Neocons in Full-Panic Over Trump’s Skyrocketing 2024 Support. INTERVIEW: Irish Journalist Ben Scallan on Ireland's Riots, Censorship Laws, & More
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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 important American political dynamics over the last six years has been the clear migration of neocons, warmongers, and war hawks from the Republican Party, where they situated themselves during the War on Terror, back to the Democratic Party, from which many of them originated.
Back in 2016, they originally, and quite lucratively, were branding themselves Never Trump Conservatives to imply that they were still conservatives and republicans just as much as before, but were too principled and simply could not tolerate Donald Trump.
People like Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney, David Frum, Jonah Goldberg, the Lincoln Project con artist, and so many agents of the U.S.
security state, such as the Bush-Cheney head of the CIA and NSA, General Michael Hayden, rapidly grew in popularity, got rich writing anti-Trump books, and became completely rehabilitated in the eyes of American liberals by posing as conservatives who are simply too noble, too patriotic.
Who too much loved and believed in the rule of law and the virtues of honesty to possibly abide Donald Trump but gradually as their social media followings and book audiences and donors became composed almost exclusively of American liberals, And as their only real constituency beyond that continued to be the country's largest media corporations, which could not get enough of them, they very quickly succumbed to audience capture.
More and more began opposing not only Donald Trump, but almost every other Republican who wasn't as consumed with the same kind of monomaniacal hatred for Trump that consumed them.
And then somewhat slowly but surely, they began admitting, one after the next, that they are really just standard-issue Democrats, that they oppose not just Trump now, but the entire Republican Party, and that most of all, they vehemently support the re-election of Joe Biden, whom they regard with great respect and reverence and affection.
And one of the most interesting questions, and one of the most deliberately ignored, is why have the most destructive, deceitful, and dangerous neocons in our country, the people who lied the U.S.
into multiple wars, not just Iraq, who cheer every American war from a safe distance, wanting to send other people to fight in them, who endorse classic authoritarianism and censorship soon as it suits their agenda, And who lied the way most people change their socks.
Why have these people become the most devoted Democrats and Biden supporters in media?
Conversely, why are the nation's most extreme neocons also those who most fear and hate Donald Trump?
It's obvious why American liberals want to avoid asking that question.
They've been doing it for years.
But in that question resides so many vital revelations about the state of the Democratic Party and the Trump movement.
Now, I bring all this up in part because I've long been interested in this question, but also because these anti-Trump neocons are now clearly in full-blown panic mode as a result of recent polling and other political troubles for Joe Biden.
They have all united the largest liberal media outlets to endorse a hysterical, unhinged script.
Yes, we told you in 2016 that Donald Trump would be a fascist and the new Hitler if he won, but this time we're really meaning it.
Now we'll look at why these people are doing this and how they even aided the media outlets all to say the same thing and why this is all happening.
Then, the country of Ireland has become the subject of a great deal of attention and interest in the West.
That is true in part because of violent riots that just broke out in Dublin following the horrendous stabbing of three Irish children in broad daylight with the police naming as a, quote, person of interest, an Algerian refugee who had evaded multiple deportation orders in the past.
But it's also attracting attention for the way Irish leaders are exploiting that unrest to try to jam down the public's throat one of the most repressive and draconian censorship and hate speech laws yet enacted in the West.
And what we've always argued when reporting on hate speech laws in other countries is that they're important not just unto themselves but also because of what they forebode for what's coming to the United States.
One of the Irish journalists who has been covering these issues most intrepidly and independently is Ben Scallon of the Dublin-based Grit Media.
He'll be our guest tonight to describe what is happening in Ireland and the implications of it for all Western democracies.
And then finally, a vote in Congress will be held imminently, perhaps as soon as tonight, declaring that anti-Zionism is now anti-Semitism.
And this resolution will almost certainly pass with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Now, maybe you're somebody who believes that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
I'm not.
But either way, we'll examine this question.
Why is Congress, the United States Congress, now instructing Americans on an overwhelming bipartisan basis which political views are deemed bigoted and which are not?
There's clearly dangers and abuses from allowing them to do this.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
One of the most warped aspects of American media culture is that the people who most aggressively lie and then get caught lying don't end up being held accountable and most definitely don't end up being expelled from the highest levels of corporate media, The opposite happens as we've covered many times.
They get promoted and rewarded.
for doing that lying, especially if that lying is done on behalf of the agenda of the U.S.
security state.
If you lie to sell wars, if you lie to sell coups, if you lie to sell authoritarianism that the government wants, not only won't you be troubled in any way in your career, you will be fueling your assent The journalists who get caught lying most are those who are most promoted.
In fact, you could really say that within corporate media, lying is not just tolerated, it's required, it's a prerequisite to advancing up the corporate media ladder.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who did more than any other American journalist to convince Americans after 9-11 that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9-11 attack so that he could usher in the Iraq war that he long wanted.
Has skyrocketed up the corporate ladder, ending up as not just the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, he told those lies with The New Yorker, and then he got recruited to run The Atlantic, but he's also now the host of PBS NewsHour.
That's what happens when you get caught lying.
Now, so many of the people who have been responsible, most responsible for those lies in politics and media are neocons, the people who were widely vilified By most of the left liberal faction in the United States after the war on terror, because they were the ones who planted themselves in the Republican Party, knowing that all the wars they wanted were now possible by exploiting 9-11.
And so many of these people had their careers and reputations left in tatters, but now they've completely rehabilitated them by simply becoming the leaders of the anti-Trump media animus in the United States.
That's all it takes.
For most people in media and politics, there's only one issue.
Do you hate Donald Trump or don't you?
And if you do, you're automatically on the side of the good.
You're a serious, responsible person no matter what you've done in the past.
And the really interesting thing is that these neocons have completely abandoned the Republican Party and are now back to being Democrats.
They love Joe Biden.
They see the Democratic Party as their most promising vehicle to advance their warmongering neocon agenda.
That's why they're back into the Democratic Party and it's always been an interesting question.
Why do those people who have done the most To destroy the image of our country, the standing of it, who have the most amount of blood on their hands, who lie so frequently, who embrace authoritarianism.
Why are those people the ones who most hate and fear Trump?
To the point where they completely transformed into the opposite politically of what they were, and why are they now the leaders, the thought leaders, the most popular pundits for American liberalism?
And what we've seen over the last week is this incredible theater where they've all decided they're going to read from the same script.
They ran to all the corporate media outlets, the biggest ones in the United States, that hired them in the wake of all those lies.
And they use those newspapers to send out the same script, almost verbatim, about how Donald Trump is Hitler.
We know that everybody in American discourse who you're supposed to hate immediately gets turned into the new Hitler.
It was done to Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad.
And Ahmadinejad in Iran.
And Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Now Hamas.
And, of course, Donald Trump and any Republican politicians who in any way are attentive to the populist wing of that party rather than to its establishment wing.
The obvious proximate cause for this panic that neocons are in are all the polls showing that Joe Biden is in very serious trouble heading into 2024 and Donald Trump is stronger than ever.
One of the polls that most Triggered this kind of hysteria was this New York Times poll from November 5th.
Trump leads in five critical states as voters blast Biden.
The New York Times Siena poll finds.
And it said voters in battleground states said they trusted Donald J. Trump over President Biden on the economy, foreign policy, and immigration, as Mr. Biden's multi-racial base shows signs of fraying.
And here you see the graph showing that Trump is now clearly ahead in five of the six swing states, all of which Joe Biden won in 2020.
Up 10 in Nevada, five in Arizona, four in Pennsylvania, six in Georgia, and five in Michigan.
The only one where Biden leads Trump is in Wisconsin by two points.
And what really scares them the most is the Fleeing of Black voters, Latino voters, and Muslim voters, all the people they thought they held captive forever, who are now saying they won't vote for Biden and or will actually vote for Trump.
Here from November 28th is Gallup's findings.
Poor marks for Biden on the Middle East, the economy, and foreign affairs.
Oh, is that all?
Just the Middle East, the economy, and foreign affairs?
Biden is an extremely unpopular president.
People do not trust his judgment in any way.
And of course, they can see that his brain is melting before our eyes.
And it spells gigantic trouble for the Democrats, and these neocons know it.
And at the same time, Donald Trump's lead is bigger than ever in the Republican primary, to the point where big donors have abandoned Ron DeSantis and now are pouring millions and millions of dollars into a desperate effort to prop up Nikki Haley.
That's their last hope.
Nikki Haley.
Selling Nikki Haley to the Republican base over Donald Trump.
What has made matters a lot worse for Biden is the war in Israel, the war by Israel in Gaza, because the Israel-Palestinian issue has really been on the back burner for many years.
We've barely talked about it on this show in the last couple of years.
We barely just debated it in our political culture in general.
The last time there was a major bombing campaign by Israel on Gaza was 2014.
They've been bombing them every year periodically, but the big sustained last bombing campaign was in 2014 under President Obama.
That's nine years ago.
And there are a ton of new voters, new Americans paying attention to politics for the first time since then, in part because of Donald Trump and in part just because young people every year become adults and start paying attention to politics.
And this is the first look A lot of American liberals are getting of Israel and most importantly of how steadfastly the Democratic Party supports Israel.
And they're watching every night on TV dead Palestinian babies and videos of thousands of Palestinians being killed and they're hearing Joe Biden said, of course, we're going to keep funding and arming Israel.
And it's something they didn't know and they're horrified by.
And it's really costing Joe Biden in his base.
Young voters, people of color, Muslims here from Politico.
In on December 2nd, swing state Muslim leaders launched a campaign to quote abandon Biden in 2024.
Now Muslim voters are not a very powerful or significant part of our voting constituency numerically, but they're concentrated in several key states, in particular Michigan.
That Joe Biden absolutely needs if he has any chance of being re-elected in 2024.
So you have Muslim American leaders telling the Muslims who are part of their organizations and who listen to them that Biden's support for Israel and its devastation of Gaza is a red line that means they shouldn't vote for him.
That is real political trouble.
Here's Politico.
Quote, The bubbling anger among Arab and Muslim Americans over the president's handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict could threaten his chances of re-election.
The bubbling anger among Arab and Muslim Americans could threaten Biden's chances of re-election in many of the swing states in 2024, all of which contain key pockets of Arab American and Muslim American voting blocs.
The growing Muslim American population is roughly 3.45 million people, according to Pew.
In 2020, roughly 59% of Arab Americans supported Biden, according to the Arab American Institute.
But recent polling suggests his support has continued to deteriorate.
Now, obviously, Trump is a very pro-Israel politician.
His presidency was extremely pro-Israel.
He moved the embassy to Jerusalem, something that only years earlier was considered a fringe idea.
It didn't become controversial because the senior Democrat in Washington, the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, stood up and said, I agree with Trump.
I support Trump.
I congratulate him on what he did.
Trump had made early signs in 2015 and 2016 that his instinct as someone who wants to forge deals was, according to him, the United States was too pro-Israel and lost any standing to be a fair broker negotiating a deal, which generals have long said is crucial to American national security.
He said we can't be so pro-Israel if you want to have credibility to negotiate a deal.
But very quickly after that, when that caused a conflict, that was one of the things that made neocons hate and distrust Trump.
He got very on board with the opposite narrative, became extremely pro-Israel, went to AIPAC, began listening less to Steve Bannon and more to Jared Kushner.
And his president, he was very pro-Israel, said there's no reason from a Muslim perspective to think Trump would be better.
But they're not saying they're going to vote for Trump.
They're saying they just won't vote.
If you believe that what Israel is doing is a war crime or a crime against humanity, as a lot of people do, and you know that Joe Biden is the one enabling it, of course that's a red line for a lot of voters.
So Biden was already in big trouble in the polls.
This is obviously making it worse.
Losing your most energized and important base.
And now what you're seeing is a major media meltdown.
People petrified in the media.
That Trump might win again, and they know they have no control over the voting populace.
The voting populace has tuned these people out.
So, all they can do is reach for the most extremist, unhinged script possible.
And it's amazing, just in the last three days, to watch every major American media outlet, practically, instantly embrace the same exact script.
They're like dancing seals, trained seals that are dancing to the same music.
So many liberal digital outlets that are based in Brooklyn have failed over the last decade.
It's not hard to understand why.
All these digital outlets, the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and Vice, that have been ravaged by layoffs, that can't make money, are just Democratic Party spokespeople.
But when you have the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and much bigger outlets, the Atlantic, Who are doing that also, who are also talking about how Trump is Orange Hill, or why does anybody need these digital outlets?
They sound exactly like MSNBC and CNN, and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so there's no reason to read them, and nobody is.
And that's why they're all suffering huge layoffs, because they're completely redundant.
They're all, it's a herd mentality.
They all say exactly the same things in exactly the same ways.
So look at how this is being done.
Here's the New York Times from today.
Why a second Trump presidency may be more radical than his first.
Obviously the problem here in trying to convince Americans that they shouldn't vote for Trump because he'll be a new Hitler, is that Trump was already president for four years.
He didn't put dissidents in concentration camps, he didn't close media outlets, he didn't execute people.
Because they're minorities.
It's very hard to convince people that Trump is going to be the new Hitler when they already watched him for four years.
Even if they didn't like him, they didn't see any Hitlerian behavior.
So they have to escalate the rhetoric.
No, this time we really mean it.
Donald Trump has long exhibited authoritarian impulses, said the New York Times, but his policy operation is now more sophisticated and the buffers to check him are weaker.
Mr. Trump's violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm in comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen.
All right.
As he runs for president again, facing four criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump may seem more angry, desperate, and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term.
No U.S. president before him has toyed with withdrawing from NATO, the military alliance, and the Western world.
He said he would fundamentally reevaluate NATO's purpose and NATO's mission in a second term.
All right.
First of all, Trump said the same thing in 2016.
Why are we in NATO?
Why are we spending all this money to protect Western Europe when they don't spend any money on our defense?
Secondly, withdrawing from NATO is not a fascist or authoritarian move.
If anything, NATO has been responsible for all sorts of wars, offensive wars, in Yugoslavia that had nothing to do with defending.
Europe bombing Serbia, we were told it was because of Milosevic's war crimes, that had nothing to do with defending Europe.
Regime change in Libya, that had nothing to do with defending Europe from attack, the original purpose of NATO.
And then what's happening in Ukraine, I would argue the same thing, but leave that aside.
So people debate NATO because they should debate NATO.
Trump did it in 2016.
This isn't even new.
Questioning NATO is not the stuff of fascism.
You're allowed to question NATO.
We should be questioning NATO.
Quote, more than anything else, and I can't believe they're using this as the argument for why Trump is going to be the new Hitler, Mr. Trump's vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values.
Building on how hard he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.
They just said in the prior paragraph that Trump himself faces four separate indictments and prosecutions on felony charges, two from the Biden Justice Department, two from liberal state prosecutors, one in Georgia, one in New York.
Hunter Biden, the whole case was Corrupted by aggressive White House protection and Justice Department protection as two IRS whistleblowers came forward to warn.
Only to then watch his plea deal fall apart the minute it was subjected to judicial scrutiny.
How can these same people who are cheering Trump's Here's the Atlantic from Jeffrey Goldberg.
that the only chance they have to win or one of the main chances is to put Trump in prison, their main political adversary, how can they then turn around and say the reason Trump's going to be Hitler is because he's going to weaponize the Justice Department against his political opponents?
Which is exactly what's being done now by them.
Here's The Atlantic from Jeffrey Goldberg, arguably the single most dishonest and deceitful American journalist with the most amount of blood on his hands unless you count Bill Crystal as a journalist or David Fromm as one.
And of course, David Frum also works at The Atlantic.
December 4th, all those today.
A warning, America survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage.
A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.
It's amazing, both The New York Times and The Atlantic out with exactly the same narrative, exactly the same script today.
Quote, if there is a bottom, no sure thing, he's getting closer.
Tom Nichols, who writes for the Atlantic's daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism.
Argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet fascist.
Oh, really?
Because this is all he's been called for the last five years by all of these media outlets.
Now we're hearing that, according to experts, now it's finally time to call Trump a fascist?
Quote, for weeks, Trump has been ramping up the rhetoric, Nichols wrote.
Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country.
Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it.
The country survived the first Trump term.
They're not without serious damage.
The second one, if there is one, will be much worse.
I know Democrats talk so affectionately about immigrants, and yet the border is exactly the same as it was under Trump.
All these immigrants who are being detained in these facilities that caused AOC to go in 2018 and pose for cameras while she was dressed in all white and crying, none of that has changed.
So what they do is, as usual, is they take very American policies, attribute them to Trump, and then call him Hitler.
Here is one of the worst neocons, Robert Kagan.
We devoted an entire show to Bill Kristol a couple months ago and all his warmongering and the bloodshed he's responsible for with all the deceit he spread.
His partner in all that was Robert Kagan.
They invented modern-day neoconservatism in the 1990s with a project for a new American century that called for regime change in Iraq and many other countries before 9-11.
And then they exploited 9-11 to bring it, uh, usher it in.
Robert Kagan is also the husband of Victoria Nuland.
The ubiquitous State Department official who ends up in power no matter whether you vote for George Bush and Dick Cheney or Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
The only time when she's not in power is when Trump was elected.
That's one of the reasons they hate him so much.
It was the only time his wife, Victoria Nuland, didn't get to run Ukraine.
Robert Kagan is now, after spending all those years lying the country into wars, including the Iraq War, is now a Washington Post editor.
Do you see how lying is rewarded?
How it ensures that you explode up the corporate ladder in corporate media?
Same exact script.
All in five days or four days.
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.
We should stop pretending.
Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship?
The odds are, again, pretty good.
The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump any more than Hitler's local gaudiers needed instruction.
In such circumstances, people work toward the Fuhrer.
Which is to say they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.
We can expect more of this when the war against the quote, deep state begins in earnest.
This is what they're really afraid of.
Trump says he's on the war path against the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the NSA.
And these people live on the U.S.
security state.
They love it.
It's the weapons of war that they use.
According to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security.
A, quote, uniparty of elites made up of neoconservatives on the right and liberal globalists on the left who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart.
That is the uniparty.
Neoconservatives and establishment liberal interventionists.
He described that perfectly.
This is why Robert Kagan, well before Trump came on the scene, was preparing to support Hillary Clinton.
There's an op-ed article on this in 2014 in the New York Times, Hillary Clinton's Next Act.
It talks about how neocons were lining up behind her because they saw in her a much more promising warmonger than the increasingly anti-interventionist Republican Party.
This has been going on forever.
Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition proved powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship.
Robert Kagan has been calling people Hitler forever.
He called Saddam Hussein Hitler and Assad Hitler and Gaddafi all the people they wanted to go to war against.
It's just, he opens his mouth and he labels people Hitler.
These are the people who are the serious foreign policy experts at the highest levels of our corporate media.
Here is Liz Cheney.
Obviously, she's an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq to this very day.
Has supported every single American war, just like her dad.
Her dad supported the Vietnam War, but unfortunately couldn't go fight in it himself.
Got to Furman, sent a bunch of other people to die in it.
And that's what the Cheney family continues to do.
And she, of course, is obsessed monomaniacally with her anti-Trump hatred The media loves her, they're now promoting her anti-Trump book, even though Liz Cheney has no constituency other than some liberals.
She got booted out of office by a record 36 point loss in the Republican primary when running for re-election last year.
Here she is on CBS, exactly the same script.
You say Donald Trump, if he is re-elected, it will be the end of the republic.
What do you mean?
He's told us what he will do.
It's very easy to see the steps that he will take.
People who say, well, if he's elected, it's not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances, don't fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted.
One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.
I mean, isn't it so obvious and blatant that they all got together and decided to say this all at once?
This was December 3rd.
This all is emerging within three days.
And every major corporate media outlet coming from the same group of people, the same warmongering neocons, I got my start in journalism, I began writing about politics because the war on terror under George Bush and Dick Cheney was little more than an attempt to import authoritarianism of the kind they pretend to be so concerned about into the United States.
With these radical theories of executive power that said the president can do anything in the name of national security, even break the law.
They had all kinds of lawless torture camps and detention, due process free detention camps.
They spied on Americans without the warrants required by law.
They are what they're trying to convince Americans Trump will really be this time if he wins.
Here's Ann Applebaum, one of the very same people, who is so concerned that Trump will abandon NATO if he wins.
That's her warning.
And then here is David Frum, who was George W. Bush's speechwriter.
Spent 2003 calling Americans who, conservatives who didn't support the war in Iraq, unpatriotic.
These are the worst people, the most destructive people.
And they've united to try and claim that if the Americans elect Donald Trump, as they seem poised to do according to polls, they're going to get a new Hitler.
Here's David Frum warning about the danger ahead in the Atlantic.
If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he better bring a better understanding of the systemic vulnerabilities, more willing enablers, and a more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries.
A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.
Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functioning government, with a president at its head, but the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal at its head.
The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw.
For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
If Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward.
Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin.
Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.
Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6th can never be undone.
They're such drama queens.
They know people have tuned them out.
People hate the media in this country.
They despise it.
They don't trust it.
And they don't trust the institutions of authority either, which is why Trump is leading in the polls, despite being indicted four separate times.
Because Americans look and don't see that as a credible accusation of criminality.
They see it as a corrupted one.
And so the only thing these people can do, what they've been doing for decades, is running around warning everybody and screaming and ranting about and raving about Hitler.
Even though these people are the most authoritarian ones in the country, in addition to being the most deceitful and having the most blood on their hands.
Trump Was the only president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war.
That's one of the main reasons they hate him.
War is the thing on which they feed for their sense of purpose, for their agenda, for their geopolitical interests, for their love of other countries, for the way in which they profit and feel strong.
All these people have been cheering the most classically authoritarian measures for years in the name of stopping Trump.
Here was the same Atlantic in April of 2022 by the same Jeffrey Goldberg.
Disinformation is the story of our age.
The Atlantic has played a major role in the emergence of this fraudulent disinformation industry which is designed to justify censoring a political speech on the internet.
and giving it a guise of apolitical science.
These people are not just warmongers and liars, but they are authoritarians as well.
And we can't mention Jeffrey Goldberg without mentioning his March 2002 article at The New Yorker, the headline of which is a great terror, but the subheadline, which we'll have, is that Saddam Hussein was in a league with Al Qaeda, that he had ties to Al Qaeda.
And by the time the war in Iraq came, 70% of Americans were convinced Saddam Hussein had personally planned the 9-11 attack, and it was because of people like Jeffrey Goldberg that they believed that falsehood.
Here is, also in the Atlantic, in Applebaum, social media made spreading disinformation easy.
She's been the one talking about Russia's online manipulation campaign.
Here you see Russia's online information campaign.
She talks to David Axelrod about disinformation.
These are the people who have been justifying and building the censorship industry from within the corporate media.
These are the ones who have the audacity to warn that Trump is authoritarian.
Here is David from cheering Donald Trump's indictment.
Cheering the fact that the Biden Justice Department is trying to prosecute and put in prison their leading political ally, all while he goes around also warning that it's Trump who is the great threat to our republic and to the foundations on which it is built.
These are the people who are the most dangerous and they are now completely aligned with the Democratic Party.
Liberals tried claiming, no, no, we're not aligned in anything.
It's just a marriage of convenience, a marriage of the moment.
They hate Trump.
We hate Trump.
That's all the things are that we have in common.
And yet the reality is these people see the Democratic Party for very good reason.
As the best vessel for advancing their agenda, they were fully behind the U.S.
funding and fueling of the war in Ukraine.
They're fully behind Joe Biden's policies in Israel.
They fully support the Democratic Party's belief in censoring the internet.
And it's really worth asking if you're an American liberal, if you're a supporter of the Democratic Party, if you plan to vote for Joe Biden.
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And authoritarian and chronic liars, why are they so excited about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party?
And why do they most hate and fear Trump?
that is a question that's really worth asking.
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Today we have a journalist from Ireland who is going to talk to us about the recent riots in Ireland and especially the efforts by the government there to exploit those riots and other frustrations to usher in one of the most draconian hate speech laws.
That any Western democracy will have and I've talked before about how important that is to pay attention to when it happens in the EU or the UK or Canada or Brazil or now Ireland because of every time governments go a little bit further in the West with censorship powers, every other government then knows that it can.
And we'll have them on in just a second but there's some breaking news I wanted to talk to you about.
Briefly before we get to that interview, which is a House resolution that is now pending before Congress and it is one that is going to be imminently voted on as perhaps as early as tonight.
And it's a resolution, so it's not a binding law.
It's a sense of Congress.
But there's a part of it that I think is very disturbing.
Here's the resolution.
It was brought to everyone's attention by my former Intercept colleague, Ryan Grimm.
And it's introduced by Congressmen Miller and Kristoff.
And it's a resolution strongly condemning and denouncing the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world.
Which is fine, you know, it's Congress denouncing bigotry.
I mean, I don't know that it's such an important thing for Congress to do, but it's not necessarily an offensive one, except for the fact that they go to define what anti-Semitism is, and what they say is, anti-Semitism clearly and firmly, oh, the House clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Now I think this word Zionism in the wake of this war has been thrown around without the meaning being discussed.
Zionism is a new ideology.
It emerged in the early part of the 20th century.
It didn't really exist before that.
And the theory was that Jews should have an ethnostate, their own ethnostate, where it's a state of Jews, it's a Jewish state, Jews form the majority.
Jews govern that country.
It's a country where Jews from around the world have the right to come.
This didn't exist before this ideology.
They called it Zionism.
And you can go and read the earliest theoretical pioneers of Zionism, and it provoked a lot of debate.
There was a lot of opposition to it.
Where is this country going to be?
And why is there going to be an ethnostate created, a new ethnostate?
Is that really comporting with Jewish values?
There were a lot of Jews who thought Zionism was inconsistent with Judaism for so many reasons.
It was debated all over the world.
It took decades for the State of Israel to be formed in 1948.
When the British, having been attacked with terrorism by Jews in that country, they bombed the King David Hotel and did other extremist acts using violence to win their own country.
That's one of the points is people will use violence to gain the right of sovereignty.
They fought for and they finally won the right to have a state comporting with Zionism.
But there are a lot of people who oppose the idea, including Jews.
And there's no reason in the world why opposing Zionism, the idea that Jews should have their own ethno-state, requires anti-Semitism.
Obviously, some people who are anti-Zionist are that because they're anti-Semitic.
Some people are opposed to immigration because they're white nationalists.
That doesn't mean that being opposed to immigration requires white nationalism, even though some people are opposed to immigration because they're white nationalists.
Some people oppose affirmative action because they're anti-black, they're anti-black racists.
But being opposed to affirmative action doesn't require anti-black racism, et cetera.
So I don't believe that being anti-Zionist is the equivalent of anti-Semitism, but I know probably a lot of you do, and that's fine.
That's a debate Americans should have, and can have, are free to have.
Why is it that it is now the role of the United States Congress to officially decree to Americans which political views they shouldn't have on the grounds that they're bigoted?
How is that a proper function for the United States Congress to serve, to dictate to Americans this political view that many of you hold is bigoted, it's anti-Semitic?
Obviously that can have immense chilling effects.
People don't want to express a view that the United States Congress on an overwhelming bipartisan basis, which is what this vote will be, obviously.
Few people will be courageous enough to oppose it.
I think Thomas Massey, the Republican from Kentucky, will just on principle.
I don't know for sure, but I think he will.
He has in the past opposed things like this.
Maybe a few left-wing members of the Democratic Party will, but it'll obviously chill political speech if Congress just goes around demonizing certain political views officially as part of legislation or resolutions, but also it can have very real effects.
Lots of institutions, corporations, universities officially ban all forms of bigotry, including anti-Semitism, and this would fortify the idea that you should not tolerate debates about Zionism.
In the United States, all to protect a foreign government, a foreign country in Israel, we're going to start chipping away at the free speech rights of Americans.
That's been happening since the start of this war.
American student groups being banned.
People proposing the FBI investigate people who are pro-Palestinian.
Colombia banned two pro-Palestinian groups, one of which was a group of Jewish students.
So you can dismiss this as trivial, and I understand why it's symbolic, but it's actually quite insidious.
It sets an extremely bad precedent.
What if tomorrow they say opposition to immigration is white nationalist?
Maybe some people who are comfortable with this won't quite be comfortable with that.
It's a good reason to not want the United States Congress in the business of decreeing which particular political views are bigoted and which ones aren't.
Alright so Ben Scallon is an Irish journalist and he's somebody that we began speaking with several months ago before these latest riots that took place in Dublin in the wake of the stabbing because I wanted him to come on the show and talk about this censorship craze that is consuming large parts of the Irish elite and the incredibly draconian bill they're trying to get passed that will allow them to punish people
For not just expressing, but being in possession of hate speech defined in the most ambiguous and broadest way possible.
And then the riots happened in Ireland and the case picked up and we decided it was really important to have an Irish journalist on to help us understand what's happening in his country in Ireland.
And so we have this Dublin-based journalist, Ben Scowen.
He's a great independent journalist whose work I've been following for a while.
And here is that interview that we taped just a few minutes before we went on air.
It's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Thank you so much for having me on.
It's great to talk to you.
Yeah, you too.
So, as I said, there's a lot of attention being paid now to Ireland here in the United States and the West generally because of these recent riots and because of the government's response, including seemingly wanting to censor even further.
And I want to talk about the substance of those in a bit.
But you and I were talking about having you come on to talk about events in your country well before that, a couple months ago, I think.
In part because a lot of this has been brewing all year.
So before we get to the recent events, I remember hearing the Irish government complaining pretty bitterly back in February, the beginning of this year, about what they called an exponential increase in protests and suggesting more controls on speech were needed to respond to that.
What were these protests all about throughout this year before we had the most recent one and in the wake of that stabbing?
Yeah, so Ireland has seen an unprecedented number of protests regarding mass immigration in the past year or so, and that's been an issue that's been kind of burgeoning on the agenda for quite a few years, but it has really accelerated, I would say, since the start of 2022 with the advent of the war in Ukraine and the fact that there's been a huge
Influx of people to Western Europe from other parts of the world due to these kinds of conflicts.
And so Ireland, for our part, being a small island, the Republic of Ireland has a population of just about 5 million people.
We've taken in 100,000 individuals from Ukraine and many more from other parts of the world, which is obviously a huge proportion of our population.
There are towns and villages all up and down the west coast of this country, which have had their population more than doubled by this process.
And so that's going to give anybody whiplash, you know, regardless of what your thoughts are on immigration in general, that's a huge number.
And And so there have been a lot of people across this country in various little communities who have said, look, this is this is just excessive.
You know, we want to be welcoming.
We want to help people who are in a difficult situation, but within reason and we can't go overboard.
And so that's kind of the general sentiment behind this, this protest.
And that's a new development here, because for many years in Ireland, Mass immigration was seen as a sacred cow that was untouchable and unquestionable.
Nobody dared to utter a word against it for fear of being labelled an ist or a phobe or any of the other kinds of smear words that are labelled whenever you try to approach this topic from an adult direction.
And so that's basically the state of play here in Ireland for the past year or so.
But that's really interesting because, of course, in every country where there's a debate over immigration, the people who are in favor of, I guess, mass immigration or who stand opposed to imposing any limits, as long as usually their communities aren't the one having to bear the brunt of it, will accuse the people who do want limits or are concerned about it, as you said, of being racist or xenophobic all of those accusations that come immediately flowing against anyone who's just saying, no, I'm in favor of being welcoming.
It's just too much.
We don't have the resources to assimilate people and endure it.
One of the things I think is so interesting in what you said and what's happened in Ireland is usually when people hear about immigration debates in Europe or in the United States, but especially in Europe, I think people think about immigration from the Middle East, from Northern Africa, and from places like that.
And yet one of the triggering events in this case, one of the kind of things that pushed it over the edge, seems to be...
This flow of immigrants from Ukraine, what is it that the Irish government did in terms of allowing or calling for immigrants from Ukraine?
How many in number are there and what kinds of people have these been that has led to people being so upset about it?
Well, I'd say, first of all, that a lot of the people from Ukraine who have come here are perfectly nice, normal people.
There's not any objection to them as individuals, I'd say, would be the general attitude of the Irish people.
It really is just a number of numbers.
They could all be all Canadians, and the objection will be the exact same, because, as I say, 100,000 people being airdropped into a small country overnight, which is essentially what's happened, is just an unsustainable influx of human beings.
And so I think that's part of the problem.
The government, for their part, last year, they requested, or they didn't request, but they effectively said that Ireland could and would be willing to accept about 200,000 Ukrainian refugees from the war, which would be an enormous undertaking.
We've taken half of that, and it's already total drain on our system, which is buckling under the pressure.
We now have hundreds of asylum seekers who are living in tents in Ireland, in the capital city, which is not exactly the red carpet treatment for somebody who's fleeing war, that they would come to a cold, rainy country in winter only to be put outside.
And the authorities tell them, sorry, there's literally nowhere to put you.
So this also, part of what's frustrated people about this whole situation is that we've had an ongoing homelessness crisis for years in Ireland.
There have been about 10,000 homeless people in Dublin and it's been a key election issue for many years.
And so for the fact that There's many people looking at this situation now saying, well, you couldn't help our own people who are in crisis for a decade, but suddenly we have the ability to harbor half the world and everybody who needs help from abroad.
So much so that our minister for integration a couple of years ago, before the Ukraine war broke out, He put out tweets in a variety of different languages, Arabic, French, Georgian, and so on, basically outlining the fact that if you come to Ireland and seek asylum, you'll be given your own door accommodation within four months of your arrival.
So that is essentially ringing the dinner bell to anybody across the world, whether they're a legitimate asylum seeker or not, that Ireland is the place to be.
And we're offering all of these great opportunities.
And so come on in.
Yeah, the government says, hey, come, and people come.
I think it's a reasonable assumption.
people.
So, I mean, it's hard to prove that those two things are connected, but if you use your common sense, you would have to imagine that there is at least some connection there between these two events.
Yeah, the government says, hey, come, and people come.
I think it's a reasonable assumption.
What's so amazing about it as well, though, is there's this huge disparity between what these people were promised and then the reality of what they're being given.
When they get there, they're kind of alert to Ireland with these nice sentiments, and yet the government either isn't willing to or isn't able to find the resources to fulfill those promises that they made to those people and encouraging them to come.
I think that's a good point.
I think I think one of the things that shows is that there's obviously a strong economic component to concerns about immigration, despite the attempt to suggest that it's always about racism or nationalism or selfishness or hostility to people who aren't like the people in that country.
Has there been, as part of these protests that the government was complaining about all throughout the year, an explicitly economic component or set of issues that also have been driving these protests?
Or has it just been about immigration?
I think it's been a variety of things.
A big component actually, which has come up quite a bit, is the lack of consultation.
A lot of people have mentioned this quite a bit, where they say, you know, we're not even being asked, do you want this to happen?
The first thing we hear from the government is, we get a notice saying, oh yeah, by the way, there's going to be 100 adult men, because that's actually one of the other details here that our integration minister has admitted Most of the people coming are single adult males, which is not what a lot of people have in mind when they think about a refugee.
You know, you're thinking about women and children and old people and the infirm.
And that's not to say that men can't seek asylum.
Of course they can, but it's a bit unusual when that's the bulk of the people fleeing.
You would expect the numbers to be, you know, families.
That's usually the thing that springs to mind when you think of helping refugees.
So a lot of communities now in Ireland, they hear just overnight, oh, yeah, by the way, 100 adult men are going to be moving into this hotel, which is right near your children's school, mostly unvetted people that we don't know a lot about because, you know, many of them don't have documents or papers that might be for reasonable reasons.
It might not be.
We don't know.
And you're just supposed to accept that.
And in fact, they say, oh, well, we're We're consulting with local communities or engaging with them.
But our Taoiseach, who's basically our Prime Minister, he just admitted in the Parliament a couple of days ago that when he says engaging, what he means is we're giving you the information that you need to accept the new reality of what's happening to you, basically.
Absolutely.
So it's not actually a negotiation.
There's no question that this isn't going to happen.
And he explicitly said that no one has a right to veto who lives in their area and who doesn't.
So you're going to have to accept this whether you like it or not.
Really the quote unquote engagement process is just us telling you how it's going to be.
So that's not really I think what people had in mind when they sat down at the table in good faith to talk to their local representatives.
Yeah, it is a kind of thing again that we're seeing repeating this huge breach between the ruling elite on the one hand and the people over whom they're ruling on the other.
They don't get a sense at all that there's a democratic process in effect even though they nominally choose their political leaders.
One of the things that caused a lot of attention to be paid to Ireland in the United States was this very viral tweet and again this was before The recent stabbing by an Algerian refugee to Ireland.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
I have to add that caveat.
Thank you.
Yes.
Allegedly.
It's not proven yet.
Right.
He's not been convicted.
And the calls, the newfound calls for hate speech, as I said, this has been brewing all year.
And one of the reasons I know that is because I started paying a lot more attention when Ireland started advocating hate speech laws here in Brazil.
They're desperately trying to impose one of the most draconian, but The EU, the UK, Canada have all implemented their own laws that allow control over the internet and hate speech in particular.
And I think one of the things that really got a lot of attention was this Green Party Senator Pauline O'Reilly back in June, so we're talking about five months ago, several months before these last riots, where she gave a speech that was kind of the caricature of everybody's worst fears about what people who believe in censorship and are calling for censorship really believe.
She was way too candid.
In saying what she wanted, and let me just play that for you and then I have a couple questions about it.
When you think about it, all law, all legislation is about the restriction of freedom.
That's exactly what we're doing here, is we are restricting freedom, but we're doing it for the common good.
You will see throughout our Constitution, yes, you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good.
Everything needs to be balanced.
And if your views on other people's identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.
Now, what was so stunning about that is she was talking about political speech, and the bill she was speaking about or participating in a debate regarding was the Criminal Justice Bill of 2022, which was also called the Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offenses.
First of all, did this get a lot of attention in Ireland as well, a lot of negative attention the way it did in large parts of the West?
And secondly, what was that bill she was advocating for when saying, look, of course we're coming to restrict your freedoms?
Yeah, so I don't think that piece of video that you just played would have gotten any attention at all, if I do say so myself.
If it wasn't for my publication, which is kind of the only renegade publication in Ireland that's covering this from a critical perspective.
I mean, some of our papers of record, these time-tested newspapers, We're actually lobbying the government, advocating on behalf of the legislation in question, and that legislation is a hate speech bill which would have extremely wide-ranging ramifications for this country, and it's caught international attention for good reason.
I mean, the primary issue with this legislation, from my perspective, is The extreme vagueness of it to the point where none of the key words that it uses are actually defined.
So by that, I mean, hatred is not even defined in this hate speech bill.
It says that hatred means hatred against people on the basis of X, Y and Z characteristics, which is obviously a circular, meaningless definition.
And similarly, it says that it wants to protect genders other than that of male or female But when I asked our Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, I said, you know, how many genders are there that this would actually cover?
He said that the government has no official position on that, which is obviously an absurdity.
So you could potentially offend somebody who belongs to a gender which the government can't define.
And they can't even define what hatred is, but you're still going to go to jail for a criminal offense, potentially, if you're found guilty under this thing.
So it is so nebulous and vague to the point where anybody could potentially fall prey to it.
And that's one of the major concerns that it's caused, not just here, but across the whole world.
I want to dive a little bit more into the substance of the bill, as it's pending now that the government's really trying to exploit the sentiments over these riots in order to implement.
Before we get to that, let me ask you this question, which is, you know, you were saying this probably wouldn't have gotten a lot of attention in Ireland had it not been for your critical scrutiny of it and your critical promotion of it, caused it to viralize, as I said, in the U.S.
and a lot of places in the West, because like I said, it was just such a I don't think it was a rare expression, but it was a very blunt expression of what people who advocate censorship really believe.
One of the things, I've lived in Brazil now for 18 years, and Brazil in the last several years has also increasingly turned to extremely repressive measures to control speech on the Internet, to punish alleged hate speech.
alleged hate speech that has all the same infirmities as what you've been describing, the ambiguity of it, who decides what hate speech laws.
It has all the same infirmities as what you've been describing, the ambiguity of it, who decides what hate speech is.
But people not only get banned from the internet, but can even get fined and go to prison if they violate these laws.
But people not only get banned from the Internet, but can even get fined and go to prison if they violate these laws.
And one of the things that really surprised me, I guess, as American, is in the United States, there are also a lot of people who favor censorship, but people will pretend that they don't.
And one of the things that really surprised me, I guess, as American, is in the United States, there are also a lot of people who favor censorship, but people will pretend that they don't.
No one likes to admit, yes, I'm in favor of censorship.
No one likes to admit, yes, I'm in favor of censorship.
There's a constitutional free speech guarantee.
There's a constitutional free speech guarantee.
It's inculcated as part of the American identity that we believe in free speech.
It's inculcated as part of the American identity that we believe in free speech.
Whereas in Brazil, the term free speech is something that they will just acknowledge widely that they don't believe in.
They consider it almost a fascist value now or a right-wing value.
And the difference isn't really in the attitude, but in the kind of norms of what people are allowed to admit that they believe in Brazil.
They just say, I don't believe in free speech at all.
How is it in Ireland?
I mean, is this kind of a speech, is the reason you say it wouldn't have gotten any notice without you because it's just kind of the norm in Ireland to talk about the virtues of censorship?
Or is something else about this speech something that would have just evaded attention had you not really promoted it?
I think we've got a serious case of ideological capture and groupthink when it comes to our major institutions.
I don't think the Irish public are in support of this kind of thing.
In fact, I know they're not.
Our most recent polling on this subject, which was done a couple of years ago, where a major polling company asked the public, do you believe that people should be allowed to say offensive things?
Do you believe that hate speech laws should be on the books?
And the vast majority of people said no.
Moreover, when the government themselves held a public consultation, I think in America, it's called a comment period where you ask the public before you do something, hey, what do you think of this?
They received thousands of responses in reply.
And I went through every single one of those and I categorized them all by whether they were positive And in a story that my publication ran earlier this year, we revealed that 73% of the responses to the government's own public consultation were negative.
So that's obviously an overwhelming majority.
The public clearly aren't buying this, and yet they're driving ahead with it anyway, despite having no mandate.
So I think there's a real disconnect between the general public And the journalists and the politicians and the academics and the NGOs and these sorts of elite groups, if you want to put it that way, who are all in a little club together and think alike and act alike.
And then you go to the ordinary person on the street and they don't want anything to do with this.
I mean, you think about the character of Ireland historically.
A lot of stereotypes are true as far as us being a pugilistic people who like to fight.
There's a lot of truth is said in jest.
That it would be very hard to shut up an Irish person who had a strong opinion on a political issue.
I mean, going back even further to the Middle Ages.
I think about Ireland's legacy as the country that, during the Dark Ages, when Europe was being ravaged by barbarian tribes who were burning libraries after the fall of Rome, it was Irish monks who would go into that danger to retrieve books and bring them back to Ireland to copy them and preserve them.
And that's why so many books still exist today because we were so anti-censorship and the idea of destroying literature was so anathema to the Irish psyche that our people were willing to go to great lengths and do great personal sacrifice to preserve ideas for the benefit of future generations.
So I think In a nutshell, that is the character of who Irish people are.
And I think that it's a very foreign, imported idea that we should be shutting people up and silencing them and trying to stifle ideas we don't like.
So one of the things I would emphasize is obviously we should pay attention to erosion of free speech in Ireland just because in and of itself it's an important thing.
But one of the things that has really happened is advanced democracies, Western democracies, are so interlinked.
And every country is looking for ways to control speech on the internet that is when one country goes just a little bit further, it becomes the new limit where every other country can go, which is why it's so important to pay attention to these trends.
And there were a couple things that seemed to me to be particularly disturbing about the proposed Irish law in addition to this kind of generalized hatred, this ill-defined hatred that you were just explaining.
And let me just tell you a few of them and then you can tell me whether the law actually does these things.
One is, it seems like it doesn't just criminalize or outlaw people who express hateful ideas, but even people who are in possession of things that are called hate speech.
And then a couple other critiques I've seen that seem to be in the law is there's almost like a presumption of guilt.
Like if you're accused of it until you exonerate yourself, there's a presumption under the law that you have, in fact, expressed hateful ideas.
And then the final thing is truth is not a defense.
So conceivably, if you come on a show like you just did and say, well, immigration costs are so high that communities can't afford to pay them and that is perceived as inciting hatred against immigration groups, The fact that what you're saying is just factually true is not a defense.
Are those things actually in the law as well?
Those things are absolutely in the law.
And not only that, but it's it's not only as intent, not a defense or sorry, intent is also not a defense as well as truth.
So you can recklessly and is the word they use if you accidentally say something which results in hatred or the perception of hatred, whatever that means, you could potentially be found guilty of an offence.
And as you say, you don't have to actually distribute hatred via, you know, your words or your actions.
You can be found in possession of hate materials.
So say a pamphlet or a meme on your phone or just a book in your house, who knows what that could mean.
And if police find you in possession of that, and they suspect that you planned to distribute it to others, even if you haven't yet, they can basically charge you with an offence and you then have to prove you didn't intend to distribute it.
And I'm not quite sure how you would even do that.
Logically speaking you know it's hard to prove a negative.
How do you prove you didn't intend to do something that seems like a logical impossibility?
Am I supposed to have a paper trail of me saying to my friend, hey, by the way, I'm not going to give out these leaflets later on today?
You know, that's not really something that people are likely to have.
So, yeah, the whole law seems designed in the most draconian and ill-conceived way possible.
And many people here in Ireland, including former attorney general and the former justice minister, the same person, he's fulfilled a number of justice roles within the state over the years.
He has raised serious alarm bells about this, Senator Michael McDowell, and he said that it's not a well-written piece of legislation and that even if you agree with the concept of hate speech laws, which frankly I don't personally, but even if one did, This particular piece of legislation definitely needs to go back to the drawing board, and it does not meet the standard that one would expect from a legislative scrutiny perspective.
And not to steamroll you, but just on this topic, It's telling that many of the politicians who are voting for the legislation seemingly cannot get their story straight as to what it's even supposed to do.
So, for example, we had one government TD who's a member of our parliament who said that hate speech could include people making fun of politicians' appearance online, which is obviously ludicrous in the extreme.
We had another guy, a senator, who said that it could potentially — jokes could lead to hate speech and genocide and so on.
And then, of course, we had Senator Pauline O'Reilly, as you referenced earlier, saying that the law is all about suppressing freedom.
But then if you ask, say, the justice minister about any of this, she would vehemently deny that it's about any of those things.
She'd say, oh, no, that's nonsense.
It's not supposed to do that.
It's not supposed to stifle jokes.
But then the key issue for me is, Then you have all of these politicians who are apparently voting on legislation that you're telling us they don't understand.
So apparently it's so convoluted and vague that even the people who are voting to pass this into law don't grasp it, according to you.
I mean, I don't know which is scarier, either they're right or they're completely flying blind and just about to put this on the law books without any due regard for what it actually says.
And either one of those is a terrifying option.
Yeah, you know, I think we cannot overstate how much of this is often driven by anger at being mocked online and on social media and they see some kind of, you know, negative critique of themselves or some kind of insult as everybody online routinely is exposed to.
and they're enraged by it, at the injustice of it, that they actually want to go and censor the Internet.
It might seem trivial and unlikely, but oftentimes that is what drives censorship, which is this anger that the ruling class elite has over the ability of common folk to criticize them, to mock them, to say things designed to harm their reputation, to say things designed to harm their reputation, just the stuff of which free speech is made that's so often part of the motive, and I think social media really exacerbates it as they all read what's said about them, and if it's unflattering, they get angrier and angrier and want to control it.
What are some of the penalties or the punishments if you do violate this law, even though it's hard to know what the law even prohibits, but if some court somewhere or some prosecutor decides that you violated the law, what are the possible punishments?
IT IS A LITTLE BIT OF A It's you're looking at prison time.
It's I'd have to brush up again and see but I believe it's up to a year in prison potentially.
You know for some of the offenses you're also looking at potential fines and it's kind of at the discretion of a judge depending on how serious they think your offense was that they could dole out to you.
But you know I think it's one of those things that in a way The label of hate criminal is probably the most devastating punishment of all.
You know, I think that that's the kind of thing that is enough to annihilate a person's reputation and job prospects and life in general, that if you're found guilty of hate speech, I don't know who's going to hire you after that.
So in a sense, The mere accusation of this supposed crime, I think, is probably the most devastating punishment of all.
And then the actual legal penalties of going to prison, potentially, and being fined a substantial amount, that's just sort of almost like a bonus.
It's terrible as well, needless to say.
But really, Absolutely.
Last question.
effect that it has on debate as a whole, just the prospect of being labeled something so horrible is in and of itself kind of one of the worst punishments.
Absolutely.
Last question.
One of the things we've seen in the West with all these censorship provisions that have been enacted is they are very skillful at exploiting crises.
They did it with the COVID pandemic and the election of Donald Trump and the claims about Russian interference and dissemination of disinformation online, the war in Ukraine.
All of these ushered in these kind of crises or pseudo crises ushered in new levels of censorship.
There seems like there's a greater push now in the wake of these riots over this stabbing, the stabbing of these three young children and people who intervened, to call even more urgently for the imposition of this prohibition on hate crimes.
What Just is the summary of why the public reacted so strongly to this particular incident?
Was that the culmination of some of the frustrations we had talked about at the start?
And then, is there a chance that the horror over these riots can actually give a boost to the government's desire to have the censorship power legislatively implemented?
Yeah, I think the riots, first of all, were reprehensible.
I don't support the riots at all, and I think most people who oppose the hate speech law don't either, because essentially what happened there was that a group of people decided to protest against the stabbing of several young children at school and an adult childcare worker, a woman, which was an appalling crime.
The suspect is still in hospital at the minute and is yet to be charged.
A man of Algerian origin who is the police's person of interest in this crime, which hasn't been solved yet or nobody's been convicted, of course.
But basically, it was the latest in a long string of high profile crimes which have infuriated the public.
We've seen things.
I mean, obviously, we've always had murders.
We've always had You know, terrible crimes like that.
That's unfortunately part of living in a society is you're going to have a certain level of crime.
But we've never had children being stabbed in broad daylight on a mass scale.
That's just not a thing that we've seen in this country.
And so naturally, people were enraged and infuriated, as they should be, as we all should be.
But essentially what happened was a group of people, probably well-intentioned, decided to protest.
There were an element of radicals in there who did genuinely have fringe beliefs.
And then I suppose the opportunity of having an irate protest was seized upon by totally apolitical criminal elements who have been terrorizing the inner city for years, who basically just took the opportunity to loot and pillage and rob shoe shops and things like this.
These are not exactly People you'd find on the electoral register.
I don't think they have any politics whatsoever.
And so in this night of chaos which ensued, as you say, the government have seized upon this opportunity to say, you see, this is a far right group of Extremist stormtroopers who tried to bring down democracy, and that's why we need hate speech legislation to curb this.
Again, I'm not quite sure what stealing Nikes has to do with any political persuasion, right-wing or left-wing, but it's a total ploy, so far as I'm concerned, to ram through what they have been trying to ram through unsuccessfully for a couple of years now because they didn't have the public support for it.
Now they're hoping people feel frightened enough and they can conjure up the ever-present threat of a far-right boogeyman to scare people into allowing this law to pass.
But my attitude is I don't frankly think it's going to work.
That's the assessment on the ground.
I think that enough people are able to see through it and realize that there's already legislation on the books to deal with Rioting, incitement to violence.
Obviously, if you call for people to be killed or you call on a mob to attack an individual, that's clearly a crime, as it should be.
We don't need new laws to deal with these problems.
We've been dealing with them for years.
We had unbelievable riots during the Troubles.
In the, you know, in decades prior when Northern Ireland was being blown up.
So it's not like we've never been here before.
The idea that we need brand new legislation to deal with this and take away everybody's civil rights is just not founded.
So that's essentially the lay of the land vis-a-vis last week's incidents.
Ben, one of the reasons it's so chilling is because we have seen this pattern repeating itself in so many places throughout the West, including the United States.
There's clearly a push to get control of the internet, but the reality also is in that every country, there are kind of unique political dynamics and motives that are also pushing it, and I really appreciate your helping us understand so much better what exactly is happening in your country, in Ireland.
So thank you so much for taking the time to... I'm glad we finally got you on the show, and I really appreciate it.
No problem at all.
Thanks so much for having me.
Have a great evening.
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