Establishment Dems Outraged as Court Bans Biden & FBI From Coercing Big Tech Censorship; NYT Defends Illegal Domestic Surveillance | SYSTEM UPDATE #110
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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...
A court ruling issued earlier this week is one of the most significant defenses of core free speech rights in years.
A federal district court judge in Louisiana has barred officials throughout the Biden administration, including top FBI officials and the White House press secretary, from continuing to apply pressure to big tech platforms to censor political speech they dislike.
We know from a spate of reporting over the last two years, including but not only the Twitter files, that the U.S.
security state and the Fauci-led health policy establishment has implemented campaigns to coerce Facebook, Google, and Twitter to ban or otherwise limit ideas and viewpoints those agencies regard as threatening or otherwise uncomfortable.
This week's court ruling, though, is the first to recognize the existence of these systemic censoring campaigns at the highest levels of the U.S.
government.
The court additionally applied a longstanding First Amendment jurisprudence, which prohibits the government from pressuring private actors to censor for them in a way that the Constitution would prohibit them from doing directly, in order to rule that the First Amendment's free speech guarantees have been directly violated by such censorship campaigns.
And most importantly of all, the court put an immediate stop to it by barring senior officials throughout the government from continuing to speak with big tech companies for the purpose of pressuring them to censor the constitutionally protected political speech of American citizens.
We'll review the key parts of the ruling, highlight why it is genuinely significant, surprisingly so, and we'll show you the highly revealing reaction of liberal corporate media outlets and defenders of state censorship powers to this ruling.
It took them a few days to gain their footing and figure out how they were going to respond.
After all, nobody wants to explicitly admit that they favor the US government being able to censor the internet for political purposes, even though that is exactly what they support.
But they now finally have a coordinated script from which they're all reading that shows how they intend to defend this program and attack the court ruling.
As we have long observed, the central religious tenet of establishment liberalism in the United States, and in the West more broadly, is suppressing, silencing, banishing, and censoring dissent.
That is why media outlets directed everyone to simply ignore the Twitter files.
It's all a nothing burger, they intoned in unison.
Don't pay attention to it.
Precisely because they don't want any attention paid to their censorship schemes because they know Americans instinctively recoil from it.
Because this court ruling does exactly the same thing as the Twitter files, namely shines a light on their abuse of state power, but then goes beyond mere reporting to ban this censorship as unconstitutional, they do regard this court ruling as a genuine menace.
And watching them figure out how to attack it in real time reveals a great deal abuse requires.
Even though there's a mountain of evidence now that these agencies have regularly abused that spying power, the program has been repeatedly reauthorized by Congress with no reforms every time it comes up for renewal.
This time though, a significant number of members of Congress, mostly Republican, but some Democrats as well, are demanding real reforms, vowing that they will not renew this law without those reforms.
Yet now, it is the very same New York Times.
The one that, while at Pulitzer for exposing and denouncing this program, along with other establishment liberal venues, which are heralding this domestic warrantless firing program as vital, as noble, and as necessary, and suggesting that only what they call, quote, hard right Republicans care about these abuses.
The dynamic here is vital to consider, in part because these spying powers have been so abused for so long it's just important unto itself, but also because it yet again reveals the dramatic shift in political factions when it comes to the U.S.
security state.
The prevailing view somehow of establishment sectors is that only fascists or Kremlin agents or both are concerned about the abuses of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and only such nefarious people would possibly want to reform it.
And we'll take a look at all of this.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in the wake of massive nationwide protests triggered by the police killing of a 17-year-old boy they caught driving without a license, is now explicitly threatening to shut down social media in France in the event of similar protests in the future.
It is hard to overstate how aggressively virtually every Western state is now developing plans to further control the use of the internet for political speech and organizing.
I think there is no more pressing issue in the West.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The court decision this week that banned the FBI and health agencies and the Biden White House, including the Biden White House press secretary, from continuing to speak including the Biden White House press secretary, from continuing to speak with big tech companies and big tech executives as part of their plan to censor or big tech to censor is much more significant than I think a lot of people are realizing.
So we really want to pay some attention tonight to breaking down what this decision is, What its significance is, and most importantly of all, how the establishment wing of U.S.
politics and U.S.
media that has come to believe that censorship is a vital good, a vital need, is reacting to this decision.
So just as a little bit of background, earlier this year, Joe Biden and countless officials at the top levels of the U.S.
security state and the U.S.
health policy establishment Alleging that they have implemented programs that are designed systemically to censor the internet by coercing and pressuring and threatening big tech companies, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the rest, to censor political content that they dislike.
Now, the fact that the US government is in fact doing this, is in fact constantly pressuring and coercing and threatening big tech to censor more, is not in reasonable dispute.
Ample reporting has demonstrated exactly how that they are doing that, the details of it.
Democratic members of Congress do it out in the open.
They repeatedly summon big tech executives to appear before Congress and explicitly threaten them with regulatory and legal reprisals in the event that they do not censor more than they're already censoring in accordance with the demands of the Democratic Party.
Increasingly, Democratic lawmakers, lawmakers in the Democratic Party, Don't bother denying anymore that this is happening.
That used to be what the reaction was.
Oh, this is a conspiracy theory to believe the government through the security state or through health policy officials are pressuring Big Tech to censor.
That's just a major conspiracy theory.
Now that the reporting is dispositive that this, in fact, is happening, they've switched to, yes, it's happening and it's justifiable.
It is now common to hear Democratic members of Congress stand up and, in increasingly explicit ways, look into the camera where they're being interviewed or where they're appearing in front of Congress and say, They think the U.S.
security state, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the NSA, are benevolent actors who only mean the best, who simply want to protect us, and are censoring for that reason.
And we ought not to be angry about it, but instead grateful for it.
It's right out of 1984.
Big Brother censors because he loves you.
Big Brother loves you and wants to protect you.
This is the exact message that they're saying.
I don't want you to take my word for that.
We're going to show you just several illustrative examples of where they're saying exactly that.
Finally, we have a federal judge, a federal district court.
In the Western District of Louisiana who has put its foot down about the fact that the Constitution does not allow the government to go around pressuring and threatening and coercing private actors such as big tech companies to censor for them in a way that the Constitution would prohibit government officials from directly censoring themselves.
There's a long line of case law The seminal Supreme Court case, which we will show you, that has repeatedly held that the First Amendment does not just bar the U.S.
government from censoring directly, meaning enacting laws making it criminal to express their views or punishing people who are dissidents, but also prohibits them from doing a workaround to the First Amendment free speech guarantee by using its regulatory power or its legal authority or its economic reward system to threaten and coerce private actors to censor for them.
So this case was initiated by these two attorneys general of these two states.
It sued on behalf of epidemiologists whose views were censored off the internet.
I'm talking about major epidemiologists with the highest academic pedigree.
Journalists and activists whose views on COVID, whose views on Ukraine, whose views on a wide range of issues were also censored.
Not as a result of the autonomous decisions of big tech companies.
But as a result of people at the highest levels of government picking up the telephone or sending emails to Big Tech and saying, these are the things we do not want you to permit to be heard.
And if you do, that is going to affect our relationship.
Finally, a federal court has said, A, this is happening.
B, there is ample case law that makes this unconstitutional, and C, I am hereby ordering this to stop immediately.
Major senior Biden officials from continuing this campaign of indirect but very serious and unconstitutional censorship of political speech on the part of American citizens over the internet.
So here is the caption of the case.
You see that the decision was issued, obviously not coincidentally, on July 4th, 2023.
And the caption of the case is the state of Missouri versus Joseph Biden at all.
So it's a whole variety of plaintiffs against a whole variety of defendants.
And it was issued by Judge Terry Dowdy of the Western District of Louisiana.
And we're just going to show you a couple of key parts of this case.
So he writes, quote, This case is about the Free Speech Clause and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The explosion of social media platforms has resulted in unique free speech issues.
This is especially true in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.
In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the federal government, and particularly the defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech.
Although the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech, the issues raised herein go beyond party lines.
The right to free speech is not a member of any political party and does not hold any political ideology.
It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of the market, whether it be by government itself or by private licensee.
And it's citing the Red Lion case from 1969.
Plaintiffs allege that defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication regarding what defendants describe as quote, disinformation and misinformation and malinformation, have colluded with and or coerced social media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms.
Plaintiffs also allege that the suppression constitutes government action and that it is a violation of plaintiff's freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The First Amendment states Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech.
The principle function of free speech under the United States system of government is to invite disputes.
It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.
Freedom of speech in the press is the indispensable condition of nearly every form of freedom.
Now, here is the Case itself, and here is the specific order where you see that it says, quote, these parties are, meaning the defendants who were sued, name about 50 different federal agencies, including the FBI, Homeland Security, the National Institute of Health, the whole edifice that Dr. Fauci presides over, these entities
Including the White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, quote, are hereby enjoined and restrained from taking the following actions as to social media companies, this is what they are now, effective immediately, these officials are now prohibited from doing the following regarding Big Tech, quote, one, meeting with social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner
The removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social media platforms.
Two, they may also not, quote, specifically flag content or posts on social media platforms and or forward such to social media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.
They are also barred from, quote, three, urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech.
Four, they also may not, quote, they are barred from, quote, emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social media companies, urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.
They are barred as well from five, collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and or jointly working with the election integrity partnership, the virality project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content on social media that's protected free speech.
And finally, they are also barred from quote, Threatening, pressuring, or coercing social media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of posting containing free speech.
That prohibition is obviously aimed directly at the kind of activity we learned the federal government has been doing, not in an ad hoc way, but systematically through a wide range of reporting and ultimately by the Democratic Party itself.
Now, there are certain things the court made clear the government is still permitted to do.
Unlike the way that this is being depicted by CNN and the New York Times and other corporate media outlets, it is not a full ban on the right of the federal government or its officials to communicate for any reason with social media companies.
They are still permitted to communicate with social media companies.
They're permitted to convey information to social media companies.
They're even permitted still To express their view that certain information posted to social media violates the law or puts people in danger from a national security perspective.
What they can't do is try and pressure these companies to remove constitutionally protected political views or political opinion under the First Amendment.
So here's a couple of the things they are still permitted to do.
These are carve-outs from the order.
The court says, quote, it is further ordered that the following actions are not prohibited, not prohibited by this preliminary injunction, meaning the government is still allowed to, quote, one, inform social media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies, two, contact and or notify social media companies contact and or notify social media companies of national security threats, extortion, or other threats posted on its platform.
So I had a exchange earlier today with Jamil Jaffer, who is a longtime activist for free speech on the First Amendment.
He was previously a top lawyer with the ACLU with whom I worked quite a bit on a variety of different free speech cases.
I have a lot of respect for him.
He's very smart.
He's now with the Columbia University First Amendment Project.
And he was making the point that he thinks that even though there are serious constitutional concerns arising from the efforts by Biden officials in the US security state and the health policy agencies to press social media companies to censor, he thinks the order is a little bit overbroad because it is true that it's common for the government to he thinks the order is a little bit overbroad because it is true that it's common for the government For example, journalists generally, when they have classified information that they intend We did this with the Snowden story.
Every time we had a story to report, it was actually a condition imposed by our source, Edward Snowden, when he gave us this material.
We went to the federal government and we said, we intend to publish this information, to report this story, and we're going to give you an opportunity to convince us that we shouldn't or that we should withhold certain information because maybe there's things we're not aware of that if we publish this information would cause some sort of harm.
We invited them to do that, and they often did.
Now, I think there might have been one or two cases at most, maybe two, I think it was one that I can remember, maybe there was two, where we actually took the government's advice into consideration by withholding information we had intended to publish based on their arguments being persuasive that doing so might jeopardize people in ways we hadn't anticipated.
By and large, they would just kind of scream and yell and whine and vaguely insist that this reporting would endanger people but never give any specifics and therefore we would just ignore it and we would report it and there's never been any evidence that that reporting or WikiLeaks' reporting ever put anyone in harm's way.
The government always says, "Oh, this information is very dangerous.
You're going to endanger people if you publish it because they don't want you to publish reporting about their crimes.
So they manipulate those concerns and fears.
But certainly they have the right to.
Express that view that, oh, this material, if it's permitted to remain on, might endanger people.
And Jamil Jaffer's argument was this court opinion seems to go too far in preventing the government from doing those sorts of things that you would probably want the government to do and that they even have the right to do.
But I think the judge was pretty careful, maybe not as careful as he could have been.
In carving out certain kinds of communications that the government is still permitted to make when it comes to their belief that certain content actually constitutes criminal activity or puts people directly in danger from a national security perspective.
What they are barred from doing is what the constitution clearly prohibits them from doing.
Which is trying to remove material from the internet that contains viewpoints they dislike or that otherwise makes them uncomfortable.
Now, just to highlight how serious this has become, I don't know if we have this video with Mark Zuckerberg.
We're going to get that up if we don't, where he basically says, we're going to have that for you in just a second.
So Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview last month in which he discussed how relentless was the pressure coming from the US government during the COVID pandemic to censor all kinds of material.
On the grounds that it constituted disinformation or that it was in some way damaging or dangerous.
And what Zuckerberg said is that the government was demanding that Facebook censor what turned out to be a wide range of dissenting views that actually turned out to be correct.
In other words, what the government was demanding be suppressed on the grounds that it was disinformation was in fact Views that turned out to be vindicated turned out to be correct and true.
And he was also arguing, and I have to say Mark Zuckerberg sometimes does take a somewhat hardline position in defense of the right of Internet freedom, even though Facebook typically capitulates to government pressure, because the U.S. government is a very powerful actor.
They control trillions of dollars in budget.
They can punish you in all sorts of ways.
And so when the government, the federal government, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, Dr. Fauci come to your front door, even if you're a gigantic company and say, you better remove this information or we're going to consider you to have blood on your hands.
That is a very powerful force that is going to influence people in a lot of ways.
That's exactly why the Supreme Court has said, The government is not just barred from directly censoring, but also using that kind of bullying behavior, that kind of implicit coercion and threat to get private actors to censor for them.
So listen to what Mark Zuckerberg said about how often and how relentless the censorship demands were from the federal government about COVID and how many of these they wanted censored and it turned out to be true.
So misinformation, I think is, um, Has been a really tricky one, because there are things that are kind of obviously false, right, that are maybe factual, but may not be harmful.
So it's like, all right, are you gonna censor someone for just being wrong?
It's, you know, if there's no kind of harm implication of what they're doing, I think that that's, there's a bunch of real kind of issues and challenges there.
So let me just stop that for a second.
So he's saying there are some cases where the government wanted things censored that probably were false.
Now, who makes that decision?
Is it Mark Zuckerberg who's supposed to sit as this kind of like philosopher king and grapple with the question of whether certain views are really false or true?
False enough to censor?
Why is he competent to make those determinations?
Where did this competence come from?
And why would you trust tech billionaires to police the limits of political discourse in the United States that is absurd and dangerous?
But what he's saying is, even if there are times, and I guess the other alternative is, okay, well, we don't trust tech billionaires, we trust The government, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, Homeland Security, we trust them to make definitive determinations about truth and falsity so much so that whatever they deem to be truth, nobody can deviate from that view without being censored?
How can anybody with any minimal familiarity with the history of the United States government, I don't mean the past distant history, I mean the very recent history of the US government, including during the COVID pandemic, Possibly place faith and credibility and trust in the federal government and the U.S.
security state to arbitrate what is true and false to the point where debate is no longer permitted.
But he's making a different point here, which I also think is an important one, which is even if you could determine that certain views are false, since when in the United States does that mean that we censor those views?
Are you not allowed to be wrong anymore?
Are you not allowed to express views that are incorrect, the government swoops in and demands that the internet and big tech platforms remove your views from online or prevent you from being heard because of the determination that you're wrong, that you're in error?
What kind of mind would think that it is desirable or possible to pursue, through a censorship regime, a discourse that is cleansed of all error?
But this is the next point that he makes that I think is the really important one.
But then, I think that there are other places where it is, you know, just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic, where there were you know, real health implications, but there hadn't been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions.
And, you know, unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that, you know, kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and, you know, asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being, you know, more debatable or true.
And that stuff is really tough, right?
It really undermines trust in that.
And I mean, that is a remarkable admission if you think about it.
Even if the government, even if the government hadn't ended up censoring claims that were dubious, that would still be dangerous enough.
That is not the role of the U.S. government.
government in the United States.
That's what the Constitution is for.
It's what the First Amendment is for, to prevent the government from playing that role.
But even if you think that is a legitimate function for the United States to play, for the United States government to play, They ended up demanding the censorship of claims and views that turned out to be true.
Remember, for the first year of the pandemic, the claim of the United States government was that the origin of COVID had been definitively and dispositively proven, that we knew for certain, that it was a naturally occurring virus that was zoonotic in nature, that it leaped from animal to human.
And that any attempt to present an alternative view, including the view that it actually came from a leak from the Wuhan lab through U.S.
government-funded research, was dangerous disinformation.
That is what Anthony Fauci got leading epidemiologists to sign on to in The Lancet, including epidemiologists who had just a week earlier emailed him in private to say that they were convinced That it was man-made, that it came from a leak, from a lab leak, and not naturally occurring.
And that letter was organized by someone, Peter Daszak, who was one of the people heavily involved in the exact kind of gain-of-function research that could have led to that lab leak, a conflict that was never disclosed in The Lancet.
And anybody who tried to question the wisdom passed down through that Lancet letter, Was banned from the internet?
Or was either of you censored?
And only a year later, when the Biden administration admitted that even they didn't know what the origin was, and now that leading scientific units inside the U.S.
government, including at the FBI and the Department of Energy, say it's more probable than not that the origin of the COVID pandemic was a leak from the lab in Wuhan and not from a zoonotic source, only now did they reverse course and say, now we are going to allow you to debate it.
But so much about whether or not you should use masks when you're asymptomatic, the value of the vaccine in terms of stopping trends, all those things with which you're very well familiar, are all things the U.S.
government spent two years demanding big tech censored.
As Mark Zuckerberg said, much of what they wanted censored actually turned out to be true.
Now, Here is the New York Times article on the judicial ruling.
There you see the headline, Federal Judge Limits Biden Officials' Contacts with Social Media Sites.
And the sub-headline is, The order came in a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Missouri and Louisiana, who claim the administration is trying to silence its critics.
And just listen to what the New York Times says about this.
Quote, A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms.
A broad swath of content online.
A ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the corona pandemic and other issues.
Right in the first paragraph of this news article, the New York Times is already slanting the story to glorify government censorship campaigns as necessary to stop disinformation.
This is one of the developments that I find genuinely remarkable, like truly surreal, There are not supposed to be political ideologies in journalism.
Journalism is not about allegiance to a particular political party or a particular ideological viewpoint.
At least in theory, that's not what journalism is supposed to be about.
Journalism does, though, have certain values embedded within it.
Obviously, journalists are supposed to rise in defense of a free press and to oppose attacks on press freedom.
Which is why their relative silence on the ongoing prosecution of Julian Assange is so shameful.
Because one of the core principles of journalism, one of the functions journalists are supposed to play in a society is to defend press freedom.
If they don't, who will?
But another value inherent to journalism, historically, is that journalists defend free speech and oppose censorship because free speech is necessary for journalists to do their job and censorship is anathema to it.
And what has happened in the United States, particularly over the last six years, is that the leading advocates for censorship, for state censorship, are liberal corporate media outlets like the New York Times.
And so many reporters, they employ, write stories that are designed to do nothing other than pressure social media companies to censor by creating stigma and shame around their refusal to do so.
I cannot count how many New York Times stories there are along the lines of, Facebook violates their own rules by allowing this post that's in violation of their own terms of service, and it's like a tattletale.
It's like a tattletale masquerading as a journalist, like whining to the public that Facebook is letting people violate their rules and demanding that they censor.
That's a whole strain of journalism now.
And you can see in the very first paragraph of this quote-unquote news article, there's not an op-ed.
The New York Times trying to imply that somehow we're all going to be in danger because now the government is not allowed To censor the internet any longer and therefore we are vulnerable to disinformation.
Look at how many assumptions are embedded in there.
A, that the government is competent and capable of decreeing what is disinformation.
B, that they're trustworthy in terms of their motives.
That when they censor they will do so to protect the public rather than to protect their own political interests.
And that, C, we will be harmed by free speech.
If there's too much free speech, we will be in danger because of disinformation.
This is the mentality of liberal corporate media outlets, that censorship is not just tolerable, but necessary.
And everything they write is designed to defend it.
Listen to this next paragraph, talking about this judicial ruling banning state censorship.
Quote, this ruling, quote, was a victory for Republicans.
Who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-wing content, sometimes in collaboration with government.
Democrats, on the other hand, say the platforms have failed to adequately police information and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes, including violence.
Now, on the one hand, I find it kind of repellent that the New York Times wants to cast Free speech has nothing more than a partisan dispute where Republicans are in favor of free speech and Democrats are opposed to it.
Where Republicans are complaining about state censorship and Democrats demand more of it.
On the other hand, that actually is true.
That really is the official position of the Democratic Party in every conceivable way.
Whenever the question becomes, should big tech platforms be censoring more or censoring less, Democrats are immediately on the side of more censorship.
Let me just show you a few examples before we go on with the New York Times framing of it, which is obviously designed to justify these censorship programs and attack this court ruling for upholding the Constitution.
Back in 2021, one of the many times that, in October 2021, one of the many times that either the Congress or the Senate, when run by Democrats, summoned the CEOs of major social media companies, before them, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and explicitly told them, we demand that you censor more.
Senator Ed Markey, the liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down.
to whether they want more or less censorship.
Here's what Ed Markey told the CEOs of big tech companies. - Problem.
The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down.
The issue is that they're leaving too many dangerous posts up.
- All right, so any questions?
That really is, that is such a succinct and candid way of describing the position of the Democratic Party.
Which is, our concern is not that they're censoring too much, but not censoring enough.
And that's not just their view, in the abstract, that they think big tech should be censoring more, that it would be nice if they do so.
They're constantly summoning The CEO's of the other executives of these companies to the Congress and telling them you better start censoring more or you will suffer legal and regulatory reprisals.
They constantly threaten Big Tech with all sorts of punishments.
Including the repeal of Section 230, which is what immunizes them from being sued for deposting by users of defamatory or other harmful information.
They're constantly threatening these big tech companies.
If you don't censor in accordance with our vision of what is dangerous speech, the Democratic Party's, you will be punished.
Here is something even more remarkable, which is when Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger went to testify Before the House, about the revelations of the Twitter files.
And again, before the Twitter files began, the position of the Democratic Party, when people like me used to stand up and note that the U.S.
government was implicitly pressuring and coercing big tech to censor was that's a crazy conspiracy theory, that's not really happening.
Once the Twitter files provided the proof, we could all read the emails from Homeland Security and FBI officials to Twitter.
Constantly this relentless tsunami of demands that material be censored.
The Democratic Party had to switch from this isn't happening to this is happening and it's a positive and good thing that it's happening.
Here is Colin Alred and I just I wish if I could probably if I could pick one video for people to listen to it might be this one.
He is scolding Matt Taibbi.
Matt Taibbi's crime, in the eyes of this Democratic Congressman, is that Taibbi said he thought it was disturbing to allow the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security to censor the internet.
That he thought that that was dangerous, that that was an abuse of power, and that that was likely unconstitutional.
And here is Colin Allred telling Matt Taibbi, not that he's wrong about what's happening, but that The fact that they're doing this, Mary, it's not our anger and concern, but our gratitude.
Listen to what he said.
Do you want to use social media to influence our elections, both big, the ones that you've spent a lot of time talking about, and small, like mine?
Mr. Congressman, may I ask a question?
It should be a bipartisan goal.
No, you don't get to ask questions here.
Okay.
It should be a bipartisan goal to ensure that Americans and only Americans determine the outcome of our elections, not fear-mongering.
And I think, I hope that you can actually take this with you, because I honestly hope that you will grapple with this.
That it may be possible, that if we can take off the tinfoil hat, that there's not a vast conspiracy But that ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn't get people hurt or see our democracy undermined.
And that the very rights that you think they're trying to undermine, they may be trying to protect.
I mean, can you believe that?
There are Democratic members of Congress, and this is not an aberrational view, this is completely common, who are no longer embarrassed about standing up in public and saying, look, the people at the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security, they just want to help.
Thank you.
They're here to protect us.
So when they're censoring, don't put on your tinfoil hat and think they're censoring for nefarious aims.
These are the people in our security agencies.
The brave men and women, the patriotic men and women who composed the U.S.
Security State, they don't have nefarious motives, they have benevolent motives.
They want to protect us and our democracy and our safety.
And so when they're censoring, just realize that this is something we should celebrate.
This is demented.
I cannot believe that any person Thinks this way, let alone a member of Congress.
And yet this has become the ethos of the Democratic Party, that the union of state and corporate power, which is the classic academic definition of fascism, unifying state and corporate power for the same end, the unifying state and corporate power to censor the Internet.
Is something to celebrate and venerate and the U.S.
security state is largely benign, even well-intentioned and benevolent actors, and that they can not only be trusted with the power to censor, but they should be trusted with that power.
And polling data shows that Democrats hold these security state agencies in very high esteem, that they trust them and approve of them and view them positively.
And they also overwhelmingly believe that the Internet should be censored by a combination of state and corporate power.
That is what the Democratic Party believes.
And sometimes I genuinely can't believe that there are people who claim that I or Matt Taibbi or others have changed our views when we've been opposed to the U.S.
security state and to censorship powers in general forever.
What changed is that the Democratic Party is now explicitly on the side of the U.S.
security state and of censorship.
They always have been.
They just would hide it better.
Nobody would ever stand up in public and say what this person just said.
They'd be too embarrassed to say it.
It's childish.
It's like a seven-year-old.
Oh, the CIA, they really mean well.
They love America.
They're just here to help.
They're censoring for our own... Who would possibly not be embarrassed to say that in public?
Well, the Democratic Party is not at all.
Now, and by the way, just even announcing the show, I noticed so many people immediately accusing me of being right-wing now, and I'm changing my views.
Because I'm opposed to giving the power to the federal government to censor the internet and distrust the CIA and the FBI and the NSA to do so.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Maybe the CIA and the NSA and the FBI really are benevolent actors like Congressman Al Red says.
But it's certainly never, that's never been something that I've thought before.
I haven't changed my views at all.
The Democratic Party has radically transformed around me because They became convinced, not unreasonably, in the Trump era, that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the entire security state apparatus was on their side, that those agencies were trying to sabotage the Trump administration and particularly criminalize Donald Trump.
That is where Russiagate came from, that is where these indictments came from, that is where those impeachments came from.
And along with neocons, they now regard the U.S.
security state agencies as on their side.
And that is why they're so happy to see them censored, to see them vested with the power to censor, and why a court ruling that seeks to ban that censorship is something they regard with such indignation, just like they saw the Twitter files with such contempt because it revealed the existence of the censorship program that they wanted to keep hidden.
Now, if you can tolerate it, and I apologize in advance because this one's particularly repulsive, I wanted to show you one more video because I'm making the claim that the Democratic Party now explicitly stands up and says that they, out in the open, are in favor of state censorship and want the U.S.
security state to censor.
Back in March of this year, Republicans in the House introduced a bill That would have prohibited exactly the kind of censorship program this court just barred on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
It was called the, I believe, the Free Speech on Social Media Act.
And it was designed to say that no member of the U.S.
security state or the federal government in general is authorized to pick up the phone or write an email to Big Tech with the intention to have political speech removed from the Internet.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, one of the most popular Democrats, the Democrat from Maryland, who's the ranking member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, stood up and said that this should be called the I Love Vladimir Putin Act or something along those lines.
Just listen, I just want to play you a part of what he says.
This is so deranged how Democrats think.
If you are skeptical of the U.S.
security state or if you believe in free speech and oppose state censorship, they will accuse you over and over of being on the side of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
Listen to how many times he invoked the name Vladimir Putin and remember, he's opposing here a bill that would have done nothing other than prohibit the U.S.
government from censoring the internet.
Well, they've got a perfect bill for you then.
We call it the Putin Protection Act.
That's what it is.
The Putin Protection Act.
A distinguished gentleman from New York explained Putin spent millions of dollars in 2016 to pump propaganda, electoral sabotage, into our political system.
He did!
Every security agency in the country told us that.
We got a bipartisan report from the Senate saying it.
They're agnostic about it.
When it comes to Putin, they see no evil, they hear no evil, none of it, no.
But we know that it... Just let me stop there for one second because of the lie that he just told that's just so flagrant.
I'm talking about March of 2023, more than a year into the war in Ukraine.
80% of the Republican caucus in both the Senate and the House support Joe Biden's policy of having a proxy war in Ukraine to defeat and weaken the Russians by sacrificing Ukraine at the altar of that policy goal.
80% of Republicans voted for the $40 billion authorization to send to the war in Ukraine to fuel Joe Biden's war, the war of NATO and the war of the EU and Joe Biden.
Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, all of them.
You just wind them up.
Kevin McCarthy, all of them.
You wind them up and they start spouting about the evils of Putin exactly like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi do.
There's absolutely no difference between the two parties on the question of Vladimir Putin and Russia.
He's the new Hitler.
He's the evil.
We have to stop him.
He's going to take over all of Western Europe if we don't stop him.
Et cetera, et cetera.
There's a small wing of the Republican Party, thankfully, that's a sense on that ground, and that is not in favor of the proxy war in Ukraine, and that is more aligned with President Trump when it comes to the view, which once was shared by President Obama as well, that the United States and its interests militate in favor of cooperating with Russia and not trying to confront Russia militarily or other ways.
So the entire Republican Party is on Jamie Raskin's side, with the exception of about 15 to 20 percent.
But do you see what he's doing here?
He's depicting this free speech bill as somehow a pro-Vladimir Putin bill because the Republicans love Putin.
Let's listen to a little bit more.
Putin cannot beat America politically.
He can't beat us economically.
He can't beat us militarily.
Putin can't beat us philosophically.
There's one thing he's got.
The internet.
Why?
Because we're a wide open country.
And so he says, let's take advantage of it, let's go on their social media platform.
We'll put people who oppose Putin on the internet in jail, which they do.
If you send a tweet against Putin, you're going to jail.
You put out a tweet against his filthy imperialist war, which some of them support in Ukraine, if you put out a tweet against that in Russia, you're going to jail.
But he says, let's take advantage of America's openness.
We'll take advantage of them and we're going to put out propaganda.
We'll lie about when the election is.
We'll say it's on Thursday when it's on Tuesday.
First of all, this is like a crazy person standing on a street corner ranting and raving.
Just as a reminder, this bill has nothing to do with Russia or Vladimir Putin.
It's a bill that would prohibit the United States government and its senior officials from trying to pressure big tech to censor political content from the internet.
And I think he's mentioned Putin probably 15 times now and we're not even 60% into the video.
His 3 minute floor speech is Putin and Putin and Putin and Putin.
But what he's really saying here is we hate Russia because in Russia dissent is censored off the internet and criminalized and therefore in order to beat Russia we also have to censor the internet and can't allow free speech otherwise we become too vulnerable because free speech is too dangerous.
We'll tell people to go vote next week, whatever.
And that's the genesis of this whole thing.
We have our security agencies who alert social media and they say they're putting up fraudulent information on your platform.
And now they come forward and they say the Democrats are trying to, what?
Tell the truth.
Not Democrats, the government.
Our paid federal government agencies are trying to tell the social media when foreign malign actors like Russia and China and Iran are trying to interfere in our elections.
That's what this is about.
Putin Protection Act.
They want Putin and Xi to run free over our platforms and then they want to fine federal government employees thousands of dollars if they alert our government to what foreign malign actors are doing.
I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's just listening to that gives me a headache because it's just the height of irrationality and it's exploiting, it's just so blatant what he's doing.
He's trying to get you to hate foreign leaders and then exploit your hatred for foreign leaders to say as a result, we have to trust the kind, honest, benevolent men and women of the U.S.
security state with the power to censor the internet in order to keep us safe from China, Iran, and Russia.
Does anyone believe this?
Yes, they do.
They do.
Because this kind of fear-mongering is potent.
That's why the U.S.
security state has used it for decades.
It's why we never stop having wars.
Because American media outlets are very good at raising fear levels against foreign leaders to convince people they ought to acquiesce to whatever claims the government is making for greater powers.
And that's exactly what the Democratic Party is doing.
You notice as well, not quite as explicit as Congressman Elroy, but still the core premise of that speech was that the U.S. security state loves us and wants to protect us.
And that's why they pick up the phone and demand censorship, not because they're political actors trying to suppress dissent.
Here, going back to the New York Times, that says that this is a Republican versus Democrat issue.
The Times continues, quote, courts are increasingly being forced to weigh in on such issues with the potential to upend decades of legal norms that have governed speech online.
I don't know what decades of legal norms they're talking about other than the fact that First Amendment jurisprudence has long held that the government is barred under the First Amendment from pressuring and coercing private actors to censor for them.
Quote, the issue of the government's influence over social media has become increasingly partisan.
Let's listen to the sentence.
The issue of the government's influence over social media has become increasingly partisan.
Why?
Why would that be?
Why would the issue of the government's influence over social media be partisan?
It's because one of the two major political parties in this country, the Democratic Party, believes that the government should have influence over social media.
They believe the government should be able to censor the internet.
Polling data shows that, which we'll show you.
But it's a remarkable sentence.
It just doesn't seem that remarkable any longer because we're so normalized, we're so accustomed to this.
That the entire Democratic Party pretty much believes that the proper role of government, the proper role of the CIA, the FBI, the NIH, the CDC, is to quote, influence the content on social media.
The Times goes on, quote, the Republican majority in the House has taken up the cause, smothering universities and think tanks that have studied the issue with onerous requests for information and subpoenas.
Oh my God!
Think of the poor universities and think tanks who are being smothered with requests for information and subpoenaed by the Congress.
Do you think that the New York Times would ever describe investigations led by a Democratic House as smothering people who are receiving information and requests for information?
The Times goes on, quote, the defendants, the social media company, and experts who study disinformation.
As always, there's that fake expertise, experts who study disinformation.
All of them agree, said the New York Times, that quote, there is no evidence of a systematic effort by the government to censor individuals in violation of the First Amendment.
Who are these disinformation experts qualified to opine that way?
Here's one example.
David Rand, an expert on misinformation at MIT, said his understanding was that the government had, at most, a limited impact on how social media platforms engage with misinformation.
All right.
That's what the New York Times just printed based on Disinformation experts.
Unfortunately for the New York Times, there's a gigantic tsunami of evidence proving that is a lie.
Independent of the Twitter files, and remember we had multiple reporters who reported that story on the show, and we detailed, before we spoke to them, every document of significance in their reporting to describe how systematic the government's efforts are to influence social media companies to censor.
Before that reporting began, roughly a month before it began, The Intercept, which is a left-leaning outlet, published through its reporter Ken Klippenstein, who most definitely is a left-wing reporter, and Lee Fong, Who is more difficult to describe politically, but certainly is one of the nation's best investigative reporters.
This headline, quote, leaked documents outlining the plan by Homeland Security to police disinformation.
And the article reported the following, quote, The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by the Intercept has found.
Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents, years of it, obtained via leaks in an ongoing lawsuit as well as public documents, illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
Remember the New York Times just quoted disinformation experts saying there was no evidence that this censorship campaign was systematic in any way.
And here's The Intercept, a left-leaning journal who actually did reporting, they didn't just talk to self-anointed disinformation experts, who reported that actually it's an expansive effort that's radically and rapidly increasing.
They go on, quote, the work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clear view earlier this year when DHS announced a new, quote, disinformation governance board, a panel designed to police information, misinformation, false information spread unintentionally, disinformation, false information spread intentionally, and malinformation, factual information shared typically out of context with harmful intent.
That allegedly threatens U.S.
interests.
Remember that board that led by that preposterous woman and that resistance fanatic Nina Yankovic, who was a bridge too far even for our political culture because she was such a parody of a fanatical censor?
Homeland Security did it out in the open.
They tried to appoint a disinformation czar and the New York Times is saying, we quote, we consulted with disinformation experts who say there's no systemic effort.
The Intercept went on, quote, while the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as Homeland Security pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate, the New War on Terror, has been wound down.
The War on Terror, that was the original mandate of Homeland Security, was created in 2002 after 9-11.
They no longer have that old War on Terror, they do have a new War on Terror, the war against What the Biden administration calls right-wing radicalism and white supremacy, that is the new war on terror.
Quote, behind closed doors and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S.
government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.
According to minute meetings, meeting minutes, and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt, a Republican who is now also running for Senate, Discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention and online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.
So we have a huge amount of evidence showing the government's doing exactly what the court in this case concluded it was doing, but which the New York Times denied.
Here is a couple of videos to show you how liberal media outlets are reacting to this case.
Here, first of all, is a reporter whose name is Ryland Riley.
He used to work at the Huffington Post and what he did was truly bizarre.
He developed a beat as a reporter for the Huffington Post that was about nothing other than doing the FBI's work for it.
He became obsessed with hunting down people who were at January 6th.
He would obsessively study video footage and he would rat out American citizens.
It's the FBI's work.
He became a law enforcement agent working for the FBI.
And he would label it the Sedition Hunters.
Imagine going into journalism and then doing the work of the FBI.
Just for a year and a half trying to get citizens arrested.
By hunting down who was at this protest.
Not even necessarily people who engage in violence.
Remember, the vast majority of people charged in connection with January 6th are not accused of using violence on that day because the vast majority of them did not.
As a result of that work, he now got promoted, of course, to NBC News.
That's the reward.
Like, Natasha Bertrand got rewarded for all the Russiagate lies she spread and then for being the first journalist to spread the CIA lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
You, of course, get promoted in corporate media.
The more you lie, we've been over that many times.
He's now risen from a Huffington Post, some shitty liberal blog, to a shitty liberal cable outlet, MSNBC.
And he went on the air today and responded to this lawsuit that barred the U.S.
government from censoring, trying to censor the internet through pressure.
And of course, needless to say, he tried to defend or at least mitigate what the government was doing in a way to attack this lawsuit and defend the government because that's what corporate liberal journalists do by instinct.
The administration will eventually appeal this?
I think that's pretty safe, and I think that that's where the worry is in terms of communicating with social media companies about ongoing threats and the national security threat.
It creates sort of a carve-out for that, but essentially what a lot of these allegations have to do with is the government flagging posts that violate the standards that these social media companies have independently set up.
So if they find something that, you know, they're flagging this post and say, hey, they're not explicitly saying you need to take this down, often there's sort of an implicit implication there saying, you know, There's an implicit implication there.
What does that even mean there's an implicit implication there?
Just the way he speaks has that like tattletale vibe to him and what he's saying is the government is doing the right thing.
That's of course what they always say.
That's what journalists do.
They defend the government in the United States.
It's remarkable.
You wind them up and they defend the U.S.
security state and the government even when what the government is doing is a censorship campaign.
And he's saying, look, all the government is doing is trying to tell these, they're just trying to be helpful.
They're trying to tell these big tech companies that certain posts violate their own rules.
Why is that the role of the US government?
To call Facebook and Twitter and say, your rules don't allow this, and yet these things are being allowed.
Obviously, when the FBI calls you and these kinds of requests are made, everyone understands exactly what the implicit implication is, whatever that means.
Which is, we're the federal government and we don't want this material published on the internet, and we believe it's dangerous and we're going to accuse you of having blood on your hands if you continue to permit it.
That's what Mark Zuckerberg in that interview was saying.
It's a relentless pressure campaign to censor things, including things that turned out to be true.
And you have these journalists who, they took a day or two, because it is not easy to go on the air and explicitly defend what is nothing more than a state censorship campaign.
But they're going to do it because that's how important censorship is to them.
But do you see just the way he speaks and the things he says?
It's like an instinctive defense of government officials.
I'm sorry to subject you to this, just listen to the rest.
Bringing this to your attention and then the social media company can decide independently whether or not that violates their ongoing standards.
But it's a really new area and a really complicated one and one that there should be close guardrails on to make sure that the government is not overreaching.
But the idea that the government can't have any communication with these social media companies I don't think is really a world that we would want to live in.
Got it.
Ryan Reilly.
Oh yeah.
We certainly want to live in a world where the government can't call up Facebook and Twitter and Google and tell them to take things off the internet.
And again, that description of the court ruling, it's a world in which the government is barred from communicating with big tech.
It's a lie, as we showed you.
There are significant carve-outs for when the government can contact big tech.
They just can't encourage or coerce or demand censorship.
Here on CNN is one of the thousands of former prosecutors that CNN employs, Eli Honig, and they're all very upset.
They have this panel of five people, what is it, six people, six people on CNN to talk about this very upsetting court ruling that bars the government from censoring the internet.
They're all very upset.
You know that because they have these Square's where they're all in.
It's a big panel.
It's like a crisis.
And let's listen to how they defend this government program.
Trump appointed judge right away.
So you're already, they're already signaling to your audience you're supposed to hate this court ruling.
Yes, that's how federal judges get appointed.
Presidents appoint them.
Every judge on the federal judiciary is an Obama appointee, or a Bush appointee, or a Trump appointee, or a Clinton appointee.
That's how the system works.
They all have the same authority.
And Trump appointed this judge, but the Congress confirmed the appointment.
It's not like Trump gets to just put anyone on the federal bench he wants.
I'm sorry, what was the vote confirming this judge?
Oh, 98 to 0.
So maybe it actually doesn't matter that much that it was a Trump-appointed judge, given that every single member of the Senate who voted on this person judged him to be qualified and capable of serving on the federal bench.
Reading the words in this injunction, a quote, massive effort by the defendants to suppress speech based on content, those are the judge's words, calling the present case quote, arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in the United States history, Ellie.
Yeah.
It's a dramatic decision by this judge.
If you read through it, he's citing to literature and George Washington and Ben Franklin.
Here's what really... Oh my god, that is so weird.
That is so weird.
Why would a judge... Can we stop this?
This judge... This judge is so crazy that he's citing literature.
And Ben Franklin, like the founding fathers on the meaning of the Constitution.
What kind of crazy judge does that?
You see, like, we're, like, almost 40 seconds into this discussion, they haven't mentioned a single word about the substance.
All of this is priming the audience to hate the judge.
He's a Trump appointee, got approved 98-0.
He's a weirdo who cites literature in his court rulings.
What kind of weirdo does that?
citing to literature and George Washington and Ben Franklin.
Here's what really is astonishing to me.
This is a conservative ideology that clearly comes through in this decision.
It's a conservative political ideology, right?
We saw some of the quotes questioning vaccines, questioning masks, conservative talking points.
But the ruling itself is the opposite of judicial conservatism.
This is one of the most aggressive, far-reaching rulings you'll ever see.
What this judge is purporting to do.
Okay, someone please tell me how a case applying the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution to prohibit the government, the U.S.
security state and the health policy industry, the health policy establishment, from censoring the internet.
Someone please, please tell me how that is a right-wing ideology.
When did it become a right-wing ideology to uphold the Constitution by defending free speech and prohibiting state censure?
When did this happen?
Again, there's some truth to it.
Because polling data shows Democrats overwhelmingly do want the state to censor the internet and want big corporations to censor the internet.
So it is a Democratic Party cause to censor the internet and it has become a Republican Party cause to defend free speech, but that is not obviously true.
Historically, free speech was a major cause of the left.
It came out of the Berkeley School in the 60s.
There were largely left liberal judges who were responsible for many of the most important landmark First Amendment rulings.
But there are a lot of conservative judges throughout the 20th century who did the same.
Generally, free speech has been one of those values that transcend ideology.
It's just there are no more values like that.
And so somehow, in the hands of the federal prosecutors that CNN employs to report the news, a free speech ruling is now a right-wing ideology.
This is really what is true.
If you defend free speech, or oppose censorship, or denounce the U.S.
security state, it does code as right-wing ideology now.
I don't know why that happened, I don't know when it happened, or I don't know how it happened.
I just know that it happens.
Every time I'm accused of being a new right-wing convert, it's because I'm criticizing the CIA, FBI, and NSA, or defending free speech and opposing state censorship.
Something I've been doing my entire life.
It's just starting around 2016 that somehow became a right-wing value.
is to micromanage, really, the day-to-day interactions between essentially the entire executive branch, all these agencies that are listed as defendants, and the leading social media companies.
And in the actual temporary injunction, the judge basically says, "You're not allowed, administration, to talk to these social media companies about any protected free speech speech except for cybersecurity threats, national security threats, criminal threats.
But where's the line?
Who's going to police this?
This is a judge trying to micromanage the day-to-day regular activity.
Okay, I just need to explain the foundations of the American political system.
The executive branch takes action.
They're permitted to take action as long as their actions have been authorized by the Congress, a separate branch of government, and as long as those actions are within the limits, the boundaries established by the Constitution.
And when the government, either through an act of Congress or through an act of the executive branch, takes action outside of the limits of the Constitution, the role of the judiciary, the third branch, is to intervene and say, you cannot do that.
The Constitution does not permit this.
No matter how popular it is, no matter how much authority you have for it in Congress, The superstructure of the government, the Constitution defining the outer limits of what government officials can do, does not permit this to happen.
So you're therefore barred from continuing to do it.
That's exactly what a judge is supposed to do.
I haven't listened to this entire segment with every single person.
Shocked if it weren't the case that the overwhelming majority of people on CNN were critical of this decision and in favor of government censorship.
I would even not be surprised if not a single person on this panel ended up defending the judge.
Maybe they had one.
But what he's saying here is so deceitful.
In every sentence it just reeks of propaganda.
Just the whole segment from start to finish is designed to convince the audience That judges are somehow acting improperly when they strike down censorship campaigns on the part of the U.S.
government, even though there's nothing that a judge should be doing more than that.
Sarah, you know, I think Ellie gets to the point that I've been trying to figure out throughout the course of the last 24 hours, we were texting about this yesterday, in terms of how significant it is.
a very activist judicial opinion.
Sarah, you know, I think Ellie gets to the point that I've been trying to figure out throughout the course of the last 24 hours.
We were texting about this yesterday in terms of how significant it is.
If you look behind the scenes, communication between federal government...
They were texting about it yesterday.
I would love to see those texts.
I'm sure there are just avatars of judicial brilliance between those two CNN hosts.
These two right here, trying to put that on the screen so we can see them.
Trying to figure out exactly what it is that this opinion means.
So let's go back to...
Uh, this here, which I think is critical to, um, to note, just one second.
So in February of 2021, at the start of the Obama administration, the Democrats in Congress used their control of the House to subpoena Here you see executives from Twitter and Facebook being sworn in to testify before the House.
And it was the fifth time or the fourth time in about 18 months where the Democrats in Congress had required them to do so.
And I wrote an article that was headlined, quote, Congress escalates pressure on tech giants to censor more threatening the First Amendment.
The sub-highline was, in their zeal for control over online speech, House Democrats are getting closer and closer to the constitutional line if they have not already crossed it.
And the whole point of this article was that Democrats out in the open were now pressuring big tech companies to censor more and more and threatening them with punishment if they don't, and that that was a violation of the First Amendment under very clear Supreme Court jurisprudence that this judge this week finally applied.
As part of this article, I interviewed Ben Wisner, who is the director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
He's one of the best people at the ACLU.
He is the person who has represented Edward Snowden for almost a decade or, yeah, just about a decade now.
So it's someone with whom I've worked fairly closely on that case and others.
And he quote, told me that while a constitutional analysis depends on a variety of factors, including the types of threats issued and how much coercion is amassed, it is well established that the First Amendment governs attempts by Congress to pressure private companies to censor.
For the same reason that the Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what information we can read and see outside narrow limits, it also prohibits the government from using its immense authority to coerce private actors into censoring on its behalf.
That's what Ben Weiser at the ACLU told me, that it's undoubtedly true, indisputably true, that the Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment bars not just direct censorship, but indirect coercive pressure campaigns to censor as well.
The seminal case We've gone over it on the show before, so I won't go in depth into it.
It is the case of Bantham Books versus Sullivan that involved the acts of a city commission in Rhode Island to try and bully and pressure a bookstore that had displayed books in the window that the city commission disliked and tried to bully them into withdrawing or removing those books from sale or from display in the store window.
And the publisher, Bantam Books, sued the officials in Rhode Island who were doing this on the grounds that the First Amendment bars them from that kind of pressure tactics against bookstores.
So the government wasn't directly censoring.
They weren't enacting laws banning these books.
They were just kind of sending threatening letters to these bookstores saying, I think you might want to remove these books which we dislike and we think are dangerous.
Otherwise, we may have to look further into it.
Exactly what the US government is doing with big tech.
And the Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional, even though this was not a case of the First Amendment, of the government directly censoring.
This is a case where people defending the government were saying, oh, it's just the bookstore that did it on its own.
They decided they didn't want to sell this book anymore.
Just like they defend big tech censorship.
Oh, there's just big tech deciding they don't want to be associated with this content.
And the Supreme Court rejected that view and wrote, quote, The commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publication deemed, quote, objectionable and succeeded in its aim.
That was what the intent was of these government actors.
Exactly like what the CDC and NIH and Tony Fauci and Homeland Security and the CIA do when they pick up the phone and call these big tech companies and ask for certain information to be removed on the grounds that it's dangerous or foreign propaganda.
the agenda.
The Supreme Court recognized, quote, it is true, as noted by the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, where the case went before the Supreme Court.
That the book distributor was, quote, free to ignore the commission's notices in the sense that his refusal to, quote, cooperate would have violated no law.
Supreme Court saying, sure, there was no law forcing the bookstore not to comply.
They could have refused in theory.
Quote, but it was found as a fact and the finding being amply supported by the record binds us.
That the book distributor's compliance with the Commission's directive was not voluntary.
People do not lightly disregard public officers' thinly-veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.
And the distributor's reaction, according to uncontroverted testimony, was no exception to this general rule.
The Commission's notices, phrased virtually as orders, Reasonably understood to be such by the book distributor, invariably followed up by police visitations, in fact stopped the circulation of the listed publications, the Latin term for by its own force.
It would be naive to credit the state's assertion That these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation.
Quote, their operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra legal sanctions.
They acted as an agency not to advise, but to suppress.
That is exactly what's going on here.
I could show you tons more videos of just countless random Democrats on these committees saying to these big tech companies, we are tired of your noncompliance.
You keep promising to censor more.
And every time you promise, you don't.
And if you don't start censoring more, we're going to make you do it through legislation and regulatory action.
They're threatening them with punishments if they don't comply with these censorship requests.
Nobody thinks that's voluntary.
And the court finally acknowledged that.
Now, there's another case that I think is incredibly interesting, which is the ACLU.
And again, we all know the ACLU and what it's become, but there still are elements there that are kind of the old school ACLU that really believe in civil liberties.
And one of the expressions of that came when the ACLU defended the NRA.
That's right, the National Rifle Association, the NRA.
In a lawsuit against then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo because Andrew Cuomo was trying to destroy the NRA with a pressure campaign against anyone who was doing business with the NRA.
He was essentially saying, if you keep doing business with the NRA, we're going to cut off our ties with you.
He was trying to get everybody to isolate the NRA and destroy them because he disagreed with the NRA's agenda.
The ACLU filed an amicus brief in this lawsuit that the NRA actually won.
Arguing that Andrew Cuomo was violating the First Amendment, even though he wasn't trying to shut down the NRA directly, but doing it through a pressure campaign.
And the ACLU in this brief wrote, quote, Governor Cuomo's actions could reasonably be interpreted as a threat of retaliatory enforcement against firms that do not sever ties with gun promotion groups.
The government may violate the First Amendment through action that falls short of a direct prohibition against speech, including by retaliation against speakers.
And again, that's exactly what the U.S.
government has done here.
Now, as I've referenced, polling data makes overwhelmingly clear as well that not just Democratic lawmakers, but supporters of the Democratic Party, favor Both state and corporate censorship of the internet.
This is not in doubt.
Here is a poll from Pew Research, probably the leading polling firm in the country, along with Gallup, from August of 2021.
And the headline there is, partisan divisions have widened over government and tech firms in restricting misinformation.
Here you see on the left in yellow, this is the percentage of people, of adults, who say that they want the U.S.
government The state to quote take steps to restrict false information online even if it limits freedom of information.
These are people who trust the government to determine what is false and want the state to take enforcement action to censor the internet in the name of combating disinformation.
65% 65% of people who identify as Democrats or leading Democrats want the state to do this compared to 28% of Republicans who want that.
And if you look at these trends, as early as 2017, it was split.
Only minorities of each party wanted that.
Because, of course, Americans are opposed to censorship.
By 2021, in part because of the 2016 election, in part because of the 2020 election, almost 7 out of every 10 Democrats want the state to censor the Internet.
Compared to only 28% of Republicans who want that, which is still too high, but look at that division.
Look at this division here between Democrats who want the state to censor the Internet and Republicans do.
That is why it really is a Democratic Party ideology.
Censorship is.
The percentage of Democrats who want tech companies to censor the Internet, so they trust tech billionaires and big tech firms to censor the Internet, 76% of Democrats, three out of every four Democrats, want internet censorship.
They do not want the internet to be free.
Versus 37% of Republicans.
And again, the trends, you see the trends here.
This gap has widened significantly.
The Democratic Party is rapidly headed to overwhelmingly favoring both state and corporate censorship and uniting state and corporate power by having the government collude with big tech firms to censor the internet.
It's so ironic.
It's like just like the same people who spent years claiming that the Kremlin had secretly seized clandestine control of the powers of the US government through secret blackmail, a completely deranged conspiracy theory claim that they're the ones who dislike conspiracy theories.
The people who want to unite state and corporate power to censor speech A classic hallmark of fascism.
If you pick up any textbook about what fascism means, it doesn't mean wearing a MAGA hat.
It means this.
That is what the Democratic Party wants and those people, of course, never stop telling you that they're the guardians against fascism.
They're the anti-fascist.
While they propose and advocate and agitate for it, have succeeded in implementing policies which are classic fascist values.
We finally have a court ruling today that says enough is enough.
The First Amendment matters.
It bars this kind of censorship, and at least for now, we'll see what happens on appeal.
Every government agency named in this lawsuit, the main ones, in the health establishment sector of the government and the U.S.
security state are now barred from doing what the U.S.
government has been doing for several years now, which is controlling the flow of information on the Internet, preventing you from expressing your political views if they find them sufficiently bothersome, but using their vast powers, the Supreme Court has described it, To coerce and threaten and bully big tech companies into censoring.
At least for the moment there's a court ruling recognizing that that's happening.
Recognizing that it is a core violation of the Constitution to continue and ordering it stopped effective immediately.
That is something that not Republicans or Democrats or liberals or conservatives but anyone who believes in free speech ought to be celebrating.
I know that I am.
So speaking of the way in which the political spectrum has radically changed, I just want to remind you of something that happened, which was in December of 2005, the New York Times published which was in December of 2005, the New York Times published an article that ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize, and the headline of it was Bush Let's Spy on Callers Without Courts.
Now, the backstory to this article is that it was written by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and they actually discovered that this was happening.
That the U.S.
government and the NSA were spying on the phone calls of American citizens speaking with foreign nationals without the warrants required by law.
They discovered this was happening in mid-2004.
In other words, 18 months before the New York Times published this article.
And when the Bush White House learned that the New York Times found out about this program, President Bush and Dick Cheney summoned the publisher of the New York Times, one of those Salzburgers, and the editor-in-chief at the time, to the White House, to the Oval Office, and told them, if you report on this program, you will have blood on your hands.
It never made any sense.
Why would it help terrorists to know That the government was spying on American citizens without warrants instead of getting warrants as required by law.
It would never help anybody do it.
The only people it would help were the NSA and Bush officials to conceal it.
But the New York Times was so scared in the wake of September 11th and the war on terror that anytime the Bush administration told them not to publish something, they didn't.
This was the reason, by the way, Edward Snowden didn't go to the New York Times with his leaks because he was petrified for good reason that he would unravel his life To disclose this information and bring it to the New York Times, and President Obama would call up the New York Times and say, you're not going to print that.
If you print it, you're going to have blood on your hands.
And the New York Times would publish a tiny little bit of it.
It would be a one-day story, and Edward Snowden would have gone to jail for decades just to hand a bunch of information to the New York Times that they ended up concealing like they did in this story.
The only reason the New York Times ended up publishing this story was because, to his great credit, Jim Risen, was furious that he was being blocked from reporting this.
And so he signed a book contract and wrote a book in which he was going to report the story himself in his book.
And the New York Times knew this book was coming out in January of 2006.
So they didn't want to be scooped by their own reporter.
So they published the story in December 2005.
They won a Pulitzer for it.
They celebrated themselves for their courage, even though they were forced into publishing it.
But the essence of the story Was that obviously the point of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is the government cannot spy on us without warrants, without going to a court ahead of time and convincing the court we've actually done something that justifies our government spying on our conversations.
That's not supposed to be the relationship of the government and citizens.
They're not supposed to spy on our conversations unless they get a warrant.
But the Bush administration decided in the wake of 9-11 they didn't want to get warrants.
That if they were spying on a foreign national who turned out to be talking to an American citizen, they used to have to hang up if they didn't have warrants.
They decided they were going to just listen anyway, even though there was a law in place, FISA, that required warrants.
They just violated the law.
All the people who did this, by the way, are the ones who go to The Atlantic and The New Yorker now and on CNN and NBC and talk, you know, about the rule of law and how sacred it is.
These are all the people who broke this law.
So the New York Times reported this, and this is what they said.
Quote, Months after the September 11th attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international email messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible, quote, dirty numbers linked to Al-Qaeda, the official said.
This is, of course, the reason given by the government.
Oh, we were just trying to find terrorism.
That's why we're listening to Americans' calls and reading their emails without warrants.
The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence gathering practices, particularly for the NSA, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad.
As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
Quote, this is really a sea change, said a former senior official who specializes in national security.
It's almost a mainstay of this country that the NSA only does foreign searches.
Now, One of the reasons we had this spate of whistleblowers in the war on terror, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, William Binney, all from the NSA, was because it was kind of gospel that the U.S.
security state was not intended to spy on American citizens on domestic soil.
And after the war on terror, they started really turning these weapons inward onto American citizens, onto American soil, more than they ever had before.
They've obviously done it forever.
But it was still considered taboo.
When they got caught doing it, like with the Church Commission, it was considered a scandal.
After 9-11, it became the norm.
The U.S.
security state now exists not to spy on foreign nationals to protect American citizens, but to spy on American citizens themselves.
That was the change that the war on terror ushered in.
The New York Times revealed the scandal.
Whether you liked this spying or not, thought it was justified or not, it was definitely illegal.
It was a violation of the FISA law in 1978 that the Congress enacted in the wake of the Church Commission abuses to curb future abuses to control how the NSA and the FBI spied on us.
And what happened was, instead of punishing the people who spied illegally on Americans, it was a violation of the law.
Remember, everyone is equal under the law, we hear with Donald Trump's indictment over the fact that he had some classified documents in Mar-a-Lago.
What happened instead was the Congress Under Nancy Pelosi, the House was controlled by Nancy Pelosi, but the Democrats were completely in on all of this stuff.
Nancy Pelosi was the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee in 2002 when this happened.
She was briefed on this program, just like she was briefed on torture at Guantanamo, and she was fine with it all.
She only pretended to oppose it once it became public.
But the Democrats were fully complicit in all of this.
And so, rather than punish the Bush and Cheney officials who did this, they instead enacted a law called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that retroactively legalized the spying.
Made it legal, retroactively.
They said, from now on, the NSA and the FBI are permitted to spy on the calls of Americans and read our emails, if they're talking to someone on foreign soil, without getting warrants.
It legalized relentless spying against American citizens.
And the section of the law that did that was called Section 702.
And everybody knew Section 702 was pretty extreme, like the Patriot Act.
And the argument offered was, don't worry, it has to be renewed every few years.
And we're only going to renew it if this emergency continues, this emergency of terrorism.
And just like the Patriot Act, every time it's up, it gets renewed with no reform, even though there's ample evidence That this law is being consistently abused by the FBI for political ends.
So just to give you this background, here is the New York Times in February this year.
As the law, the law is due to be renewed this year, Section 702.
And you see the headline, Security Agencies and Congress Brace for a Fight Over the Expiring Surveillance Law.
Skepticism about security agencies and surveillance by Republicans.
Again, only Republicans, according to the Times, and they're correct, are skeptical about security agencies and surveillance.
I've been skeptical about it forever.
I used to be skeptical about it.
It used to be considered left-wing, and that's why I was called a leftist.
I'm still skeptical about it.
Somehow now, though, it's a right-wing cause, so now I'm called right-wing.
Skepticism about security agencies and surveillance by Republicans allied with former President Donald J. Trump.
May bolster traditional liberal and libertarian critics of a post-September 11th law.
Exactly.
The law was always criticized by liberals and libertarians.
Now the opponents, the leading opponents of this law, of these spying powers, are Republicans allied with Trump because they saw firsthand how readily these spying agencies abuse their powers for political ends.
The Biden administration is expected this week to ramp up a political battle over a high-profile warrantless surveillance program that traces back to the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
A 2008 statute that legalized the program, known as Section 702, will expire at the end of December unless Congress votes to extend it.
A top national security official at the Biden Justice Department is expected to urge Congress to reauthorize Section 702 during a speech at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday.
Top FBI and NSA officials have already asked lawmakers to do so, portraying the authority as critical for gathering foreign intelligence and protecting against threats stemming from overseas hackers, spy services, and terrorists.
But civil liberties advocates have opposed Section 702 or pushed for tighter limits on the program because it sweeps in Americans' messages too.
The reauthorization cycle, those skeptics of backing among Republicans who have aligned themselves with Trump, and his distrust of spy security agencies and surveillance.
So that was the setting the New York Times set in February this year.
This law is set to be renewed.
The Biden NSA and DOJ are demanding to be renewed with no reforms, no limits, but Republicans aligned with President Trump are concerned and skeptical about these powers and therefore want reforms as a condition to renewing it.
And that's exactly what's happening.
Now here this week is the New York Times.
Remember, this is a spying program that the New York Times exposed.
In 2005 on the grounds that it was so scandalous that it couldn't be secret, the American people had to know about it.
And look how they now talk about this domestic spying power, this domestic spying program.
This is the headline.
The GOP threatens spy agencies premiere surveillance tool.
Do you see what happened?
The New York Times went in 2005 for winning a Pulitzer for denouncing it as illegal and dangerous.
To now claiming only Republicans oppose the spying power and therefore it's now been elevated into the premier surveillance tool.
If the FBI and NSA can't spy on Americans without warrant, none of us are going to be safe.
Now this is the most amazing sub-headline.
Listen to how the New York Times describes opposition.
Quote, with hard right Republicans attacking federal law enforcement agencies.
This is what George Bush and Dick Cheney were saying in 2005 when the New York Times exposed the program.
This is what George Bush and Dick Cheney were saying in 2005 when the New York Times exposed the program, that it's a critical surveillance tool, that it's only that it's a critical surveillance tool, that it's only designed to target foreigners overseas who are connected to terrorists.
But now that it's Republicans who oppose this spying power, The New York Times has completely switched its position.
In a news article, they of course have a position, a very didactic one, and they're heralding the spying program they once denounced as a critical spying tool to keep us safe, and the only people who object now to the FBI and NSA spying on Americans without warrants, who are these people?
Quote, hard right Republicans.
Listen to what this article says, quote, an intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the FBI with charges of political bias.
Oh my God, please don't vilify the FBI.
They don't deserve that.
They're not an agency with a history of abusing their spying power for political ends.
They don't deserve to be vilified.
Only Republicans, right-wing Republicans, would dare vilify the FBI that still works in the headquarters called the J. Edgar Hoover Headquarters.
J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 60 years in the 20th century because everyone was petrified of him in Washington because he kept dossiers, spying dossiers, on every president and every American leader.
And they were petrified of removing him.
He ran the FBI for six decades with nothing but political abuses.
But now it's only hard right Republicans who think this and they're vilifying the FBI by pointing out that maybe it's not a good idea to allow this agency to spy on us without warrants.
Here's the New York Times.
Hard right, right-wing Republicans in Congress are vilifying the FBI by saying they have political bias.
And because of that, they are, quote, imperiling a program, allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool, and amplifying demands for stricter limits.
It was the New York Times that exposed it.
It used to be secret.
And when the New York Times justified exposing it, they said, it's so dangerous to allow the government.
To spy on us without warrants and now they're attacking, quote, hard right Republicans for having the position the New York Times had in 2005 and are saying they're vilifying the FBI, it's wrong to wonder if the FBI should need warrants before spying on us.
Here, quote, there's no way we're going to be reauthorizing that in its current form.
No possible way, said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, a key ally of Mr. Trump's, who is leading a special house investigation into the, quote, weaponization of government against conservatives.
Weaponization is in scare quotes there.
Quote, we're concerned about surveillance, period, said Jordan.
This is the longtime left liberal view.
This is the ACLU view.
Before it became a liberal advocacy group.
And now the New York Times depict it as just the province of hard right Republicans who are crazy because they have allegiance to Donald Trump and don't trust the FBI.
The New York Times goes on, this is right out of the words of Dick Cheney, right out of the mouth of Dick Cheney, quote, at issue is a program that allows the government to collect on domestic soil and without a warrant the communication of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans.
Leaders of both parties have warned the Biden administration that Congress will not renew the law that legalized it, known as Section 702, without changes to prevent federal agencies from freely searching the email phones and other electronic records of Americans in touch with surveilled foreigners.
Quote, you couldn't waterboard me into voting reauthorized 702, said Republican Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, who backed the program in 2018.
That is true.
The program was last renewed in 2018 with no reforms.
And it got the backing of Republicans because Trump was president, but it also got the backing of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and many other Democrats.
That's how it passed.
At exactly the same time that Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and those kind of people were telling Americans that Donald Trump was a Hitler figure, that he was a fascist and a white supremacist aiming to overthrow U.S.
democracy, they supported the reauthorization of a law that gave the Trump administration the power to spy on Americans without warrants.
That's pretty inconsistent behavior, I would say.
Here's Matt Gaetz, he goes on, quote, the 702 spying authorities were abused against people in Washington on January 6th, and they were abused against people who were affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, and I'm equally agreed by both of those things, said Gaetz.
Can I ask, is that a right-wing or a left-wing view that Matt Gaetz expressed there?
I don't want the FBI spying on Americans without warrants.
They've abused their spying powers against both January 6 protesters and the Black Lives Matter movement, and I'm equally aggrieved by both because the FBI shouldn't be spying on American political movements without warrants.
According to the New York Times, that is a hard right position, but I would like to know when it became that.
The New York Times goes on, quote, Congress created Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 and has renewed the program twice since, largely thanks to the overwhelming support of Republican lawmakers.
Exactly.
It's always been a Republican position because it came from George Bush and Dick Cheney to support this law.
Why now is it a hard right view to oppose this law?
That makes no sense.
Quote, but significant turnover on Capitol Hill has brought a new generation of Republicans less protective of Washington's post 9-11 counterterrorism powers and about half of those Republicans have never cast a vote on it.
Exactly.
This is the key change.
That most people who are American liberals do not understand and most people in media do not understand.
I want to read that again because it's so true.
And it's something to celebrate.
Quote, significant turnover on Capitol Hill has brought a new generation of Republicans less protective of Washington's post 9-11 counterterrorism powers.
In other words, this new generation of Republicans Is skeptical of the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA like the left and liberals in the United States used to be, but no longer are.
The article goes on, quote, this will be a first impression for many of them, said Representative Darren LaHood, Republican of Illinois, a supporter of the program, who is part of the Intelligence Committee's six-member working group trying to determine how Congress can restrict the program without hamstringing it.
Quote, the thought that 702 and Pfizer just focused on terrorism, I think that narrative has to be changed.
We need to focus on China.
We need to focus on Russia.
We need to focus on Iran and North Korea.
These Republican establishment figures always have an endless list of villains that you're supposed to be scared of to justify government spying on you without warrants.
They've never explained why they can't spy on Americans without warrants.
Their argument is warrants are too complicated, they're too difficult, and in reality the FISA court grants warrant applications in more than 99% of the cases.
It's the easiest thing in the world to get a FISA warrant.
So even if you believe we have all these villains we have to spy on Americans to protect against, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, terrorism, etc., etc., just make them go get warrants.
That's always worked.
Ronald Reagan got warrants in the middle of the Cold War with Russian missiles, nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at every American city.
He fought the Cold War.
and got warrants in order to spy, why can't they get warrants now?
Quote, the Biden administration has been making a similar case to lawmakers, meaning a similar case to that Republican lawmaker, appealing to them to renew Section 0702, which National Security Advisor Jake Sherman, I think it's supposed to be Jake Sullivan, I don't know if it's the New York Times or ours, but anyway, that's Jake Sullivan, has said I don't know if it's the New York Times or ours, but anyway, that's Jake Sullivan, has said is crucial to heading off national security threats
That's the Biden administration agreeing with the Republican establishment like they always do, like they do on Ukraine, like they do on China, and now they do on this spying power.
Quote, but far-right lawmakers.
Have embarked on a louder and more politically loaded effort to fight the measure.
They have seized on official determinations that federal agents botched a wiretap on a Trump campaign advisor and more recent disclosures that FBI analysts improperly used section 702 to search for information about hundreds of Americans who came under scrutiny in connection with the January 6th attack and the Black Lives Matter protests after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
Exactly!
There's a mountain of evidence that the FBI has abused these powers for political ends.
Why wouldn't you reform this law and limit what they can do?
You don't have to be a hard right Republican to think that.
Quote, in recent years, Capitol Hill has welcomed several new Democrats with backgrounds in national security who would favor extending the program.
So anyone who's wondering who changed and what changed, read that New York Times article and pay attention to this spying debate.
The new crop of Republicans are skeptical of the CIA, FBI, and NSA and want to limit spying powers without warrants.
The new crop of Democrats come from the security state agencies, worship the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI, love spying powers, and love censorship.
That is the radical change that our politics has ushered in.
And if you don't understand that change, as is true of most establishment liberals and people who work in the media, you can understand nothing about American politics.
Every issue is shaped by those changes that were ushered in by Donald Trump and by the new breed of Republicans and by the new breed of Democrats.
Polling data shows it.
The positions of the parties show it.
I've been in the same spot forever.
What changes is the labels that get attached to those views.
But you see the politics changing around these issues.
Where the Democrats are now the people who believe in establishment authority and power and want all the powers that go along with that including censorship, warrantless spying and the rest and it's these new crop of Republicans who are opposed to it.
Now the reality is there are some leading Democrats including Senator John Ossoff from Georgia and even Dick Durbin who also say The FBI can no longer be trusted with these spying powers and reform is needed.
So it's really a bipartisan effort more so than usual.
There are some Democrats who aren't on the side of people like Adam Schiff and that new crop of national security fanatics and U.S.
security state worshipers.
But the way that this is being depicted is the way that our discourse constantly now describes these values.
That if you believe in things like free speech, if you believe in things like the need for the government to get warrants before spying on us, you are now some sort of hard right figure.
Remember the Atlantic called RFK Jr.
the first MAGA Democrat.
Even though RFK Jr., or not even though, because RFK Jr.
is a defender of free speech, is skeptical of the security state agencies, questions the CIA war in Ukraine, and U.S.
militarism in general, somehow, in the hands of the corporate media, those have now become MAGA views, or hard right views, all as a way of maligning them.
And that's what these two stories have in common tonight, this defense of the censorship regime by the U.S.
government in bed with Big Tech and these new spying powers.
You can see who's behind them.
And the people behind them are establishment liberalism tied at the hip to the establishment wing of the Republican Party.
The only dissent really comes from the same sector that voted against the war in Ukraine, which is what the New York Times describes as hard-right Republicans associated with Donald Trump.
That is the coalition that I think needs to be fostered.
There are still people on the left who still do believe in that.
They're not really represented in Congress.
Unfortunately, there's just almost none willing to stand up and defend these issues, but they are around.
But that is increasingly, I think, the ethos of independent media and of this kind of anti-establishment populism.
That for me is way more important than right versus left or Democrat versus Republican.
The litmus test for me is, do you trust and believe in the benevolence of establishment authority and establishment power to the point that you want them to censor and spy on Americans without warrants, or do you not?
And these two stories offer an outstanding window into understanding the real anti-establishment dissident coalition that has been emerging and reshaping and forming In opposition to those very tyrannical and authoritarian powers.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form.
We had intended to cover the issue of President Macron threatening a crackdown on social media and the internet over protest movements in that country.
We will put that on our show for tomorrow night due to time constraints.
We have gone for about two hours, so we're going to go ahead and report on that tomorrow night.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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