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May 13, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
25:44
Rumble Live: Defending Your Human Right to Freedom of Expression

Glenn Greenwald joins Rumble Live in Toronto to discuss the importance of defending the human right to freedom of expression. - - -  Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Without further ado, let me introduce to you a free speech hero of mine, Glenn Greenwald.
Good morning!
How are you?
Good morning.
How are you?
I am very happy to be here in Toronto.
I want to really thank Rebel News and Rumble for organizing this incredibly important event.
As Ezra just mentioned, as some of you might know, I live in Brazil, so it's an extremely long trip to try and get here.
When Chris Pawlowski, the CEO of Rumble, called me and said, hey, we're going to do a free speech event in Canada about this new pending law.
Can you come?
I said, I don't know.
It's a very far way to go.
It's 30 hours of flying.
You know all the misery of flying.
And then I have to get back.
I have to come turn around and go to New York.
And he said, OK, just let me know.
And I think, think about it.
Let me know.
And then I sat down and I started reading about C-63.
And then I read C-63, even the government's own description of C-63.
And I immediately called Chris and I said, book my flight.
I'm definitely going to Toronto.
So it's way too dangerous to allow.
Now, I want to emphasize, as Ezra said, I live in Brazil where there's all kinds of extreme censorship laws being introduced, very similar, though not yet quite as extreme, as the one that you might be facing.
Rumble is now banned in several countries because of its courageous and noble refusal to comply with censorship demands by various governments on the grounds that free speech over the internet was one of the promises of the internet as to why it would liberate us and free us from state and corporate control.
And that means you need platforms standing up and defying government censorship orders instead of being compliant with them In order to keep the internet free, and so I'm so proud to be part of a platform like Rumble that is truly convicted about these values.
And I think what's so important to realize is although, as Canadians, I'm sure you're particularly worried about the Trudeau government and the slot, and if I were you, I would be also, it's not actually just a Canadian issue.
That's one of the reasons I'm here.
This is taking place now all over the democratic world.
It's completely interconnected.
One of the strategies, in fact, is to see how far every country can go, and then that sets the bar that much lower for how far other countries can go.
We've seen a new internet censorship law in the EU.
We've seen one in the UK.
We're seeing new hate speech laws in Scotland and in Ireland.
We see new hate speech laws throughout South America, including in democratic countries like Brazil.
We see censorship programs even in the United States, where there's a First Amendment in theory.
And it's all feeding off of one another.
Every country serves as a laboratory for every other country.
It's all based on the same mentality.
There's not a Canadian censorship argument and an American censorship argument in Europe.
It's all based on the same view.
That is why it is so vital to resist it everywhere that it emerges.
Because it will feed it in other countries.
And then we'll be at the point where internet companies will almost be compelled to impose the most extreme form of censorship that any one country has been able to enact on the entire internet in order simply to comply with the laws of every government.
That's why it's crucial to stop it in every instance where it takes hold.
Now, one of the, as I was reading C63, I actually had this thought.
As I was reading it, I was seeing things like, you may have a life sentence in prison for expressing views that some government somewhere thinks is defending genocide.
And think about how many things might be Defending genocide in the eyes of certain governments or inciting speech, inciting hatred rather, which is pretty much every political speech could do that.
And then there's prison sentences and the ability of the government to drag you before tribunals and impose punishments on you, deprive you of your liberty for expressing your political views.
And I think even 10 years ago, even in Canada, which has for me always been kind of a dark beacon of assaulting free speech in the name of stopping hate speech, even in Canada, I think anywhere in the democratic world, it should be shocking, shocking and alarming to even think that there's a law that could contemplate this kind of a scheme.
And yet I don't think there is.
There's a lot of people in this room up in arms about it.
There's a lot of people increasingly expressing backlash against it, but nowhere near the level that it should be provoking.
And I think it's important to ask why that is.
And I think there are two important reasons to note about this.
Number one is I really do think that as citizens of Western countries, we have been inculcated from birth to believe That there are those tyrannical authoritarian countries who are our enemies on the other side of the world.
It's like in China and Iran and Russia and North Korea.
Those are the bad countries that deny freedom.
We are the democratic world.
We stand for freedom.
This is what we're inculcated to believe since birth.
Anyone who's above the age of 40 was born into the Cold War or right after the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, and this is what
How we saw the world and it's embedded in our in our thought process and so when you try and tell somebody who lives in a country like Canada or the United States or Western Europe that there is now tyranny and authoritarian in your country just look at these laws that punish you for your political expression the hallmark of a tyrannical government there's an instinctive unwillingness to believe that it could possibly be taking place here just a almost an instinctive aversion to believing it about our own societies
It's very dangerous because authoritarianism and tyranny is not about any one particular country or any one particular political culture.
It's about human nature and the ability and eagerness of human beings, once they get power, to crave more and more and more of it.
And Western leaders and Canadian leaders and American leaders, as they're showing, Are not immune to that.
And I think even all of us, alarmed by these things, have this embedded in us.
You feel this kind of desire to move away from this idea, these extreme terms like tyranny and authoritarianism, as though it could never happen in our free and democratic and Western countries.
It absolutely can and it absolutely is.
And I think it's very important to make sure that we all resist that temptation.
Now, the other issue that I think is also so important to note about why so many of these things are not as shocking as they should be is because it is not an abrupt change where we go one day from having free speech to the next day having intense and all-consuming censorship.
It's an incremental process.
It kind of goes inch by inch by inch by inch, and every time an inch is taken, That is then what becomes normalized and accepted, and then the next inch is taken, and then the next, and the next, and now you're many yards away from where you began, but you haven't been shocked by it, even though if you had gone from the first point to the last, you would think it was very abrupt, because it's been done very gradually, and it's normalized you, and it customized you along the way.
I'll just give you one very clear example of how that works.
After 9-11, the 9-11 attacks in the United States, when obviously Americans were traumatized at the highest level of fear possible for valid reasons, they immediately seized on that fear and said we need this whole new set of laws enacted.
Laws that are completely anathema to the American conception of liberty, to how our government functions, to the powers that our government can exercise on us when it comes to surveillance and detention and arrest and due process and free speech.
And even right in the weeks of 9-11, when Americans were pretty much willing to allow the government to do anything in the name of preventing another terrorist attack, the government's introduction of what was called the Patriot Act It was so controversial, it was deemed so radical, such an aberration, an abrupt aberration from the American tradition that even people supportive of the US government who took the terrorist threat very seriously said, wait a minute, this is a bridge way too far.
We can't allow the government to seize these kinds of powers in the name of stopping terrorism.
Even when the World Trade Center was still in rubble, people found the Patriot Act so alarming That the only way they could assuage the population and convince power sectors to accept it was by saying, oh, don't worry, we're implanting a provision in the law that makes it temporary.
It's only here for three years and as long as the terrorist threat is gone in three years, which of course we think it will be, the law will disappear.
It's not going to be part of the American tradition.
It's a temporary emergency measure.
Here we are in 2024, 23 years after the 9-11 attack, without anything close to a major terrorist attack of the size of 9-11 happening on American soil.
And the Patriot Act is now just a part of the political woodwork of the United States.
Nobody talks about the Patriot Act anymore.
Every three or four years it has to be renewed.
There's barely any debate.
The Congress goes and votes by 386 or maybe 60, 40 civil libertarians in Congress who raise objections to it.
Nobody listens to them.
Nobody cares.
The Patriot Act is now a permanent part of the sector and the framework of American political life.
And that is what's happening with censorship.
You start off and you say, look, there are extreme forms of speech that we can't allow.
So Western Europe says, we can't allow revisionism of the Holocaust or questioning of the Holocaust.
We can't allow explicit neo-Nazi parties to exist.
Everybody says, okay, there's no reason we should allow that kind of speech.
Now the framework is implemented.
And what, of course, happens once government leaders get that taste of power, they get inebriated on it and they want more of it.
And then suddenly it becomes, oh, anything that seems that we can call white nationalist, now that too can't be permitted.
So now you're talking about people who question mass immigration.
Oh they must be white nationalists, they can be banned too.
And then you move it further and you say people who question election integrity, whether our government is really being honest in the conduct of elections, suddenly now these people are insurrectionists, they have to be banned too.
And you go inch by inch by inch and suddenly it's this suffocating stranglehold around your neck that you didn't realize was being put there because it started off as a kind of warm soft embrace and just got tighter and tighter and tighter until We really didn't even realize anymore how extreme we'd become.
When you read 63, see 63, try and use your brain of 2010 or even 2015 to think about a law like this and you will find yourself shocked.
And yet I think even those of us who are enraged don't quite realize because of that incremental pattern, how extreme it is, how much of an attack it is on the core values that we were told would always be guaranteed as the reason we should consider Our Western countries to be beacons of freedom and liberty.
It's not because of their geographical location on the map.
It's because of the values that you represent.
And when you strip away those values, as is being done aggressively and viscerally, then this facade of freedom starts crumbling.
And that's exactly what is happening with laws like this.
And I think more and more people are finally starting to realize that.
and it's our job to make them realize that even more.
I think a really important point, I mean, we can gather here and we can talk about the evils of censorship, and probably most of us agree on we can gather here and we can talk about the evils of censorship, and probably most of us agree on this, but I think it's very important to understand why are Why, we were all taught
One of the things that makes our society free is the right of citizens to express their viewpoint without being punished by the government.
Only in places like Saudi Arabia and China and Russia and those bad countries do dissidents go to prison, not in our Western governments.
You can be a dissident, you can be a critic of the government, and not go to prison for it.
But if you read C63, That is not true.
On the terms of the language, I remember the first article I found about C-63 was from a pro-free speech, anti-government site, and I read it and I thought to myself, okay, that has to be an exaggeration.
And the next thing I did on purpose was I went to the government site, the Trudeau government's explanation of C-63, and in order to justify the law and explain it and explain why you shouldn't be worried about it, it was almost even more alarming than that first site that I found.
So why do they think that they can convince people that this kind of censorship is something they should accept?
The reason is, is because the nirvana that is promised is actually very tempting.
Who wouldn't love to live in a world where there's no hatred?
We all just love each other all the time.
We hug each other.
We're in total harmony.
That sounds fantastic.
And who wouldn't love to live in a world where there's no disinformation?
All that people hear and all that people say is completely truthful all of the time.
So if governments can promise that, of course a lot of people are going to want that.
Oh, yes, definitely.
Who wants hatred?
Who needs hate speech?
Who wants incitement of genocide?
Who wants disinformation?
Those are all bad things.
We should, of course, ban them.
They're very harmful.
And obviously the problem is, these are extremely subjective terms, inevitably subjective terms, deliberately subjective terms, and you put those in the hands of anyone, any human being with that power to determine what is true and false, what is hateful and not, to the point that ideas can be banned, those will be abused inevitably.
One of the things that's amazing about this law, and all these laws now, these censorship laws, is the category of speech That it purports to ban is speech which, quote, incites hatred against others.
Incites hatred against others.
I don't think I've ever heard of a political speech in my life that didn't have the capacity to incite hatred against others.
In fact, didn't have the intention to do so.
Here I am standing now for 30 minutes, 20 minutes.
Proceeded by many speakers who also did the same, trying to get you to see, to argue for the cameras, for people watching, that the Trudeau government is authoritarian and tyrannical in its approach to these laws.
Obviously, my speech has the capacity to incite hatred against Justin Trudeau and his government.
All speech does.
All speech does.
If Justin Trudeau stands up and says the Canadian right is a fascist, racist, white nationalist political movement, as it feels like he does pretty much every day, he gets up and says that like as frequently as he changes his socks, obviously that has the potential, not just the potential, but the likelihood to incite hatred against the people whom he's maligning and condemning in those terms.
I don't know of any political speech That is immune from the accusation that it's inciting hate speech, which means that whoever has the power to decide which speech is in that category and which speech is out has almost absolute power.
You can ban these ideas or permit these ideas.
Imagine the unlimited power that vests in the hands of government officials or bureaucrats or commissions whom they appoint.
To decide which ideas are permissibly expressed and which ideas are now criminal, and that is absolutely what this law on its face does.
Now, one of the things that I found particularly alarming, and I honestly had to book several places to confirm that I was reading this right, was that one of the things this law does is that it permits lengthy prison terms, in fact I think life in prison, for anybody who's accused of defending or advocating genocide.
Now that sounds like a nice thing.
We all are against genocide.
Genocide's terrible.
And why?
We don't want people advocating that or calling for it or inciting it.
The problem, of course, is that the term genocide itself is extremely ambiguous and people disagree on what it means almost everywhere where the term arises.
Look at any conflict.
Look at the one in Israel and Palestine right now.
It is the official position of many governments around the world that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is genocide.
And that means that if you have a law in place that makes it criminal to advocate genocide, you could easily fall into the scope of that bill if you stand up and defend the Israeli government in the war that it's perpetrating.
In Gaza, a lot of governments around the world hear that and interpret that as the defense of genocide.
Then you could go to other countries, just cross the border, into a country that is supportive of Israel and sees the Palestinian cause As advocating the genocide of Jews or Israelis.
And there, the entire thing is reversed.
There, if you go and criticize Israel or you defend the Palestinian cause, you can be accused of inciting genocide, of chanting genocidal chants, of inciting hatred against Israelis or Jews.
And that is why, as Ezra was saying, the core of free speech, defense, the thing that makes it most vital, the thing that is most vital if you want to succeed, is that you not only defend free speech when it comes to the attack on the ideas with which you agree, the ideas that you most like, almost as important, in fact, I would say more important, is that you defend free speech, including when the ideas that you most is that you defend free speech, including when the ideas that you most hate are being
Everybody defends free speech for the ideas that they agree with.
If you go to North Korea and you want to defend the government, you're totally free to do that.
And everybody will defend.
What you can't do is express views that power centers dislike, that governments dislike.
And so the only way to defend real free speech and not have people think you're just cynically using it as a weapon to advance your own political cause is to defend it.
In all cases, because the minute you endorse this conception, this idea, that hate speech can be shut down, that it can be criminalized, that it can be punished, because you think that the people against whom it's being applied should be silenced because their views are so harmful and so toxic, you're automatically guaranteeing that that system one day will be weaponized against you and your allies because that power will shift into the hands of other people.
And that is the biggest challenge that free speech Champions have is to not only stand and defend that cause and wave that banner, when it comes to the ideas that you're most aligned with, with which you feel the most empathy, but also the ideas that you hate the most.
That's the true test of a free speech champion, of somebody who can be a credible defender of opposing censorship.
And I encourage and urge all of you to make sure that you're as disciplined as you can be in doing that.
I look for the places Where the ideas that most offend me are being attacked because that's where I want to go and defend free speech.
15 years ago I remember Ezra Levant getting hauled before some hate speech commission for having expressed ideas that at the time I really felt offended by.
I did not agree with his ideas.
But I was infinitely more offended by the idea that he could be dragged before a commission, a government commission, And have to prove to them that his ideas weren't hateful, that they didn't incite hatred sufficient to the point where he could be punished criminally, because I could empathize with that and very easily imagine myself in some country or that country one day being hauled before a commission for my own ideas as well.
And that is why when I stand up for Ezra Levin's free speech rights, even in the case where he's expressing ideas that I dislike or for anybody else, I know that I'm also engaged not just in a principled cause, which is I think important, but also a self-interested cause, because the only way you can be taken seriously and credibly as a free speech champion, as an opponent of censorship, is if you're doing it in all cases.
Now, let me just close by saying that I do think that the movement to censor over the last decade in the West, here in Canada, in the United States, throughout Western Europe, has been directed and driven almost entirely By a fear of right-wing populism.
I think what you can see, and if you go back and look at the history of how this censorship industrial complex arose, how these groups that purport to combat disinformation began being funded by billionaires.
The most traumatic event for Western liberals was 2016.
That was when the British people defied what they were being told to do by their bosses in Brussels and in London.
And they opted instead to leave the EU by approving Brexit.
That was a trauma to Western liberals.
And then, four months later, while Western liberals were still highly traumatized by that, the worst event, event, the most apocalyptic event for them happened that they could possibly have dreamed of, which was when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And that was when Western elites, I don't just mean on the laughter, liberals, I mean Western elites, defenders of establishment power, which you find a lot of in both political parties where which you find a lot of in both political parties where you have a two party system that's dominant, decided the following,
We can no longer allow this internet to go uncontrolled because when it remains uncontrolled, when it remains free, when people can speak their minds and share their opinions with other people, when it no longer has to be mediated through large media corporations that we influence and control, the people go wild!
We can't control them any longer.
We can't control what they think.
They don't vote how we tell them to vote anymore.
They left the EU.
They voted for Donald Trump over a political icon like Hillary Clinton.
We can't allow that anymore.
And what you have seen ever since is a highly financed and highly coordinated system of groups in the West They invented this new expertise overnight.
They concocted it out of whole cloth.
They pronounced themselves.
I'm a disinformation expert.
Like, oh, I'm a surgeon.
I went to school and I learned how to become a surgeon or I learned how to become a pilot or an engineer.
I learned how to identify disinformation better than you can.
Where did that expertise come from?
That is a fake expertise that does not exist.
What that is assigned to do is to try and convince you and everybody else that political censorship is not actually political censorship It's the byproduct of this apolitical scientific analysis by people who have access to complex knowledge that you don't have.
And so when they decree that something is disinformation, we're all supposed to just stand up and cheer its banishment because the experts have said this is false and we should trust the experts.
I mean, what have experts ever been wrong in the West?
Like, not in Iraq, not in COVID, not during Russiagate.
We should, of course, trust these experts.
They've proven over and over how right they are, and I think that's the most menacing part of all of this.
But I just want to remind you one more time, and I know it might be a little bit of a challenging message to bring to this group, but I nonetheless think sometimes challenging messages are important.
Of course, I could just feed you with things that you want to hear, but I just want to urge you to realize that any anti-establishment view, whether on the right or the left, Is considered dangerous to establishment power.
And I know probably most of the people in this room are supportive of the Israeli cause.
Look at these pro-Palestinian protesters as menaces, as people who are expressing hateful ideas.
I promise you that's how liberals see you.
That's how liberals saw the trucker protest.
Oh, these people are impeding our streets.
They're breaking the law.
Of course they need to be shut down.
They're hateful.
They're endangering the public health.
Or people on the left say, those right-wing fanatics, they're racist.
They're spreading hatred against minority groups who are vulnerable.
We can't allow that.
And a lot of people are tempted to now say the same thing that, oh, these people who are protesting the Israeli war in Gaza are inciting hatred against another minority group and therefore need to be shut down.
And I think it's extremely important that if we're to have credibility in this cause that I believe supersedes all other causes because if we don't have free speech, we have nothing
The crucial thing is to unite on principle and defend the right of human beings, of citizens of Western societies, to express their views, no matter what they are, without having bureaucrats and commissions and judges and presidents tell us that our opinions, for some reason, are illegal or criminal or can even subject us to prison.
C-63 does that, many other laws do that, and it's time to say enough.
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