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May 19, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:34:40
RFK Jr. and Vaccines: What Counts as a Disqualifying "Red Line”? Plus: Montana Becomes First State to Ban TikTok | SYSTEM UPDATE #84

The focus of the episode is RFK Jr. and his politics on Vaccines. Glenn poses the question "What counts as a disqualifying 'Red Line?'" Montana becomes the first state to ban TikTok. Let's dive into the "why." Which state/s will follow? Check it all out on the latest episode of System Update! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good evening.
It's Thursday, May 18th.
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, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is, along with Marianne Williamson, mounting a primary challenge to the Democratic incumbent president, Joe Biden.
Despite polls showing that, without even yet launching a campaign, he already has close to 20% of Democratic voters supporting him, while Williamson has another 7% supporting her, Democratic officials and their media allies are attempting to just wish this all away.
Just pretend that Biden has no primary challengers, because the ones who are running against him are, for reasons nobody ever bothers to explain, Too unserious and lacking in credibility for the Democratic Party to even deem them worthy of attention, much less debate.
An interview conducted yesterday with RFK Jr.
on the online show Breaking Point, hosted by two excellent journalists, Crystal Ball and Sagar Njeti, attracted significant attention because of the exchange between Ball and RFK Jr.
on his longtime well-studied skepticism about vaccines.
Ball told RFK Jr.
that she not only disagreed with his views on vaccines and pointed out correctly that a large number of Democratic voters share her opposition, but that she considered his vaccine skepticism to be, quote, a red line, a red line, meaning not just a source of disagreement for her, but something that she and many other Democratic voters would consider disqualifying in of itself.
Without regard to any other views he might hold that she likes and agrees with and considers extremely important.
Now, I've long been interested in and have often written about the idea that once a politician adopts a view that is so disagreeable That it renders them completely off limits from consideration for support.
That they almost get put into this cramp camp of being crazy or conspiracy theorists or people just too unhinged to even consider supporting no matter how much agreement one might have with them.
I first observed this dynamic in the 2012 election.
When Barack Obama was running for re-election, on numerous policies the progressive wing of his party claimed to find morally abhorrent.
While the Republican primary field included longtime Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the only major presidential candidate in history to advocate views on crucial issues which progressives claimed to find of the utmost importance, such as Ron Paul's steadfast opposition to the drug war and policies of mass incarceration that accompanies it, As well as his career-long opposition to the abuses of the U.S.
security state, all of which President Obama supported and even strengthened.
And yet, when I repeatedly pointed this out, I was told by liberals and other Democrats that Ron Paul's opposition to abortion was a, quote, red line that rendered him completely off-limits no matter what other positions he held, no matter how noble his other views might be.
But that never made sense to me, and still does not.
Why was Ron Paul's pro-life position a quote, red line, but Obama's support for the drug war, or say, his view that he had the right to assassinate American citizens using drones, all with no due process, an extraordinary power, the embodiment of extremism and radicalism, why was that not a quote, red line?
How was that determined?
It seems it's so often used as a pretext for justifying support for party leadership and especially the ideology of the establishment, often unwittingly.
Given that the same argument has arisen in the context of RFK Jr.' 's challenge to Biden to argue that RFK is off-limits, but Joe Biden, chief advocate of the war in Iraq, chief architect of the US prison state, ardent supporter of the drug war, that he, Joe Biden, is somehow not off-limits, has not crossed any red lines, I think it's really worth exploring how certain politicians are declared disqualified And whose interests are served by this framework?
And specifically, who gets called crazy in our political discourse and why?
Then, Montana's Republican Governor Greg Gianforte today signed a bill effectively banning Montana citizens from using the social media app TikTok, owned by a Chinese company, even if those citizens in his state have voluntarily chosen that platform as their preferred means for expressing their political views and seeking cultural and social communities.
Now, I realize that there's so much anti-China sentiment in the US right now, not only in parts of the American right, but also the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.
That virtually any measure, any new government power invoked or justified in the name of weakening or stopping China will be automatically supported from the start.
But to me, the overarching lesson of the U.S.
government's response to 9-11 in the form of the so-called War on Terror is that it is precisely in such moments when anger toward or fear of a perceived foreign threat is so high that sweeping new state powers are being demanded in its name, such as the right to ban social media apps,
It's precisely then when we must be at our most vigilant and our minds most skeptical and open to the possibility that the new government power either does not really address the perceived threat in whose name it's being justified or that the dangers of this new political power are greater, much greater, than the threats posed by the foreign actor.
It is in that spirit that we will examine the details of this new law banning TikTok in Montana, as well as the dangers it raises.
Do we want government officials to have the power to ban social media apps they perceive to be, quote, dangerous?
Do American adults, after hearing the asserted risks and dangers, have the right to decide for themselves which platforms, which social media platforms, they want to use for political expression and organizing?
I hope that before you lend your support to laws like this and other state powers seized in the name of fighting China, or fighting Russia, or fighting Iran, or fighting Al-Qaeda, that you at least remain open to the possibility that the threats are being exaggerated to enhance state power at home, or that the proposed new powers do not really accomplish what their proponents claim they will.
This is an extraordinary new power.
Many politicians are demanding the right to ban entire apps and social media platforms from specific states and even from the whole country.
And as a result, it deserves not reflexive or emotional approval, but rather serious attention, scrutiny, and critical thought.
And that's what we intend to apply to this law.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form.
To follow us there, simply go to Spotify, Apple, or any other major podcasting platforms.
You can follow us there.
The episodes post 12 hours after their first broadcast live exclusively here on Rumble.
Being Thursday night, we would ordinarily have our after show on our Locals platform, available only to subscribers, but since we're still easing back into working after our hiatus due to a death in the family, we thought it best not to have our after show tonight, but we will be back Tuesday and Thursday of next week with our show after this one at its regular time.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Earlier this week, the Democratic primary challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appeared on the online show, Breaking Points, hosted by two very great, good journalists, Breaking Points, hosted by two very great, good journalists, Crystal Ball and Sagar Njedea.
And I found this interview very illuminating for multiple reasons, and it attracted a lot of attention.
especially this segment that we will show you and break down in which Crystal Ball confronts RFK Jr. about what she calls either his vaccine skepticism or his anti-vax sentiment.
And he does a good job of using the time she gave him to respond.
And what I found very interesting about this interview were several things, including the fact that she told him she regards his views on vaccines to be not merely an issue with which she and many other Democratic voters strongly disagree, but for her, a, quote, red line, meaning that anyone who crosses into that territory meaning that anyone who crosses into that territory specifically is one that she considers essentially off-limits.
It's a red line.
Once you cross it, there's no coming back.
And because this is a dynamic I have long noticed, starting with the 2012 presidential election, as I alluded to between Barack Obama and Ron Paul, which I want to break down in terms of why that first attracted my attention, and the broader tactic Which I'm not saying Crystal invoked but certainly is often invoked in the context of RFK or Ron Paul or people who are just a little bit outside of establishment thought of calling them crazy or declaring them too strange, too unhinged and too bizarre.
It's a very common and potent tactic and I think it's one that you will find is only wielded by the establishment against Critics of the establishment.
In other words, establishment figures have all the space in the world to endorse the most deranged, the most unhinged, the craziest policies.
But as long as you're in alignment with establishment orthodoxy, you will never be declared crazy, no matter how crazy those ideas are.
This is a term, this is a tactic reserved only for those who question prevailing establishment orthodoxy.
And I think all of us Are in a way vulnerable to it.
It's a very potent and pervasive form of propaganda that requires our constant vigilance.
And if we let our guard down at all, we're all susceptible to being influenced by that to think, no, that person has taken a view that everyone just knows is wrong.
Everyone trustworthy and reliable and credible knows is wrong.
And therefore, I just want to stay as far away from them as possible.
I think analyzing how this tactic is wielded, how it manifested here is of the utmost importance.
Now, just a few cards on the table before I go show you the parts of the interview and dissect it and connect it to other events.
I consider both Crystal and Sagar Anjeti to be good friends of mine.
I've appeared on that show many times.
I have a lot of respect for their work.
This is a case where I'm going to express some disagreements with Crystal's views, but it's not because I think she is a poor journalist or somebody Ill-motivated?
Quite the contrary.
I think the fact that she is someone who is often very rigorous and scrupulous in trying to guard against establishment propaganda, yet nonetheless in this case used a tactic that is usually a tool of the establishment and breaking points as they showed that had succeeded because it is anti-establishment is what makes it particularly worthwhile.
If this had been Anderson Cooper or Joe Scarborough or Chris Hayes or any of those kinds of people, It would have been unworthy of analysis because that's what you expect from them.
So I think the fact that it came from an anti-establishment venue makes it all the more illustrative.
And I also just want to note that we have been in contact with RFK Jr.
about appearing on this show.
He's agreed to do so.
We're just negotiating exactly the date on which he will appear.
I hope to devote an entire show to him or most of our show to him.
Like we did with Marianne Williamson, like we did with Vivek Ramaswamy, like we intend to do with any of the presidential candidates who will come to our show.
I'm definitely interested in talking to him and we will be doing that very soon, although he's by far from a candidate that I support.
He has all kinds of views with which I vehemently disagree, including his ardent support for most of the extremist expressions of Russiagate.
So he's clearly not my candidate.
I'm nonetheless interested in this dynamic because of what it illustrates more broadly.
It's a really perfect, vivid illustration of this tactic that I think deserves a lot of attention.
It's often overlooked, and like I said, many of us ingest it almost reflexively.
So let's go ahead and take a look at...
The first, the segment of this interview where vaccines were discussed.
It's about 10 minutes long.
We're going to show you just a couple of segments and I'll comment on the parts that I think very common as we go along and kind of explain the framework that I want to explore with it.
About vaccines, this is an area where you and I have significant differences and, you know, just to level with you on this, like, a lot of what you say I really respond to.
I think you're a very genuine person, but the across the board, whether you want to call it vaccine skepticism or anti-vax advocacy, which has been a central part of what you've been up to for the past number of years, For me personally, it's an issue, and it's a real sort of red line.
And I know I'm not alone in that, especially running in a Democratic primary.
There are going to be other millions of people.
Okay, so there you heard what she said, that this is not just an issue with which she disagrees with him, but it's for her, and she surmises that thing correctly for a lot of other Democratic voters, a red line.
Now, I don't want to place huge amounts of meaning in that phrase where it comes to Crystal because she's speaking here live and without a script.
And I know as well as anybody how sometimes you don't express yourself in the most precise way that you use phrases or words that you wouldn't use if you were sitting and contemplating exactly what you wanted to say.
But the fact that she did say it, and you could kind of see the progression of her thought where she told him, for me, Your view of vaccines is very wrong.
In fact, it's a red line.
I think it's very telling.
She wanted to make the point that this is not just an ordinary disagreement she has with him.
This is something that, for her, despite all the other things he says that she says resonates with him, places him in this kind of different, off-limits category.
I've never heard her say that about Joe Biden.
I believe she supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election, most definitely not in the primary.
She, I believe, was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
That's for sure.
She did not support him in the primary, but certainly in the general election, that was her preferred candidate.
I have not heard her say that positions Joe Biden has taken.
Is a red line for her where she would never support him in a way she seems to be saying here for RFK Jr.
when it comes to vaccines.
So that's part of what attracted my attention.
Let's listen to the rest.
People like me who have similar concerns.
So how do you win them over?
What's your message to people who think like I do?
But just tell me, tell me where you think I got it wrong.
Well, I think you get it wrong when you draw a correlation between the rise of things like autism and the introduction of vaccines when there isn't hard scientific evidence tying those things together.
How do you know?
Let me ask you this.
How do you know there's not a hard scientific evidence?
Well, because the one major study that purported to show that was retracted and the scientist who conducted it was, you know, had to... Now what you're doing... Basically fraudulently created... No, no, no.
Hold on, hold on.
But I don't want to get in a debate with you about this because you've spent your life Let me just tell you, I've listened to hours of interviews with you with an open mind, and I'm not persuaded.
Now, maybe I'm wrong.
That's possible.
I'll hold it out there.
People can watch.
I thought Megyn Kelly did a phenomenal interview with you that went through all these claims piece by piece by piece.
I really encourage people to watch that whole exchange because we won't be able to do it justice here in the five minutes we have left.
But there are going to be people like me who aren't persuaded and who see this as an issue.
And the fact that it's been such a central part of your advocacy means I can't just sort of put it to the side and say, oh, well, I'll just ignore, you know, this piece that's been really important to you in your life.
So you're running in a Democratic primary.
You have a lot of people who feel even more strongly than me who think that, you know, Dr. Fauci is a hero and all of these things.
How are you going to persuade them?
How are you going to reach them?
And what is your message to them?
Well, first of all, I'm not leading with my opinions about vaccines.
What I say to people is, show me where I got it wrong.
Show me where I got my science wrong.
I've written books about this.
I wrote a book about the link between dimericel and autism that has, I think, 450 distilled scientific studies that confirm and validate that.
All right, so there's a lot going on there that I think is worthy of attention.
First of all, you can see that Crystal...
Is explicitly acknowledging that she doesn't have the same level of information and knowledge.
She hasn't devoted anywhere near the amount of time to this question as RFK Jr.
And for that reason, she's explicitly saying, I don't want to actually engage with you on the merits.
She keeps trying to kind of switch the question to a political or punditry question of, well, look, right or wrong, There's a lot of Democratic voters out there who share my views, who think you're wrong on vaccines.
How do you intend to persuade them?
But he wants, rightly so, after having been accused of being wrong on vaccines, to hear from her what the basis is for her view that he's wrong.
He wants to engage the substantive debate.
That's part of why he's running.
And I think he goes on to say to her that he, after listening to her try and mount the case, that she's parroting establishment outlets, that she's parroting what the health establishment and what health policy officials have just repeated over and over to the point that I think even well-intentioned people like Crystal start absorbing it to be true.
And this is what I think is such an important point.
I think in order to a public platform where you opine strongly on vital issues like whether the benefits of vaccines have been oversold, whether their harms and risks have been minimized and concealed, I really think you have an obligation whether their harms and risks have been minimized and concealed, I really think you have an obligation to have that opinion
And I've tried very hard in my journalistic career never to opine publicly unless I feel I have that kind of a basis of information.
That's one of the reasons why I've always confined myself to a few issues at a time.
One of my concerns with doing a show like this nightly, and I talked about this a lot with my team, was how am I going to do a show where I have to talk every night about 9 or 10 or 12 issues where my knowledge about it is superficial?
And so one of the things we decided was we're not going to talk about 9 or 12 issues every day.
I'm not going to be obligated to opine publicly or journalistically or assert claims when I have just an ordinary level of knowledge, no deeper or more developed than the ordinary person who has a full-time job that requires no deeper or more developed than the ordinary person who has a full-time job that requires
And so if you're going to come and tell Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his face that he's not only wrong when it comes to vaccine skepticism, but so wrong that it's crossed over this red line, then I do think you have the obligation to be prepared to engage on the merits and then I do think you have the obligation to be prepared to engage on She does go on to say, look, I may be wrong on this.
This is something that I am open to being persuaded on, but I've listened to you and I haven't been persuaded.
But she also says that she doesn't really have anywhere near the level of knowledge he has.
He spent years working on this.
Remember, RFK Jr.
was, for 20 years or so, a very widely regarded environmental activist.
Working on issues of harmful waste by corporations and toxic dumping.
He's somebody who's a very serious person.
He is not some extremist or marginalized figure who just emerged out of the blue and started You know, for clicks or attention, talking about vaccines, this is a very deeply developed view, which does not mean I agree with it.
I don't have the knowledge to agree with it or not, but what I know is this.
Health officials in the United States and in the West were proven to be not just wrong, but dishonest repeatedly throughout the COVID vaccine.
Starting with the very first week, When Dr. Fauci received emphatic emails from some of the most well-regarded virologists and epidemiologists on the planet telling him that they were very convinced that the novel coronavirus could not have emerged naturally or through species jumping, but almost certainly came
From a lab in Wuhan that happened to be one that received funding from agencies supervised by Dr. Fauci.
And for obvious reasons, Dr. Fauci was highly motivated to destroy and crush any possibility that this pandemic came from risky research that he himself approved and funded.
And so within a matter of a week, the entire establishment got on board with the view that he insisted they endorse, which was that the notion that this came from another species and jump species evolved naturally was all but proven, while the possibility of a lab leak was debunked.
We know that that was completely baseless at best.
To the point where for a year or so, Facebook and other social media companies barred anyone from questioning it.
Powerful Dr. Fauci was in creating a false consensus.
You couldn't even question what he was saying, let alone did you have people willing in public to say he was wrong, only for the U.S.
government itself to finally get to the point that they said they didn't know the origins of the coronavirus and that an investigation was needed, including to consider the possibility of a lab leak.
And now, as we know, From the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, the most elite scientific units and teams in the Department of Energy and in the FBI believe that a lab leak from the Wuhan lab is not only plausible, something you weren't allowed to say as a result of Dr. Fauci, but is the most probable explanation for where the coronavirus came from.
You certainly have other experts who dispute that, but the debate is open.
And yet Dr. Fauci, from the beginning, closed it.
We also know that all kinds of claims about the Pfizer vaccine and other vaccines were false to the point of being just deceitful.
There's famous clips of people they send to propagandize the public, Rachel Maddow and others, but Dr. Fauci himself saying that the vaccine prevents transmission, that if you're vaccinated, you cannot contract or transmit the virus to others.
And then two months later, we watched as millions of vaccinated people were contracting and transmitting the virus to other vaccinated people, something that turned out to be a complete lie, and on and on and on and on.
So whether I'm persuaded or not by what RFK Jr.
has to say about vaccines, both generally and when it comes to the COVID vaccine, I know for sure we benefit from having these questions debated.
That's the reason the DNC wants to pretend R.K.
Jr.
doesn't exist.
They're petrified of him for reminding Americans not only of how much we were Deceived on almost every aspect of the COVID pandemic, including the vaccines, but how much damage that has done from all the policies that we enacted based on these false claims from school closings that have destroyed the social and intellectual development of
Huge numbers of our nation's youth and youth around the world to skyrocketing rates of depression and suicide and alcohol and drug abuse, which came from the harms of isolation and shutdowns.
And so many other things.
So at the very least, I think that if you have a public platform, you have a responsibility to encourage and cheer for and want to foster debate on these most critical questions, especially when it comes from highly informed people who are challenging and dissenting from establishment orthodoxy, especially on debates where they have been proven over and over to lie and to be proven wrong.
And so Crystal Ball has every right to insist That she disagrees with RFK's skepticism on vaccines.
But I think if you're going to use your public platform to say that, as opposed to just believing that privately, which we all have to do.
We all have to form opinions privately.
But there's a big jump to say, I'm going to use the privilege and the responsibility I have with my public platform to opine on issues that I really haven't done the work necessary to have a reliable opinion.
Then I think the only default position there is, if you're going to comment on those issues without the sufficient knowledge, is to encourage skepticism.
To say, I want to hear these debates.
We need more transparency and more of a right to have these questions raised rather than telling somebody that they're not only wrong, but so wrong that they've crossed a red line.
Which is completely in alignment with what the DNC is trying to do.
To say that both Marion Williams and Ann RFK Jr.
don't even deserve to be heard.
They don't even deserve to be considered.
Primary opponents to Joe Biden.
If you ask a DNC official, they'll say it's already done.
Biden has no primary challenger.
He's our nominee, without a single vote being casted, without any debate being held, precisely because what their strategy is, is to encourage people to believe that RFK Jr.
is not just wrong, but so wrong, that no matter how much else you might like him on other issues, such as his vehement opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine, That he shouldn't even be someone that you're willing to get near.
He crossed a red line.
This is the establishment tactic that I think Crystal Ball, in this case, and so many other people in so many other cases, have unwittingly and with good motives propagated.
It's almost subconscious.
She believes this, Not, I'm sure she's done the hours of work she said she did, but hours of work on a question this complex is nowhere near enough to opine that emphatically and to tell someone they're off limits, that they've crossed a red line.
So, again, I don't think she did anything criminal or cataclysmic here.
I think it's more illustrative of how this propaganda tactic functions, often implicitly.
Let me show you another example.
This was from When Barry Weiss went on Joe Rogan's program.
I believe we have that video.
Do we have that video ready?
We're going to pull that up right here.
And I just want to, this is from January of 2019.
Barry Weiss went on Joe Rogan's program.
So it was right as the Democratic primary and the Republican, well, there was no Republican primary, but there was a Democratic primary.
It was heating up.
There was a Republican challenger, Bill Weld and a couple others, but they never got anywhere near 20% in the polls like RFK Jr.
did.
But there was a vibrant Democratic Party primary with Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren.
And Tulsi Gabbard, she was one of the people, and Marianne Williamson, who was among those challengers.
And so, Barry Weiss had a discussion with Joe Rogan about these Democratic candidates, and specifically about Tulsi Gabbard, who I believe, unbeknownst to Barry Weiss, is someone that Joe Rogan really admired and still admires.
And I want you to watch what happened, the way Barry Weiss asserted claims Only to have it be clear that she had no basis for making them.
She had just heard it so often that she just implicitly started believing it was true because it came from establishment voices.
Watch this.
So none of you heard that, but Joe Rogan inserted Tulsi Gabbard as Barry Weiss was listing the candidates.
Ideas.
Ideas.
Well, when she was 20.
So I don't know if you heard that, but Joe Rogan inserted Tulsi Gabbard as Barry Weiss was listing the candidates.
Listen to this again.
But okay, so who's in right now?
So we have Kamala, Kirsten Gillibrand, monstrous ideas.
Well, when she was 22, she had... No, she's an Assad toady.
What does that mean?
What's a toady?
I think that I used that word correctly.
Jamie, can you check what toady means?
Like toe in the line?
Is that what it means?
No, I think it's like a... T-O-A-D-I-E.
What does that mean?
I think it means what I think it means.
Toadie.
Definition of Toadies.
A person who flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons.
A sycophant.
So she's an Assad sycophant.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, that's known about her.
Are you saying Tulsi Gabbard is a sycophant to Bashar al-Assad?
Yeah, of course I'm saying that.
That's known.
That's known about her.
I can't imagine making an accusation of that gravity on a very public and widely watched platform without having a single example I'm able to cite to substantiate that accusation.
And all I can say is, yeah, this is known.
Everyone knows this.
Listen to this. - matters or defers to others for self-serving reasons. - A sycophant. - So she's an Assad sycophant, is that what you're saying? - Yeah, that's known about her. - What did she say?
Oh, we have to look.
I don't remember the details.
We probably should say that before we say that about her.
We should probably read it, rather.
Well, I have read it.
No, we should right now.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Just so we know what she said.
Look up Tulsi Gabbard.
And I really enjoy talking to her.
I like her a lot.
I find that remarkable.
Now, again, I think Barry Weiss was well-intentioned there in the sense that she was saying something she believed to be true.
And had come to believe it because just enough people had said it that in her brain a switch clicked and it just became gospel to her.
Something that you don't even need to bother anymore to debate.
She was obviously extremely unprepared to debate that.
We're even to raise a single thing Tulsi Gabbard had done that would justify accusing her of that.
And I think it's very similar to what happened with Crystal Ball, though I think Crystal Ball was much more prepared to talk about RFK's vaccine skepticism than Barry Weiss was to talk about Tulsi Gabbard's supposed toadiness or Serving someone for your own self-interest dishonestly to Bashar al-Assad, but nonetheless, I think it's very similar dynamic.
As RFK Jr.
pointed out in the second half of the segment we didn't show you, he said, I think what you're doing is parroting establishment voices.
And it was clear to me that that was what she was doing.
She definitely did some work, but nowhere near enough.
Now, as I mentioned, this is a dynamic that I've been talking about for many years.
And the thing that really led me to first start talking about it was in 2011, 2012, when Barack Obama was seeking re-election to his second term in office.
I was a very vehement critic of Obama in many areas, particularly in his embrace of the exact war on terror policies instituted by George Bush and Dick Cheney and civil liberties assault in the name of the war on terror that Obama spent all of 2008 vowing to uproot.
And not only did Obama continue those, he aggressively expanded them in some very radical and extremist ways.
And the left purported to be just as appalled by that as I was.
This was during the time when my audience became filled with a lot of left-wing supporters because I was vehemently criticizing President Obama, but not from a conservative or right-wing perspective, but from the perspective of civil liberties and my critique of his continuation of George Bush and Dick Cheney's most invasive and radical policies in the war on terror.
And that was something the left strongly believed in.
And there was a candidate running for president in 2012 who agreed with the left's critique about President Obama's civil liberties assault and his name was Ron Paul.
Agreed with the left on some pretty important issues like the war on terror and civil liberties, but also became a vehement opponent of the drug war, of the idea that American adults should be put into prison if they choose to buy and consume narcotics the government has declared to be illegal, that are drugs you're not allowed to use, even if as an adult you're completely informed of the risks and benefits and choose to use them.
Not only are you prohibited, but you will go to jail for it.
He argued that this led to mass incarceration, was the main reason the U.S.
imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world by far, that there was a racial component to it, things the left should have adored.
And yet, even the mere suggestion that Ron Paul's candidacy should be looked at And not necessarily one should vote for him or support him if one doesn't want to, but at least appreciate and celebrate and support the parts of his candidacy that were genuinely unique in a way that the left has long claimed to crave.
That was one of my earliest and most violent breaches with the American left when I started trying to argue that what Ron Paul is doing is something that should inspire them and whatever you want to say about Ron Paul and the issues on which you disagree with him, that it's at least as true
For President Obama, and yet the fact that President Obama had a D after his name and was the incumbent president and had the establishment on his side, whereas Ron Paul was always somebody who was kind of marginalized, considered a little crazy, not because of any personal behavior, which has always been upstanding in terms of his personal integrity and his conduct in office, but because of his views,
He was immediately declared to have crossed red lines, the way Crystal Ball said of RFK Jr., the way Barry Weiss said of Tulsi Gabbard.
Now, here you can see just a very common article from 2011 in the Washington Post.
There you see the headline, Ron Paul, call him a nut.
Just like, he's crazy.
This is by their media critic Eric Wemple.
Again, this is the same tactic.
Ron Paul doesn't have views with which one disagrees.
He's just crazy.
You just call him a crazy person, an insane person, and be done with it.
Now, the article I wrote in December of 2011 in Salon that, as I said, was probably maybe after my support for the majority opinion in Citizens United on free speech grounds.
This is probably, which was 2010, this is probably the At the time, the most abrupt and aggressive breach I had with the American left, and here you see the article, Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies.
And there you see in the sub-headlines, the benefit of his candidacy are widely ignored, as are the Democrats' own evils.
So it reminds me very much of the framework Cristobal had created.
She's certainly not a supporter of Joe Biden, but at the end of the day, she will urge him to be elected.
She will advocate for people to vote for him in a general election because apparently he hasn't crossed red lines, whereas RFK Jr.
has.
And this is the same issue for me when it came to President Obama and Rand Paul.
So let me show you a couple of videos where Rand Paul said some things that were really extraordinary that you would think the left would be supportive of and Excited by?
Let's take a look at this video here, which is him talking about the effort by President Obama to use the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
Listen to Ron Paul express his opposition to that policy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Plans, rumors, and war propaganda for attacking Syria and disposing Assad has been around for many months.
This past week, however, it was reported that the Pentagon indeed was finalizing plans to do just that.
In my opinion, all the evidence to justify this attack is bogus.
It is no more credible than the pretext given for the 2003 invasion of Iraq or for the 2011 attack on Libya.
The total waste of those wars should cause us to pause before this all-out effort at occupation and regime change is initiated against Syria.
There are no national security concerns that require such a foolish escalation of violence in the Middle East.
There should be no doubt that our security interests are best served by completely staying out of the internal strife now raging in Syria.
Now, just to put this in the simplest terms, to this day, if you mention the name Ron Paul, not just the Democrats, but anyone who's an adherent to establishment dogma, they'll laugh at him.
They'll treat him like a joke.
Like, he's crazy.
He's just insane, like the Washington Post said.
Just call him a nut.
And yet, Ron Paul, in 2002, was one of the most ardent opponents of the idea of invading Iraq.
He made all kinds of predictions that proved prophetic and prescient.
And at the same time, Joe Biden Who no Democrat will say is crazy or off limits or has crossed a red line, was one of the most vocal advocates of the war in Iraq.
And because he was a Democrat, considered to have a lot of experience in foreign policy, he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, you could really make the case that Joe Biden's support for Iraq, the war in Iraq, like Hillary Clinton's and like John Kerry's, was arguably the most important, he was the most was arguably the most important, he was the most important senator that enabled that war to happen, that led half the Democratic Senate caucus to vote in favor of the war in Iraq.
Let's listen to him in 2002 while he was cross-examining in a very hostile way Scott Ritter, who at the time was a weapons inspector who was against the war in Iraq and was saying he was in Iraq, he was on the ground in Iraq as a weapons inspector, he vehemently believed Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
So Ron Paul turned out to be right, Joe Biden turned out to be radically and disastrously wrong and yet for some reason Joe Biden is considered sane and on the right side of the red line and Ron Paul is on the wrong side of it.
Let's put this video up of Biden in the Senate in 2002.
Actually, I believe this is a Senate hearing about the first war in Iraq.
We need to get that confirmed.
There are lots of clips, of course, of Joe Biden vehemently arguing for the war in Iraq.
This may be a video from 1998.
1998, we need to get this confirmation on that.
Okay, so yeah, so this is 1998 talking to Scott Ritter, but he's advocating regime change all the way back in 1998.
So three years before 9-11, and then four years before that war was actually approved of.
Listen to what Joe Biden said.
Major of Foreign Relations, for any opening statement he would like to make.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin by saying I think, Major, you provided, have provided and are providing a very, very, very Valuable service to your country by coming forward as you have Because quite frankly, I think what you've done is you've forced us to come to our milk here, all of us in the United States Congress.
I think you and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam's at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction.
And you and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it's the thing we have to face, that the only way, the only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone, start it alone, and it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking the son of a... taking Saddam down.
You know it, and I know it.
So I think we should not kid ourselves here.
There's stark, stark choices.
So it is amazing.
Biden was not just an advocate of the war in Iraq in 2002 when it was proposed after 9-11.
He was a very emphatic advocate of it, of regime change in Iraq and the need to take down Saddam Hussein before 9-11 even happened back in 1998.
Now, why is Joe Biden considered sane And people like Ron Paul considered crazy and off limits and insane when on the most critical questions of our time, Joe Biden has been wrong over and over.
Let's look at Joe Biden and his support for The war in Libya, a war that, like the war in Syria that Obama waged to take out Bashar al-Assad, turned that country into a complete wreck of a country, where anarchy of the worst kind thrived, where slave markets returned, where ISIS returned, that created extreme amounts of instability, not just in that country, but a migrant crisis in Europe, one of the worst and most misguided
Interventions the United States has ever launched.
Joe Biden, like the war in Iraq, was strongly in favor of that one as well.
Let's go ahead and pull that up.
Libya, Qaddafi, one way or another, is gone.
Whether he's alive or dead, he's gone.
The people of Libya have gotten rid of a dictator of 40 years who I personally knew.
This is one tough, not so nice guy.
And guess what?
They got a chance now.
But what happened?
In this case, America spent $2 billion total and didn't lose a single life.
This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past.
So I think this is somewhat of an elusive point.
So I just want to get at it in one more different way, which is, The idea is that the establishment in the United States uses a tactic of proclaiming you to be mentally unwell or somehow just completely radioactive simply by virtue of dissent to establishment orthodoxy.
And even if it's establishment orthodoxy itself that proves to be the crazy view.
That proves to be the destructive view.
That proves to be the deranged conspiratorial view.
You will never be labeled crazy or off-limits or have crossing a red line as long as you're in alignment with establishment thought.
There is no limit to what you can do provided you remain on that side.
This is a term and a tactic reserved only for those who dissent from it.
That's why Joe Biden is never considered crazy or off-limits but people like RFK Jr.
or Ron Paul are.
I think the most vivid example is this one.
From 2016 until 2019, and we covered this on our show on Tuesday night when we talked about the Durham Report and its conclusions about the FBI's interference in our election by essentially collaborating with the Clinton campaign to create this false basis investigation to link Trump to Russia.
In the context of that, we discussed the fact that for three full years in the United States, the main political story that drowned our politics, that covered the front page of newspapers on a virtually daily basis that was constantly on television, was Russiagate, the Russiagate scandal.
And the two key component parts Was the first that the Trump campaign had criminally concluded or collaborated with the Russians to hack into the DNC's emails.
And John Podesta's email, something we know from the Mueller investigation that closed without accusing a single American of that crime, said there was no evidence for it.
And now the German investigation concluding that the FBI never even had a basis to open an investigation into that in 2016.
We know that that part was fraudulent.
But the other part that was at least equally prominent came from the Steele dossier.
The Steele dossier.
And it was one of the most insane and unhinged conspiracy theories imaginable.
It really was the case that establishment figures in the media and politics for three straight years continuously went on television and to their pages in the op-ed columns, they even gave themselves posters for it, and constantly ratified the view That the Kremlin had seized control of the levers of American power by virtue of sexual, financial, and other forms of personal blackmail held over the head of Donald Trump.
That essentially they could force him to do the bidding of the Kremlin even if it came at the expense of the United States.
A conspiracy theory that if you tried to submit as a script in Hollywood, it would be too much even for them.
It's preposterous.
It's a joke!
When you talk about wild, crazy conspiracy theories, that is the living, breathing embodiment of it.
And no matter how often it was disproven because Trump acted against the most vital Russian interest.
When he sent lethal arms to Ukraine after President Obama refused to do so, a direct threat to Russia's vital interests.
When Trump spent years trying to sabotage the most important economic project that Moscow has, which is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, connecting it to Western Europe to allow it to sell cheap natural gas through Germany.
No matter how many times Trump acted directly against Russian interests, when he bombed Russian troops in Syria, And threatened to bomb Russian troops even more, and take out the main Russian ally, Bashar al-Assad, no matter how much he acted against Russian interests, this conspiracy theory continued.
And yet, not a single person who propagated that crazy conspiracy theory would ever be called crazy, or a conspiracy theorist, or having crossed a red line, because they were acting in servitude and captivity to establishment dogma and establishment interest.
To this day, those of us who have stood up and objected to that conspiracy theory as being baseless are the ones called crazy and even called a conspiracy theorist because these terms really are just weapons and tools used to stigmatize anybody who challenges establishment thought.
This is the point that I want to most get at.
Now let me just show you one last example of this.
Because it happened not only to Rand Paul, but also to Ron Paul, but also his son, Rand Paul, when he became elected as Senator from Kentucky.
The exact same things were said about Rand Paul that were said about Ron Paul, including, here you see from the New Republic in May of 2011, a headline, Ron Paul is really crazy.
Ron Paul is really crazy.
All but echoing the Washington Post Similar story about his father, just call Ron Paul a nut and crazy.
And Conor Friedersdorf, who now writes at The Atlantic, wrote a really great article in Newsweek that examined the question of why Rand Paul Could be deemed crazy.
What was it about Rand Paul that allowed him to be called crazy by establishment figures in Washington media and politics who themselves endorse all sorts of objectively, inherently extremist and radical ideas?
And the answer, of course, is because All crazy really means in Washington is opposing establishment thoughts.
So here's Conor Friederdorf's article in Newsweek in May of 2017, in May of 2010.
There you see the headline is Rand Paul crazier than anyone else in DC.
Let's look at the text of the article, quote, "Rand Paul has plenty of beliefs that I regard as wacky, such as his naive, now withdrawn assumption that markets would have obviated the need for certain provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or his desire to return America to the gold standard.
Of course, I feel world-weary exasperation upon hearing every national politician speak, Have you ever gotten through the election season television commercials without rolling your eyes?
But the media seem to reflexively treat some ideas and some candidates less seriously than others for no legitimate, objective reason.
Third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot was called a disparaging name so often that he tried to diffuse the situation with humor by dancing in public to Patsy Cline's rendition of the song, quote, Crazy.
Rand Paul can't escape this treatment, even on Fox News, where an anchor called him a libertarian wacko.
If returning to the gold standard is unthinkable, is it not just as extreme that President Obama claims an unchecked power to assassinate without due process any American living abroad whom he designates as an enemy combatant?
Just to remind you, the Obama administration adopted a theory that if an American citizen is abroad, In a place that they deem lawless or out of the reach of American extradition, that the United States government has the right, without charging that American citizen with a crime or giving them any due process, simply for the president to declare them an enemy combatant and then murder them by drones.
And this wasn't just a theory that Obama asserted, it was a theory that he used In Yemen, for example, he sent drones to first kill the American-born American citizen cleric, al-Awlaki, and then to kill his 16-year-old son in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki.
And what Conor Friedersdorf is saying is if you think advocacy of the gold standard Makes Rand Paul crazy?
How is that any less crazy or more crazy than a President of the United States claiming the power to assassinate without due process any American living abroad whom he designates as an enemy combatant?
Or that Joe Lieberman wants to strip Americans of their citizenship not when they are convicted of terrorist activities, but upon their being accused and designated as enemy combatants?
And he goes on a bunch of other examples.
He then concludes that essentially, people who get called crazy in Washington are always people who dissent vigorously enough from establishment orthodoxy.
I think maybe the corrective that we need is not to stop calling people crazy, but to make sure that we include establishment figures in that.
Because over the last six years in particular, the establishment has gone utterly berserk Joe Biden, if you look at it from a progressive perspective, has supported every policy that ought to be across the quote red line.
From the Iraq War, to the war in Libya, to the war in Syria, to funding the proxy war in Ukraine endlessly and without limits, to being the architect of the prison industrial complex, to being a virulent supporter of the drug war.
And yet no one will call Joe Biden crazy.
No one would call Mitch McConnell crazy, even though he supports almost every one of those same policies.
Because if you're part of the establishment, you're inherently serious.
You're inherently sane.
Even if you're wrong, you're inherently credible.
This is a tactic that appeared in Crystal Ball's interview of RFK Jr., that appeared in Barry Weiss's commentary on Tulsi Gabbard, that appeared in all of these articles demanding we call Ron Paul and Rand Paul insane, that is designed to render dissidents to establishment thought intrinsically crazy.
And it's one that I think a lot of us can adopt because we're constantly bombarded with claims from venues we've been conditioned to regard as inherently credible.
And it leads us to believe all sorts of things that we haven't really critically evaluated.
And as a result, to implicitly or reflexively regard as crazy or weird or off limits or on the other side of a red line, people who are questioning policies that themselves are often quite crazy but are deemed to be sacrosanct, By virtue of the fact that it's the establishment that supports them.
And so I thought this interview with RFK Jr., the treatment of RFK Jr.
and his candidacy, the permission given for the DNC to basically pretend he doesn't exist, all illustrates this tactic.
It's been one that is evident for decades.
And I think when you put it all together, it's one that we really need to work to be consciously aware of.
So right after this, we will be back.
We will look at the new law in Montana that bans TikTok and hope to apply the same critical faculties I was just talking about to this new law and other measures being demanded in the name of stopping China.
We'll be right back after this.
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In the last segment I talked about a lot of policies that were enacted in the name of the war on terror and fighting Al Qaeda that by all objective measures should be deemed not just radical and extremist but really quite just crazy, just unhinged.
And one of the lessons I learned from those years of reporting
In fact, probably the overarching lesson is that one of the most dangerous ways that governments extract power from its citizenry is to convince that citizenry that they face such a monumental threat, such a grave fear, usually from foreign sources, from foreign actors, that they need to capitulate to government demands for increasingly greater powers, including for powers previously thought
out of any conceivable possibility.
That was the story of the Patriot Act.
We've covered that history several times on this show.
Within literally days after 9-11, while the rubble and the corpses beneath it had not yet been cleared from the streets of Manhattan, there was legislation designed to enable the United States government to spy not just on foreign nationals but American citizens in ways previously there was legislation designed to enable the United States government to spy not just on foreign nationals
the government has to meet in order to spy, in order for the CIA and the FBI to share information about American citizens At the time, even as proponents acknowledged It was an extremist and a radical bill, a fundamental change to the American system of government, to the values that we've always embraced, for the limitations required for the government to operate in a way that protects our basic rights.
And yet, the Patriot Act passed easily, despite those realities, overwhelmingly, in both the House and the Senate.
Anyone who even breathed the word of dissent against the Patriot Act was instantly accused of either not taking seriously the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Islamic radicalism, or usually and worse, being on the side of Al Qaeda, being pro terrorist, simply for questioning anything the government demanded in the name of Al Qaeda.
And as I said, I was someone who lived in Manhattan and worked in Manhattan and was in Manhattan on 9-11.
I remember how traumatizing that attack was.
I remember it took me, I think, two weeks and I went to a movie and I realized in the middle of the movie that for about 10 minutes I wasn't thinking about the attack for the first time since it happened.
It was genuinely a traumatizing attack and very shortly after that came the anthrax attacks Which for a lot of Americans, I believe, escalated those risks even further.
And we're going to devote a show very soon, perhaps tomorrow night or in the upcoming week, about the anthrax attacks and the impact it had on American perceptions about threats that we face, but also the still very significant lingering questions about how that anthrax attack was launched I genuinely believe as do a lot of mainstream scientists and even mainstream news outlets.
They don't talk about it anymore, but they did at the time that the FBI's version of events for how the anthrax attack happened stretched credibility to a breaking point that we don't really know the full story, but it sheds a lot of light on things like How our government manipulates and weaponizes viruses and other biological weapons in our labs, in Chinese labs.
So we're gonna devote an entire show to remembering that history.
I think a lot of you are probably too young to remember it, to have lived through it.
But the lesson that I got from all of that is that once a perception of fear or anger toward a foreign power is high enough, The population is basically conditioned to accept anything and everything the government demands in the name of combating that threat.
And right now, the threat that Americans regard as the gravest and the most serious is no longer Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
It's not the Russians, unless you work for MSNBC and the Washington Post op-ed page.
It's not Iran.
It's China.
I think there's a consensus growing, certainly within the establishment wings of both parties and even the populist right in the Republican Party, that China is the single gravest threat that the United States faces.
And at some point, we're going to delve deeply into the question of whether that's an accurate perception.
But for the moment, I want you to just assume that it is so to assume that whether you think of China as some kind of an enemy with which we need to go to war, or some kind of a
Very serious, formidable competitor that will likely require decades of a new Cold War, of funding the intelligence agencies, of spending more and more money on weapons, on deploying fleets and military units in that part of the world, and confront China in every conceivable way, even if you're right about that.
It still is the case that we are all vulnerable to having that concern, that fear, that anger towards China exploited for the government to seize more powers by telling you that those powers are necessary to combat the threat from Beijing and that you need not worry about these new powers because the government is only here to help you and protect you And keep you safe from the Chinese Communist Party.
This has absolutely become an argument we're hearing more and more in Washington in ways that I think people are finally starting to realize can be very dangerous in itself.
The controversy around TikTok and whether the United States government should ban it from being used in the United States was one that a lot of people were on board with until they realized that the bill that was actually winding its way through Congress with the support of the White House and the establishment of small parties did not merely ban TikTok.
It went way further.
It was called the Restrict Act, and it essentially authorized the Biden administration to ban any Foreign app or social media platform that in its sole discretion it deemed dangerous.
And that was a perfect textbook case of how people's good faith fear of China was exploited, was opportunistically manipulated to try and grab powers that none of us should want the government to have.
And as just to kind of reference the prior segment, one of the people who stood up and stopped that restrict act and sounded the alarm on it was Rand Paul.
The same person who tried just to attach some safeguard and oversight provisions to the $100 billion authorized for the war in Ukraine and was basically accused by Mitch McConnell for that reason alone of being a Kremlin agent, of being crazy, of being somebody who is just kind of always strange and weird.
Apparently the idea of sending $100 billion to Ukraine with no safeguards, the most corrupt country in Europe, that's totally sane.
Wanting safeguards over how Americans' funds are being used, that's insane.
So he was the one who stood up and warned people, look, your good faith fears of China are being exploited by the U.S.
government for powers you'd never want them to have.
In Montana yesterday, the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed a bill and the Republican governor signed a bill that purports to ban TikTok from Montana.
Let's look at the bill itself first and how it's talked about.
So here you have the press release from the state of Montana and the Republican governor, Gianforte, who the headline boasts bans TikTok in Montana.
It's an obviously popular thing for a Republican politician to do.
The subheadline says government prohibits use of apps tied to foreign adversaries on state devices and networks.
It's from May 17th.
And here's what it says.
To protect Montana's personal, private, and sensitive data and information from intelligence gathered by the Chinese Communist Party, Governor Greg Gianforte today banned TikTok from operating in Montana.
The governor today also directed the state's chief information officer and executive agency directors to prohibit the use of all social media applications tied to foreign adversaries on state equipment and for state business in Montana.
Note, it's not just TikTok.
It's any foreign adversaries who have social media companies or tied to social media companies and applications.
They're not banned in the whole state the way TikTok is, but they're banned for use on State equipment infrastate business in Montana.
Quote, the Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to spy on Americans, violate their privacy, and collect their personal, private, and sensitive information is well documented, Governor Jim Ford said.
Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montana's private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.
Now, I just want you, even if you're somebody who reflexively reacts to that positively, to do two things.
First, ask yourself where the evidence is that TikTok is used in some unique way as a spying system on Americans, in a way that isn't true for, say, Facebook and Google and almost every other big tech app.
What is it about TikTok that makes it unique as a threat?
Now, if you want to say, well, it has ties to China, I don't think anyone really thinks that big tech companies have some kind of patriotic loyalty to the United States.
But there's really, I noticed today when I noted on Twitter my concerns about this law, people are making lavish claims about what TikTok does.
It's telling me that it's not just people who choose to use it they can spy on, but they can spy on basically anybody, including people who have not wanted to use it.
Really wild claims of the kind that Barry Weiss made about Tulsi Gabbard on Joe Rogan without having the ability to substantiate it.
I have no doubt TikTok collects huge amounts of user data, but they're collecting it from adults who are choosing to use that platform.
Nobody is forced to use TikTok.
You have huge numbers of adults in the United States who are choosing, after having heard all the warnings about TikTok, to use it.
So that's one thing I want to ask you to consider is, if you're going to make claims about what TikTok is and what's done with this data and how it can spy on us in a unique way, I want you to check whether you actually have concrete evidence on which those beliefs are based or whether you've just heard it in the ether enough times being repeated you've come to believe and assume it's true.
But the second point I want to focus on which I think is even more important is the question of whether this power can be abused.
Do you actually want governors of states to have the power in their own discretion to ban apps That they regard as dangerous.
So maybe in the case of Montana, you're happy because it's a Republican governor who's banning an app connected to China.
But what about if Gavin Newsom, or in California, Kathy Hochul in New York, decides they think Twitter is dangerous?
Because Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk using foreign money, or because Elon Musk doesn't censor enough and therefore it's a dangerous app because it allows too much hate speech and disinformation, a core belief of Democratic Party officials, and they can classify it as a foreign app or just something that's too dangerous.
Do we want political officials deciding which apps and social media platforms you are and are not permitted to use?
There is no question that this law implicates First Amendment rights, core First Amendment rights, in ways that I think ought to be obvious and self-evident.
The mechanism that the law uses is very disturbing.
It forces Google and Facebook, or rather Google and Apple, to prohibit The availability of TikTok on their stores.
So if you're in Montana, and obviously they can only purport to prohibit this for Montana, Google and Apple are supposed to figure out how they can ban people in Montana from downloading this app because the government has said it's too dangerous for you to use it if you choose to.
But aside from the technical issues and the bizarre nature of a governor of a state banning an app, as opposed to the federal government doing it for all of the country, the free speech infringements are clear.
There are millions of Americans who, for whatever reason, believe that TikTok is the best venue that allows them to be heard.
They have millions and millions of people who have followed them.
They have communities in which they're integrally involved.
And you certainly have the right, if you're a politician or a citizen, to try and persuade them not to use TikTok.
But to order them not to use it, even if in this specific case you think that power is being used well, is a power that can very easily become threatening in a way that so many of those war on terror powers that seemed appealing at the time because we were told they were going to be used to combat and fight Al Qaeda, Ended up being some of the most extremist infringements of our civil liberties in American history.
That is a lesson we have to keep in mind.
These are very emotional appeals.
You hear the phrase Chinese Communist Party and I know there are parts of your brain that tell you that is the supreme evil and we need to do everything to battle it.
But do you really want that framework to be in place?
That the government can do everything as long as it's not in the name of combating China?
Here from the New York Times is a article on the debate that has already arisen by people very concerned about the free speech implications of this law, and I am absolutely one of those people, as are people from across the political spectrum.
As I said, Rand Paul himself has raised these issues before.
There you see the New York Times article from today, quote, TikTok ban, a court battle over First Amendment rights appeared to be brewing in Montana on Tuesday, on Thursday, in response to the state banning TikTok from operating there as of January 1st, the first prohibition of its kind in the nation.
The ban, which was signed by Governor Greg Gianforte on Wednesday, set off an outcry from TikTok, civil liberty and digital rights groups, and angry TikTok users who have called it an unconstitutional infringement of free speech.
Montana lawmakers and Mr. Gianforte, a Republican, say the ban is necessary to prevent Americans' personal information from falling into the hands of the Chinese government.
TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Under the law, TikTok will be fined for operating the app within the state, and app store providers like Google and Apple will be fined if TikTok is available for download in Montana.
Ramya Krishan, a lawyer at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the Constitution protected Americans' right to access social media platforms of their choosing.
To justify a ban, Mr. Krishan said, Montana would have to show that its privacy and security concerns were real and that they could not be addressed in narrow ways.
Quote, I don't think TikTok is yet committed to suing, but I think it's likely it will.
Because this is such a dramatic and unconstitutional incursion into the First Amendment rights of Americans, We are certainly thinking through the possibility of getting involved in some way.
Now, let me remind you of where this tactic came from, for how to ban social media apps.
In January of 2020, in the wake of all of the censorship that social media companies, big tech companies, under the heavy pressure from the Democratic Party, Imposed on conservatives, including deplatforming the sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, from Facebook and Twitter.
In the wake of that, American conservatives in particular decided Big Tech could no longer be trusted, and they abandoned Big Tech in gigantic numbers for the free speech app Parler.
Which was not a right-wing or populist app, or a right-wing or MAGA app, even though it was called that.
But instead, it was just a free speech app formed by actually adherents of Rand and Ron Paul, more libertarian than conservative.
And their view was, we want this platform to be free from censorship constraints.
Very similar to how Rumble.
Has embraced that theory and yet also is called right-wing or MAGA.
That was what was done to Parler.
And in the wake of January 6th, Parler became the most popular app in the United States.
The most downloaded app in the United States.
More than Instagram and TikTok.
More than Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.
Its popularity exploded.
And around that time, AOC was the first Democratic politician to go on to a public platform on Twitter, and she cited a tweet from the pro-censorship group Sleeping Giants, claiming that January 6th was planned in part on Parler.
Turned out it was planned a lot more on YouTube and Facebook, but of course AOC would never confront those platforms in that way.
They're way too powerful.
So she picked Parler because Parler actually was immune to censorship demands.
And she said, Google and Apple, how dare you allow this app to be available in your stores for download?
We demand that you immediately remove this app from your stores.
Ro Khanna, the Democratic Congressman who represents Silicon Valley, echoed her call to do that.
And within 24 hours, Google and then Apple removed Parler from their stores.
The same exact framework being used to ban TikTok, forcing Apple and Google to remove apps from their stores so that even if you as an adult want to use that app, you'll be barred from doing so because the government forced these companies to make them unavailable.
And what happened as a result of that ban was that not only were new users barred from downloading Parler, but current users could no longer get the updates necessary to make the site functional.
And after Google and Apple obeyed, AOC went back and said, Amazon, how is it that you can possibly host a site like this?
And so Amazon, the dominant company in web services and web hosting, Booted Parler and closed their account and it crippled that app and although they've tried recovering, they really have never been able to get anywhere near the level of popularity.
That's the framework that's being used now against TikTok, the one that Democrats used against Parler.
Now again, even if you want to say, well, Parler was an American company, TikTok is a Chinese one, If you think that this power is going to be confined just to TikTok, I think you're living in a world of naivete that I don't recognize.
I've never seen a power this broad and this potent be confined to its original function.
Here you see a tweet from the Libertarian Party.
From yesterday, responding to a tweet from the Montana governor justifying this law, and it says, imagine believing TikTok is an actual threat to your privacy when your data is shared and involuntarily with the NSA.
This is, I think, one of the things that has gotten lost in this debate over TikTok is the idea of data sharing, collecting information about you, is basically the core business of Google and Facebook.
And they don't just collect it on you, they turn it over in mass numbers indiscriminately to the NSA.
That was part of the Snowden story and there's been subsequent reporting that makes clear just how extreme this is.
Being spied on by social media apps, either don't use them or focus on the far bigger threat, which is Facebook and Google, since they're so much larger.
Here, for example, is the New York Times in June 2018 that has the headline, Facebook gave data access to Chinese firm flagged by US intelligence.
So Facebook is sharing data.
With the Chinese.
The article, let's see this next graphic.
I think, there you go.
It says, Facebook has data sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with Chinese government, the social media company said on Tuesday.
The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo, and TCL.
The deals were part of an effort to push more mobile app users onto the social network starting in 2007 before standalone Facebook apps worked well on phones.
The agreement allowed device makers to offer some Facebook features such as address books, like buttons, and status updates.
Facebook officials said the agreements with the Chinese companies allowed them access similar to what was offered to Blackberry, which could retrieve detailed information on both device users and all of their friends, including religious and political leanings, work and education history, and relationship status. work and education history, and relationship status.
A 2023 article from Al Jazeera, March of 2023, let's get that next graphic on the screen, says here, quote, US says China can spy with TikTok, it spies on the world with Google.
Lawmakers push to ban the app comes as they mull extending powers that force tech companies to facilitate mass snooping for the United States.
Let's go to the next The first part of this Al Jazeera article that it says, During a five-hour grilling of the chief executive of TikTok last week, United States lawmakers railed against the possibility of China using the widely popular, partly Chinese-owned app to spy on Americans.
What they did not mention was how the U.S.
government itself uses U.S.
tech companies that effectively control the global Internet to spy on everyone else.
As the U.S.
considers banning the short video app used by more than 150 million Americans, lawmakers are also weighing the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta, and Apple to facilitate untrammeled spying on non-U.S.
citizens located overseas.
And it explains the way in which that's done.
Now, the United States can ban TikTok.
Assuming courts don't rule that a violation of the First Amendment, which I think is a highly dubious proposition, given that it is the place where 150 million Americans choose to go to express their political views and to be heard by others.
Banning that, of course, raises First Amendment implications.
But then what's going to happen is reciprocity Other countries, including China, are going to say, well, if you're banning foreign apps and only want American apps, then we're going to ban American platforms.
We're all going to live in isolated, controlled internet, separate from one another.
One of the points that Rand Paul raised, and I think one of the critical points that is often lost here, And it's amazing because this was the key point of the Twitter files, is that American big tech companies are under the control of the U.S.
security state.
We know how aggressively the CIA, Homeland Security, and the FBI are not only seeking but have obtained the power to control the flow of information over the Internet, over social media companies.
So if you want a world In which the only apps and social media companies the United States can use are ones that are American, whatever that even means at this point, given that all these companies have major foreign investors, but that are American in terms of where they're incorporated.
If you want to believe they have like allegiance to the United States, you're going to create a world in which the only social media companies we have available to use if we're in the United States are ones that are subject to the control of the U.S.
security state.
At the time that this TikTok debate first arose, I showed you a video by a TikTok user who talked about the much greater freedoms of speech available on TikTok.
That while dissent to the proxy war in Ukraine was all but barred by Facebook and YouTube and Instagram, and even Twitter before Elon Musk, it was freely available on foreign apps, including TikTok.
Banning TikTok is going to severely reduce the range of options you have for where you can go speak and the extent to which you can be heard.
Obviously, there's places like Rumble and ostensibly Twitter that are devoted to free speech, but the fewer choices we have, If all we have are U.S.
companies, the easier it is for the U.S.
security state to ensure that our ability to speak on social media is being heavily controlled.
And all I'm asking is that you think about the implications of this, about how these powers might be abused, before you simply applaud for these laws because the Chinese Communist Party and the specter of it is invoked.
Now let's remember that one of the main Revelations from the Snowden reporting was that big tech companies back in 2013 were handing over enormous amounts of your data to the NSA.
This is the article, the second article I wrote.
The first one was about how the NSA was collecting millions and millions of phone records on American citizens.
This is the second one the following day on June 7th.
About the program called Prism, in which the NSA had a program to obtain enormous amounts of user data from the leading Silicon Valley tech companies, including Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft.
Here's the first paragraph of the article.
You can go back and read it, but it says, quote, The NSA Access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers, and live chats, the document says.
The program facilitates extensive in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information.
The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the U.S.
or those Americans who have communications to include people outside the U.S.
It opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the U.S.
being collected without warrants.
Now, Again, even if you're somebody who believes China is this grave threat, we need a full-scale, decades-long Cold War of the kind that's going to empower the very agencies I think a lot of you have come to distrust, and is going to ensure the endless expansion of military budgets and weapons manufacturers and all kinds of surveillance authorities in the name of stopping our new enemy, China.
Even if you believe all that, and even if you believe that TikTok is somehow this heavily sophisticated special spying machine that enables the Chinese to spy on Americans even if you don't use the app.
There are all kinds of mechanisms short of banning this app and giving government officials the power to ban other apps to address those concerns.
About how we can ensure that that data is being used, who it is who's overseeing that data.
There are all kinds of proposals to require that the data be kept on American soil only, that objective third-party experts in data safety have access to the source code and how TikTok is actually managing this data.
But giving government officials the power to ban apps, entire social media platforms, ones that 150 million of your fellow citizens have decided voluntarily to use, after hearing all the dangers, I think entails a lot of dangers itself that are being run roughshod over.
In the name of fears of China, just like has happened so many times before in our history.
This is the tactic of the intelligence community.
It is how they have remained in power for decades.
They specialize in getting you worked up about threats posed by foreign powers to the point that you're willing to acquiesce to vesting government officials with powers that ought to be unthinkable.
We're at the point now where we trust government officials To ban entire social media apps from being used by Americans on our soil?
And we're headed toward a world in which the only social media apps that will be available are ones that have no foreign connection, which means the U.S.
government, the U.S.
security state has all the leverage about the kinds of information flows, the sorts of viewpoints that can and cannot be permitted.
I hope that in all future cases, Where we hear that certain powers and certain laws are necessary to combat the Chinese threat, even if you're somebody who's convinced that we're destined for some kind of decades-long confrontation with China, that you think carefully and critically
About whether that power is really necessary and what kinds of abuses it can foster.
And I think in the case of this law, the discourse already surrounding this bill is woefully inadequate for doing that.
And that's the deficiency I really hope that, as we report on this issue and this evolving debate more and more, is the kind of critical scrutiny we hope to provide.
So, that concludes our show for this evening.
We really appreciate your watching.
We appreciate your indulging the hiatus we took.
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