CNN Debate Recap: Dems Face Biden's Decline; PLUS: CNN’s Kasie Hunt's Meltdown; SCOTUS Censorship Decision Explained | SYSTEM UPDATE #290
TIMESTAMPS:
CNN Debate Recap (0:00-31:29)
Intro (31:43)
Revealing Pre-Debate Spectacle (38:45)
SCOTUS Shields Censorship Program (1:10:05)
Outro (1:48:10)
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We are obviously not in the studio, but instead in an undisclosed location.
We are just a few minutes after the conclusion of the first presidential debate in Atlanta, hosted by CNN, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
I honestly found that More entertaining than I expected to.
Oftentimes I actually have trouble, even though it's my job, I guess, to watch the entirety of these debates.
And I often think that only the first 30 minutes or 45 minutes matter because I can't imagine most people, most voters watching until the end either.
And so you'd still get the impression that the last half doesn't really matter much.
It's by then pretty boring.
You know exactly what's going to, how it's going to go.
But this definitely was interesting.
The whole time, I thought, and you know, I wish I could come on and talk about all the different substantive debates and disputes each of them had and analyze how I think their different policy or ideological visions are going to matter.
But honestly, none of that had the slightest importance because What both of them actually had to do was demonstrate that they are not too old and too inept and too cognitively disabled just to speak sentences and perform the job.
And so obviously Donald Trump succeeded in that.
He was like as focused and as energized as you've ever seen him being.
And Joe Biden, I mean, it was an absolute disaster.
You could not have fed any more into All of the biggest concerns and fears, even among Democratic voters, about Joe Biden being too old and incapable and adult to do the job than everything that Joe Biden did from the first second that he walked in, even.
He just had that, like, old man, like, shuffle, that very, like, stiff, draggy posture and just, like, walking, like, one tiny little step after the next as though he's afraid at any moment he's going to fall down and break his hip.
And Trump just had that Normal Trumpian posture of being extremely confident and being very present.
And I think that actually the rules and structure of the debate really helped Trump at the end of the day.
The fact that there couldn't be a lot of back and forth controlled some of his worst impulses, made him seem more sober, more serious because he could only speak when they came to him.
I think the lack of an audience as well.
Sometimes he gets riled up by the audience if they're negative, if they're positive.
And I think it helped him to just remain very focused.
Occasionally he got a little rambly.
He obviously didn't answer a lot of, but honestly, none of that makes any difference because Joe Biden honestly looked like a senile, confused, very old man who has no idea what he's saying or doing at any given moment.
And actually it was worse for the first half of the debate.
And just his voice was so addled and so many times he would be speaking and he would just cut off in mid-sentence and he had no way to conclude his thought.
It was just rambling and
Honestly, it really is watching elder abuse and you feel that, you know, it's like, God, he's going to have to sit there for 90 minutes with no notes and no help from anyone and just have that, you know, he had that like kind of half insane, half vacant look on his face where he was just like staring into space like some weird, scary, creepy psychopath, but also just having that very empty look on his face.
So, honestly, it's not even a question about whether that happened or not.
Every single Democrat and every single liberal whose reactions I was checking, including the most hardened partisans, were horrified and admitting it.
They were all talking about how Joe Biden needs to withdraw from the election and step aside and allow someone more competent.
I mean, they were the ones saying that.
I'm talking about the hardest core Democratic partisans were admitting that everything Biden was doing and saying was an embarrassment, was just awful, like almost guaranteed to lose him the election on that point.
That's why I don't really think the substance of any of it mattered.
You have this threshold you have to pass, especially if you're Joe Biden.
Where you know a large part of the electorate perceives, obviously with a lot of basis, that he's just too old and not there anymore.
And everything he did and said, and the way he said and did it, did nothing but strengthen and fortify the people who already had those concerns.
And I'm sure it created that concern for a lot of people who didn't have it already.
I actually don't think there's any chance the Democrats are going to switch out Biden, even though that's what a lot of desperate and horrified and frightened Democrats are calling for because he won his party's nomination overwhelmingly.
They didn't even have a primary.
They closed out any possibility of a primary.
The only way I could see them setting him aside is if they convince him to do it.
And I think there's no chance of that.
I mean, he's been running for the presidency basically his entire life for the last 30 years.
And you think that once he finally gets his grip on that power, he's going to give it up?
I mean, he was promising in 2020 that he would only be a one term president, basically saying I'm only here to remove Trump.
And then once I do, I'm going to step aside.
And of course he's going to run again because he's wanted this his whole life.
He's the, I mean, no matter how vacant and senile he might be, he knows that he finally has the grip on this presidency and he's never going to let it voluntarily go.
I mean, that's why he insisted on running for reelection.
That's why the Democratic Party prevented any challengers.
And then they have the other problem that even if they could convince him to step down, I mean, if they can't, then I guess they're going to have to, you know, throw him aside in public at a convention.
But then the question is, who would they replace him with?
Because for a lot of Democratic voters, including a lot of their Black base and their women base, they're going to think that Kamala Harris deserves to move up.
Why not?
She's the vice president.
And so they know on the one hand that they cannot possibly Nominate Kamala Harris.
She's, I mean, even I'd rather run with a senile, obviously just disabled Joe Biden than run with like a cackling, just cringy, hated Kamala Harris.
There are a few politicians people just instinctively are repelled by more than Kamala Harris.
So either they would have to drag somebody else and put them over her.
And was she just going to take that quietly and be content with that?
And alienate a lot of Black voters and female voters who are going to be offended that they just stomped all over her.
So they don't even have that option, I don't think.
I think that's just a pipe dream that a lot of desperate Democrats are clinging to.
And it wasn't just that Biden was so addled, it was that Trump was as focused and articulate As he's been in quite some time, like I said, it probably ended up being the best possible format for him, even though a lot of his supporters felt like he does better with an audience, that they should have not allowed this mic cutting.
I think all those things ended up helping him and he was just very relaxed.
He didn't feel like at all wedded to a script.
He was speaking very naturally and obviously with a lot of authenticity, saying the things very cogently that he's been saying for a long time.
The thing he hammered most Was I think a huge weakness for Biden, which is the gigantic uncontrolled flow across the border uncontrolled flow of huge numbers of people entering the country illegally.
And then even when it came to black and Latino voters, he was Trump was so quick to play on their biggest fears, which is that black voters are particularly concerned about illegal immigration because they know that Those are the people who are going to take their jobs.
And there's that's always been attention in the black community with the Democratic Party and the same with Latino voters.
And so he knows that he's already getting a lot of black Latino voters on his side, in part because of immigration.
And so by just bashing Biden on the exact vulnerability that he has with Black and Latino voters, I mean, even that was just very off the cuff and spontaneous.
Now, sometimes Trump just made stuff up and sometimes he just, you know, didn't answer the question and refused to answer the question.
That's just Trump.
That's what people do in debate.
Just the contrast alone on the issue of who is there and present and mentally capable and who isn't was so glaring that it's almost Irrelevant to get to any other issue.
That, like I said, is a threshold issue.
And I have to say, the behavior of the two moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, I don't think you can really criticize them.
I mean, they were pretty balanced and pretty fair in their moderating the debate, and I think in a way that a lot of people did not expect.
If you read what CNN executives were saying before the debate, they were very worried and are very worried about the perception that they are a pro-Democrat or pro-Biden and anti-Trump outlet, which they are, but they're worried about that perception.
And they also felt like The only way they can bring back an audience is by rejuvenating what was the CNN brand, which is, we do news better than anybody else.
We're not opinion makers.
We're not partisan.
We're not activists.
And so Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were under very strict instructions.
Not only to be fair, but not even to like follow up in a way that challenged the veracity of what they were saying.
In fact, CNN executives are saying they're not there to fact check.
They're there to moderate the debate.
The fact check can come after.
And I'm sure CNN is doing all kinds of work now to call Trump a liar, to repeatedly say that he's lying.
But there wasn't any of that during the debate.
I mean, they were pretty much being the kinds of journalists that Americans expect people to be.
And I can guarantee you, and I've seen it already, so many Democrats scared and alarmed and enraged by Biden's utter just debacle that they're going to blame the moderators on CNN because what they're going to try and say is, okay, Trump was older.
He seemed rather Biden is older.
He definitely seemed more tired.
We concede that theatrically he did worse.
But they're going to say the reality was Trump lied in every answer and since the CNN moderators weren't doing their job of calling Trump a liar and a racist and a fascist every three minutes, the fault lies with CNN and with the moderators.
And it's just so interesting that the one time CNN journalists actually did what they were supposed to do, namely be fair and neutral in the context of a political debate, that's when Democrats are so enraged because they don't believe that's the role of journalists, they believe the role of journalists is to openly Attack Trump and his movement and the Republican Party.
And because they didn't do that, Democrats really are going to believe that these moderators who actually did what they were supposed to do as journalists and hosts and moderators, in fact, were to blame for the entire debate.
You know, there was a little bit of a debate on Israel that didn't really go very far.
Same with Ukraine.
It was more Trump saying.
You know, I think this is a thing that's going to appeal to voters is Trump was the first American president in decades, whatever else you want to say, who did not involve the United States in a new war.
And under Biden, you had the Russian invasion of Ukraine that's now going on for two and a half years.
You have the attack on Israel by Hamas and then the obliteration of Gaza by Israel with threats of other Mideast wars breaking out.
And this idea that nobody trusts or respects Joe Biden, and that's the reason there's all these wars going on that wouldn't happen under Trump, ended up being a much more effective argument precisely because Biden was doing everything possible to show that, of course, why would anybody fear or respect Biden in any of course, why would anybody fear or respect Biden in any way when he can barely construct a coherent sentence or even know what it is that he's saying or So even the substantive messages of Trump, the country's a mess, it's kind of falling apart.
There are all these illegal immigrants streaming over.
There's all these wars going on.
The reason is because Biden barely knows what he's saying.
Even that was kind of bolstered by the more stylistic part of Biden's conduct.
You know, I guess Trump was, to the extent he had a position on Israel, it was they should go and finish the job.
And Biden seemed to be pretty much saying the same thing.
There didn't seem to be any differences there.
Same with Ukraine and Russia.
I mean, Biden, Trump was saying it's outrageous that the United States has to pay so much money for this war when the Europeans, and he could have made a better case saying how wealthy the Europeans are, how much of a high standard of living they have, that it's really more of a concern to them because the proximity of that war to them, they should be paying a lot more.
But I think, you know, that's the extent of the substance on economics, you know, It is true that Trump's economy was pretty good prior to COVID and that Biden's has been a lot weaker in terms of how it's affecting ordinary citizens.
But this kind of substance, I mean, even Frank Luntz, Frank Luntz, who's very anti-Trump and always has those little samples of regular people, watched the debate with, I guess, a group of undecided voters.
And he said, he asked the undecided voters, how many of you have been more persuaded to vote for Biden as a result of this debate?
And he said zero raised their hand.
Not one person in this group said that they were more inclined to vote for Biden after watching this debate.
And the interesting thing about that is there was at least half of those undecided voters who actually voted for Biden in 2020.
And I do believe that's going to be the perception of Americans walking away from this.
I'm not saying they're going to be excited by Trump.
I'm not saying they're going to be necessarily trusting of what he's saying he's going to do.
But You know, he came off as kind of an evasive politician sometimes, but other times he had very effective lines, especially near the beginning when I think most people formed their impression.
And I just don't think people are going to believe that Biden can run a country.
He's clearly not running the country.
And we don't really know who it is, but we know it's not Joe Biden, that person who was on that.
Here's the other thing.
Usually for these kinds of events, When a lot of Americans are paying attention.
It was true in the 2020 debates.
It was true for the State of the Union speech where everyone's watching and Joe Biden cannot come and like drool and fall on his face.
They usually do a pretty good job of getting him as prepared as he can be to appear presentable for however long he needs to be for an hour, 90 minutes.
And I have no doubt that whatever they do to prepare him to be presentable and viable, they did this time.
I mean, he rested for the entire week.
They had no schedule.
He was prepped for a full week.
He was rested for a full week.
I'm sure he ate well and consumed things that were designed to give him energy.
So what you saw tonight was the best possible version of what Joe Biden these days can be.
So just imagine what he's usually like on days where he hasn't had that kind of rest and that kind of preparation.
I mean, this is the Joe Biden at his absolute highest level of capacity.
And, you know, it was another disaster.
And then there's this part that I also found enjoyable and entertaining, which is in the middle of the debate.
One corporate media employee after the next began claiming Oh, sources close to Biden tell me that he has a cold and has been suffering from a cold for several days.
And all these media outlets are rushing to Twitter to say with red sirens, source close to Biden says that he has a cold and has had a cold for several days.
And it's like, why would you not disclose that before the debate to even lower expectations more?
The idea that in the middle of the debate, When he barely can finish a sentence, you're going to try and convince people that the reason he can't speak and can't articulate an idea is because he has a cold?
That you just decided to share with everybody in the middle of the debate?
And then to watch all these journalists go onto Twitter and treat it as though they had some breaking news.
Some of them were using the red sirens, like, breaking!
Someone close to Joe Biden, who's anonymous, tells us that the president has a cold.
That is the sign of how desperate they all are.
Now, I guarantee you on all these shows right now, On all these media outlets that probably more people than usual are watching, certainly CNN, they're doing their best to try and say, I know it seemed like Trump won, but that was only because he lied continuously and repeatedly.
I have no doubt that's what they're saying.
And they're going to, I'm sure, try and convince people it's better to have an old, addled, half senile at best president Who more or less like refrains from lying in every sentence than it is to have a healthy, energetic, charismatic, articulate, pathological liar and criminal.
I'm sure that's going to be the framing.
I have no doubt that if you turn on CNN or NBC or any of those networks, that's exactly what they're trying to do to salvage this.
At the same time, the embarrassment that Joe Biden was tonight was so stark and so visible that It's going to be.
It was too extreme for them to try and deny that it happened.
Even media outlets so desperate to ensure Biden's re-election and prevent Trump from winning, even they're going to have to admit how, from a performance perspective, how awful and embarrassing Joe Biden was.
I think they're going to talk openly about the possibility that he may have to step aside.
There were all kinds of major media figures who are liberals saying that, just speculating on that.
Lots of reporters were saying, every Democrat I'm texting with is just sending like shocked emojis and embarrassment emojis.
I mean, what happened tonight is so obvious that for them to have even a shred of credibility, they cannot try and cover that up or conceal it or deny it because everyone saw it with their own eyes.
This has been the problem from the beginning is everyone sees with their own eyes that Joe Biden is in rapid cognitive decline.
I mean, he already was in 2020.
That's why they were warning in 2019 Democratic operatives were that Joe Biden is not equipped to run a campaign, let alone be president.
And it was only once he got the nomination did they say, oh, that can't be talked about anymore.
But even in 2020, he already had these problems when Cory Booker and Joaquin Castro would go on the debate stage with him in the Democratic primary debate.
They would all use that attack against Joe Biden.
They would say things like, Joe, I believe it seems like you forgot what you just said two minutes ago.
And they would kind of mock him and raise this all the time.
And now four years later, I mean, if you even compare the Biden that we saw tonight to the Biden of 2020, even that Biden in 2020, who was already in cognitive decline, seems like a completely different person than the Biden of tonight.
And then the end question was, well, a lot of people are concerned about your age because you're going to be 85 or 86 at the end of the second term that you're seeking.
And so imagine The complete vegetarian state, the complete jelly his brain will be by the time we, the vegetative state, by the time we get to, if we got to a second term, every day and month and year that passed by, Bryden's brain would be just melting more and more.
So those are my impressions.
Again, I mean, I know it's devoid of substance.
It's more like a, Critique on style and comportment and those things do typically matter more than anything else in debates I mean to this day people believe that the reason
JFK beat Richard Nixon in the first ever televised debate in 1960 was because JFK is young and charismatic and handsome and Nixon always sweat throughout his whole life and under those TV lights before they had the kind of makeup that would prevent this he was just sweating and had perspiration on his face.
I mean we do as human beings react to that those kind of signals and every day and of course it matters in politics but If they were just both kind of within the same realm of performative failure, then I would say maybe substance matters more.
But when the difference in style and behavior and comportment is this extreme, where already you have this massive concern about Biden's cognitive, not even decline anymore, just his cognitive incapacity, He really looked like a nursing home patient.
Like, you know how those, like, have you seen, I've had a grandparent or two at the very end of their life in nursing homes.
And like, you go into their nursing home and like a lot of these old people who are dying, they have Alzheimer's, whatever, a lot of them are really angry.
They get like these angry looks on their face.
They hate everybody.
They're resentful.
They scream at everybody.
Even when he was getting like angry, he looked like one of those old people from a nursing home It was just kind of watching something on TV and like reacting in this very emotive way.
And it still didn't come out clearly what he was angry about.
I honestly think the people who are propping him up.
are really guilty.
They should have intervened a long time ago and said, like, you can't do this.
But it could be that the one thing he still is able to process and understand is that he wants to be president.
He wants that power.
I mean, as I said, he's been running for president since basically the 1970s.
If you get elected to the Senate as one of the youngest senators ever at 29 years old, of course you're thinking about the presidency.
And he ran in the 80s and he ran in the 2000s and now he's running in 2020.
I mean, this is a person who desperately knows he wants to be president.
And if the country were doing really well, if we weren't involved in wars, if their economy was growing, if people felt happy and satisfied in their lives and their economic security, then maybe it wouldn't matter.
They wouldn't really care.
But when you combine people's anxieties and perceptions, That things in their lives are going very wrong.
And then you present this person who's supposed to be running the country, who just seems at best disoriented and confused and weak.
Of course, they're going to make this connection between the stylistic failures and the substantive failures.
And honestly, it could have been that I am not shocked that Biden did this.
I am a little bit shocked that Trump was able to be so disciplined, relatively.
He had, again, a few moments where he just kind of rambled.
If you bring up fraud in the 2020 election, of course he's going to kind of just, like, stab it and go into his thing.
But especially for the first hour, he was incredibly articulate and responsive and smart.
And then, like, even when it got into that argument about who the better golfer was, You could see Trump was really offended by Biden claiming he had a six handicap.
And then just the funny Trump came out when he was like, I think this is the biggest lie yet.
And he's like, I do have an eight handicap.
And Trump said, I've seen your swing, Joe.
You don't have anywhere near a six handicap.
I mean, he was just so at the top of his game, Trump was.
Trump doesn't get better than that.
And that made the contrast with Biden all the more severe.
I just, I don't, I mean, they convicted Trump of 34 felony counts.
Biden only mentioned it once because I think they realized that it hasn't really changed the polls.
A lot of people believe that that's a very trivial case involving a sex scandal and Biden bringing up his Sleeping with Porn Stars and the like only probably fortified that perception.
Trump continues to lead in all the swing states, and so Trump is clearly in the lead.
He's consistently getting 20, 25% of the black vote, 40 to 45% of Latinos.
And there's no way this debate did anything other than to make it far more likely that Trump is going to win.
So I have no idea what the Democrats are going to do.
I'm sure a lot of them are going to want to do something that gets rid of Biden as the nominee.
I just don't think it's possible.
And even if it were possible, again, you have the whole problem with Kamala Harris, that you're definitely not going to run with Kamala Harris.
They know they will get crushed if they do that.
But then how do you just take somebody and stick them above her?
like that's gonna obviously be seen as incredibly disrespectful to well she now identifies as a black woman she didn't previously but the first black woman who's been uh the first woman in fact not let alone black woman to be vice president you're just gonna promote somebody over her and put them like like a gavin newsom or someone like in ahead of her you think It's just the whole thing.
It just seems like a very desperate situation.
If you're a Democrat, and part of what I found entertaining and amusing was actually watching them realize that they couldn't even deny it.
They had to admit it.
I even saw Brian Stelter Saying, look, Trump appears not to have age at all, and Biden is a complete disaster.
Imagine how extreme things have to be for someone like Brian Stalter to say that.
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is saying, we absolutely have to find a way to get Biden off the ballot.
But I think that's just a kind of recognition of the desperate state they're in.
I don't think that's a genuine, real plan about how that would work.
And everything they planned for Trump, they already have.
They already got him convicted in this Manhattan case.
It's extremely unlikely any of these other cases, the three other cases, are going to have a trial before the election.
So what else do they have?
Nothing, really.
And I don't know, I just can't imagine anybody other than the hardest core Democrat looking at Joe Biden and thinking that it's in their best interest of their country, of their community, of their lives, of their kids' futures to keep that person in power.
So I think that's a really good question.
That's pretty much all I have to say.
You know, you can try and parse what they said on foreign policy.
Again, there were very little differences there.
Trump didn't even try to differentiate himself substantially other than just to basically say, look at this guy next to me.
He's the reason there are so many wars breaking out because no, how would you, how can anyone fear or respect this person with a melting brain?
And I think Trump did a good job, too, of not going overboard with attacking Biden for that, more or less letting people see it for himself.
Only one time did he sort of say, I have no idea what he said there at the end, and I don't think he did either.
But it was so obvious that what Biden said, he just trailed off mid-sentence, had no idea what he was saying.
So I think most people thought the same thing, and Trump was just kind of voicing that perception.
But What is there to say substantively about any of the debate?
I mean, it didn't matter.
Most of the time you couldn't understand what Biden was saying.
And Trump was not particularly substantive either, but he was still so much more in command.
And I think, you know, convince people that he's the only one of the two who could possibly Be capable to have any kind of power or leadership and improve the lives of people by running the country.
Complete disaster for Joe Biden.
I don't think I'd be saying that if it weren't true.
As I said, I've pretty much seen every prominent media liberal and Democrat even admit that.
That's to the point where they were trying to say he had a cold.
Um, so there was a little someone invaded the stream for a minute.
So those are my impressions.
I can't really read the chat, unfortunately, but I assume that everybody saw things pretty much the same way.
Yes, that's it.
I think that we're going to see a lot of entertaining things over the next couple of weeks as Democrats and their media allies try and navigate the fallout from this utter and complete and very visceral disaster.
All right.
I'm sure we'll be talking about this more on our live show tomorrow at 7 p.m.
Eastern, our usual time on Rumble.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of very entertaining fallout from what we saw tonight, so we will definitely cover that and continue to report on it, analyze it, and mock it.
And that's it for tonight.
I hope everybody has a great evening.
I hope you enjoyed watching the debate as much as I did.
Good evening.
It's Thursday, July 27th.
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, the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be held tonight in Atlanta, starting at 9 o'clock p.m.
Eastern.
When the Trump campaign decided it did not want the involvement of the Presidential Debate Commission, which it perceived as having been biased against Trump, The campaign agreed to give CNN the full autonomy and unlimited power to control the debate, subject only to the agreement of both campaigns.
Now, in the past and in the future, CNN has barely hidden its vehement anti-Trump hatred and activism.
And the same is true of the two CNN personalities who will moderate the debate tonight, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.
But CNN's power over this debate happened solely because both campaigns, including the Trump campaign, agreed to it.
Earlier this week on one of the CNN morning programs hosted by a woman named Kasey Hunt, an on-air meltdown by that host revealed so much about the function of the U.S.
corporate media in general and CNN in particular.
CNN invited on to the program the Trump campaign's official press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, to discuss the debate and every aspect of it, but as soon as she started expressing Her distrust in Jake Tapper, pointing to all the lies and disinformation Tapper has previously spread about Trump and the way he compared Trump to Hitler, this CNN host angrily interrupted her, demanded that she refrain from any criticism of any CNN host.
And when Levitt continued to express her criticism, the CNN host angrily cut off that interview.
Now, all of that stood in very stark contrast To the virtual, giggly collaboration that very same host had on that very same morning when she invited one of Hillary Clinton's longtime henchmen, Philippe Reigns, to explain all the things that Biden should do in order to crush Trump.
It was collaborative and friendly.
And they were obviously having fun.
Now, we've intended to examine all of this over the last several nights, but have run out of time each time.
As we said, the behavior of the CNN host is so deranged as to be quite entertaining, but it also reveals so much about the mindset, the mentality, and the real function of CNN and the corporate media outlets like it.
Given that CNN is about to host and completely control tonight's presidential debate, it is well worth examining tonight what happened there and what it shows.
Then one of the topics we have reported on and covered most on this show is the Biden administration's unprecedented censorship regime, whereby they spent years successfully coercing and threatening big tech platforms to censor dissent on COVID, US elections, Ukraine, and much more.
The people who were censored under that regime brought a lawsuit against the Biden administration and all four federal judges to have ruled on this program.
A lower district court judge and then a unanimous three-judge ballot panel all ruled that these censorship actions not only violated the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, but in the words of the appellate court, constitute one of the gravest assaults on free speech seen in decades, if not ever.
The U.S.
Supreme Court late last year decided to review this whole case, and back in March, it held oral argument on the ruling.
Now, we reported extensively on that oral argument on this show, and at the time, more or less concluded that a majority of the justices seemed very inclined to dismiss the case, not by finding that the actions of the Biden administration were legal and constitutional, but instead by embracing some theory or other That would enable the court to avoid having to decide the question entirely.
This week, that is exactly what the Supreme Court did by a 6-3 majority.
The court reversed the rulings of the lower court and held that these plaintiffs, these American citizens, had no right to sue their government on these questions because they lacked what courts call, quote, standing To sue.
Now, even though the court did not approve of the Biden administration's censorship regime on the merits, meaning they didn't say that the Biden administration's actions were constitutionally permissible, this is still one of the most unfortunate and potentially destructive rulings in years, as it effectively gives the Biden White House or any other future administration the green light, the ability to force Big Tech to censor dissent
On behalf of the government, we'll examine this ruling in detail, explain what happened, and most of all, assess its ongoing and future implications.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
We are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app because if you do so, it works on both your smart TV and your telephone, and that also enables you to follow the Rumble programs you most like to watch.
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Although tonight is Thursday, in lieu of this after show, the normal after show, the after show instead will be, we'll wait until the debate is over, and then I will stream my thoughts and analysis of it, and the entire thing will be available solely on the Locals platform, and the first part of it or so will be available here on and the entire thing will be available solely on the Locals rumble for now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now
it is absolutely true that cnn is about to have a level of control and autonomy over a presidential debate that no network no media outlet has had over a presidential debate in decades it's
It's typically decided by a committee, by a commission that oversees presidential debates, but the Trump campaign wanted that commission to have no involvement in the debates and thus agreed with the Biden campaign to allow CNN not only to host The debate but to essentially agree to all of the rules that will govern how the debate is conducted.
Now, it should go without saying that CNN is an extremely untrustworthy media outlet in every sense of the word.
We have constantly documented the radical amounts of misinformation that the network routinely spreads.
Just this week, we documented when they were discussing the case of Julian Assange, when they invited on to discuss that case the former deputy director
Of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, who left in disgrace, and then they allowed McCain to spew a bunch of lies about Assange and WikiLeaks, including one claim that is provably false, namely that what differentiates, he said, WikiLeaks and Assange from real journalists is that Assange and WikiLeaks never contacted the government to allow them input into
What they were about to publish to give the government an opportunity to say, you shouldn't publish this because it's too dangerous.
Now, as I pointed out on Monday Night Show and we demonstrated, there's all kinds of reporting that WikiLeaks, in fact, did exactly that in 2010.
In fact, right before the release of the diplomatic cables, they contacted the Clinton White House and said, we would like you to say whatever you want to say to suggest to us or to argue to us why this document or that document shouldn't be Published, it might harm innocent people.
It'll be up to us to decide, which is always the case.
But they wanted the State Department to at least have that input.
And the State Department under Hillary Clinton wrote back and said, we refuse to allow you or refuse to speak to you at all about any of this.
So what Andrew McCabe said on the show, hosted by Caitlin Collins, Was an absolute lie.
Of course, she didn't push back on it.
And so I documented this lie, made sure she saw it on social media, and then even wrote to her to bring to her attention the 2010 foreign policy article that described how WikiLeaks did exactly what she allowed Andrew McCabe to falsely claim WikiLeaks never did.
And of course she hasn't acknowledged it.
She's never going to apologize for it.
She'll never retract it.
She'll never correct it because CNN is a network that has no qualms at all about lying actively as long as it's in pursuit of its political cause.
That's just one very recent and very vivid example of countless ones.
Now there was a truly Bizarre scene on CNN this week on a morning show that is hosted by someone named Casey Hunt.
She used to be at NBC and worked on MSNBC and now she basically does the same thing that she did on MSNBC but for CNN.
And they invited on both the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign separately to talk about this debate, obviously intending to promote it,
And the Trump campaign's official press secretary came onto the program and tried to express what the Trump campaign wanted to say about this election, about this debate, and Casey Hunt angrily lost control of herself and refused to allow the Trump campaign spokeswoman to say what she wanted to say and then cut off the interview.
Here's what's happened.
Here's what happened.
There you see that is Casey Hunt on the left, for those of you Understandably unfamiliar with who she is.
And there's the Trump campaign spokeswoman on the right.
And we're about to show you what happened.
it.
They treated themselves as professionals as they have covered campaigns and interviewed candidates from all sides of the aisle.
I'll also say that if you talk to analysts of debates previous, that if you're attacking the moderators, you're usually losing.
So I really want to focus in on.
So you see there, it was Casey Hunt who went and defended Jake Tapper and Dana Bash after she had criticized them and defended them, said, if you ask other people in media, meaning people like those two who work for corporate media, they'll tell if you ask other people in media, meaning people like those two who work for corporate media,
So she was defending the CNN moderators that the Trump campaign obviously believes are not unbiased moderators and so obviously she wanted to answer what the CNN host had said and then found that she was not permitted to do so.
And what these two men are going to do and say when they stand on the stage.
Now, we have a little bit of what Donald Trump, your boss, has said in trying to set expectations for this debate.
I want to play a series of his comments, and then we'll talk about it.
Watch.
Maybe I'm better off losing the debate.
I'll make sure he says I'll lose the debate on purpose.
Maybe I'll do something like that.
I assume he's going to be somebody that will be a worthy debater.
Should I be tough and nasty and just say you're the worst president in history?
Or should I be nice and calm and let him speak?
So he's basically saying there, well, will I let Joe Biden win?
It does seem as though many Republicans have set the bar very low in terms of arguing that Joe Biden is basically senile.
Now you have people like Doug Burgum coming out and saying, well, President Biden's very accomplished trying to set expectations in a different place.
What do you expect from?
Now, before she tries to answer, let me just that whole question.
The whole premise of it, the whole buildup of it, is to mock and criticize Republicans.
The whole point is, oh, first Republicans say Joe Biden is senile, now it comes time for the debate, and you have all these people in the Republican Party changing tunes.
She cannot ask a question as a reporter, as a journalist, that isn't just loaded up, larded up with all kinds of pro-Biden, anti-Trump animus.
It's just it's in her bones.
It's what the network does.
So even the question itself was so argumentative on behalf of the Democratic Party, criticizing the Republican Party.
And if she did that to Democrats the same way, I would have no problem with it.
I would even say she's doing her job.
But we're about to show you the segment where she had on Democratic Party operatives to talk about the debate, and you'll see how completely different she behaved, even in tone, let alone substance.
But here's what happens when Caroline Leavitt tried to respond.
Joe Biden.
Well, first of all, it would take someone five minutes to Google Jake Tapper, Donald Trump, to see that Jake Tapper has consistently... Ma'am, we're going to stop this interview if you're going to keep attacking my colleagues.
Ma'am, I'm going to stop this interview if you continue to attack my colleagues.
I would like to talk about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who you work for.
Yes.
If you are here to speak on his behalf, I am willing to have this conversation.
I am stating facts that your colleagues have stated in the past.
Now, as for this debate, the expectation for- Okay, I'm sorry guys, we're going to come back out to the panel.
Caroline, thank you very much for your time.
You are welcome to come back at any point.
She is welcome to come back and speak about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump will have equal time to Joe Biden when they both join us now, later this week, in Atlanta for this debate.
Our thanks to Caroline.
Do you see that tone she used?
She was so angry, but she was trying to show what a professional she was.
She was like, you are permitted at any moment to come back on the show and talk about Donald Trump, your boss.
But obviously, if you invite someone on to talk about the debate that's about to happen and you are a CNN host and you come and explicitly offer a defense for why these moderators are so known for being so fair and so objective, And so nonpartisan.
Obviously, if you're the spokesperson for the Trump campaign who has been invited on to talk about the debate, you have every right to respond to the defense of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as being so professional and so respectful of both parties, because that's not what they think.
And yet, I've never seen, especially when it comes to a press secretary of a major presidential campaign before, be treated that way.
Like, not even allowed to get two words out.
And the idea was, how dare you speak ill of my colleagues, meaning CNN personalities, major CNN personalities, who are about to host the debate.
And then, if that weren't enough, she went on to Twitter.
And she issued this decree, look at this imperious tone from Casey Hunt, proposed it right after that happened.
Quote, you come on my show, you respect my colleagues, period.
I don't care what side of the aisle you stand on, as my track record clearly shows.
Please show me Casey Hunt treating a spokesperson for the Clinton campaign or the Biden campaign in this manner.
Where does this idea come from that somehow journalists like this can use this major corporate platform to attack and criticize anyone they want to try and ruin their reputation, ruin their lives?
Everybody is fair game to them, even if they're ordinary citizens who have been unmasked by CNN for mocking Nancy Pelosi or putting memes on the internet that CNN disliked.
Everybody is fair game except CNN journalists.
Those are the ones that shall not be criticized.
And you see the tone of it?
You do not criticize us.
They really do have this kind of sense of aristocratic entitlement.
I think part of it is the fact that, as we'll show you from the New York Times article, really nobody watches CNN anymore and they know that and so this kind of The pompous claim to just respect my title is really all they have left.
But it is also the case that they really do believe that their job and work is so noble, that they are so fair and objective, that they're the guardians of truth, that they should be able to criticize and attack anyone they want, insult them, call them names, as they do constantly.
But nobody should be able to do that to people who work for CNN.
Now one of the things that Leavitt, the Trump spokeswoman, was trying to point out is that Jake Tapper has a long history of, in fact, not being nonpartisan or objective or neutral, as Casey Hunt argued that he was and that everybody understands and recognizes Jake Tapper for being, but in fact he has a long history of attacking Trump in a way that
You would have to be completely partisan to do it, going so far even to compare him to Adolf Hitler, and there are all kinds of video clips.
Here's one from Jack Posobiec, who compiled this about how Donald Trump has spoken of—or how Jake Tapper has spoken of Donald Trump in the past.
The dehumanizing rhetoric of Adolf Hitler is once again alive and well on a national political stage.
This time, of course, in the United States.
Donald Trump, a couple times over the weekend, referred to immigrants from South America, Africa and Asia.
He did not mention Europe.
South America, African Asia as, quote, poisoning the blood of our country, which it's not hyperbole.
That does very directly echo Adolf Hitler's language before World War Two.
If you were to open up a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf, you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as poisoning.
There's really no other way to say it.
Donald Trump's language mirrors this directly.
Now, if you're comparing Donald Trump repeatedly on the air to Adolf Hitler, the single most hated person from all of human history, history, then I don't think you have a very good claim to say that you're this objective, neutral, nonpartisan journalist.
You can make the case that Joe Biden is Hitler by taking little snippets of his speeches or by saying, "Oh, look, Joe Biden tries to silence and censor and imprison dissidents and his political opponents." I mean, they just did it to Julian Assange.
They have done it to the January 6 protesters who have been treated in ways unlike any other protesters in history, especially nonviolent ones.
They've tried to imprison Donald Trump himself.
And you can say, oh, look, that's what Adolf Hitler did.
That's the sort of thing he did.
But this is not the kind of rhetoric you use unless you really hate Donald Trump and want to destroy him.
And obviously it is relevant if you're a Trump campaign spokesperson who goes on the air, invited on the air to talk about the presidential debate, to explain that you think that the moderator, at least one of them, is not, contrary to what the CNN host just said, this fair, balanced, respectable journalist, but in fact a vehement anti-Trump partisan.
And you saw the video that demonstrates that, but CNN won't allow that to be stated on air by this Trump campaign spokeswoman.
Now, as I said, if that's how Casey Hunt behaved with Democratic Party operatives who came on CNN to talk about the debate on behalf of Joe Biden, then I would say, OK, she's a very aggressive journalist.
She's being very adversarial.
I wouldn't really have a problem with it.
But look at this show, the same exact host, Casey Hunt, from that exact morning, she invited Philippe Reigns onto the show, who was the Democratic operative to talk about the debate.
And basically, they were there to invite Philippe Reigns to talk about all the things Joe Biden should do, like giving advice on air in order to crush Donald Trump.
And the tone that she uses and the body language and the questioning is exactly the 180 degrees contrary to the one she uses for the Trump campaign, where even her questions were just dripping with anti-Trump pro-Biden bias.
I mean, you could just hear it yourself.
Look at the tone, the tenor of the conversation when she's speaking to Philippe Reigns, who even Democrats will tell you is one of the worst scumbags in all of Washington politics.
I mean, he was Hillary Clinton's favorite smear artist and artist and dirtbag.
He worked for the Clintons for years.
And now he's there to defend Joe Biden.
and listen to this segment from the very same day from the very same host.
Hopefully you're doing both at the same time.
You're saying this is what I did and he couldn't do it.
In fact, this is what I had to clean up because this is what he did.
And, you know, I think it's important to note that the debate is not this isolated event disconnected from the campaign.
So you're ideally going in and you're saying what you say day to day.
The reason I bring that up is because we're in between the trial of his 34 convictions and his sentencing.
And while the trial did not move numbers dramatically, they did expose sort of a soft underbelly with some groups.
Yeah, they moved a little.
But it also said, look at how long he's permitted to speak with no interruption.
And the only time she interrupted him was to tell him that he should make his point even further.
He was saying, look, the polls didn't move that much because of Trump's conviction.
And then she broke in and said, well, it actually did move some.
And he's like, yeah, you're right.
It did move some.
So she's like demanding.
The only thing she's interrupting is when she wants to make a pro-Biden, anti-Trump point that he's making even more emphatically.
There's some people who, you know, I'm not happy about this.
I don't know that I'm going to abandon the former president.
And I don't know I'm going to go to Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden has some, maybe not low-hanging fruit, but he's got some fruit to try to reach for.
And it's an opportunity to go for that.
Do you see how they're all sitting there babbling, nodding their heads?
Yeah, I'll just go back a few seconds.
You can watch John King, the CNN national correspondent, or whatever ridiculous title they give him, and Casey Hunt.
Watch what they do when Philip E. Green says, yeah, Biden has a lot of opportunity here.
But he's got some fruit to try to reach for.
And it's an opportunity to go for that in ways that not, you know, Roe, the two years of Roe is a big moment for that.
Economy, what he's done for black voters, which has been a huge debate within the debate for four weeks.
But Matt brought up a good point that it's really just no surprises.
You want to throw everything at them so that when they are out there, They're like... So you did this with Hillary.
I remember going somewhere after you were done with prep.
You were literally dressed like Donald Trump.
The shoes, the cufflinks, the whole thing.
Character actor.
Like, uh, what's... I'm a Daniel Day-Lewis kind of guy.
What's the one Trump line you'd give to Biden right now?
I mean, look at that jovial tone.
Hey, remember, I was there.
Remember that time when you got dressed up as Donald Trump?
You did such a great job.
You wore cufflinks and hair like Donald Trump.
I mean, that was so funny, Felipe.
Tell us about that.
And also, it's kind of odd to...
Take political advice from Hillary Clinton's top political operative, given the fact that they didn't actually win the election.
They ran against one of the most unlikely people ever to be elected president.
They managed to lose an election that the entire establishment was supporting, while the entire establishment was supporting them, and while everyone believed it was almost inevitable that she would win.
Why would you consult a person who's responsible for one of the most horrifying debacles in political history, which is the 2016 loss by Hillary Clinton, but look at how friendly they are.
Hey, remember that time, Philippe?
I mean, the difference in tone and in substance and in treatment could not be any more visible.
I mean, these look like people who are coworkers, who are like friends sitting around a bar.
Giggling about old times.
And on stage.
Give to Biden on stage.
To try to prepare him.
I would say, you know, it's been a couple of weeks, but I want to take a moment to wish Donald Trump a happy, what is it, 79th, 78th birthday?
It's me.
Can't get him into the Trump voice.
Just can't do it.
All right.
If he doesn't, he better get him.
I gotta go back.
Look at that grin she has on her face.
Look at that.
She's so happy.
Where's that adversarial journalist that we saw just like three minutes ago?
Now whatever Philippe Reigns says, the advice, the things he's saying to mock Donald Trump, she loves it.
She can't get enough of it.
I've let this gun on for two minutes.
Have you heard a single adversarial syllable?
Everything is giggly, everything is collaborative, because this is the side that they're on.
And I'd have so much more respect for them if they would just admit that instead of going around saying, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are among the most respected professionals.
These are real news people.
They are, you know, decades of conducting debates in the fairest, most nonpartisan way.
It's a joke.
These people are complete jokes.
And there's never a moment where they ask themselves, why is it that nobody watches us?
Why is it that everybody hates us?
This is why!
If you pretend to be one thing to the public, and the public sees so clearly that you're the exact opposite, They're going to feel like you're a liar, like you're defrauding them.
It's like a used car salesman trying to tell you that this broken down crappy car with a bunch of defects is in fact this almost new car that has the highest performance ever.
People hate that more than anything.
When they know that they're being lied to, that their intelligence isn't being respected, that the reality of what someone is doing is the complete opposite of what they're claiming and presenting themselves as being.
You just look at that grin that she has.
Because Felipe Reynes said something that had a little bit of mockery about Donald Trump.
The joy in her is just exploding uncontrollably out of her exactly the way the contempt exploded out of her when she was talking to Trump's campaign spokesperson.
Well, that was what he said to Biden.
I mean, Trump would be like, no, I'm not.
I'm much better.
But he's going to do a thing with the mic.
He's going to be like, why is my mic off?
They gag me, they want to put me in jail, they turn off my mic.
Even when he's supposed to do it, he doesn't.
He knows damn well.
He's big on, you know, why they're playing with the teleprompter, why they're playing with the mic.
He will play dumb as part of his, you know, they're out to get me.
Very interesting.
Very interesting.
Very interesting, she said at the end.
After spending, like, the last minute and a half, like, not just chuckling, but like, tackling, And that's why these people make me sick.
I think journalists should be adversarial to people in power, to everyone in power, not just to people in one party and not the other.
And if you're going to do that, then just admit that you're there as a partisan opinion maker and activist.
The reason she cut off the Trump campaign spokeswoman because she was saying the truth that CNN cannot let people hear, which is no, you're not nonpartisan, you're not fair.
Jake Tapper has a long history of despising Donald Trump and being extremely clear about it.
Now, the New York Times had an article this week that described the, as I said, unprecedentedly powerful role CNN is playing in the debate.
And also point out along the way that CNN has so much at stake in this because they are a collapsing, failing network who nobody watches.
Here from the New York Times, In this debate, CNN is the decider.
One network is in charge of every aspect of the Biden-Trump debate, a major shift from previous years.
Tens of millions of viewers are expected to be watching.
For the first time in decades, a single television network will have sole discretion over the look, feel, and cadence of a general election presidential debate.
Unlike in past years when an independent non-profit commission oversaw the contest, CNN has picked the moderators, designed the set, and will choose the camera angles that viewers will see.
The debate at 9 p.m.
Eastern could be the single most watched moment of the presidential campaign, with consequences that will ripple all the way to November.
And much of the credit or the blame for what transpires on tens of millions of screens on Thursday will land at CNN's feet.
Within the cutthroat TV news industry, the debate is seen as an enormous marketing coup for CNN.
Which even at a time of austerity for cable television has stood out for ignominious reasons.
The channel is currently on track for its lowest rated month in prime time since 1991.
since 1991 with fewer than 100,000 average viewers a night among adults 25 to 45.
Imagine a corporation of the gigantic size of CNN, which is owned by other bigger corporations, It's been around for decades.
Everybody knows this news brand.
They spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on advertising and promoting their shows.
And yet, with all these resources, they cannot even get 100,000 people in the United States within this age range, the only one that matters to advertisers, to watch their primetime shows.
They cannot reach 100,000 people.
It is hard to put into words how disastrous that is for CNN.
And yet they just continue along the merry way.
Never engage in self-analysis about why everyone hates them to the point that nobody watches them.
Now, earlier today, CNN did something that was so concerning and irregular that even the White House Correspondents Association, of which CNN is a member, vocally denounced CNN for, which is that CNN has decided this is a closed room debate.
There will be no audience.
And so there's no audience reaction.
There may be, I don't know, staffers of the campaigns that could clap or whatever, but the idea is there will be no audience reaction.
It's just the two candidates, CNN controls when their mic is cut off so that they can't speak over one another.
And obviously, I think that favors Joe Biden.
Again, I'm not sure why Donald Trump agreed to this, but That's what the Trump campaign did.
But CNN has announced that it will not allow any other journalist, non-CNN journalist, even a couple of representatives of what's called the pool, the White House press corps that follows Joe Biden around, to be there.
So that in case CNN does any trickery, at least there will be non-CNN reporters who will be there.
CNN has repeatedly said no.
Here's the New York Times media reporter Ben Mullen noting, quote, the White House Correspondents Association says it's, quote, deeply concerned that CNN, quote, has rejected our separate request to include the White House travel pool inside the studio.
Here's the full statement of the White House Correspondents Association.
Quote, for weeks, WHCA has advocated for the inclusion of our White House travel pool inside the studio for the presidential debate.
Our work has included outreach to the White House, the campaigns of both President Biden and former President Trump, and the debate host network CNN.
Tonight's debate will have no audience present and includes format rules that can silence candidates' microphones.
We don't know how this will play out in real time.
A poll reporter is there to observe what is said and done when microphones are off.
Or when either candidate is seen on camera but may speak, gesture, move, or engage in some way.
The White House Correspondents Association believes that principle of coverage matters.
The White House travel poll has been included in past presidential debates, and we believe that standard of access is essential.
Precedent matters for future debates, signed Kelly O'Donnell, president of the White House Correspondents Association.
Do you know how extreme misconduct has to be on the part of CNN for even all of the other corporate media outlets that compose the White House Correspondents Association to publicly denounce CNN in terms this vehement and public?
So, everybody knows what CNN is.
To the point that they barely hide it.
And while I think they ought to be the last people, maybe slightly above MSNBC, to host a debate of this kind, especially with this kind of power, it is true that the Trump campaign
Agreed to it, which is the only reason why CNN is about to have the unilateral power outside of the eyes of any non-CNN journalist to shape this debate in whatever way they can, notwithstanding how many years they've spent spreading lies and disinformation campaigns to defeat the Trump campaign and undermine the Trump presidency and why they continue to do that up until this very day.
So, we'll see how the debate goes.
As I said, we will Have a post-debate reaction immediately following the debate that we will put on our stream on Locals.
We'll put some of that on Rumble as well.
But for our Locals members, we will have that there immediately, the entire reaction that we have right after the debate.
But obviously, CNN is going to be what CNN is.
And the only question is, to what extent will they do it when so many people, for once, are actually watching their network?
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One of the topics that we have covered most on this program ever since it launched is the growing means and prongs of censorship that western governments
and the United States government as well have been creating and employing with the primary intention of controlling and constraining the flow of information over the internet and particularly big tech platforms where more and more Americans than ever before
And more and more Westerners than ever before are getting their sources of information so that if you can control that and commandeer it, and if the government can dictate to big tech companies what they should and should not allow on those platforms, that gives them an extraordinary power.
In fact, it's the exact opposite of the power the internet was supposed to promise, the ability for citizens to be free to access information more easily than ever.
If the government is allowed to dictate and coerce companies to ban dissent and only allow government approved narratives, which is what we're getting closer and closer to all the time, the internet goes from an unprecedented tool of liberation to an unprecedented tool of coercion and control.
And one of the most disturbing features of this new censorship regime, a formal censorship regime, is the way in which the Biden administration created a system for just picking up the phone and calling the top levels of Facebook and Google and X and TikTok and instructing them what they want censored and implicitly and sometimes explicitly threatening them with punishments if they fail to comply.
We've been covering that for years.
The Twitter files broke open a whole new way of looking at this.
And as a result, the plaintiffs, various American citizens who, including major scientists and doctors at the leading institutions who had a dissident view on COVID, or people who were concerned about the efficacy or safety of the vaccine, who expressed different views on masks and school shutdowns, or who had different views on the 2020 election and its integrity,
Or who dissented on the war in Ukraine have been systematically censored on the Internet over many years.
And it turns out that in many cases that's because the government at the highest levels was directing those big tech platforms to censor.
And the power of the U.S.
government is so great that it is almost impossible to Resist it, because when the government picks up the phone and comes knocking through the FBI or the CDC or the CIA or the National Institute of Health and says, these posts are wrong and we believe that they should be taken down and harasses and badgers the big tech company until they do it, obviously that becomes a form of government censorship.
And that is what four federal courts who have looked at this issue, four federal judges rather, Who have looked at this issue when a lawsuit was brought against the Biden administration claiming violations of the First Amendment free speech right.
Plaintiffs who were censored in exactly the ways I just described who claim that their government was abridging the First Amendment right of free speech.
A district court judge found in favor of the plaintiffs wrote a very lengthy and aggressive opinion denouncing what the Biden administration was doing as a direct assault on free speech.
And the government, the Biden administration lost and then appealed it to the Fifth Circuit where a three-judge panel unanimously affirmed most of what the district court had ruled, Also found not only that it was a violation of the First Amendment, but one of the gravest in the history of the court.
And as a result, approved of the injunction that the district court had imposed on the Biden administration to prevent it from picking up the phone and calling Big TAC.
The one the Supreme Court decided that it would take this case and review this question It froze the injunction pending the Supreme Court's ruling.
And back in March, the Supreme Court held oral argument between the lawyers for the plaintiffs and the lawyers for the government.
And we reported on what happened at the oral argument.
We played some excerpts of it.
And it seemed very clear that a majority of the court seemed inclined to toss this lawsuit out, not by ruling that what the Biden administration did was constitutional or legal or appropriate, But instead by just simply finding a way to refuse to roll on the question at all by embracing some more technical or legalistic reason as to why that case should never have been in court in the first place.
And that's exactly what the Supreme Court this week Did in a six to three ruling, a majority ruling written by Amy Coney Barrett, and that was joined by Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh.
So those were the three conservative judges, Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Kavanaugh, joined by Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson that formed the six member majority and Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion of the court that all the six judges signed on to.
The three judges who dissented were Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.
Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, but the majority of the court decided to reverse the lower court rulings against the Meyd administration to throw the case out completely, not because
They ruled that the Biden administration's actions were constitutional, but simply said, in essence, these plaintiffs have no standing to bring this suit because they cannot prove definitively that the reason they ended up being censored online was because the government
pressured big tech companies to do so, even if they said you can prove that the government pressured big tech companies to censor the exact kind of speech these plaintiffs were expressing.
And you can prove that and they did prove that.
Because, said the court, you can't prove a direct link between the government action and the censorship.
Hypothesizing that perhaps it was just the big tech companies on their own deciding to censor.
They couldn't prove that it was the government that did anything against them, and therefore they have no standing to ask the court to rule on its constitutionality.
This is a common way the Supreme Court evades having to rule on government conduct that they don't actually want to nullify.
They did it all the time through the War on Terror, as we'll show you, when people wanted to contest the constitutionality of how the government was spying on American citizens without warrants.
The court would say, oh, well, it's a secret who the government is spying on.
We can't force them to give us their list because that would jeopardize national security.
And because it's all done in secret, the plaintiffs can't prove for sure.
that they were targets of warrantless surveillance, and therefore their lawsuit alleging a violation of the Fourth Amendment has to be thrown out, not because we think the government's spying is constitutional, but because these plaintiffs can't prove for sure that they were victims of that government action.
And I'll explain a little bit more about how that works and what that doctrine is, and actually why it's an important doctrine, despite the fact that it's often abused by courts to avoid ruling, as it was abused here.
But before getting to that, let me just show you what the majority opinion began by acknowledging before getting to its rulings.
This is what Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.
Yeah, we can just show the title first.
There you see the title, Supreme Court of the United States.
It's titled Murthy versus Missouri because it was originally brought by the Attorney General of Missouri and Louisiana against a variety of different Biden officials, including Murthy, who was the Surgeon General at the time.
He was very active in pressuring big tech companies to censor dissent on COVID.
And here's what the majority ruling acknowledged.
Quote, during the 2020 election season and the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms frequently removed, demoted, or fact-checked posts containing allegedly false or misleading information.
At the same time, federal officials concerned about this spread of quote, misinformation on social media, communicated extensively with the platforms about their content moderation efforts.
The plaintiffs, two states, and five social media users sued dozens of executive branch officials and agencies, alleging that they pressured the platforms to suppress protected speech in violation of the First Amendment.
The Fifth Circuit agreed, concluding that the officials' communications rendered them responsible for the private platform's moderation decision and then affirmed a sweeping preliminary injunction.
And then the Supreme Court goes on to say, quote, the Fifth Circuit was wrong to do so.
To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and rejectable by the injunction they seek.
Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.
In other words, even if you can prove that in the past you were Subject to government censorship.
Then you can seek other remedies.
But what the court, what the plaintiffs were seeking here, what the court issued was an injunction barring the government in the future from continuing to coerce big tech companies to censor.
And because these plaintiffs couldn't prove that in the future they will be victimized by the government and its actions, they have no right to seek a injunction governing the actions in the future.
Now, that might all sound very technical and annoying and frustrating.
But it is actually an important limitation on the power of the judicial branch to only adjudicate cases Not just that raise abstract issues.
You can't just say, I don't like what the government's doing here.
I'm a citizen.
I'm going to sue and ask the court to rule on the constitutionality.
The only time they're allowed to rule on anything is when there's an actual conflict between the plaintiffs and defendants.
When there's an actual relationship between the two where harm can be shown was done to one side by the other.
It's called the Case or Controversy Limitation.
And it comes from Article 3, Section 3, or Section 2, rather, of the Constitution.
Article 1 is what defines the legislative power.
Article 2 of the Constitution is what defines the executive branch's power.
And Article 3 is what defines the power of the courts, of the judicial branch.
And Article 3, Section 2 says, quote, the judicial power shall extend to all cases "...to controversies to which the United States shall be a party, to controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, between citizens of the same state, and between a state or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens, or subjects." So, it's saying the Judiciary Branch can't just go around enrolling on any question.
There has to be a case or controversy between those kinds of parties.
And what it's really doing is it's defining when a federal court has jurisdiction as opposed to a state court.
So if two citizens of the same state sue one another and there's no federal question, they're suing say for breach of contract, that'll go to a state court, not a federal court.
But that clause has been interpreted by the Supreme Court over many, many decades to limit the Supreme Court's or any federal court's ability or power to rule only when there's an actual lawsuit between two parties.
They're judges.
They're not floating arbiters of what is permissible or not.
The only thing courts are permitted to do in the United States is resolve an actual conflict between two parties, where one has allegedly harmed the other, and then the court rules.
Here from Cornell Law School, they have a legal information study site that is actually very good at explaining the way in which constitutional provisions have been interpreted.
There you see the title, The Requirement of a Real Interest.
Quote, almost inseparable from the requirements of adverse parties and substantial enough interest to confer standing is the requirement that a real issue be presented as contrasted with speculative, abstract, hypothetical, or moot issues.
It has long been the court's, quote, considered practice not to decide abstract, hypothetical, or contingent questions.
A party cannot maintain a suit, quote, for a mere declaration in the air.
And it's quoting there a 1937 case at Life Insurance v. Hallworth, which was written by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes.
And it often is a very important document.
Now, actually, that quote did not come from that case.
From what Charles Evans Hughes decided in this 1937 case, when defining the limits on the judicial power, he said this, quote, a controversy in this sense, meaning the constitutional sense, Must be one that is appropriate for judicial determination.
A justiciable controversy is thus distinguished from a difference or dispute of a hypothetical character, from one that is academic or moot.
The controversy, in order for courts to decide, Must be definitive and concrete, touching the legal relationship of parties having adverse legal interests.
It must be a real and substantial controversy, admitting of specific relief through a decree of a conclusive character, as distinguished from an opinion advising what the law would be.
So, what they're saying is, if you see your government enacting a law that you don't like or that you believe is illegal, you can't just run to a court and ask a court to just kind of issue an advisory opinion on whether what the government did is legal.
That's beyond the limits of a court's power under the Constitution.
The only thing a court can do is see a case or controversy between a plaintiff and a defendant, or in criminal cases, between the state and the defendant.
And then they set precedent for how other cases like it are to be decided.
So that's a real important limitation on the court's power.
You don't want a court just being this floating arbiter of deciding Legality.
Now here's what Amy Coney Barrett went on to argue as to why that kind of standing is lacking here.
We showed that already.
So here's what she said, quote, following a grant of panel rehearing, the Fifth Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's ruling.
It first held that the individual plaintiffs had Article III standing to seek conjunctive relief, Reasoning that the social media companies had suppressed the plaintiff's speech in the past, and were likely to do so again in the future, and that both of these injuries were, quote, traceable to government-coerced enforcement of the platform's policy and, quote, redressable by an injunction against government officials.
It went on.
The court also concluded, the lower court, the district, the appellate court, the appellate court also concluded that the states had standing both because the platforms had restricted the post of individual state officials and because the states have the quote right to listen to their citizens on social media.
And then here's what Amy Coney Barrett said that a lot of media accounts deliberately ignored.
A lot of media articles tried to pretend that this was a huge victory for the Biden administration because the court ruled that they weren't really censoring.
The court refused to rule on that question.
And as Amy Coney Barrett here says in this next passage, she said, we begin and end with the question of standing.
Meaning once we find that the plaintiffs have no standing to bring this lawsuit, that's the end of the case.
We cannot go on and then decide whether or not what the Biden administration did here is constitutional, and because they found no standing, they did not in fact reach the merits of the case.
She says, quote, at this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.
We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute.
A proper case or controversy exists only when at least one plaintiff quote establishes that she has standing to sue.
Quoting a Supreme Court case from 2019, she must show that she has suffered And this is Amy Coney Barrett, not using he as a generic pronoun, but she, just referring to a plaintiff, quote, she must show that she has suffered or will suffer an injury that is, quote, concrete, particularized and actual or imminent, fairly traceable to the challenge action and digestible by a favorable ruling.
And she's quoting there the case of James Clasper versus Amnesty International.
Which is one of those war on terror cases where Amnesty International sued James Clapper arguing that his actions in the war on terror were unconstitutional and the Supreme Court sidestepped that question as well by concluding that either Amnesty or the American citizen suing James Clapper could prove that they were actually harmed by the program James Clapper was implementing and overseeing.
Which I believe was the domestic spying program in this case, and we'll show you that in just a minute.
This is how the court so often avoids ruling on these questions.
And so the Supreme Court is citing that precedent where they protected the Obama administration and James Clapper from a ruling on whether their domestic spying without warrants was not constitutional.
The court goes on, "These requirements help ensure that the plaintiff has such a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy as to warrant invocation of federal court jurisdiction." The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendant's conduct, asked us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials across different agencies with different social media platforms about
This court standing doctrine prevents us from, quote, exercising such general legal oversight of the other branches of government.
We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
So I just want to be very clear that this court, contrary to what a lot of liberal pundits and corporate media outlets were trying to imply, while knowing it wasn't true, this court did not rule in favor of the Biden administration in the sense that they said they did nothing wrong. this court did not rule in favor of the Biden Or that their pressure and coercion of big tech platforms was not unconstitutional.
They didn't rule on those questions.
They simply said the plaintiffs did not offer enough evidence to prove that they were directly harmed by the government's actions, that that was the reason they were being censored, the core reason.
Look, Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, they censor all the time on their own.
And while it probably is the case, or seems likely, that the people suing here were censored because of government pressure, because they had evidence that the Biden administration was saying, you have to censor exactly the sort of opinions that these specific medical experts were expressing.
And then Facebook, right after that call, would then go and remove a post or ban the person, even though it's likely said the majority opinion.
The individuals cannot prove that it was the government that caused their censorship.
Maybe it was just Big Tech acting on their own, even though at the very time they did it, they were being harangued and cajoled by the Biden administration.
And they also said the majority couldn't prove that they were likely to be censored that way in the future, and therefore could not ask for an injunction.
Maybe they can ask for other sorts of remedies, but not an injunction.
An injunction is only when an unconstitutional or illegal act is likely to occur in the future, and then that way you can join the party from continuing in it.
So it's an incredibly stretched and Dubious and just facially light attempt to avoid reaching a ruling at all.
And this is what we told you after we heard the oral argument we thought was likely to happen.
What we thought was what the Supreme Court was likely to do.
Just refuse on standing grounds to even consider this and as a result allow this censorship regime That the lower court said was among the gravest assault on the First Amendment in the history of the courts that they've seen allow that censorship regime to continue.
Now, the dissent was written, as I said, by Justice Alito.
He was joined by Clarence Thomas and Justice Gorsuch.
And the dissent was very powerful in explaining why the majority's ruling was not only Utterly wrong on the legal issues, but also incredibly dangerous in its outcome.
So I just want to read you some of this so you understand what the implications of this is.
Now, here's Alito's dissent.
Quote, if the lower court's assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years.
Meaning this is not just a regular claim that the government violated the Constitution.
He used the exact language that both lower courts used, that this is one of the gravest assaults on free speech in years.
And then he went on to explain why, quote, our country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance.
And our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matter be allowed.
I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID-19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value.
Some was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous.
But we also know that valuable speech was also suppressed.
Of course, purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment.
As a result, they may publish or decline to publish whatever they wish.
But government officials may not coerce private entities to censor speech.
See the National Rifle Association of America versus Vula.
Now, let me just note what this case is and why it's so interesting that Justice Alito is citing it.
The administration of Andrew Cuomo, when he was governor of New York, attempted in multiple ways to try to destroy the NRA because obviously the Democratic governor of New York dislikes, to put it mildly, the ideology and political agenda of the NRA.
And so the government, Andrew Cuomo, was threatening all sorts of private actors that you will be punished if you have anything to do with the NRA.
And this conduct was so extreme That it was the ACLU that agreed to represent the NRA.
The ACLU represented the NRA in this case because the ACLU believed that Andrew Cuomo's conduct against the NRA was so obviously an attack on free speech, even though the government wasn't directly censoring the NRA or they were trying to pressure private actors to destroy the NRA, but the ACLU felt they needed to defend the NRA and the ACLU won.
The court ruled in this case that Justice Alito was referencing, that Andrew Cuomo acted illegally, not because he censored the NRA, but because as he used his government power, the Cuomo administration did, to threaten and coerce private actors to do that censorship for them.
Which is exactly what happened here.
The Biden administration didn't censor anybody.
They told big tech companies, if you don't censor the dissent that we want censored, there are a lot of ways that we're going to punish you.
And as we said before, there's a long history of the court ruling on this, including in the Bantam Books case in 1964, when a bookstore was showing books that Rhode Island officials disliked, they believed was obscene, and they knew they couldn't Order it taken down.
So what they did instead was they started harassing and threatening the bookstore to take the books down.
And when the bookstore did, the publisher of that book, of those books, sued.
And the Supreme Court said, look, this isn't a case where the government censored the books itself.
But what they did was they recruited private actors to censor for them.
And the First Amendment not only bars the government from censoring directly, it also bars the government from pressuring or coercing private actors to censor for them.
I've been writing about that line of cases for years to say the government's conduct in threatening big tech companies.
You would see all the time Democratic House summoning the CEOs of these big tech platforms and saying, if you don't censor more, We're going to punish you.
We're going to undo the Section 230 protections that you have under the law.
We're going to unleash our regulators on you.
And it was so obvious that the government in the open was threatening Big Tech to censor the material that Democratic Party officials wanted censored.
And I've been talking about that Bantam case and this line of cases for years.
The dissent goes on, quote, the record before us is vast.
It contains evidence of communications between many different government actors and a variety of internet platforms, as well as evidence regarding the effects of those interactions on the seven different plaintiffs.
For many months in 2021 and 2022, a coterie of officials at the highest level of the federal government continuously harried and implicitly threatened Facebook With potentially crippling consequences if it did not comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain COVID-19 related speech.
Not surprisingly, Facebook repeatedly yielded.
And remember, Mark Zuckerberg afterwards said that not only was the government constantly forcing Facebook to remove dissent about COVID, He said a lot of what we were forced to remove was either very debatable, or in some cases, it turned out to be true.
The Biden administration forced Facebook, according to Mark Zuckerberg, to censor and remove dissent about the government's COVID policies and pronouncements that turned out to be true.
Even if it weren't true, it would be an attack on the First Amendment.
You're allowed as an American citizen to express opinions that end up to be false.
But in this case, they were censoring true dissent.
Alito goes on, quote, these past and threatened future injuries were caused by and are traceable to censorship that the officials coerced.
And the injunctive relief sought by one of these plaintiffs was an available and suitable remedy.
The evidence was more than sufficient.
That was one of the plaintiffs to sue, and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issues that the case presents.
The court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion, in this case, to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.
These demands were coupled with, quote, thinly-veiled threats of legal consequences.
And they cited the Bantam Books case from 1964 that I just described using that language, that what the Supreme Court said in Bantam Books in 1964 about Rhode Island officials was that when the Rhode Island officials were telling the bookstore to remove these books, it was accompanied by, quote, thinly-veiled threats, which means that
It's proof that the government was coercing the bookstore to take down these books, not just merely asking politely.
He then goes on, quote, three instances stand out.
Early on, when the White House first expressed skepticism that Facebook was effectively combating misinformation, Slavitt informed the platform, that's a Biden White House official, health official, that the White House was, quote, considering our options on what to do about it.
In other words, if Facebook did not, quote, solve its, quote, misinformation problem, the White House might unseath its potent authority.
The threat was made more explicit in May, when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki paired a request for platforms to, quote, stop amplifying untruthworthy content with, quote, a reminder that President Biden supports a robust antitrust program.
Immediately after noting President Biden's support for antitrust enforcement, Psaki added, quote, So his view, Biden's view, is that there's more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of life-threatening information is not going out to the American public.
The natural interpretation is that the White House might retaliate if the platforms allowed free speech.
Not if they suppressed it.
Finally, in July, the White House asserted that the platforms, quote, should be held accountable for publishing misinformation.
The totality of this record, constant haranguing, dozens of demands for compliance, and references to potential consequences, evince, quote, a scheme of state censorship.
Again, quoting Bantam Books.
And then Alito went on to say that the outcome of this case will be that not just the Biden administration but future governments are now free to constantly harangue big tech to censor dissent because they know that the Supreme Court has said how difficult it is for a plaintiff, even one who can prove they're censored because of the government's actions, to be able to have standing to bring a lawsuit.
Now, I've been writing about this for many years, the way the Supreme Court abuses the standing doctrine.
Which again, I believe is an important doctrine.
It's a crucial limitation on the court's power.
You need limitations on the power of all three branches, including the judiciary.
But they did this constantly throughout the War on Terror with refusing to rule on the constitutionality of blatantly unconstitutional programs, including in this case that Judge Barrett and the majority cited To justify what they did this week, hear from Reuters in February of 2013.
Quote, Supreme Court throws out a challenge to surveillance law.
Quote, US-based journalists, lawyers, and human rights groups cannot challenge a federal law that allows surveillance of some international communications, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, in a case touching on government efforts to fight terrorism.
Split five to four on ideological lines with conservatives that time backing the government and the liberal wing in the minority.
The country's highest court said none of these categories, including human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have legal standing to sue because they could not show they had suffered any injury.
The law in question that they were challenging was the 2008 amendments to the FISA Surveillance Act.
that authorized mass surveillance by the U.S. government without identifying specific targets for the purpose of monitoring foreign communication, foreigners outside the country and gathering intelligence.
And the argument was it also allowed the Supreme Court, when targeting foreigners, to also listen in on the conversation of American citizens, talking to them with no warrants.
And just in a sign of how malleable the law is, the justice who wrote the majority in that opinion, finding that plaintiffs had no standing to challenge the government's domestic surveillance activities was Justice Delito, the same justice who wrote the dissenting opinion arguing that standing had to be conferred, in this case, against the Biden administration. the same justice who wrote the dissenting opinion arguing that
Now this was a case against the Obama administration, saying that the Obama administration was illegally spying.
Quote, in Tuesday's ruling, Justice Samuel Alito wrote on behalf of the majority that the challenger's arguments was based on quote, a highly speculative fear that the government would target their communications and not choose other means to carry out surveillance if it was required.
The law states that U.S.
based people should not be targeted and the various individual and groups that filed suit have not shown any evidence that they have been, Alito said.
Likewise, the law's opponents had no evidence that the non-US people they were communicating with had been targeted either, he added.
Quote, we declined to abandon our usual reluctance to endorse standing theories that rest on speculation about the decisions of independent actors.
So there the government was spying without warrants on the conversation of certain American citizens.
When groups would sue to get the list of the American citizens they were spying on with no warrants, the courts would say, oh, we can't order the government to disclose that because forcing them to disclose that list would endanger national security.
And then when groups that had a lot of reason to believe that their conversations were subject to warrantless surveillance sued to get a ruling that the Obama administration's domestic spying program was unconstitutional, The courts would turn around and say, sorry, you can't prove that you're being spied on because the list of targets that they're spying on, we allowed them to keep secret.
And because it's secret, you can't prove that you were targeted.
And therefore, because you can't prove that you were targeted, you have no standing to sue and get a court ruling on the constitutionality of that warrantless surveillance.
This is how the court for two decades now has been taking a very legitimate doctrine, the doctrine of standing and only ruling on a case of controversy, and widening that requirement to such an extent that they're almost making it impossible for American citizens and widening that requirement to such an extent that they're almost making it impossible for American citizens to challenge the actions of the executive branch by arguing that the executive branch's actions violate court constitutional rights because the doctrine of standing
In 2013, with respect to domestic warrantless spying, in 2024, with respect to a censorship regime resulting in the censorship of American citizens on the Internet, that That it's essentially shielding the executive branch and allowing it to engage in unconstitutional behavior by making it harder and harder for anyone to sue and get a ruling in this regard.
And as a result, a censorship regime that the lower court, that the unanimous appellate court, and all three descending judges of the Supreme Court have all said is one of the gravest assaults on free speech in history.
is now allowed to continue not because the court ruled that it's constitutionally permissible because the court simply refused to hear the case at all all right that concludes our show for this evening at As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
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