Important Court Victory for Non-Violent Jan 6 Protesters. Brazil, Free Speech and Authoritarianism. PLUS: Congressional Hearing on Safety for College Students
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Victory for Jan. 6 Protestors (7:05)
Authoritarianism & Free Speech in Brazil (35:18)
Congressional Hearing on Safetyism (1:10:33)
Ending (1:22:06)
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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 and sacrosanct rights is the right to peacefully protest.
There have been few threats to this right over the last decade as serious and dangerous As many of the prosecutions of the nonviolent January 6th defendants.
From the start, prosecutors were faced with a genuine legal dilemma.
How could they convert January 6th from what it really was, a three-hour protest turned riot in which the vast majority of the people were nonviolent, into not only a crime but major felonies for which lengthy prison terms could be imposed even in the absence of allegations of the use of violence.
The answer they came up with was to take long-standing laws and bestow upon them radical and exotic interpretations that those who wrote those laws could never have possibly envisioned.
That is how the January 6th defendants, the vast, vast majority of whom were nonviolent by the government's own admissions, were turned into felons and given lengthy jail times.
Finally, those radical prosecution theories, which endangered the right to protest for all Americans, suffered a serious blow in the federal judiciary today as a three-judge panel of the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals, composed of two Obama-appointed judges and one Clinton-appointed judges, so all three Democratic-appointed judges, Struck down one of the major theories used by the prosecution to impose lengthy prison terms.
We will report on this ruling and its very significant implications for the January 6th defendants, but also for Americans everywhere.
Then, we've been reporting for several years now on the growing repression and censorship and authoritarianism in Brazil, the world's sixth most populous country and the world's eighth largest democracy.
When doing so, we have repeatedly emphasized that this matters to Americans not only because Brazil is a highly influential country in our hemisphere, filled with oil and environmental reserves and iron and other commodities, but also because Brazil is being treated by the U.S.
and the EU as a laboratory of sorts, where the same theories to justify harsh systemic censorship are being embraced to crush the right of dissent in all sorts of ways.
Last night, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released a video that he conducted with two prominent conservative Brazilians.
Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and the person who received the highest ever vote total for a congressional candidate in Congress.
And the journalist Paulo Figueiredo Filho, who was one of Brazil's most watched TV journalists, who is now in exile in South Florida with a genuine and undoubtedly well-grounded fear of arrest.
if he returns to brazil the brazilian supreme court has banned virtually every social media account he has as it has done to so many other dissidents of the brazilian establishment we're very happy that tucker did this interview and brought attention to this repression and hope it brings a lot more international attention to the various dangerous developments in brazil now i did not agree with all of tucker's framing and disagreed with several of his observations and i will explain what i mean by that
but the oppression he attempted to highlight is very real and very serious and has a lot more effects on americans than i think most american americans We will review the critical issues tonight.
Congressional Republicans today held a hearing where they invited Jewish American college students from some of the most countries, most elite universities, including Harvard, Penn, Columbia, MIT, and more, and for hours.
These students and their Republican representatives in Congress claim that they were endangered, even though not a single one of them has been physically attacked or even threatened with physical assault.
Words, I suppose, are once again to be treated as violence.
As many left liberal political elites have been doing for years, Republican lawmakers and the students attempted to depict themselves as marginalized and unsafe on college campuses, and then to demand that administrators do more to create safe spaces for them.
Last night we examined at length this deeply sinister attempt to concoct a narrative that suggests that Jewish Americans, of all people, are uniquely vulnerable and persecuted victims in the United States.
It's offensive.
Oh well, as well as being obviously untrue.
Now mostly this is done to render off-limits any opposition to Biden's policy of financing Israel's military in wars by implying that any dissent to that policy is bigoted and driven by racism against Jews.
But much of it is being done for the same reasons such victim narratives are often embraced in the United States, for the multiple benefits such narratives confer on the victim group being defended.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It's almost certain that January 6th is going to take center stage in the 2024 election, After all, there's very little in Joe Biden's record that people actually like and that he can point to.
And so he and the Democrats are going to run as much as possible on accusations that however much you hate Joe Biden, Donald Trump is worse.
And one of the leading claims that they will make in order to do that is that Trump is some sort of a fascist or a dictatorial threat to all things decent in American democracy.
And to accomplish that, they will constantly try and remind the country about January 6, claim that it's an insurrection, that we were just seconds away from having the world's most militarized and powerful government overthrown By a thousand or so Gen X and boomers who came from Facebook got off their couch for the first time in months.
Some of them did not wield any weapons and yet somehow we were told on January 6th came just seconds away from overthrowing the American government.
No, it wasn't a protest.
It wasn't even a riot.
It was an insurrection, a coup.
And one of the things that has been done with that narrative is to construct a edifice of extremely threatening and repressive legal precedent that is designed at its core to find ways to do something that really could never be done in this country previously, which was how to take people engaging in nonviolent political protest.
And remember, no matter what you think of January 6 or what it was or how it was caused, no matter what you think of that, the fact is, the irrefutable fact, it's just true numerically, is that the vast, vast majority of people who were accused of crimes in connection with January 6, the more than 1,000 Americans who were charged with crimes, Roughly 85 or 90% of them are acknowledged to have been non-violent.
They are not accused of having used violence, which means they participated in a protest.
Without using violence of any kind.
And the Biden Justice Department made very clear as to the FBI that they consider January 6th to be one of the worst, most dangerous, darkest days in our history, that they would launch an unprecedented investigation.
And to do that, it was necessary to try and put the people who they prosecuted in jail, not as being people guilty of a misdemeanor.
But is people guilty of felonies so they could put them in prison for a long time?
And that is exactly what happened.
There are a lot of January 6th defendants who have been convicted of felonies, even though they're not accused of participating in an insurrection.
And they're not accused of using violence.
They're accused of a nonviolent protest.
So how is it that prosecutors were able to take nonviolent political protesters and convert them into felons?
Obviously, that wasn't done to virtually anybody in the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots that went on for months.
People who engage in violence were sometimes prosecuted, often they weren't, but non-violent protesters were almost never prosecuted.
They were arrested on misdemeanor charges at most.
Kamala Harris did things like raise money for their bail fund.
And they weren't treated as serious criminals at all because they weren't engaged in violence.
And typically non-violent political protesters in the U.S.
are rarely charged, and if they are, they're charged with misdemeanors, but not in the January 6th case.
And the way that this was done is so ironic.
We've been over this before.
I've written articles about it.
You can go.
And if you want to really dig into the legalities of what I'm describing here, you can do so.
But basically, there were laws that were enacted in the wake of the collapse of Enron, which was a gigantic energy company.
Paul Krugman and a bunch of luminaries sat on its board.
It turned out to be a gigantic scam.
It collapsed in 2000.
It cost Billions and billions of dollars for investors.
It was basically just a Ponzi scheme.
And prosecutors, federal prosecutors, argued that they didn't have sufficient weapons in their hands to punish the parties they wanted to prosecute, including accounting companies.
There was a major accounting company that was prosecuted and disbanded.
as part of that prosecution.
And so they enacted a new law, one sponsored by Paul Sarbanes, the Democratic senator from Maryland.
It was called Sarbanes-Oxley, and it was designed basically to turn into felonies for the first time people who obstructed investigations or the gathering of evidence or some kind of a formal government inquiry so that you could actually be guilty of felonies if you obstructed their investigation, and it was designed basically to turn into felonies for the first time people who obstructed Investigations or the gathering of evidence or some kind of a formal government inquiry so that you could actually be guilty of felonies if you obstructed their investigation, if you withheld information from them.
That's what it was designed to do and prosecutors decided that they would take this Sarbanes-Oxley law and try somehow to argue that people who protested on January 6th and who delayed the counting and certification of the electoral college vote by three hours were somehow guilty of what that statute was attempting to criminalize.
And the irony of this is that in order to argue this, the prosecutors had to say what Donald Trump was saying, which is that the certification of the Electoral College by the Congress on January 6th is not merely a ministerial or ceremonial act, that it's actually a real government investigation to dig into the validity
of the certified results of the state's election results and the Electoral College that it's actually a real investigative proceeding of the kind Starbanks obviously was designed to criminalize if you disrupted it even for three hours.
And it was a preposterous theory because the entire point of those who want to turn January 6th into an insurrection was that there is nothing to decide on January 6th.
It's just a ceremonial ritual and that the Congress has no discretion.
And it was, of course, Trump's argument to Mike Pence.
No, Congress does have discretion, which is why, as vice president, you have the power to reject The certified rulings, if you believe there was fraud there.
So they actually had to adopt Trump's view of January 6th, that this was no symbolic act or ritual or ceremony that was just empty, but it was actually a discretionary government investigation into the Electoral College.
And that alone is how they accused January 6th defendants who didn't use violence of being felons by saying they disrupted for three whole hours A government investigation of the kind Sarbanes-Oxley was designed to turn into felonies.
Because the government poured enormous amounts of resources into prosecuting these people, and most of them were impoverished or not able to afford lawyers because a lot of them were being threatened with many, many years in prison if they didn't plead guilty, most of these issues did not end up being litigated effectively.
But this question did go to the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals, and the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals a couple of years ago ruled that this interpretation was valid.
That January 6th was enough of a discretionary government investigation that if you disrupt it, even for a short period of time, you can be guilty of a felony under this law.
And as a result, that question is decided unless and until it goes out of the full D.C.
Circuit Court or to the Supreme Court, meaning any judges underneath this court in the district court level or even on the appellate court are bound by that ruling.
So there was a ruling today in a case of one of the January 6th defendants who was given a lengthy prison term, even though he wasn't accused of violence.
And the argument that he brought to the appellate court was basically one that said that January 6th was not the kind of ceremony or ritual that that law covered.
Now the court said, look, we can't rule on this question for purposes of reversing your conviction, your felony conviction, because this court has already decided it and we're bound by that ruling until the Supreme Court rules.
But what they did do was they addressed this question.
For purposes of the sentence, meaning under the sentencing guidelines, if somebody obstructs an investigation of this kind, they can get a much larger prison sentence.
And the lower court judge gave him a lengthy prison sentence based on the interpretation of this law that said January 6th is kind of an act.
And the appeals court today, composed of three Democratic appointed judges, two by President Obama and one by President Clinton, overturned the imposition of this harsh prison term for this one January 6th defendant based on this theory that could be used to invalidate these felonies for everybody.
And in the process, issued a ruling that could affect, likely will affect, the prison terms of over 100 January 6th defendants who were also sentenced to enhanced prison sentences based on this theory that the appeals court today unraveled.
Now, I know it's a little bit complicated, a little bit legalistic, that explanation, but it's necessary to understand the ruling and understand what is at issue.
Like I said, if you want to dig more deeply into the Ruling itself and the legalities of it, you can find my articles on it if you enter Glenn Greenwald in.
And prosecution of January 6th defendants, we'll try and get that up on the screen as well.
We'll put it in the chat as well, the link to that article that I wrote explaining the legalities in greater detail.
But here's what the court ruling said today, and you can hear by the tone of the Washington Post, How clear of a victory, how major of a victory it is, not only for January 6th defendants, but also for the right to protest in general.
Victories have been very few and far between for January 6th defendants.
Prosecutors have just run roughshod over all of their rights.
Here you see the Washington Post story on this from today.
Appeals court ruling that vacates capital writer's sentence could impact dozens of January 6th cases.
While a panel of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Circuit upheld Larry Brock's conviction, the court said a judge wrongly applied an enhancement that lengthened the recommended prison sentence range under federal guidelines.
The enhancement, on the ground that Brock's conduct resulted in, quote, substantial interference with the administration of justice.
Has been implied in more than 100 other January 6th defendants' cases, said Patricia Hartman, a spokesperson for the Washington U.S.
Attorney's Office.
If the ruling stands, those defendants who have not already completed their prison term may push for new sentences.
The obstruction felony charge is already at the center of another case the U.S.
Supreme Court will hear arguments on next month that could upend hundreds of capital riot cases.
The justices agreed to hear the appeal fired by lawyers for another rioter charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, one of the most widely used charges brought in the January 6th attack.
Brock's attorney had said in court papers that the misapplied enhancement likely increased his client's sentence by about nine months.
Prosecutors had recommended a sentence of five years in prison.
Now that's how significant that is.
Now, I think we're ready to pull up the article that I wrote about all of this on the screen when I was at Substack.
If you want to read that, there you see it on the screen.
It's from January 20th of 2022.
And the headline is, Congress's January 6th Committee Claims Absolute Power As It Investigates Citizens With No Judicial Limits.
It talks about what the Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney-led 9-11 Commission was doing and abusing its power, but in there as well, it talked about how prosecutors had to stretch in order to find ways to turn nonviolent protesters into felons using an exotic and radical ruling of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that the Supreme Court will soon rule on and that the court today in Washington said for sentencing purposes was not valid.
Now, Here's the case itself.
It is called the United States of America versus Larry Rendell Brock.
He's the defendant.
And it was argued on September of 2023, decided March of 2024.
Now you see here, just by the way, there's a commentary on how courts work.
This issue was briefed.
The lawyers wrote all their briefs in the summer of 2023.
The court heard oral argument on it, September of 2023.
It was only today, March 1st, 2024, that the court issued a ruling.
So you have six months, or yeah, six months, five months, basically, five full months between the time it was argued in the appellate court and the time that it was the court decided.
While these people are just sitting in prison week after week, month after month, while the court just takes its sweet time to issue a ruling.
And this is very common.
It was one of the things when I was a lawyer that I was most frustrated by.
There's a Martin Luther King phrase that justice delayed is justice denied.
And nothing happens in the federal courts or in the state court system in the United States quickly.
Even when it's a matter of urgency that just sits there and these judges just take their sweet time to rule on it.
And your clients might be in prison, they might be in bankruptcy, they might have their money wrongfully withheld, and there's just no control that you or anyone else has on how quickly or slowly these judges rule.
But the ruling itself is quite a victory, and again, not just for the January 6th defendants who are nonviolent, but also for the right of protest itself.
Here's what the relevant part of the ruling said, quote, The court convicted Brock, meaning the lower court, convicted him of six crimes, including corruptly obstructing Congress's certification of the electoral court under 18 U.S.C.
1512.
At sentencing, the district court applied a three-level sentencing enhancement to Brock's section 1512 conviction, that's the one for Sarbanes-Oxley, on the ground that Brock's conduct resulted in, quote, substantial interference with the administration of justice.
We hold today that the administration of justice enhancement does not apply to interference with the legislative process of certifying electoral votes.
For that reason, we vacate his sentence for his section 1512 conviction and remand to the district court for resentencing.
The government responds that quote, administration of justice refers to the appropriate administration of law by all three branches of government.
Quote, obstruction of the electoral college certification vote on January 6 falls comfortably within the meaning of administration of justice as used in that law because it involves Congress's performance of duties required by law.
That's the argument of the government.
Several of our district courts have agreed with the government's view.
But with great respect to our district court colleagues' thoughtfully reasoned efforts to apply this guideline, we hold that, for purposes of the Sentencing Guideline 2J1.2, the phrase, quote, administration of justice does not encompass Congress's role.
Considered in context, Congress's counting and certification of electoral college votes is but the last step in a lengthy electoral certification process involving state legislators and officials, as well as Congress.
Taken as a whole, the multi-step process of certifying electoral college votes, as important to our democratic system of government as it is, bears little resemblance to the traditional understanding of the administration of justice, such as the judicial or quasi-judicial investigation of determination of individual rights.
Now, that is the key.
This law said that if you disturb or interfere with corruptly the administration of justice, meaning just department investigations or judicial hearings of the kind that they had so much difficulty prosecuting in Enron because people were interfering it and they didn't have these legal weapons in their hands to threaten them with felonies.
That's what this law was designed to fix.
It's not meant for a congressional hearing or a congressional certification of electoral college, which has none of the attributes of a real judicial investigation or investigation by the Justice Department.
That was always the corruption at the heart of the January 6th defendant's prosecution is to try and turn nonviolent protests into a felony.
The problem is, as you can see, it takes a kind of difficult, heavy, somewhat boring Recitation of legal doctrine, and so it was difficult to get people really excited about what was being done here.
Finally, an appellate court had the courage to step in and say, the interpretation of the law that courts have been using and that prosecutors have been using to give these people enormous prison sentences is not appropriate.
It is not intended, this law, to encompass this kind of behavior.
And as a result, they sent it back to the district court and said, you cannot enhance prison sentences based on this interpretation that the court rejected.
And as I said, even though technically they couldn't undo the conviction itself because this court had already, not these judges, but other judges on this court had already decided in favor of the prosecutors and now it's out at the Supreme Court level.
This decision goes to the heart, not just of the sentencing part of this, but also the conviction part of it, the part that turned these people into felons.
Now, as a practical matter, a lot of these people are in prison already.
They've served out their term.
By the time it gets up to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court's going to hear your oral argument, then the Supreme Court will decide.
Even if the Supreme Court rules in their favor, it won't matter to a lot of them, but it will matter to some who are still lingering in prison with very lengthy prison terms.
Even though they were not guilty of any kind of violence.
Now, here's a second article that I wrote on on this.
I think this one is actually even more directly applicable to this question.
It was in November of 2021.
And the headline of this was Democrats are profoundly committed to criminal justice reform for everyone but their enemies.
And it was basically an argument that under the Trump era, prosecutors in the Justice Department went after Trump associates and January 6th defendants using very pro-prosecutorial theories of criminal justice that the liberal left has long rejected and railed against and denounced.
Left liberals believe that people are imprisoned too easily in the United States, that we need more permissive interpretation of laws, more permissive interpretations of a prosecutor's power, and I'm always somebody who has believed that as well.
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country by far in the world, both as a percentage and as an absolute number.
And I've always believed that prosecutors have too much power, that it's too easy to obtain convictions, especially on these kinds of charges.
And that has always been a more left-liberal view.
It's also a libertarian view.
There are a lot of libertarians who advocate for reform of prosecutorial power and criminal justice reform.
And yet, what happened here was that because the people being punished with these pro-prosecutorial theories Where Trump associates like Michael Flynn or January 6th defendants, almost no people on the liberal left objected to any of this because they were so happy to see their enemies punished.
And there you see the subheadline in this article, principles of rehabilitative justice, reform of the carceral state and liberalized criminal justice evaporate.
When Democrats demand harsh prison for their political adversaries.
And this is so much of what I think has been the problem in the Trump era, maybe even in politics generally, is that people proclaim belief in a certain principle.
They proclaim belief in and support for a particular political value.
But the minute it comes time to punish their enemies or to advance their cause, they're willing to abandon those principles for the immediacy of the benefits.
Now one of the examples that we've covered extensively on this show and we're going to get to in a minute is the fact that a lot of conservatives and a lot of Republicans who have spent years complaining about the evils of cancel culture and the evils of censorship were more than happy to watch ever since October 7th happened where huge numbers of Israel critics were fired from media, fired by academia, censored for their criticism of Israel.
All the things we've been over many times, and that was a complete abandonment of principles in order to punish people who were critical of Israel by people who strongly are attached to or supportive of the State of Israel.
Here's an example of that same sort of lack of adherence to principle that I think is a huge plague on our political culture.
And it came today in the UK.
In the UK, yesterday, There was an election that's called a by-election, where a Member of Parliament leaves early, they resign, or they get another job, and then there's a vacancy in Parliament that has to be filled with what's called a by-election.
It's sort of like if, say, Michigan just had an election on Saturday, there's no national election, it's just a very local election to choose who will be the Member of Parliament for that constituency.
And it was held by the Labour Party, the centre-left party in the UK that is expected to win the Prime Ministership next year under Sir Keir Starmer.
And it was considered to be a somewhat safe spot for Labour, except that a former Labour Party Member of Parliament, George Galloway, Who is a Scottish leftist, has always been known as that.
He was one of the most vocal and eloquent opponents of the invasion of Iraq.
He came to Congress and testified and gave this like masterclass in political rhetoric.
He's now, he's been elected to Parliament before.
He got expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 because he was a critic of the Iraq War and the Labour Party under Tony Blair was leading The UK into the Iraq War and so his opposition to the war in Iraq got him expelled from the Labour Party.
He then got re-elected as an independent, lost his seat, and now he was running mostly in opposition to two things.
The NATO war in Ukraine and US-UK support for the war in Israel.
And the Labour Party candidate, who everyone thought was going to win, ended up getting, uh, the Labour Party ended up renouncing him because he Became too critical of Israel in phone calls and he apologized but the Labour Party wants nothing to do with Israel critics so they basically renounced their own candidate and that led to a smashing victory by George Galloway.
He got more votes than all of his opponents combined.
And because he's such a vehement opponent of the war in Ukraine, he's often accused of being a Russian agent.
And here is this person, Paul Mason, in the UK.
He used to be known as a leftist.
He's now moved much more to the center.
He tried running for parliament earlier this year and he lost.
And he published a thread today about George Galloway's victory, particularly angry because Galloway opposes the war in Ukraine.
And this is what he said.
He said, "Galloway's victory in Rockdale is a 'which side are you on' moment, both for the left and Democrats everywhere," meaning Democrats more broadly.
And then he went on to say this, "If George Galloway uses Parliament to push Russian TV-style disinformation, then we need a united cross-party militant defense of democracy.
The National Security Act of 2023 does not exempt MPs from its provisions.
The National Security Act of 2023 was a new criminal law enacted in the UK Designed to criminalize people who were supposedly allied with the Russian government or pushing pro-Russian disinformation, meaning any opposition to the war in Ukraine.
And here you have a prominent left liberal figure calling for the parties in the UK to unite to prosecute George Galloway for his opposition to the war in Ukraine under the National Security Act of 2023.
And this is what Western liberalism has become, more than anything.
They all think the same ways in countries.
And by all, I just mean the dominant factions.
Obviously, there are always exceptions.
But they really believe that they are not just justified, but duty-bound to embrace the most repressive and the most classically authoritarian measures, censoring people, spying on them, putting them in prison with no due process, even prosecuting them under the national security laws for their dissent.
Essentially saying we need to become authoritarians and tyrants because we need to save democracy.
The kind of mentality that says we need to make sure that we put Donald Trump into prison before the election because if we don't, he may get into power and weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies.
We need to censor anyone who questions the 2020 election, anyone who questions our COVID policy, anyone who questions the war in Ukraine, anyone who questions our support for Israel, because we can't allow free speech because democracy is at stake.
And the only way we can protect democracy is if we censor our political enemies.
It really is that extreme of a mentality.
And that is what has left liberals in the United States cheer a narrative that calls a protest that lasted for three hours an insurrection.
There's almost nothing that could vest the government with more power than claiming that your political enemies are an insurrectionary movement.
And they've been cheering as the courts have been implementing legal precedent, new radical legal precedent that would allow them to prosecute non-violent protesters.
As felons.
And obviously in this case, it's being applied to the January 6th defendant, but the way legal precedent works is it can be used against anybody.
And more than anything, it's this abandonment of claim principles for immediate political benefit that I think is more corrupting to our political system than almost anything.
And it's what leads liberals who have spent decades claiming that they believe in all these things and free speech and due process.
And opposition to the U.S.
security state and opposition to pro-prosecutorial criminal justice theories to abandon all of that on a dime because they believe that doing so provides them with immediate political benefit of defeating the Trump movement.
And that's what these January 6th cases are all about.
If someone used violence on the Capitol, they deserve, of course, like anyone using violence, to be prosecuted as felons, if that's what the evidence proves.
Violence against police officers or against Individuals at the Capitol does not become justified because it's part of political protest, but people who were non-violent on January 6th, which is the vast majority of them, do not belong in prison, do not belong as felons.
And this ruling today from three Democratic Party appointed judges, I think is a major blow.
Maybe it took getting a little bit away from the emotion of January 6th to finally get an honest and good legal ruling, but I really think this is a significant step in undoing a lot of these precedents that liberals cheered because they wanted to see these people in prison but that in fact endanger the rights of all of us.
One of the issues that we have tried to cover that is not often very covered is not just the censorship regime being implemented in the United States but also the way in which it's connected to censorship regimes in the rest of the democratic world.
The way in which the EU has adopted a new law called the Digital Services Act, or the UK has adopted the Online Safety Act, or Canada has adopted several different provisions that allow them to control the flow of information on the internet and to criminalize or to punish people who allow the flow of information that they dislike.
It's dangerous if you're an American, because those examples are contaminating the United States.
The United States government looks at those examples and realizes that that's a blueprint for copying it.
And so we've covered the developments in those countries, but also in Brazil, in part because we're here in Brazil, but also because Brazil is a very important country.
It's the second largest in the hemisphere, the sixth largest country in the world.
It has bigger oil reserves than a lot of Middle Eastern countries.
It has the world's most important and valuable environmental asset in the Amazon.
There's all kinds of commodities and important metals, including iron.
And what happens in Brazil is influential for the entire region of Latin America, but also for the Western Hemisphere.
And what has been happening in Brazil is the implementation of a censorship regime that is more extreme than almost in any other country.
Where it is routine, as we've repeatedly reported, for the Supreme Court of Brazil to simply issue orders declaring people banned from social media without any process, without charging them with any crime.
The Supreme Court issues a ruling, sends them to a social media company, says, you are hereby required to ban this person or remove this post.
There's no appeal process.
There's no explanation needed.
And a huge number of people who are supporters of the Bolsonaro movement or who are critics of the current government, which is the government of Lula da Silva, are banned from social media entirely, including members of Congress, members of the Senate, prominent journalists.
If you try and access their social media, you will get a message from Facebook and Google and Twitter saying, this account has been banned by Brazilian authorities and is not accessible.
If you are in Brazil and you try and watch this program on Rumble or any other show on Rumble, this is the message that you get.
Rumble is no longer available at all in Brazil, just like it's no longer available in France.
And here's what the message says.
Quote, Notice to users in Brazil.
Because the Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in Brazil.
We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon.
And the reason is that Rumble just every day gets order after order after order requiring censorship with which they do not agree and they don't want to be an agent of it.
And so they would rather sue Brazil and lose access to their country than become an agent of censorship for the government.
The same choice they made when France ordered them to remove RT and Sputnik as Russian media.
And Rumble said, I'm not going to obey the French government's orders about who I can platform and who I can't.
We're a free speech platform.
I'd rather be unavailable in France.
And if you're in France and you try and watch this program or any other program on Rumble, if you don't have a VPN, that allows you to scramble your location you get the same exact message notice to users in in france and it says something very similar and rumble is suing both the brazilian and the french government but this has become commonplace not just censorship there are a lot of top
bolsonaro officials who have been subject to search and seizures of their homes who are exiled in the united states because if they come back they will be arrested and several of bolsonaro's top aides including his top advisor on foreign policy felipe martins who's a young highly educated foreign policy expert is now in prison
Because they had their own January 6th and January 8th, very similar to what happened.
And the view of the court is that that was an attempted coup and that anyone connected to it in any way is a criminal who belongs in prison.
Now, leaving the substance of that aside, what is amazing is that this all happens without due process.
Felipe Martins is in prison, but he hasn't been convicted of any crime.
He was just ordered in prison by the Supreme Court, preventatively pending his trial.
And this has happened over and over and over and over again.
They have basically succeeded in criminalizing the entire Bolsonaro movement and I'd like to remind people that I am Anything but a fan of the Bolsonaro movement.
Here is, for example, a headline from The Hill in July of 2019.
Brazil President Threatens to Jail Journalist Glenn Greenwald.
And the Brazilian president at the time was Jair Bolsonaro, and that's exactly what he did.
He had a press conference.
Talking about reporting I was doing about his government, he said, Glenn Greenwald says how much he loves Brazil and how much he loves seeing all parts of the country.
Well, there's a good chance he's going to get to see our jail system, our prison system from the inside.
And then six months later, I was actually indicted, not really because of Jair Bolsonaro, but because of his justice ministry and the justice minister on whom we were reporting and allies of that justice minister inside the equivalent of the Justice Department.
They charged me with being a conspirator, a co-conspirator with my sources.
And it got dismissed after about three weeks because of a Supreme Court ruling that protected my press freedom.
But you can see if a president of a country threatens to imprison me because of my journalism, you can safely assume I'm not a fan of that person or his movement.
I'm not speaking as a fan of that movement, I'm speaking as a believer in core political rights.
The right of free speech, the right of a free press, the right of due process.
All of which is being severely assaulted by the Supreme Court.
The reality is that this censorship regime and this attack on due process, this forced closing of media outlets and the requirement that certain conservative media outlets fire certain people, their most popular, genuinely right-wing hosts, and put sort of like Mitch McConnell or Bret Baier or Jennifer Griffin type people in their spot, people who are much more comfortable to the establishment.
is something that has been happening since 2019 while Bolsonaro was still president, three years before Lula was inaugurated.
Lula won the election in 2022.
He became president on January 1st, 2023.
So this predates Lula, this attack on basic free speech, because it's coming from the Supreme Court and from one judge in particular named Alessandro de Moraes, who has become easily the most powerful person in Brazil.
In fact, his power became so extreme that even the New York Times twice expressed concern about it before the election.
Imagine how much it takes for the New York Times to express concern About a censorship regime and other attacks on due process and free speech being implemented by a judge against a right-wing political movement, which is the Bolsonaro movement, and in defense of a more left-wing government, which is Lula da Silva.
You know the New York Times wanted Lula to win, but they were still extremely concerned by what this judge was doing.
Here, for example, in September of 2022, so just two months or so before the, or a month before the Brazilian election, Here is the New York Times, and there's a picture of Alexandre Moraes.
He's the judge on the Supreme Court, basically responsible for all of this.
You see the picture of him right here.
That's him.
And the headline was, to defend democracy, is Brazil's top court going too far?
Brazil's Supreme Court has acted as the primary check on President Jair Bolsonaro's power.
Now many are worried the court is posing its own threat.
That's exactly what's happening in the United States.
Even if you want to consider the Trump movement a threat, the confederation of power that has emerged in the name of stopping Trump and his movement has become far more authoritarian and threatening than anything they claim Trump is.
Precisely because of that mentality I was describing earlier, that if you become so self-righteous in your political views that you are fighting some serious threat, you begin to believe that you are justified in any sort of authoritarian or even tyrannical methods because your cause is so just, like Paul Mason calling for all parties to unite to prosecute the newly elected George Galloway under the National Security Act of 2023 because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
That's the kind of mentality this engenders.
And almost all of the Brazilian left, with a few exceptions, have stood by and cheered all of this.
Something that was so extreme that even the New York Times decided to warn about.
Quote, Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media.
That he said attacked Brazilian institutions.
Let me just read that again.
Mr. Moraes, that's the Supreme Court judge in Brazil, has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he has said has attacked Brazil's institutions.
This is in 2022, before Lula was elected.
He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and video with little room for appeal.
And this year, 10 of the court's 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a live stream.
In many cases, Mr. Merage has acted unilaterally emboldened by new powers the court granted itself in 2019.
I just want to stress that since a lot of people, including Tucker last night in that interview, tried to link this to Lula, this regime that is so threatening began in 2019, three years before Lula was elected.
And these new powers the court granted itself in 2019 allow it to, in effect, act as an investigator, prosecutor, and judge all at once in some cases.
And I would go so far as to even say that it's not just the court is acting as investigative prosecutor and judge, although it does that.
It starts its own investigation.
It prosecutes the person.
It convicts them.
It issues punishments with no due process and no explanation of any kind.
But in many cases, this judge, Alexander Demiraj, also considers himself the victim.
So if somebody makes a video critical of him or a post critical of him, he will also sit in judgment of it.
So he's not only the judge during an executioner, but also the victim sitting in his own case.
I mean, it's a violation of the most basic safeguards against judicial tyranny.
Which again, even the New York Times decided were so extreme that flags needed to be raised about it.
Political leaders of the New York Times on the left and much of the Brazilian press and public have largely supported Mr. Moraes' actions as necessary measures to counter the singular threat posed by Bolsonaro.
So this should sound familiar to everybody in the United States, that they support this tyranny because there's a singular threat posed by Bolsonaro that's exactly The mentality that leads to authoritarianism in the United States.
Oh, we're fighting a singular threat in Donald Trump.
We can't afford these niceties of civil liberties and free speech.
That is the mentality that is always the most dangerous.
It's a mentality of such extreme self-righteousness that it recognizes no limits on its own power.
Quote, but many legal experts say that Mr. Maraisch's shows of force under the banner of saving democracy Are themselves threatening to push the country toward an anti-democratic slide.
And that, to me, describes the United States perfectly.
Now, yesterday, Tucker Carlson conducted an interview with two prominent Brazilian conservatives, as they said, Paulo Figueiredo and Eduardo Bolsonaro. Paulo Figueiredo and Eduardo Bolsonaro.
Figueiredo is actually in exile in South Florida, afraid to return to Brazil because he is almost certain to be arrested if he does.
He was a very popular TV personality, not unlike Tucker Carlson on a conservative network called Jovenpond.
Which has been all but dismantled by the court.
It still exists, but it's been punished in all sorts of ways.
They've been required to fire their most popular hosts and replace them with far more tepid and centrist and mainstream voices.
Imagine a court forcing a media outlet.
Imagine if the Supreme Court said to Fox News, you will be closed unless you tomorrow fire Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
And replace them with people like Chris Wallace.
That's basically what has happened.
Now, here's the tweet that Tucker posted to introduce the segment.
He said, quote, the Biden administration helped install a pro-Chinese government in Brazil, which immediately shut down opposition media and began arresting dissidents.
Here are two of its victims.
Now, That is not a framing that I'm comfortable with, even though I'm very happy Tucker did this interview, and I'll explain why.
I don't see things quite that way, but I'm just going to give you the first minute or so of Tucker's kind of introduction to this so that you can get a better sense, again, of the kind of perspective he was presenting.
We're going to get that on in just a second here.
A little less than two years ago, we went to Brazil to cover the presidential election, then in progress, the incumbent, President Jair Bolsonaro, was running against a former president, a convicted felon, very close to the government of China, called Lula.
And as you wandered around the country, went to its biggest cities, you really got the feeling if this election goes to Lula, this place is going to, in very short order, become a police state.
People are going to go to jail.
Democracy is going to end.
The media will no longer be able to report honestly and openly, and the Chinese government will have undue influence over- All right, so let me just stop there and say a couple things.
As I just demonstrated, this regime of attack and erosion of rights began Long before Lula was elected.
It was already in place when Tucker was in Brazil and Jair Bolsonaro was president.
In fact, Tucker interviewed me in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro where I was talking about the severe attacks on free speech rights imposed by the Brazilian Supreme Court.
It was already before Lula was elected that people were being arrested and the like.
before Glew was elected and people were being arrested and the like.
As for being very close to the Chinese government, and the attempt to suggest that China sort of had some role in these effects.
I also am not comfortable with that view either.
Just as a reminder, Lula ran for president three times in Brazil.
And lost all three times in the 1990s.
He was a labor leader.
He's very charismatic.
He became increasingly popular as a national figure.
But he was just always a little bit too far to the left to be able to win national elections.
The entire establishment was right against him.
Finally, in 2002, he did several things to insist that he would be a more moderate leader than people expected.
He selected as his vice president a very prominent banker He was very popular among the capitalists of Brazil, who exercised a lot of power.
He also wrote a famous so-called letter to the Brazilian people, where he vowed that he doesn't support closing of press freedoms and the like in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua, that even though he has friendly relations with countries in the region, that that is not his model for how the Labour Party, which is his party, should work.
So he made a lot of moderate gestures, and he won in 2002.
And he was a popular president, he was easily re-elected in 2006, and during the time of his presidency from 2002 to 2010, Brazil experienced major economic growth.
It went from being the 13th largest country economy in the world to being the 6th largest economy in the world.
And every sector of Brazilian society, including the wealthiest people, the large corporations, the stock market, and the poorest people, all prospered and thrived.
When Lula left office in 2010, because the Constitution required him to leave office after two terms, and he did, he had an 86% approval rating.
86% approval rating.
That was when a very young President of the United States named Barack Obama met Lula for the first time and said, this is the guy who has everything figured out.
This is a really popular leader.
Lula is not just some Nicolas Maduro figure or Fidel Castro figure.
He has been a very credible voice on the world stage for a long time.
Just saying facts.
You don't have to like Lula.
These are facts about Lula's career.
And when Lula left office in 2010, he was so popular.
That he chose as his successor, not another popular politician, but a pretty obscure politician who was a close and loyal aide of his, named Dilma Rousseff, because she would become the first female president of Brazil, a pretty patriarchal country.
And his popularity was so immense that he was able to transfer that to her, and she won pretty easily in 2010, and then she got re-elected again in 2014.
So his political popularity is and always has been real.
You don't need a fraudulent election to elect Lula.
Lula is a huge political force, beloved by many millions of people, especially the poor people in Brazil who identify with him and see him as one of them.
He grew up very poor, one of nine children.
He was illiterate until he was 10.
He lost a finger in a factory.
There's a big mythology around Lula.
And as for being close to China, the reality is that China has expanded massively.
Both in terms of its economy and its relationship and trade relationship with other countries and China began buying a huge amount of commodities and other products from Brazil and selling to Brazil as well.
And so China became the largest trading partner of Brazil.
It's a capitalistic relationship.
So this idea that China has infiltrated Brazil, that China was doing fine in Brazil under Bolsonaro.
It was also the number one trading partner of Brazil under Bolsonaro.
China is an important country to Brazil financially and economically and has been for many years.
I would not suggest that China is a player in these events.
I think it's much more domestic than anything, although it is true that the United States government, the Biden administration did dispatch many diplomats and the CIA.
Throughout the 2022 election, under the guise of telling Bolsonaro that they would not accept any claims of voter fraud, any attempts at a coup, but clearly the Biden administration wanted Lula to win.
They were much closer to Lula ideologically.
That is also a fact.
Let me just finish the rest of Tucker's commentary here.
Brazil, and that's a big deal, not just for Brazilians, but for the United States, because Brazil is the most significant country in the Americas after this one.
It's huge.
It's got enormous natural resources.
It's got a well-educated population.
There's a lot in Brazil.
And so if it descends into darkness, that's a problem not just for Brazil, but for every country in this hemisphere.
So the question is, two and a half years later, a year and a half later, rather, what happened in Brazil?
Lula won in an election that was very obviously rigged.
Amen.
No, when he says it was an election very obviously rigged, I don't know if he means by that that the vote count was fraudulent, because I don't think there's much evidence for that.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but there's no evidence that I've seen convincing that it did.
Or if he means by rigged the kind of rigging that was done in the United States with the media entirely aligned in favor of Lula, which was absolutely true, with the Bolsonaro movement being constantly censored, the Supreme Court banned Supporters of Bolsonaro and Bolsonaro himself from pointing out that Lula was convicted of a crime.
He was convicted of a crime a Conviction that ended up being nullified in part because of the reporting that we did that showed his prosecutor was convicted But he was it was corrupt, but he was still convicted They were barred from saying that Lula had friendly relations with Nicaragua and Venezuela even though he did so a lot of statements that were at least politically viable if not Factually true.
The Supreme Court banned the Bolsonaro movement from saying it.
So, if that's what he means by rigged, I'm comfortable with that word.
Now, let me just add one more thing, which is not only did the censorship regime under Alexandre Di Marais, the Brazil Supreme Court Justice, begin in 2019, as the New York Times said itself, and we were reporting back in 2019 and 2020, in opposition to him, but this judge, Alexandre Di Marais, was not chosen By the political left in Brazil.
He was not chosen by Lula to be on the court.
He was not a Lula associate or a associate of Lula's party, much to the contrary.
In 2016, Lula's successor from this left-wing party, Dilma Rousseff, she won in 2014 and they closed the election.
The center-right never really accepted her victory in 2014.
And so in 2016, they concocted obvious pretext to impeach her.
And they succeeded in impeaching her.
They removed her from office two years before her term ended and they replaced her with her vice president, Michel Temer.
And the Brazilian left despised Michel Temer, thought he was guilty of a coup.
And he joined forces with the center-right in trying to implement austerity.
And it was Michel Temer who first appointed Alexandre de Moraes as his justice minister.
And then as his justice minister put him on the Supreme Court, the left was opposed to Alexandre de Moraes.
They called him a racist and a fascist, even though they now love Alexandre de Moraes.
He's like a hero to the left.
It wasn't the left that put him on the Supreme Court.
It was as a result of this impeachment, which the Brazilian right supported, including Jair Bolsonaro.
So I just want to make clear that the picture is more complicated than, oh, censorship happened because Lula got elected and people started getting put into prison.
It's really coming from the Brazilian Supreme Court and it happened before Lula was elected.
And I think that the most powerful person in Brazil by far is the Supreme Court Justice and I think it's important to note that because tyranny can come from a lot of places including from the courts when the law starts getting weaponized.
But because he's his primary enemy and his primary target is the political right in Brazil, The left worships Alexander Demarest, even though, as I said, when he was appointed to the court by the person who engineered the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the left hated him and called him a racist and a fascist and everything the left calls people when they dislike them.
Overnight, they became worshipers of his because he's putting people in jail and silencing their enemies.
Now, here is a snippet Of this Brazilian journalist who will explain what happened to him.
And as I said, he's living in South Florida.
He's a very articulate and was a very popular critic of Lula's government and a supporter of Jair Bolsonaro when he's not only off the air, but his social media is banned, his assets are frozen, and there's a lot of other people like him.
And that is the result of this Supreme Court judge.
And I was working normally on a regular TV station in Brazil, like mainstream media, doing a conservative show on primetime.
We had millions of people watching it.
It was the most watched political show in the country.
And on December 30th of 2022, I received a call from someone that worked on a big social media company saying, well, we received a court order from the Superior Court, Superior Federal Court, the Supreme Court of Brazil, saying that we have two hours to take down your social media platform.
And I had like, I don't know, 1.5 million followers there on that specific one.
And then I was like, wow, I'm not going to say the name because I don't want to expose the person that informed me.
And I was like, wow.
So I went live streaming and I said, look, apparently I'm going to disappear.
But later I found out, because I got a call from a federal police officer saying, look, the order against you is broader.
Apparently they ordered to freeze all your assets in the country.
They also ordered that we're going to seize your passport and you can't get in the country.
and i was like wow what was the crime um so i never i was never formally notified so there's nothing anywhere that i committed any crime or that i'm being accused or charged of anything now i know that probably sounds believable like unbelievable like oh he must be hiding something but he's not so often these people are not charged with crimes for
Felipe Martins, who I mentioned earlier, the young foreign policy expert who was a top aide to Jair Bolsonaro, was in prison even though he has not been accused of any crimes.
He's in prison preventatively pending his trial.
And this has become very common.
We reported back in January of last year on a order that Rumble received, along with multiple other social media platforms, from the Supreme Court judge And all it was was a list of prominent people in Brazil who all of these social media platforms were required within two hours to permanently ban and remove.
And if they didn't, they would be fined something like $100,000 every day for failure to remove them.
It contained no explanation, no accusation of a crime.
The people whose accounts are being removed and banned had no idea that this was happening.
They weren't notified.
They let alone given an opportunity to contest it.
It was completely done in secret with no due process.
This is how this Brazilian Supreme Court judge operates in the dark with no due process.
So often sitting in cases where he himself is the alleged victim.
And we were able to get our hands on one of these orders, even though it was supposed to be secret.
And in the order, it said you are required to keep this secret.
This is American social media companies.
He's ordering not only to censor people they haven't chosen to censor, but also to not speak about it at all.
And we did a report back in January, which you can watch if you want.
And we'll put the link in there.
But let's go back to these materials.
One of the things that was mentioned was the role of the U.S.
government in Brazil's elections.
I think that's important to note because I think a lot of times people hear about the CIA role, the involvement in the country, and people really don't believe it.
So here from Reuters in May of 2023, exclusive, the CIA chief told the Bolsonaro government not to mess with Brazil's elections, sources say.
Here's some more detail.
It came from the Financial Times in June of 2023.
Quote, the discreet U.S.
campaign to defend Brazil's election.
Amid widespread speculation about a coup attempt, the Biden administration pressured politicians and generals to respect the result.
Quote, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin used a visit to a regional defense ministers meeting in Brasilia to send a clear message.
Military and security forces need to be under, quote, strong civilian control, he said.
In private, Austin and other officials belt out to Brazil's military the consequences of supporting any unconstitutional actions, such as a coup, quote, there would be significant negative ramifications for the bilateral military-to-military relationship if they were to do something and they needed the respect, and they need to respect the outcome of there would be significant negative ramifications for the bilateral military-to-military relationship if they were to do something Further reinforcement of the message to Brazil's top brass came from General Laura Richardson, head of U.S.
Southern Command, which covers Latin America, during visits last September and in November 2021, officials said.
CIA Chief William Burns also came and told the Bolsonaro administration not to mess with the elections.
Quote, the Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, the National Security Advisor, all visited in an election year, said McKinley.
Is this unusual?
No, it's not.
Oh, is this usual, rather?
No, it's not.
It's not usual.
It's unusual.
And it certainly is.
Now, this is coming from the Biden administration.
And they were saying, look, all we were doing was going there to try and make sure that the election was legitimate.
We were protecting democracy.
That's what the CIA has said forever.
And it's amazing.
That the Brazilian left cheered the CIA from doing this because Brazil has a very sensitive history with the United States.
It was the CIA and the US government in 1964 that helped right-wing generals in Brazil overthrow the democratically elected government.
And it resulted in a 21-year military dictatorship in Brazil that the United States and the UK supported.
So you would think when Brazilian leftists hear that the CIA is coming to Brazil to pass messages about the election, they would say, stay out of our country.
They were thrilled about this because they knew the Biden administration wanted Lula to win, which is not surprising.
He's much more ideologically aligned with President Biden and Bolsonaro was more aligned with Trump.
And so you have all the top national security officials from the Biden administration, including the head of the CIA, coming to Brazil during an election year to repeatedly meet with top Brazilian officials about the election.
And of course, the United States government is going to say, oh, we were just going there to protect the integrity of the election.
But knowing that they want to win and that they were constantly coming here and meeting with these officials is the kind of thing that people ordinarily are against, especially on the left.
Unless they're convinced, as they were here, that the CIA and other Biden officials were here to do what they could to ensure that Lula won.
And this is the state of Brazil.
And I encourage you to watch the Tucker Carlson interview.
Like I said, there are some things that were in that that I am not fully on board with that I think Overlook some nuances, which I think in Tucker's defense might be something that happens if you're reporting on countries, but not immersed in them.
There's no way you can know the details of the political situation in every other country, but the themes that Tucker was trying to highlight and the platform he gave to these grievances are completely, not just true, but deeply alarming.
And I think both of the, yeah, sad, and I certainly agree.
The United States is not far behind.
We also have our own censorship industrial complex.
We are constantly dealing with the fact that the government is trying to censor the internet.
Remember, four different federal court judges ruled that the Biden administration assaulted the First Amendment free speech rights in one of the gravest ways we've seen in decades, according to the court, through constant coercion from the CIA and other top level government agencies of big tech demanding that it remove content the government dislikes.
About COVID, about Ukraine, about the election, about all sorts of things.
And obviously, there were many Trump officials who were prosecuted based on an insane conspiracy theory of Russiagate that got debunked, but a lot of these people went through the prison system, ended up in jail.
And now, of course, the number one political goal of the Democratic Party, without question, is to try and put Trump in prison before the election.
Because they see his imprisonment as a vital political weapon.
Tyranny is not something that usually happens in a big melodramatic swoop.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes you get big changes, a revolution, a coup.
Oftentimes it happens incrementally, but it's happened in Brazil quite rapidly.
And I would suggest the U.S.
is not far behind and the U.S.
is on the same path with the same premises and the same mentality.
And that's why Brazil and the U.K.
and the E.U.
and Canada and everywhere else in the democratic world that these measures are being implemented.
Largely because after 2016, the Western establishment decided that it could no longer allow core freedoms like free speech because when it does, it leads to outcomes they can't control, like Trump's victory, like Bolsonaro's victory, like Brexit.
And they decided that they, being the establishment, would do anything to shield their own prerogatives and their own ideology and their own power.
And of course, they invent all kinds of reasons why their imprisonment of political enemies and censorship is so necessary.
Oh, these people are dangerous.
They question the vaccine.
They're coup advocates.
They want to overturn democracy.
Everybody always has a reason for authoritarianism.
Some external threat, some domestic threat.
That's always the playbook.
That's always the formula.
But what doesn't change is the core weapons of authoritarianism itself.
And it is not just thriving, but expanding all the time in Brazil.
And the same is true in Western Europe.
The same is true in the UK.
The same is true in Canada.
And it is absolutely true in the United States.
And it's urgent to pay attention to where it's taking place elsewhere, because that is always a harbinger of what is coming to the United States as well.
Last night we covered this new attempt to create a narrative that depicts Jewish Americans as a particularly vulnerable and especially endangered and vulnerable victim group in the United States.
There was a cover story by Time Magazine owned by a hardcore supporter of Israel billionaire and written by a longtime supporter of Israel, Noah Feldman, who was part of the Bush-Cheney effort to govern Iraq but also was a leading proponent of Trump's impeachment.
called the new anti-semitism on the cover of Time.
We dissected that article and then you have Barry Weiss giving a speech at the 92nd Street Y after a Pulitzer Prize winning author had an event there who was canceled, who had his event canceled because he was a critic of Israel.
They invited Barry Weiss instead to come and speak on the state of American Jewry.
They had all these luminaries like Jerry Seinfeld in attendance and Barry Weiss told them That American Jews are unsafe in the United States.
They are the real victim group.
And obviously a lot of this is an attempt to shield Israel from criticism, to imply that you become the new anti-Semite by questioning Biden's policy of financing Israel's war.
That's what this is all designed to achieve.
Now, today, House Republicans who have spent years mocking the notion That students need to feel safe from criticism, from protests, from ideas that upset them on campus, mocking these people as fragile children who need to suck on their little blankets and get therapy dogs and safe spaces.
Ever since October 7th, I've decided that Jewish students are unsafe, not because they're being physically assaulted.
The number of Jewish students who have been injured because of physical attacks on American campuses since October 7th is zero.
Or close to zero.
Certainly nowhere near a kind of epidemic of the sort they're trying to depict.
What they're actually saying is that Jewish students are unsafe not because they're being physically assaulted or threatened with physical violence, but because the words they're hearing are violent.
Words are violence.
That was the claim of the liberal left for years to try and usher in censorship in the name of protecting marginalized groups.
And apparently, a lot of people on the American right, eager to shield Israel from criticism, believe that that theory is absolutely true.
It just doesn't belong being invoked to protect black people, or Latinos, or immigrants, or Muslims, or trans people, or gay people, or women, or anybody else, only American Jews.
That's where it's valid.
That somehow, even though if you look at the metrics of American Jews, it's hard to find a group thriving more.
And you have these students at the top, most elite college campuses from Harvard, and Yale, and Princeton, and MIT, and Penn, and Columbia, proclaiming themselves victims when, as Bhajyong Gersygar said in a video we showed you, it's hard to imagine anybody more privileged than they.
And yet we had a A congressional hearing today where Jewish students were paraded around and they talked about their victimhood status.
Again, none of them were physically assaulted.
They're upset by pro-Palestinian protesters.
And you had people like Elise Stefanik, whose big star-making moment was when she demanded more censorship from college administrators who said, we have to look at the context of these statements to decide.
Threatening these college administrators again is to say, we're going to get more safety from you for these students no matter what.
Here is the New York Times account of it today.
Quote, Jewish students described facing anti-Semitism on campus to members of Congress.
Now, just let's imagine that this headline said something slightly different.
Instead of Jewish students, let's imagine that it said black students.
I don't think I can write in this pen, but black students described facing Racism on camp... Yeah, this is barely illiterate.
It looks like the scratching of some kind of neurotic person in the middle of a seizure.
But I'm asking you to imagine a headline that said, instead of this, black students describe feeling facing racism on campus to members of Congress.
At a discussion held by a house panel, student criticized their university for not cracking down on...
Racism.
An anti-war group pointed out that Muslim and Arab students are facing harassment too.
People would mock this.
They would say, oh, these poor, marginalized, self-victimized students at Harvard and Yale constantly talking about how bad they have it.
But because It's not Jewish students, it's not black students claiming they face racism on campus, but instead it's Jewish students claiming they face anti-Semitism, everything switches.
And suddenly the Republicans that would ordinarily be mocking these safety narratives suddenly embrace them.
And again, don't say that it's different because this is physical endangerment, because it's not.
No one claims these students have been assaulted or threatened with violence or the victims of violence.
They're upset and angry.
That people are writing op-eds and protesting in defense of Palestinians against Israel.
Here is what the article says.
Quote, nine Jewish students from prominent universities told members of Congress on Thursday that they feel unsafe on campus, but that their complaints of anti-Semitism had been waved away by university administrators.
At a bipartisan roundtable organized by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the students describe various episodes of anti-Semitism they had experienced on campus since the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel, accusing their schools of pandering to violent and disruptive protesters while minimizing the threat to Jewish students.
Several investigations are underway to examine claims of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias on campuses.
The Department of Education has opened inquiries into discrimination against Muslim students at Harvard and other universities.
And the House Committee is investigating anti-Semitism at Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia.
And Ms.
Fox has said the examination could be expanded.
The roundtable would help inform next steps in the inquiries, she said.
Compassionate, angry, and defiant, the students on Thursday repeatedly described feeling scared and abandoned in spite of their efforts to be heard by university officials.
Now, this is exactly what I was describing earlier as an abandonment of principles for immediate political convenience and political gain.
You have the entire right mocking cancel culture, censorship, victimhood narratives, and ever since October 7th, much of the right, not all of it, but much of it, in the name of protecting Israel, has embraced all those narratives.
Not ironically, because For many, many years, this is not new, as we've devoted shows to documenting.
Israel critics, both students and faculty, have been among the most frequent targets of cancer censorship.
That is just true.
One organization that was extremely happy with the House Republicans today was the Anti-Defamation League.
Its chairman, Jonathan Greenblatt, His executive director tweeted the following quote powerful testimony in Congress today from a Jewish MIT student.
It's unacceptable that college administrators are not taking physical threats made against their Jewish students seriously.
It's beyond time that they listen and act to make their campuses safer.
Here was a video from the House Committee on Education, which was the committee that held this hearing, and you can see some of the students there. - That they can't police free speech, but this is not about free speech.
And I think that's one thing that we've noticed is that there are actual threats There are people's offices who have been attacked.
People have banged on office doors, tried to unlock office doors.
And that has nothing to do with free speech.
That is people's lives at risk.
That is people fearing physical violence.
There have been people calling for physical violence on our campus, and literally nothing has been done.
Okay, let me just say this.
If you are somebody who is in an office and someone trying to physically break into your office to do physical harm, as she's claiming, or someone is calling and threatening you with physical violence, you don't call the dean, you call the police.
Those are already crimes.
Those are crimes that the police are duty bound to investigate and to arrest anybody who's trying to break into your office, trespass to your office or your home to try and harm you physically.
If that's what's happening, those are already crimes.
But the vast bulk of these grievances are always, oh, we hear protests, we hear slants, chants, we hear slogans.
And if all it is is this, then why do you need to go to Congress?
Call the police.
The police, presumably, take crimes like this seriously.
Now, here is the Republican Congresswoman, Elise Stepanek, who, as I said, made her big star turn moment when questioning Here she's questioning the student.
Here she's questioning the student.
Thank you for that answer.
And just straight to the cameras for the lawyers for these universities have failed.
If you think this is going to get brushed under the rug, the list is getting longer by the day.
This Congress will not stop until we hold you accountable.
That's a promise.
Now, again, you bring any other group, black students, Latinos, immigrants, trans people, LGBTs, Muslims, to the same committee, to the same members of Congress, and they will mock the idea that they deserve safe spaces.
And presumably, if they're complaining of violence, they will say, call the police.
But every single thing that the American right has claimed for years to mock when it comes from the left, they have been embracing since October 7th.
Again, not all parts of the American right.
There are a lot of parts of the American right, including prominent right-wing officials and pundits and journalists who have said no to a lot of this.
Especially the attempts to impose censorship in the name of protecting Israel, to equate Israel criticism with anti-Semitism.
But this is completely recognizable as the kind of victimhood narrative that many conservatives have long scorned and mocked when applied to literally every other victim group, every other minority group, every other marginalized group, and suddenly since October 7th have found great political value in disseminating this narrative.
And at the end of the day, one of the ways that you can know if you're a marginalized group is whether you have access to or excluded from The key institutions of society.
So when you have access to the cover of Time magazine and when you're getting invited to speak at the 92nd Street, why when a Pulitzer Prize winning author has his event canceled because he's criticizing Israel and when the House Republican Congress repeatedly opens the doors to you of Congress to invite you in and to venerate your grievances?
Those are not indicia of marginalization, but quite the contrary.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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