US Government Repeatedly Violated First Amendment by Censoring Social Media, with Plaintiffs' Lawyer Jenin Younes; PLUS: Ukrainian War Proves a Boon for Arms Dealers; Zelensky Redefines "Pro-Russian" | SYSTEM UPDATE #146
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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, one of the most significant First Amendment victories in years.
In July, we reported on an extraordinary ruling from a federal district court in Louisiana, which ruled that the Biden administration and several key components of it Including the White House, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Center for Disease Control had engaged in a massive and grave violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech by threatening and coercing big tech platforms to censor the speech of American citizens, which those government agencies and officials disliked.
The District Court enjoined, meaning barred, all officials in those agencies from communicating threats or coercion of any further kind to tech platforms with the intent to have speech censored.
The case was brought by several American citizens who had their speech prohibited or their account banned by Big Tech at the behest of their own government.
Among them was Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who dissented from several of the most important COVID pronouncements of the health policy establishment and for that reason alone was barred by his own government from being heard on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
The Biden DOJ, which has made clear that, like Democrats generally, they regard their ability to have the internet censored as a top priority, immediately announced they would appeal this ruling.
And they did.
But on Friday, a three-judge appellate court composed of two Bush nominees and one Trump nominee upheld not all but most of the ruling, including the most foundational parts.
Indeed, the appellate panel emphasized what a grave and unusually invasive free speech violation this was.
Quote, the Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of censorship, quote, of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials.
The results said the court was, quote, suppressing millions, millions of protected free speech postings.
The ruling was based on the longstanding principle that the First Amendment's free speech guarantee not only bars the state from directly censoring, but also forcing or otherwise coercing private actors to censor for them.
The appellate court found that four agencies in particular were guilty of using threats to all but force social media platforms to censor at their command, the White House, the FBI, the CDC, and the Surgeon General, and as a result, banned them from engaging in such communications or threats going forward.
We will discuss the broad and very significant implications of this decision, and we'll also speak to one of the lead lawyers who represented the plaintiffs in this case, Janine Yunus.
Then, as President Biden seeks yet another $25 billion to continue to fuel the war in Ukraine on top of the $120 billion or so already authorized, it is time to ask, who exactly is getting rich from this war?
Who is benefiting from it?
And on the 12 year anniversary, or the 22nd year anniversary, rather, of the 9-11 attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky copied the formulation of George W. Bush in a David Frum written speech 10 days after the 9-11 attacks, the notorious, quote, you are either with us or you are with the terrorists announcement, to proclaim that either you support the war in Ukraine and the West support of it with all your heart, or you are deemed to be, quote, pro-Russian.
Exactly what we've been arguing here is the true meaning of that term pro-Russian and we thank President Zelensky for making it so explicitly clear.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
It really is extraordinary that one of the most significant ever First Amendment rulings, one of the most consequential findings by a top court in this country that the U.S.
government has been systematically and in a mass way, been violating the free speech clause of the First Amendment, has received scant attention from most of our media corporations.
A few of them did report on the story, but nowhere near the level of significance that a ruling like this obviously merits.
And that's in part because the ruling is incriminating of the Biden administration and therefore the corporate media, which obviously is overwhelmingly interested in ensuring Biden's reelection, has no interest in touting it.
But more so because you have to remember, I think it's so critical, that when Elon Musk opened up the Twitter corporate files, something incredibly rare to do, and enabled first the journalist Matt Haidt and then other journalists, maybe dozens or so, to rifle through the corporate maybe dozens or so, to rifle through the corporate records of Twitter to be able to show this stream of coercion and demands and threats emanating from the U.S.
security state, the Biden White House, the health policy establishment, to Twitter demanding censorship on a whole range of crucial debates like COVID and the 2020 election and election integrity in general and the war in Ukraine and so much else.
Those journalists banded together, the employees of these corporate media outlets did, to announce that you should ignore that reporting.
That it was, in their words, a nothing burger, that it showed nothing of significance.
And what it in fact showed, and we spent a lot of time reporting on those findings for this reason, was what an appellate court just said was one of the gravest attacks on free speech, systemic attacks on free speech, that the court has ever seen in the history of the judiciary.
And that's obviously what it was, and we knew about it before the Twitter files.
There was all kinds of reporting.
About how the government intended and has in fact achieved control of the internet and the content that flows from it.
We heard from these social media outlets complaining of the constant government pressure to censor speech that the platforms themselves never wanted to censor but the government with its massive power to punish these sites or to reward them was demanding be removed and oftentimes
Thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans had their speech curtailed, their political protected speech curtailed as a result of this program, this government program that was a formalized systemic censorship policy.
Implemented in part by the prior government under President Trump.
The U.S.
security state was doing it, but it really escalated with the COVID pandemic under President Biden.
That's what the court said.
And now we have a ruling that is one of the most significant in a long time.
Now, the fact that this was going on and the fact that this is unconstitutional is something I have been screaming about for a long time, often without a lot of company.
Going back more than two years, in February of 2021, in fact, when I was still on Substack, where I was doing my primary journalism through written articles there, I responded to and reported on the fact that Congress had just subpoenaed the CEOs of the big tech companies.
There you see Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Sheryl Steinberg of Facebook, but they had also censored Mark Zuckerberg many times, the executives of Google.
And they were constantly forcing them to appear before them, the Democratic-controlled Congress was, and they were being explicit.
They were saying, either you censor more content that we want censored, or we will punish you through legal and regulatory reprisals.
And it was so clear to me back then that this was an obvious violation of the First Amendment.
There you see one of the articles I wrote on this with the headline, Congress escalates pressure on tech giants to censor more, threatening the First Amendment.
And there you see the sub-headline right here, which is, 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 what I was referring to was a long line of cases in the judiciary, culminating with the 1964 ruling in Bantam Books, which involved a Rhode Island zoning commission badgering and hectoring a local bookstore to remove books that it disliked from the window and to no longer sell them.
They didn't pass a law requiring that censorship, but they made clear that this bookstore would face all kinds of punishment if they disobeyed the order.
And so the bookstore removed.
The books did not suffer state punishment.
The book publisher sued.
It went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment of Free Speech Clause in the United States Constitution doesn't only bar the state from formally or directly censoring, meaning here's a law requiring the bookstore or all private companies to remove this book.
That would obviously be your act of direct censorship.
It also, they said, bans the government from coercing a private actor, not just advising or suggesting, but basically requiring through threats and coercion a private actor's censor for them.
And that case law has been clear.
It is longstanding.
It has been repeatedly affirmed.
And it was very obvious to me, no matter what, More than two years ago that the Democratic-controlled Congress, the Democratic Party, through their view of the necessity of Internet censorship, which again we've documented, really emerged in the wake of the 2016 election when Democrats concluded the Internet couldn't be free.
That this mindset they had all adopted was unconstitutional, and the more they were being explicit about these threats, the closer they were getting to this constitutional line.
It was clear that they transgressed it.
Now, in July of this year, a United States District Court in Louisiana, and we reported on this case back at the time in detail.
Ruled that the government, the Biden administration, and many agencies within it, including the FBI, the CDC, the Surgeon General, the Department of Homeland Security, and many others, including the White House itself, had crossed that line, had become so aggressive and coercive in their demands that Twitter and Facebook and Google censor for them, meaning take speech off the internet that they disliked,
That it had crossed that line and had become a full frontal assault on the free speech clause of the First Amendment.
Here's what the court back then in July said, quote, this case is about the free speech clause in the United States, in 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 the United States' history.
Here you see it, right on the screen, just in case you think I'm exaggerating.
This is what the district court judge said.
It involves the most massive attack against the free speech clause, against free speech in United States' history.
Now, isn't it unbelievable, if you stop and think about it for just a second, that this is what The vast majority of employees of corporate media outlets told you you should ignore it and was a nothing burger.
What the federal court ended up saying was arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.
The court goes on, quote, 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.
Plaintiffs allege that defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication regarding what Democrats describe as, quote, disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation have colluded with and or coerced social media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and and malinformation have colluded with and or coerced social media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, 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, and that was what the District Court ended up concluding.
And issued a preliminary injunction barring all those agencies from continuing to communicate with the social media sites going forward in an attempt to coerce or threaten them to censor for the U.S.
government.
It was a remarkable ruling.
Unless you were watching this show or a handful of others, you probably didn't know about it.
It wasn't talked about very much at all, which is amazing given the language this judge used.
And with good reason.
The record is unbelievably clear on this.
But that's exactly what the U.S.
government has been doing.
We've all seen that evidence.
The Biden administration immediately appealed that, denouncing it as a flawed ruling.
It went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel, only one of whom was a Trump appointee.
Affirmed the district court's judgment, not in its entirety.
It concluded that there was lacking some evidence, that some of these agencies were actually guilty of this.
But on the key question, and it applied it to the White House, the White House was scathing about the FBI.
The CDC and the Surgeon General concluded that threats that were made to social media companies were so extreme that there was no question It constituted state action to censor, which of course is the only thing the First Amendment Free Speech Clause is designed to prevent.
Quote, relying on the above record, this is the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision from issue just this Friday.
Relying on the above record, the district court concluded that the officials via both private and public channels asked the platforms to remove content, press them to change the moderation policies and threaten them.
directly and indirectly with legal consequences that they did not comply.
And it worked.
Quote, "That unrelenting pressure forced the platforms to act and take down users' content.
Notably, though, these actions were not limited Accounts run by state officials were often subject to censorship too.
For example, the platform removed a post by the Louisiana Department of Justice which depicted citizens testifying against public policies regarding COVID for violating its quote medical misinformation policy by quote spreading medical misinformation.
This is not to say that coercion is always difficult to identify.
Sometimes coercion is obvious.
Take Bantam Books, which is that, excuse me, 1963 case there.
The Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality, a state-created entity, sought to stop the distribution of obscene books to kids is what the claim was.
So it sent a letter to a book distributor with a list of verboten books and requested that they be taken off the shelves.
That request conveniently noted that compliance would, quote, eliminate the necessity of our recommending prosecution to the Attorney General.
Per the commission's request, police officers followed up to make sure the books were removed.
The Supreme Court concluded that this, quote, system of informal censorship, which was, quote, clearly meant to intimidate the recipients, quote, through threat of legal sanction and other means of coercion, rendered the distributor's decision to remove the books a state action.
Given Bantam Books, not so subtle ask, accompanied by a, quote, system of pressure, threats and follow-ups are clearly coercive.
Now, here's what the court said specifically about the FBI, quote, next we consider the conduct of FBI officials.
The agency's officials regularly met with the social media platforms at least since the 2020 election.
In these meetings, the FBI shared, quote, strategic information with social media companies to alert them to misinformation trends in the lead up to federal elections.
For example, right before the 2022 congressional election, the FBI tipped the platforms off to, quote, hack and dump operations from state-sponsored actors.
that would spread misinformation through their sites.
In another instance, they alerted the platforms to the activities and locations of, quote, Russian troll farms.
The FBI apparently acquired this information from ongoing investigations.
Per their operations, the FBI monitored the platform's moderation policies and asked for detailed assessments during their regular meeting.
This is the FBI heavily involved in decisions about what political speech citizens can express online.
Quote, the platforms apparently changed their moderation policies in response to the FBI debriefs.
For example, some platforms changed their terms of service to be able to tackle content that was tied to hacking operations.
But the FBI's activities were not limited to purely foreign threats.
In the buildup to federal elections, the FBI set up command posts that would flag concerning content and relay developments to the platforms.
In these operations, the officials also targeted domestically sourced, quote, disinformation, like posts that stated incorrect poll hours or mail-in voting procedures.
Apparently, the FBI's flagging across the board led to posts being taken down 50% of the time.
So it is really a remarkable finding here that the FBI is engaged in activity this aggressive That the court says that they coerce.
They conclude, quote, we consider the FBI, we find that the FBI to likely, one, coerce the platforms into moderating content, and two, encourage them to do so by affecting changes to their moderation policies, both in violation of the First Amendment.
The court went on.
They said the same thing with the...
About the White House, Surgeon General, and CDC.
Quote, we start with coercion.
Similar to the White House, Surgeon General, and CDC officials, the FBI regularly met with the platforms, shared strategic information, and frequently alerted them to misinformation spreading on their platforms and monitored their content moderation policies.
The FBI went beyond that.
They urged the platforms to take down content.
And then they concluded, They applied the Bantam book test and said that the FBI was clearly over the line in the way in which it monitor these sites, and then actually threaten them.
And then they concluded, quote, We do not take our decision lightly, but the Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.
Therefore, the district court was correct in the assessment, quote, unrelenting pressure from certain government officials likely, quote, had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech posting by American citizens.
We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.
So that was a pretty sweeping ruling.
Again, it concluded that certain agencies like Homeland Security and the State Department, that the plaintiffs fell short in their evidence showing that they too engage in this kind of coercion.
But on terms of the White House and the FBI and the CDC and the Surgeon General, the court was very emphatic.
That they violated core First Amendment protections by just battering these sites with threats that these sites rationally and reasonably took to be orders from the state, or at least threats that if they didn't obey the censorship orders, they would be punished.
And that is a massive violation of the First Amendment.
Now, one of these news outlets that did actually report on Friday night on this Ruling in a very understated way, which is what, why it's worth looking at is the New York Times.
So here is their article on September 9th.
Here's the very gentle language they used in the headline, quote, appeals court rules White House overstepped, not violated, not infringed, not attacked, overstepped.
The First Amendment on social media.
A Fifth Circuit panel partly upheld restrictions on the Biden administration's communication with online platforms about their content.
So you see, everything is done to mitigate the importance of this decision, to make it seem less weighty and less significant and less grave.
And here's the very first paragraph of this news article, which I find so unbelievably revealing.
Here's what the New York Times said about this lawsuit, about this court ruling.
A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the Biden administration most likely They overstepped the First Amendment.
I can't, that verb, overstep.
They violated the First Amendment.
I just read you that language.
It was the biggest assault on free speech rights in the country's history.
They overstepped the First Amendment by urging the major social media platforms to remove misleading or false content about COVID-19, partly upholding a lower court's preliminary ruling in a victory for conservatives.
Why is this a victory for conservatives?
The answer is because, as we've shown you over and over, polling data makes clear that liberals overwhelmingly support a censorship regime implemented by a combination of state and corporate power, meaning they want the state coordinating with corporations like big tech companies to remove information that the government regards as misinformation From being online.
They support that.
That's why it's a victory for conservatives.
Because liberals don't want free speech on the internet.
That is the position of the Democratic Party.
I wish I didn't have to describe it in such partisan tone.
I dislike looking at things through that framework, but that is the reality.
And the fact that the New York Times, in the very first article, in the very first paragraph of its article, describes this landmark First Amendment ruling as a quote, victory for conservatives.
Reveals the actual framework going on here unwittingly, which is that Democrats favor the censorship regime.
I've shown you many videos of Democrats explicitly defending it.
As just one reminder here from a hearing in November 2020 when the Senate had summoned Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and various Google executives, here was Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts stating explicitly what the position of the Democratic Party was.
Just listen to yourself.
Look for yourself.
The big tech business model, which puts profits ahead of people, is a real problem.
Anti-conservative bias is not a 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.
In fact, they're amplifying harmful content so that it spreads like wildfire and torches our democracy.
All right, so there you have it.
The problem that the Democrats have is not that social media companies are censoring too much.
It's that they are not censoring enough.
They're leaving too many posts up.
One Democrat after the next said they want more censorship and they threaten these social media companies that if you don't start censoring more, you just heard it.
It's not my hyperbole or my summary of what they're saying.
They're saying it explicitly.
If you don't start censoring more the way you keep promising, we're going to have to take action against you.
And that's why the New York Times described this as a victory for conservatives, because fundamental as a weapon to the Democratic Party and their leading politicians in Washington, and most self-identified Democrats as well, they want the internet censored by a combination of state and corporate officials in the name of removing disinformation online.
They favor this.
They don't want a free internet.
We are really delighted to have one of the, I think, heroic lawyers who brought this case, who was one of the lead attorneys on it.
Her name is Jenna Niones.
She's a civil liberties lawyer and a writer as well.
She's currently the litigation counsel for the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
She spent the early part of her career as an appellate public defender, providing representation to indigent clients that faced criminal prosecution.
She briefed numerous appeals courts and several cases in the highest state court, which is New York State Court of Appeals.
So she's a very experienced lawyer.
She was one of the lead lawyers arguing this case, which is Missouri versus Biden, which is in the Fifth Circuit.
And as we just summarized, that led to this first, this preliminary injunction in the district court, and now largely an affirmation in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We're thrilled to have you here and congratulations on your important victory.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely.
So let's just start at the beginning.
Talk a little bit, if you could, about how this case came about.
What led to this lawsuit emerging?
Well, as you've discussed, the lawsuit emerged from various actions taken by the Biden administration.
So this was focused much more on the executive rather than Congress.
In the spring of 2021, Jennifer Psaki, the White House Press Secretary, Biden himself, the Surgeon General, started making statements threatening tech companies, basically saying, if you don't censor more COVID misinformation, especially about the vaccines, anything that might deter people from taking the vaccines, we're going to look at our options.
We're going to see what we, you know, what we can do, because this is killing people, basically.
And of course, the platforms are very nervous about that.
They don't want more regulation.
They don't want You know, negative repercussions from the government.
They have motivations to keep the government on their good side.
So they began censoring more social media users, especially about COVID.
And that's actually the plaintiffs that I'm representing in this case, were primarily censored on COVID-related topics.
So epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kuhldorf, a psychiatrist named Aaron Cariotti, and an activist named Jill Hines, who fights for health freedom.
So just to interject there about those plaintiffs, these were actually people, American citizens, who were expressing dissent, a lot of them based on their specialty as scientists or medical professionals, expressing dissent to Dr. Fauci's pronouncements or the pronouncements of the CDC about the efficacy of vaccines or masks or COVID in general.
And the government was directing big tech platforms specifically to remove their post or otherwise block them from being heard?
That's exactly right.
And actually, you know, per your earlier discussion, these are not people who come from the political right.
I'm not exactly sure what each of their politics is, but I am very certain they're not all conservatives.
So this was just government dissenting from the government and government policies.
I actually came to be involved in the case because I had brought an earlier one.
I had become alerted to this issue when the Surgeon General and Jen Psaki started making these statements in around April or May of 2021.
And I was like, well, this is a First Amendment violation.
So I represented three Twitter users who had been suspended permanently from Twitter for similar types of tweets.
And that case was unfortunately dismissed by a judge in a federal district court within the Sixth Circuit.
But because they were aware of my work, the attorneys general asked me to join on behalf of these four plaintiffs.
Let me just ask you, though, about that dynamic that you referenced.
I understand you're here in your capacity as a litigator and a legal expert and not a political pundit or an analyst.
Nonetheless, I do want to just kind of delve in a little bit to how bizarre this idea is that The New York Times said that this is a victory for conservatives.
You know, I have to say, in the 20th century, when I was coming of age politically, the idea that we have to oppose state censorship of our political speech was very much associated in many ways with the left.
There was certainly some sentiment on the right, but it was kind of the time of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan.
Pat Robertson and this idea that the government was trying to censor music or censor the content of our expression was something that was largely associated with the religious right and the left was very vocal against it.
A lot of the landmark cases of the 20th century came from a lot of the left-wing or judges or Democrats appointed on the court, but there was a lot of Republican support for the idea of the First Amendment as well.
It never really had this kind of partisan Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative kind of feel to it because it was about the Constitution and free speech, a kind of value that I think transcended for a long time ideological conflicts.
And yet now here we have this idea that if you question health authorities, people of the executive branch about a major issue involving pharmaceutical companies and their products, that you ought to be censored.
And if anyone stands up and objects that somehow reads or codes as a right-wing viewpoint, Have you noticed that and what do you make of that?
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that as someone who doesn't really identify as a political conservative myself in case, you know, as you might have surmised from my biography.
Yeah, you are a, just to be clear, you are a public defender representing indigent criminal defendants.
So that's not typically work associated with the conservative cause.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't figured this out entirely.
I think there are a few different issues at play.
One is that the Democratic Party has just become more and more intertwined with corporate interests, and the tech companies themselves, and then pharma companies.
So when people began posting stuff that threatened the success of the Pfizer vaccine, for instance, or Frankly, any of the COVID vaccines.
I think the Democratic Party was very interested in trying to get rid of that in order to benefit their pharmaceutical company partners.
Another phenomenon that's at play, I think, is what I call Trump derangement syndrome.
I know other people use this term as well.
Just that Trump is so reviled by Democrats that anything he says, it's got to be the opposite.
If Trump says that masks are silly, then obviously they're very good, and we've got to shut up anyone who says otherwise.
And I think that's really come into play with this phenomenon.
So I certainly think this ruling is incredibly significant.
The court has pretty much said they think it is.
Both the district court judge and the appellate court said essentially that this was of a magnitude of censorship they've rarely seen, if ever.
And yet I think because the media has mostly buried it or downplayed it on the one hand, but also on the other, I think a lot of people are kind of jaded and saying like, well, what's really, what is this really going to change?
How are we going to know for sure that Biden officials are going to actually stop doing this when they were doing it in the first place when it was so obviously unconstitutional?
What would you say about the significance of this ruling and why, what would you say to people who are kind of cynical about whether this will actually change anything?
Well, first of all, when the district court issued its preliminary injunction, the government did say that it had ceased its communications with social media companies, which is some positive indication that they might listen to the ruling.
But more importantly, I think once the law is clear and you have a clearly defined ruling like this saying that this sort of conduct violates the First Amendment, people can sue for damages.
It's harder for officials to get qualified immunity.
And just explaining that a little bit, meaning, and I want to ask you about this in a second, which is if a government official is kind of in doubt or like has a good faith basis for believing that maybe their actions are constitutional, you can't really sue them because you don't want government officials being easily sued.
But once there's a court ruling explicitly stating that this behavior is barred and then they go and do it anyway, You have a lot stronger case that they did it knowing it was illegal and that's when they can be opened up to liability.
Is that a fair summary?
That's it.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And I mean, look, frankly, here, it should have been pretty clear to these people, they were violating the First Amendment, especially some of them, like a guy named Rob Flaherty, who worked in the White House, you know, he was calling the tech companies, berating them, threatening them saying, if you don't censor more, if you don't take this down, we're going to look at our options, we're going to see which What we can do and the platforms were then writing back and saying, OK, we've changed our policies.
We're censoring more.
I mean, I'm summarizing.
They didn't use exactly those words, but it's clear that that's what they were doing.
And I actually worked for a bit on the subcommittee that is investigating this issue on the House Judiciary Committee.
And they they got access to a lot of internal emails from Metta that showed the company was actually people within the company were talking and saying, Why did we suppress the lab leak theory, for instance?
And another executive writes back and says, well, it's because we were under pressure from the White House.
We shouldn't have done it.
That's pretty clear evidence that the government is the driver behind this censorship.
So they had argued for quite some time.
Oh, we're just telling these companies what we want.
You know, they get to make their own decisions.
We're just making our preferences clear.
And it's obvious that that's not what was happening.
Let's just, to make this a little bit concrete, let's just remind the audience of the kinds of things that were being censored.
So I think the government, the New York Times, in that account, want to make people believe that the only things that were being censored were obviously false and dangerous information, meaning people saying, oh, if you take the vaccine, you're going to likely drop dead of a heart attack within the first eight hours, 50% of people who take the vaccine die, things of that nature.
The reality, though, was, according to Mark Zuckerberg, He said that the government was pressuring MEDEC constantly to remove views that turned out to be true.
Not just debatable views, but views that actually turned out to be true.
They were requiring or forcing Facebook to censor.
So if you could just give a few examples from the plaintiffs that you represented, the kinds of things they were saying that ended up being censored.
Sure.
So questioning whether lockdowns were a good idea.
So these were policy debates.
Dr. Kuhldorf had a tweet censored that said, masks give older people a false sense of security because they don't actually work that well.
So maybe they're not taking other precautionary measures if they use them.
He was also censored for a tweet saying that if you have natural immunity, you don't need to get the vaccine.
It's excellent for older people.
It's not necessary for younger people or people with natural immunity.
I mean, this is an opinion.
You can differ from it, but I don't think anybody could call that misinformation.
Another thing that was quite shocking, and this wasn't the plaintiffs in this case, but actually another case that we have at NCLA, is people who suffered themselves severe adverse reactions from the vaccine.
One of them was actually diagnosed by the NIH as vaccine injured.
She was in the AstraZeneca trials, so this isn't an anti-vaxxer.
She got the vaccine herself.
Even though they were true, right?
White House was making specific requests that these people be taken down because their discussions about their injuries were dissuading people from getting vaccinated.
Even though they were true.
Even though they were true, right?
Like, not even Dr. Fauci denies that there are cases where people are injured because of the vaccine.
Every vaccine can have side effects and does.
So these are people who were just wanting to talk about their personal experience doing so truthfully, but because the government was fearful of the effects that their truthful speech would have, they demanded these platforms censored those people.
Exactly.
And the tech companies in the White House even acknowledged that this was true content.
They called it even true content that might cause vaccine hesitancy.
So I mean, this is pretty sure this should be pretty shocking.
Um, just to give kind of the other side, you know, like I showed in my monologue, this is something that has been driving me crazy for a long time.
Like, I didn't really even understand why this had been challenged under Bantham Books.
Reading that case seemed so clear to me.
Now, I realize there is this line that exists that might be somewhat blurry, where you can't bar the government from calling a media outlet, which is kind of what these social media companies are, and trying to persuade them not to publish things.
This happens all the time.
If you're a journalist, when we were doing this Noting Reporting, when I've done other stories, the government calls you, or you call them, and they make their case about why you shouldn't publish something, why it isn't accurate to say it, why it might be dangerous.
But then the decision is yours entirely, and no one thinks that's a First Amendment violation because all they're doing is giving their input, which they have to have the right to do, but they're not threatening you, they're not coercing you, they're not forcing you to do it.
And then on the other side of the line is where it's so clear that the government is threatening actual state punishment for failure to obey their censorship orders, which is the Bandham book case and that line of cases.
How did the government here try and claim that they were on the right side of the line only, or were in that kind of blurry area where it wasn't so clear?
So they said exactly that, you know, we're exercising our own First Amendment rights to let the platforms know what our preferences were.
I'll also say, you know, I think, frankly, that they lied because we got a lot of evidence through discovery.
The judge in the district court awarded preliminary injunction related discovery, which is pretty rare.
And that gave us access to a lot of the most shocking emails where you had the White House emailing the tech companies and berating them and threatening specific repercussions if they didn't, you know, censor in accordance with the government's demands.
So, you know, the government was saying, no, you know, we're just not doing this stuff.
You're wrong.
And we've found out otherwise.
And then the subcommittee also got evidence to the contrary.
So, you know, I think the line is a little bit difficult to draw.
And that's why some people are taking issue with the Fifth Circuit's limitations where they said that entwinement, for instance, so the government being heavily involved but not coercing or driving the decisions is OK.
And there are other people who think entwinement, the government being extremely involved, as it was with CISA sort of flagging, posting this is the, you know, this is the type of thing we think you should be taking down, but not making direct threats.
I think there's an open question as to whether that's OK or not.
So, obviously these companies are incredibly powerful companies.
They're very wealthy.
They're very, you know, rich.
They have a lot of influence and power.
So...
In general, in our country, nothing is really more powerful than the government when they want to kind of corral their power and bring it to bear on the head of somebody.
We're seeing that now with Elon Musk and threats of all kinds of investigations and the like.
Talk about some of the threats or reprisals the state is capable of fulfilling or that they threatened in response to or as punishment for the failure to obey their censorship orders.
The biggest one I think is Section 230.
So Section 230 protects the platforms from liability for things that people post on it.
And this is sort of important in the era of social media because if the platforms can be held liable for posts, it's going to be hard to just have a sort of free and open discussion.
I think the platforms are going to start to have a huge motivation to moderate content very heavily.
So they've You know, long feared repealing or amending Section 230 in a way that would not provide for those protections.
And the government has specifically said, Biden and his communications director have specifically said they're looking at how 230 could be amended or repealed and sort of making sure Congress knows what it wants in that respect.
Yeah, I was thinking it just can't be overstated how intertwined these big tech companies are with the federal government.
Enormous amounts of contracts from the CIA, from the Pentagon, from the intelligence community that get awarded to various companies.
And if the government wants to get vindictive or vengeful, they have all sorts of kind of insidious ways to punish them as well.
So I know you can't predict for sure, but just for viewers who may not know, one of the potential options when a three-judge panel on an appellate court rules is that you can appeal it to the full panel of, what is it, 11 or 13 judges on the appellate court and ask for a full panel ruling, 11 or 13 judges on the appellate court and ask for a full panel ruling, or you can try and appeal Do you have any indication yet from the Justice Department about their intentions, and do you have expectations about where the case is likely to go from here?
I think if I was going to place a bet, I'd say it's likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
If I were the government, I would probably do that.
They don't have that much to lose at this point.
And the ruling is so, you know, it makes it makes them look bad.
And they want to keep doing this.
They want to keep censoring.
So from their perspective, I guess I don't see why they wouldn't go to the Supreme Court.
I'm not sure an en banc, so that's the full panel of the of the circuit.
I don't know if they're going to do any better there because the Fifth Circuit is sort of known to be conservative, quote unquote.
And so if I were in their shoes, I would probably try to go to the Supreme Court.
Yeah, I mean, the Supreme Court, I guess, is known for being a little bit conservative these days too, so it'll be really interesting to see.
But I just want to emphasize, and this is part of my congratulations to you, I think people have to be aware, as somebody who was a lawyer for a long time, I know this personally, it is very rare for a court to issue a ruling like this that is so scathing
About the transgression of the federal government, especially when it comes to things that have long been considered to be within the prerogative of their executive power, to rule that they went so far over the line that an injunction is necessary against the government to enjoin them from doing it, especially this kind of broad scale behavior of communicating coercive threats to big tech.
Absolutely.
It was great to see you.
Something that I, even though I thought the case was so clear cut, I honestly wasn't expecting.
And I don't know if you were, but I really want to congratulate you.
I know these victories are very hard earned and not all that common.
So I hope you enjoy it.
And honestly, as somebody who does believe in the First Amendment and the virtues of a free Internet, somebody who's fought for it a long time, I'm really grateful that there are people like you out there fighting for it.
I think this case is incredibly important and I want to congratulate you for winning it.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely.
It was great to see you.
Good luck.
Thank you.
All right.
So we will be back just after this very quick break, and then we have a second segment for you.
So we'll be back right after this.
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We have some new decrees issued to the American citizenry from our president, Vladimir Zelensky, who resides in Kiev and rules over the American treasury and the Pentagon, from his palace in Kiev, surrounded by the Ukrainian oligarchs who got him into office.
He has some new orders for the West that I think it's very important to share.
He also has some proclamations about how to think about what it means to be pro-Russian Especially on 9-11 I think really resonate for all of us.
We all know that we're duty-bound to follow and to obey whatever orders emanate from President Zelensky.
Elon Musk is stands currently accused of treason or having should have his company seized by the government as a result of his alleged failure in one instance not to provide the Ukrainians with exactly what they wanted when they were trying to attack the Russian fleet in a way that Musk thought because the Russians told him would severely escalate the war and he didn't want to be part of the war escalation.
Apparently this is not allowed as we covered on Friday Night Show.
And so when President Zelensky speaks, it's important that we listen.
We all know that's our obligation as citizens of the West.
And he has a new interview that was published by The Economist yesterday that I wanted to share with you.
I think it contains some important messages.
All of President Zelensky's utterings are important, but these are of particular importance.
So here you see the headline, Donald Trump will quote, never support Putin, says Vladimir Zelensky.
But Ukraine's president fears that some of his country's Western backers are losing faith.
So let's take a little bit of a look at as this war just grinds on.
It's now a year and a half old.
We, as we said earlier, our president, I don't know where exactly on the hierarchy he falls under President Zelensky, but it's somewhere under that, has said that he wants another $25 billion from the American Treasury to send to arms dealers and the CIA to fund and supply the Ukrainian military with still more weapons as it plows along in this counteroffensive, sending huge numbers of its citizens to die while taking very little
territory away from the Russians.
So let's take a look at what he told The Economist.
Quote, That is precisely long war what he is preparing for.
Quote, I have to be ready.
My team has to be ready for the long war.
And emotionally, I am ready.
Ukraine's president said in an interview with The Economist, now many of his citizens are ready.
That's why they're risking their lives to flee to Romania.
Or to Poland or even to Russia under extremely treacherous conditions, including the fact that their government is now arresting them very aggressively, prosecuting them, imprisoning them, sometimes even killing them for trying to flee.
But he's ready.
President Zelensky's ready.
Quote, at the same setting a year ago, the mood was electric and euphoric.
News of Ukrainian forces success in pushing Russians back from Kharkiv region was pinging on every smartphone in the room.
I remember that electric, euphoric climate.
This year, the atmosphere is very different.
Oh, you don't say.
Three months into its counteroffensive, Ukraine has made only modest progress along the all-important southern access, where it is trying to sever Vladimir Putin's land bridge from Russia to Crimea.
The question of how long that will take or whether it will succeed weighs on the minds of Western leaders.
They still talk the good talk, pledging that they will stand with Ukraine, quote, as long as it takes.
Having failed to overwhelm Ukraine quickly, Mr. Putin seems determined to exhaust the country and to wear out its partner's resolve to keep funding and supplying it with arms.
I think it's the West's strategy to wear down Russia by keep supplying Ukraine with funds in arms.
Putin aims to make Ukraine a dysfunctional, depopulated state where refugees cause problems in Europe.
But Mr. Zelensky says Russia itself is fragile.
Mr. Putin does not understand that in the long war he will lose, because it does not matter that 60 or 70 percent of Russians support him.
No, his economy will lose.
At the same time, Ukraine's president is keenly aware of the risk to his country if the West starts to withdraw its economic support.
That would damage not just Ukraine's economy, but its war effort, too.
He puts it in stark terms.
Quote, here's the important part that you need to understand.
Quote, this is President Zelensky and his decree.
If you are not with Ukraine, you are with Russia.
And if you are not with Russia, you are with Ukraine.
And if partners do not help us, it means they will help Russia to win.
That's it.
So, there you have it.
And it's particularly nice to hear this on 9-11.
You're either with Ukraine or you're with the Russians.
There's no middle ground.
If you don't want your country fueling the war in Ukraine, it means you're pro-Russian.
And as we know, the EU and many media outlets in the United States want people who are pro-Russian Censored off the internet, or banned, or otherwise stigmatized.
And we've been asking for a long time, what does that mean to be, quote, pro-Russian?
And it was obvious for a long time that it meant nothing.
You don't have to like President Putin.
You don't have to praise the Russian government.
You don't have to say anything nice about the Kremlin.
You can even hate the Russian government.
But as long as you question whether the United States and the EU should be fueling this war forever, If you just question that, according to President Zelensky, it means you're not with Ukraine and therefore you're with Russia.
That is the formulation that has been very evident for a long time, and as I said, I am grateful to President Zelensky for making that manifest, explicitly so.
The Economist goes on, quote, With several of his Western allies, including America, holding elections next year, Mr. Zelensky knows that sustaining support will be difficult, especially in the absence of significant progress at the front.
Because this is the anniversary of 9-11, I don't think we should have to remind anybody, we probably don't, but we nonetheless will, just in case, that on September 20th, 2001, 10 days after the 9-11 attacks, George Bush delivered a speech to the Joint Session of Congress, the House and the Senate gathered, as they do for the State of the Union Address.
It was a special speech he delivered.
And this speech became notorious because in many ways it exploited the bipartisan and trans-ideological support and unity the United States had in support of our country after that attack.
And that was exploited to usher in a whole range of very extreme policies, the Patriot Act, secret, mass, indiscriminate, warrantless spying.
The elimination of due process, the invasion of Iraq, the implementation of a worldwide torture regime, rendition, meaning kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Syria or Egypt to be interrogated and tortured.
A whole range of things that were done and it was all accomplished through this formulation that either you are with the United States government Or you're with the terrorists.
There's no middle ground.
Here's what George Bush himself said.
This is at the time that the neocon David Frum, who's now at the Atlantic, who leads the pundit class in accusing anyone questioning the war in Ukraine from being a Putin apologist or a Kremlin agent.
Here's what George W. Bush said on that day.
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make.
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
All right, so that became the formulation that essentially suppressed dissent in this country for the next several years leading through the invasion of Iraq.
So, That anyone who questioned the Bush-Cheney administration or what neocons wanted were deemed to be on the side of Al-Qaeda, pro-terrorists, and the rest.
Just like people who questioned the regime change war in Syria were pro-Assad, in Libya were pro-Qaddafi, in Afghanistan were pro-Taliban, and now anyone questioning the war in Ukraine is, as President Zelensky said, on Russia's side.
We're gonna have to risk that though and ask some questions such as who exactly is benefiting from this war?
There are hundreds of billions of dollars flying around this country that was long said to be the most corrupt in Europe.
Every attempt even just to apply some scrutiny or oversight to the billions of dollars being funneled out of the Treasury into the pockets of arms dealers and Ukrainian agencies has been defeated.
When Senator Rand Paul tries to sponsor it, he gets accused by Mitch McConnell of being in the Kremlin's pocket.
And so this money is just floating around.
So here we have a story about who exactly is benefiting from this.
And there you see the title on the screen, which is, in Ukraine, a U.S.
arms dealer is making a fortune and testing limits.
And here you see the picture of this gentleman here.
His name is Mark Morales, and about him, the New York Times says, Billions are pouring into a clubby secretive arms market.
Does that sound comforting?
Do you feel like that money is being accurately and rigidly accounted for?
Billions are pouring into a clubby secretive arms market.
With Pentagon cash and unusually close Iranian military ties, Mark Morales has few peers.
He has some, but he really stands alone.
Listen to who is benefiting.
One of the types of people.
Quote, a half dozen or so men gathered last month for afternoon drinks at the penthouse bar of one of Kiev's swankiest hotels to discuss the lucrative business of arming Ukrainian troops.
The group included Ukrainian military and government officials who were always in the market for explosive shells to lob at invading Russian soldiers.
The center of attention was their gregarious host, a Florida-based arms contractor named Mark Morales, who regaled them with stories of his $10 million yacht, the Trigger Happy it's called, and his search for someone to manage his company's nine-digit portfolio.
Nine digits being 100 million to a billion, essentially.
That's very inspiring that they're thriving so well from this war.
Joining the group was a stout-bearded man who served both the buyers and sellers, Vladimir Koyfman, a chief sergeant in the Ukrainian military whom Mr. Morales plays to arrange meetings with his government contacts.
That unusual arrangement, legal experts say, tests the boundaries of American and Ukrainian corruption laws, prohibiting payments to government officials.
The administration has sent Ukraine more than $40 billion in security aid, including advanced weapons like HIMARS rockets and Patriot missiles, but the Pentagon also relies heavily on little-known arms dealers like Mr. Morales, who have the connections needed to secure ammunition, much of it low-quality or Soviet caliber, from around the world.
They operate in a notoriously shadowy, clubby arms trade, an industry made even more opaque as Ukraine rolled back years of anti-corruption rules.
I thought we heard that President Biden, Vice President Biden at the time, got the Chief Prosecutor, the Attorney General, Viktor Shonkin fired.
And as a result, we now have very strict anti-corruption rules in Ukraine.
Apparently, though, this industry is, quote, even more opaque, as the New York Times puts it, as Ukraine rolled back years of anti-corruption rules.
Arms dealers rushed to the country backed by billions in foreign aid.
Mr. Morales is among Ukraine's most important such suppliers.
The Pentagon has awarded his company about $1 billion in contracts, mostly for ammunition, and records show he has built a roughly $200 million side business selling to the Ukrainians directly.
In addition to employing Sgt.
Koifman, Mr. Morales hired away a longtime advisor to Ukraine's defense minister, who was fired recently amid concerns over graft and mismanagement.
And Mr. Morales' company has been under investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities over a deal that government officials said was botched.
In that way, the deals with Mr. Morales are reminiscent of Ukraine's freewheeling past, when arms dealers forged cozy relationships with military officials, contracts were signed in secret, and weapons brokers frequently found themselves under investigation.
The United States has lectured Ukraine's leaders for more than a decade about the need to clean up that system.
Again, we heard that that succeeded when Joe Biden got the root of the problem, Victor Shumkin fired.
Victor Shumkin, a lot of people in Ukraine say that at the time he was aggressively pursuing Burisma, the company that paid Hunter Biden $80,000 a month to sit on his board as a way of signaling that Burisma was off limits.
And that Biden got Viktor Shokin fired.
And we kept hearing about the great anti-corruption success Ukraine had since then.
But apparently, there's just hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars sloshing around Kiev, ending up in the bank accounts of some of the most unsavory characters.
To say nothing of the more upfront legal payments to Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.
And all the companies that are overtly celebrating the rise of their stock prices as a result of this war.
Remember, the market from the war on terror ended six months earlier and they barely had time to breathe and buy a new yacht and celebrate before they were back at it with the war in Ukraine.
Now, finally, there is some meaningful opposition to spending more money on the war in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, it's coming only from one political party.
Again, it's not my fault.
I wish I could talk about this in a bipartisan way.
I wish there was like an anti-war left-wing wing over here in the Democratic Party and a populist right-wing part of the Republican Party uniting, joining, to end this war, to end the U.S.
role in this war.
They do sometimes do that, usually when there's no chance of success.
Matt Gaetz had a resolution, for example, to either withdraw troops from Syria.
Yes, U.S.
troops are still in Syria, even though there's no war declared there.
Still bombing Syria.
Or to at least require President Biden to submit a plan to Congress about why we're there and what we hope to achieve and when we're going to leave.
And a few members of the squad and some other progressive Republicans, Democrats rather, joined with those Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to vote no, to vote yes rather, but it overwhelmingly failed by the super majority of the War Caucus in both parties.
But in the case of the war in Ukraine, there's only opposition from the right wing of the Republican Party, from the anti-establishment wing, the populist wing.
It was nowhere near enough in May of last year to get near preventing the original $40 billion authorization, but now because the Republicans control the House and these members in particular who are vehemently opposed to more war in Ukraine have a short leash holding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a result of the narrow margin with which he worked to become Speaker and the concessions he had to make to become that,
It may be politically unviable for Speaker McCarthy to actually bring this to a floor vote.
Obviously, if he brings it to a floor vote, it will get approved because every Democrat, most likely, will join with the establishment of the Republican Party and give President Biden what he wants through an overwhelming majority.
But the members of the House Republican caucus trying to stop U.S.
spending on this war may prevent Kevin McCarthy from doing so.
And that's why in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are working together, along with members of the House that are pro-war, like Michael McFaul, who's in charge of the House Intelligence Committee, to try and get this money authorized and work their way around the dissidents in the House.
Here's the New York Times today.
Quote, as Ukraine aid benefits their districts, some House Republicans oppose it.
So they're trying to propagandize on behalf of the war by saying, this money isn't going to Ukraine.
It's being used to create jobs in the United States.
And even Republicans who represent the district where these jobs are being created from this war are nonetheless against it.
But it has some interesting information in here anyway that's worth hearing.
Quote, the American push to fund Kiev's war effort has created big economic opportunities for Mesquite, Texas and other cities around the country.
Some of their GOP congressmen want to end it.
By early next year, this city, best known for being the rodeo capital of Texas, is on track to becoming a centerpiece of the American effort to increase artillery production vital to the war in Ukraine.
A hulking new plant going up next to a highway exchange not far from downtown Mesquite promises to nearly double current U.S.
output.
Replenishing stockpiles and preparing more ammunition to beat back the Russian invasion.
For a city in the midst of engineering an economic renaissance, the General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems factory is a major boon.
Do you see what the New York Times is trying to do?
They're trying to say, you should be happy we're giving your money to General Dynamics to send weapons to Ukraine.
Because it's producing a job boon in the United States.
How many jobs exactly is this incredibly exciting factory creating for these hundreds of billions of dollars that likely will end up in Kiev before all is said and done?
Here's what the New York Times says, quote, it is expected to employ a minimum of 125 people.
125 people for these tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine into the pocket of people like Mike Morales and other arms dealers, you can, but don't worry, because in one town in Texas, General Dynamics is about to hire 125 people, maybe 150, maybe even 200.
It will also, quote, bring business opportunities to local suppliers, retailers, and restaurants, and city officials hope, potentially help turn the area into an industrial hotbed of well-paying jobs.
If these jobs are dependent on the war in Ukraine, how good are they?
How long is that war going to go on?
What happens when this war ends if it does?
Quote, none of that appears to have persuaded Representative Lance Gooden, the Republican whose district will house the new plant, to support continuing U.S.
aid to Kiev.
Over the summer, he joined dozens of House Republican colleagues in calling for an end to American support for Ukraine's fight, voting for measures to strip $300 million in security assistance for the war-torn country from next year's defense budget and prohibit Congress from approving any more funds for this conflict.
His opposition and that of many others in his party has imperiled President Biden's request for $24 billion in additional funding for the war, threatening to derail an emergency spending bill that lawmakers in both parties are working to push through Congress next month.
This reflects how the quote, America first mentality popularized by former President Donald J. Trump has spread and intensified Republicans.
So let me get this right.
The America First mentality popularized by former President Donald J. Trump manifests in an effort to prevent tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars in American money from going to an overseas endless war and feeling that war with no end in sight.
That's something we're supposed to get angry about?
Do you have any questions about why President Trump faces criminal prosecution and felony charges in four jurisdictions?
Do you think the U.S.
security state, which Senator Chuck Schumer warned nobody in Washington ever confronts because of fear of what they will do, likes the fact that President Trump has ushered in a mentality that, in the words of the New York Times, has caused there to be finally an effort to prevent endless war spending?
The New York Times continues to propagandize.
This has prompted increasing numbers of lawmakers, including some whose constituents benefit directly from continuing American aid, to refuse to keep supporting it.
Now, there was a part of this article I really wanted to show you that is the key part of the article.
We don't have it here, but it says essentially that what this means is that for the first time in decades, Bipartisan support for the U.S.
military-industrial complex is finally being challenged.
So we have all these people who branded themselves as being part of the Bernie Sanders movement, of attacking the Democratic Party established from the left, who have now very quickly and very explicitly turned into people saying the Biden administration is fantastic, They're so much better than the Republicans.
Everyone has to vote for Joe Biden, not just in the general election, but even in the primary, because he's so incredibly great.
And Donald Trump is this really evil figure.
And here we have two stories, one of which is an appellate court finding that the Biden administration ushered in one of the gravest and most severe First Amendment attacks in decades, if not in the history of the judiciary, according to the court.
In a full frontal assault on the free speech rights of Americans.
And then the second one that says essentially that the mentality unleashed by Donald Trump is causing the first ever challenge to the bipartisan consensus on the military industrial complex in decades, including trying to bring an end to the US role in this war.
You will never hear them grapple with that.
You will never hear them assign value to it or grapple with the fact that these things are happening.
And how they weigh against, I don't know, whatever they're claiming is good, like the appointment of some good appointees to the National Labor Review Board or whatever they cite to try and claim that President Biden is this incredibly generationally inspiring figure.
I mean, it's very easy not to care about this war because Americans, except for the few who went there, have remained very distant from it, but our war is destroying Ukraine.
It is forcing enormous numbers to die against their will, to fight and die against their will.
It poses a serious risk of escalation.
By extending beyond Ukraine into other countries, by getting NATO involved, by provoking the risk of the use of nuclear weapons.
Again, Joe Biden was the one who said that that war has brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And yet, nobody in Washington seems to care about that at all.
That's like an imaginary threat that they assign zero value to.
I don't really care where it comes from, which party it comes from, which ideology it comes from.
The fact that for the first time in a long time, the bipartisan consensus on fueling the military-industrial complex with no one in sight is being challenged is something I'm going to celebrate.
And the same is true for a court ruling that put an immediate stop To one of the gravest assaults on both a free internet and free speech in many decades.
The New York Times can call that a victory for conservatives if they want, I don't care about that either.
But when you look at what is going on here, what the power centers in Washington care about, censoring the internet, funding the war in Ukraine with that end, censoring anyone who dissents from any of that.
It is an establishment ideology that is emanating from all political parties, and the only kind of politics that matters is one that opposes that no matter where it comes from.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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