hear, you are no longer able to access Those sources because the government made it illegal for any platforms that serve you to offer them.
And that's why Rumble is not available in France because Rumble carries RT because Rumble is a free speech platform and carries all media.
And it refused upon the French government's demand to remove RT from its platform and therefore it's banned in France or was going to be banned in France and now is unavailable.
So if the United States tried to do the same thing, pass a law saying all platforms are banned from hosting Russian state TV, of course that would be a violation of the First Amendment because it would be a serious impediment on your ability to receive information.
So here is the argument.
Perhaps the reason First Amendment rights haven't received more attention in this debate already is that TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance, a Chinese corporation that doesn't have constitutional free speech rights to assert.
But if we set aside the question of TikTok's rights, the platform's users include more than 150 million Americans.
As TikTok Chief Executive testified at a contentious congressional hearing on Thursday, TikTok's American users are indisputably exercising First Amendment rights when they post and consume content on the platform.
Six years ago, in Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited convicted sex offenders From using social media, reasoning that these websites had become, quote, integral to the fabric of our modern society and culture.
In other words, these are people who were convicted and served out their term and were now banned from social media.
And the Supreme Court, with the conservative majority, said it was a violation of the First Amendment to deny them the right to use the Internet.
A half century before that, the Supreme Court decided a series of cases recognizing that the First Amendment protects not only the right to speak, But also the right to receive information, including the right to receive information and ideas from abroad.
In one of those cases, Lamont v. Postmaster General, the court invalidated a federal law that barred Americans from receiving communist political propaganda from foreign countries unless they specifically asked the Postal Service to deliver it.
The court held that the law was an impermissible attempt to control the flow of ideas to the public, so there's really no question That government action, whose effect would be to bar Americans from using a foreign communications platform, would implicate the First Amendment.
That's exactly what one federal court held two years ago, when it blocked President Donald Trump's attempt to ban WeChat, the Chinese messaging app.
Perhaps there are contexts in which a ban on social media platforms could be reconciled with democratic values.
It's conceivable that the US government will eventually be able to establish the necessity of a ban on TikTok, even if it hasn't yet done so.
But the First Amendment would require The government to carry a heavy burden of justification.
This is an important feature of our system and not a bug.
Now let me just leave you with this thought.
For the last decade, the most oppressive countries on the planet have tried to ban U.S.
social media companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter from operating in their countries because they can't control the flow of information on those platforms.
Those countries include China, Iran, and Russia.
And in the West, it was continuously asserted, correctly in my view, that the eagerness of China, Iran, and Russia to ban Western social media companies from their country was evidence of their authoritarianism because it evinced a desire to control the flow of information that the citizens of their countries could receive.
They wanted to censor And they couldn't censor as well on those sites and therefore they wanted them out of their country or only would let them in their country as long as those countries agreed, those companies agreed to censor for them and they were called despotic for it.
Now we have the Biden administration also wanting to ban a foreign social media app from the United States and one of the reasons for sure Is that we know that they have the ability to control the flow of information on Facebook and Google and Instagram and to some extent on Twitter, though probably a lot less, which is one of the reasons they're so angry at Elon Musk.
But the one social media app they cannot control is TikTok.
So perhaps the reason they want to ban it, perhaps the Biden administration isn't suddenly concerned about the Chinese government spying on you, since it has a zillion other ways to do that.
Perhaps it has other motives, including the fact that, just like the Chinese, the Iranians, and the Russians, the U.S.
government wants to ensure that it and it alone controls what kind of information American citizens are getting and seeks to ban any platforms Where it is less able to do so.
Now, just in the interest of time, as I said, I'm going to be on Tucker Carlson's show in just a moment.
We're going to leave until tomorrow night the issue of NBC and how they exploited anti-Semitism.
I do, though, want to show you a video, because last week we showed you some newly discovered videos, several of which were discovered by the independent journalist and frequent guest of our show, Michael Tracy, in which Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut went on to C-SPAN in 2014 and openly boasted about a fact that now is deemed taboo, namely that it was the United States government that played a very aggressive and central role
In facilitating the ouster of Ukraine's democratically elected president in 2014 and replacing him with someone chosen by Victoria Nuland.
So when you hear about how the US loves Ukrainian democracy, you go and listen to those videos by Chris Murphy.
Where he's, in 2014, excitingly celebrating how he and John McCain and so many other U.S.
officials engineered the ouster of the elected Ukrainian president because they preferred someone else to rule that country, and they got their way.
Here is a very similar video, which was unearthed earlier today.
This is when Jen Psaki was the spokesperson at the State Department.
We showed you a video of her last week as well.
Of where she just lied right to the camera when asked whether we had helped engineer a coup in Venezuela, and she said, you know the United States is a matter of policy.
Never facilitates changes of government in other countries in an unconstitutional way.
We only help that democratically.
Which, I mean, if you're in the eighth grade and know anything about United States history, you know it was a lie, and yet she told it over and over right to the camera.
This was An equally intrepid State Department Press Corps, led as often is by Associated Press's Matt Lee, who is one of the best journalists.
He does this all the time at the State Department.
Questions very aggressively the lies told by the State Department officials.
Challenging Jen Psaki because this was right when the audio ...was released of Victoria Nuland talking to the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine in which they picked, mapped out exactly who the Ukrainian government would be after they facilitated the ouster of the Democratic president.
With Victoria Nuland's audio being heard by everybody, it was impossible for the U.S.
government to deny that it played this active role and watch Jen Psaki try and nonetheless deny it.
This is more than discussions, though.
This was two top U.S.
course we do.
That's what you do.
That's what diplomats do and discuss especially issues where we've been closely engaged.
You know, the secretary met with the opposition this weekend.
He stopped by a meeting with the foreign minister.
It's up to the people of Ukraine, including officials from both sides, to determine the path forward.
But it shouldn't be a surprise that there are discussions about events on the ground.
This was more than discussions, though.
This was two top U.S. officials that are on the ground discussing a plan that they have to broker a future government and bringing officials from the U.N. to kind of seal the deal.
This is more than the U.S. trying to make suggestions.
This is the U.S. midwifing the process.
Well, is it amazing when you see actual journalism at work in the few occasions when we do, you see the importance of journalism.
And And one of the major reasons I spend so much time critiquing harshly corporate media for failing to do this is precisely because of its importance.
The ability to tell Jen Psaki that you know what she's saying is a lie and none of what she's saying makes sense.
Here's how she answered.
"Alice, you're talking about a private diplomatic conversation.
Those happen all the time.
Of course, as part of private diplomatic conversations, there are discussions about what involvement the UN can have, what involvement or engagement should happen on the ground.
That shouldn't be a surprise.
Of course, these things are being discussed." "I don't think that it is honest for you to say, 'No, we don't have an opinion,' and that's completely up to the people of country X." "And I specifically mean in this case I'm talking about Egypt." "Sure.
Well, let me just make one comment here." There is a difference between private discussions that happen in the interagency process, in the building, and what we convey publicly as a U.S.
Government.
And we have a responsibility to convey what our position is.
Of course you're discussing a range of options on a range of issues.
That's what you do as a diplomat.
I'm sorry, if you're saying privately behind the scenes that you're cooking up a deal and then you're saying publicly that this is up for Ukrainians to decide, those are two totally different things.
I understand that diplomatic discussions are sensitive and you don't want everything to come out, but those are two totally different positions.
Elise, what do you think happens behind closed doors when people are discussing issues internally through the interagency?
This is not discussing issues.
This is talking about a deal that the U.S.
was cooking up.
I think I would disagree with you.
I think you're overstating and overqualifying a couple of minutes from a privately recorded phone call.
The fact that the US government toppled the democratically elected leader of Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 and replaced him with the US stooge chosen by Victoria Nuland is something that a few months ago if you said it you were told you were a Kremlin propagandist or a conspiracy theorist but if you actually go look at the record at the time It was a known fact.
It was something that was constantly discussed and acknowledged, even by the press corps, the mainstream press corps that covers the State Department, just like for 10 years.
It was commonplace for Western media to acknowledge and report that the dominant militia in Ukraine was a neo-Nazi militia called the Azov Battalion and now that too is something that cannot be said since we are now arming and funding that neo-Nazi militia in the name of stopping fascism.
But that is the purpose of journalism, is to take government propaganda, analyze it and scrutinize it and dissect it and show the truth with evidence.
And I think a critical part of doing that is to always make sure that we are asking questions about what the government is doing.
And that applies to the media as well, whether it comes to the media's tactics for how they exploit mass shootings like the one that happened today in Nashville.
Whether it comes to things like the law that the Biden administration is demanding in the name of TikTok, even though it has nothing to do with that.
And certainly in terms of this war that Joe Biden himself has said has brought the war closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time since 1962.
So, let's get started.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
If you want to continue to help support our work, you can do so by joining our Locals platform.
Just click the red join button right below the media player.
That gives you access to the Tuesday and Thursday night show that we do, the after show, where we take your questions and respond to your feedback.
It also gives you access to my written journalism.
I have a new article actually on the platform.
Today, we almost never put our journalism, written journalism, behind a payroll precisely because we want to maximize its impact and your Support is what enables us to do that and to do this show as well.
For those of you who have been watching, we are very appreciative of that as well.
Continue.
We hope you'll come back every night at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
Look for me on the Tucker Carlson Show in just a couple minutes to talk about the TikTok law, and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night.
▲
Export Selection