Is Kamala Harris "Working Tirelessly" for a Cease-Fire in Gaza?; Jonathan Turley on Free Speech; Richard Medhurst on his UK Arrest
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Working Tirelessly for Gaza? (9:05)
Interview with Professor Jonathan Turley (33:27)
Interview with Richard Medhurst (1:03:48)
Outro (1:24:49)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Last night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, affectionately known as AOC, ascended to the podium and delivered a speech that left all Democrats, from the most centrist and establishment to the most left-wing of the Democratic Party, in a state of unadorned glee.
She is our political future, they all decreed.
Media outlets celebrated her with equal levels of excitement, heralding her ascent from radical outside agitator to Democratic Party power player and Washington insider.
In other words, her full transformation into Nancy Pelosi, missing only the massive stock trading portfolio for now, is complete.
One of the problems, though, with all of this left-liberal celebration is that AOC told a massive and obvious lie as one of the centerpieces of her inspirational primetime address.
Kamala, she proclaimed, quote, is working tirelessly, tirelessly.
Kamala Harris, she said, is, quote, working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring home the hostages.
No, she's not.
Kamala isn't working on anything, let alone tirelessly, other than making herself the president in 10 weeks.
You think she spends even one second?
Do you really think that since Joe Biden was forced out that Kamala Harris has spent even one second Let alone working tirelessly every day thinking about the people in Gaza or that she's sitting on phones in complex shuttle diplomacy negotiating deals with Netanyahu and Hamas through their emissaries in Qatar to try and bring about an end to this war?
How dumb does someone have to be to believe that?
How dumb does AoT think her followers are?
She thinks they're very dumb and she may not be wrong.
Fortunately, there are several people at the DNC, people who actually care about the war in Gaza and U.S.
policy toward Israel rather than those charlatans and frauds who have been pretending to care online for the last 10 months for their own profit.
Who do actually care whether AOC lied about that or not.
Who do actually care whether there are any differences between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden when it comes to Israel and other things.
And we'll show you some interviews that Michael Tracy conducted for us from Chicago that have a couple of them, a few of them actually, who are truly devoted, who have a lot different views than AOC does, the Grand Uniter of the Democratic Party.
Few people in the country have been as stalwart and principled a defender of free speech rights as Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University Law School professor and frequent television commentator on various legal and political controversies.
Turley has a new book that sounds the warning about a topic that we have also been warning about on our show, namely the ongoing erosion of free speech.
That book is entitled The Indispensable Right.
Not un-indispensable right, the indispensable right, free speech in an age of rage.
In the book Turley argues that while free speech was clearly codified, explicitly so, as an absolute protection for Americans in the Constitution, the country has a long history, not just a recent one, but a long history, of abandoning that commitment precisely when it's most needed.
He also examines the recent assaults, not just in the US but throughout the West, on core free speech principles.
The book is very thought-provoking and obviously relevant to what we cover as much as anything, so we will speak to Professor Turley in just a little bit about his book and how it applies to a lot of the current controversies we've been covering, including the ones we covered last night.
And then finally, the independent journalist Richard Medhurst is a friend of our show.
He has been on before and he is also one of my favorite analysts of foreign policy and one of the most impressive critics of Western imperialism and Western wars.
He has Syrian heritage, though he lives in the U.S.
and his family is from the UK.
And he has been one of the most stalwart critics of UK foreign policy, including its support for the war in Ukraine and its fueling of the Israeli war in Gaza.
And he has also been harshly opposed to many of the defining policies of both the UK Labour Party, the now-majority party in the UK, as well as the EU more broadly.
When Medhurst attempted to enter the UK last Thursday, he was met at the plane by six police officers who informed him that he was under arrest.
Not just being detained in immigration, but actually under arrest.
They took him into custody while refusing to explain the reason, but told him that he was being held under Section 12 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.
Matt Hurst is not somebody who plants bombs or plans to kill people in the name of a cause.
He's somebody who comments to an increasingly large audience on YouTube about foreign policy and his criticisms of Western leaders.
Now, whenever I hear of someone being detained at Heathrow under this 2000 terrorism law, the UK, my ears perk up.
In large part because as many of you may recall my husband David Miranda was detained under that law at the height of the Snowden reporting in 2013 when he was returning from Germany where he had met with my reporting colleague Laura Poitras and was transiting back through Heathrow on his way home to Rio where he was detained and stopped and threatened for 12 hours that he would be arrested under this terrorism law as well.
When you hear that you're about to be arrested under terrorism law, especially if you're not a US or American citizen, you take that very, very seriously.
David got out simply because the Brazilian government made such a diplomatic stink about it, but he was very close to being arrested and detained for his role in the reporting that we were doing.
Now, David sued the UK and ultimately won.
He obtained a ruling that the provision of the Terrorism Act under which he was detained could not be constitutionally applied in the future to those like him who were working on journalism stories.
Matt Hurst, however, was charged under a different section of the Terrorism Act, one that makes it a crime to express views that are supportive of groups deemed to be terrorist organizations by the West.
Now, we just spent last night a full segment warning of the aggressively rising tide of censorship throughout the West and focused on the UK.
And so we really want to talk to Medhurst about what happened, about what the current state of this terrorism case is, and why it was that he was detained.
Now, before we do so, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
For the last two years or so, we have been subjected to all sorts of media accounts that have a very common theme, namely that, "Our little girl AOC has finally grown up. "Our little girl AOC has finally grown up.
She's given up all this agitating and activist language.
She's no longer interested in reforming or criticizing the Democratic Party.
She doesn't want to be an outsider and change the party so that she can then ascend to power with a reform Democratic Party.
She's simply now using what the media considers to be the responsible and adult means of doing politics, which is you don't put yourself on the outside, you put yourself on the inside.
And in order to do that, you make concessions about the things that you say, how you say them, the things that you're willing to speak.
A lot of people forget that when Nancy Pelosi was first elected to the Congress, she was representing San Francisco, and she was viewed as a pretty far-left San Francisco Democrat.
And that is what she was perceived as being, and often was.
She was definitely further to the left than almost all of the caucus.
And then over time, Nancy Pelosi started realizing that if she wants to be a player in the game, She has to give up on whatever is considered to be radical or agitating ideology.
She needs to become a team player, someone who supports the Democratic Party and its dogma, never cuts against it, never works against it, and focuses instead only on the evils of the Republican Party.
That's the price of admission, to be on the inside of Democratic Party power.
Now you might say, well, compromises are worth it in politics, and sometimes they are.
But not the kind of compromises that demand that you renounce everything that made you original and interesting in the first place.
If the compromises are comprehensive, if all you're doing is morphing into the same kind of people who are already in house leadership, then what's the point?
Now you're basically just Joe Crawley.
Now you're basically Nancy Pelosi.
And that has been what AOC has been doing for quite some time.
She has been distancing herself from the left.
In fact, when she ran for The Democratic primary against the longtime entrenched incumbent Joe Crawley, who was number three or number four in Democratic Party leadership, widely touted to become Speaker of the House, or at least the leader of the Democratic Caucus, when and if Nancy Pelosi finally opened her grip on power.
She ran against Joe Crowley and the way in which she won, when nobody knew what her candidacy was, she had no money, he controlled the entire Democratic Party apparatus, both in Queens and on a national level, all the money that he was able to raise, which is what gave him his leadership position.
She basically won only because she went on a bunch of independent progressive shows on YouTube and elsewhere.
She interviewed, I interviewed her for about an hour.
She interviewed with pretty much everybody in independent media.
And that was how she won.
That was what gave her the elevation as a candidate to attract a lot of donations and then ultimately she won.
People got involved in her campaign.
You will never see AOC now.
On anything having even remotely to do with independent media, unless it's an independent media outlet that has made very clear their loyalty to AOC, like Hasan Piker or people like that.
But she will never go anywhere ever where she's questioned, let's say from the left or from the sort of anti-establishment posture.
She is almost exclusively now on places like Face the Nation and CNN and the Colbert Report.
Because she doesn't have anything to do and doesn't want to have anything to do with those roots out of which she grew because she's no longer interested in ideology or policy or challenging the Democratic Party.
She's interested in how far she can ascend within it.
And I mean, that's not even worth talking about.
That's beyond clear.
There have been Countless articles in the mainstream press talking about the transformation of AOC into political insider.
And for exactly that reason she was given a prime time slot to speak on Monday night at the Democratic Convention.
Obviously they're not going to give a prime time slot to anyone who's not a very loyal team player, who's not willing to do everything possible to elect the Democratic Party rather than working to reform it.
And the speech that she gave was universally praised by Democratic partisans, including all of the members of the establishment, the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, the corporatist wing, the militaristic wing, because she has no interest in appealing any longer to the activist laughter, the left-wing part of the party that catapulted her to prominence.
She has no interest in them anymore.
She knows that they will always vote for her no matter what.
She doesn't need to pay any attention to them.
She's interested in winning the plaudits and applause and support and being impressive to the people who actually aren't blind loyalists, like the centrist in the party, the donors in the party, the financiers in the party.
And that was why her speech met with universal adoration inside that Democratic Party hall, because there was absolutely nothing heterodox about it.
There was not a peep of criticism of the Democratic Party establishment, which she said was the whole point of her existence as a politician.
She was saying things like, I'm going to take on the Democratic establishment, and even if it means I'm a one-term member of Congress, I'd rather be a one-term member of Congress than sacrifice my principles.
Those principles, to the extent they ever existed, and I don't think they ever did, are gone completely.
And one of the things she did At the DNC was stand up and not only try and deceive and mislead younger voters and left-wing voters who still to some extent trust her, the ones who do, but she just outright lied.
In order to try and tell them, look, I know there are protests going on outside about the Biden-Harris administration unstinting support for Israel, their continuous and unlimited and unconditional arming of Israel and their funding of Israel, even up to this very day as it continues to destroy any remnants of Gaza.
I know you're angry about that, but don't worry because we have a new person
Kamala Harris, even though she was Vice President for the last four years and never uttered a peep of dissent to Biden's policies, and even though her time in the Senate reflects an even more pro-Israeli stance than, say, Barack Obama, she's here to say that you shouldn't worry because Kamala Harris is a different politician when it comes to Gaza and Israel and that she is absolutely devoted to a ceasefire.
Here's what she said.
Okay.
Is Kamala Harris from the middle class?
before us a rare and precious opportunity.
In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.
She understands.
Okay.
Is Kamala Harris from the middle class if she is?
Barely.
But even more so, Kamala Harris' entire career has been funded by California billionaires.
By the biggest donors in the Democratic Party including pro-Israel Zionist and pro-Israel activist groups.
The idea that Kamala Harris of all people is some sort of scrappy achiever from the working class, and that she isn't courting Wall Street very successfully, but instead is somehow confronting them and standing up to them in defense of the working class, You have to have completely lost your soul in order to be willing to say that with a straight face.
The whole critique of AOC from the start is that the Democratic Party has become a corporatist party.
And there's few people who embody that more loyally than Kamala Harris, so that alone is just, it shows you how sociopathic she now is, that she's willing simply to ingratiate herself with the Democratic Party establishment that she once vowed to overturn That she's willing to say anything, even though it provokes uproarious laughter from anyone who understands the reality of the Democratic Party.
And then she went on and said this.
The urgency of rent checks and groceries and prescriptions.
She is as committed to our reproductive and civil rights as she is to taking on corporate greed.
And she is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.
Okay.
That whole sentence could almost not be written to be any more offensive to the truth and insulting of the most minimal intelligence of Democratic Party followers Just on the question alone of what Kamala Harris has been doing for the last five weeks since Joe Biden was forced out of the race by a cabal, an invisible cabal of Democratic Party elites, and she was somehow selected even with no votes.
Kamala Harris has woken up every day and gone to sleep every day thinking about only one thing.
I'm not even saying I blame her for it.
She's only focused on what she needs to do to win the election that is 10 weeks away and become President of the United States.
She's not working tirelessly on anything other than that.
And so to sit there and depict Kamala Harris as somehow deeply involved in high-level negotiations out of such deep and genuine concern for the Palestinian people because she's so eager to bring about a ceasefire to the war where the idiots in that hall cheered her
Aggressively, loudly, and even a lot of the left liberal influencers who have been hinting or stating for 10 months that they won't vote for the Democrats because of the, quote, genocide in Gaza.
For them to be bought off by such a, not just a cheap statement, a meaningless statement, but such a blatant lie.
Even Biden, when he stood up, didn't say Kamala Harris is working tirelessly to bring about a ceasefire.
He said that about Anthony Blinken, his Secretary of State.
But the other sleight of hand here is the idea that being in favor of a ceasefire is somehow sort of some humanitarian project or some humanitarian or radically different view of Israel than Biden.
Biden's view for months has been, we're working tirelessly for a ceasefire.
The problem is that the Israeli government doesn't want to ceasefire, except completely on its terms.
It doesn't want to end the bombing of Gaza.
It has made very clear the goal is to destroy Hamas and it won't stop no matter what until the end.
This isn't some change in Democratic Party messaging from Joe Biden.
It's a replica of what Joe Biden said.
And as we went over last night in the Democratic Party plank, The party couldn't make any clearer that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have exactly the same views on Israel, which is that they will do everything possible to stand by Israel and arm and fund it for as long as they need to.
And so to be willing to be so deceived by a politician like AOC, who looks you in the eye and tells you not just a lie, but a lie that's completely laughable, Just give you a sense again of how pathetic the American left is, the part of the American left that's loyal to the Democratic Party.
I mean, this isn't even sophisticated propaganda.
This is not even complex or debatable falsehood.
I don't believe there's a single person on the planet who believes that Kamala Harris every day is waking up to work tirelessly on ushering in a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza.
And we've been hearing for many months that that's, we're on the verge, the United States could easily, Kamala Harris doesn't have to work tirelessly, they could easily bring about a ceasefire by telling the Israelis to accept a better offer on the table, otherwise their funding will be cut off and their arms will be cut off from the United States, but Kamala Harris has already made very clear she won't do that.
These are empty words at best and complete lies at worst.
And these left liberals who have been swearing all year that they would be very unwilling to vote for the Democrats in light of their support for what is called the genocide, to watch them just abandon that on a dime, and that it was so predictable to cling to any little word or any little statement, no matter how vapid, meaningless and false,
is actually sad to watch, but it gives you a lot of insight into the complete vapidity and pointlessness and impotence and fraudulent nature of this establishment of American life.
Now, one of the people who stays true to our principles, no matter what you think of those principles, is the former Biden press secretary, or rather Bernie Sanders press secretary in 2020, Breonna Joy Gray, who was a former colleague of mine at The Intercept.
And here's what she said today, quote, Kamala Harris's official TikTok clipped AOC's convention speech to push the message that Harris working in good faith to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign is highlighting AOC's Gaza comments on TikTok.
Even though here you see the New York Times saying Kamala Harris does not support an arms embargo on Israel, a top advisor says, And again, this is the sort of thing that you actually say if you care about the war in Gaza, as you've been saying for the last 30 days, not just making excuses for the Democratic Party.
You're like, I'm not going to be bought off by some obvious blatant lie that contradicts the campaign of Kamala Harris itself because it comes from AOC's perky mouth.
Here is an interview that Michael Tracy conducted in Chicago at the DNC with Tanya Haj Hassan, who is a doctor at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza.
And having been to Gaza, having seen the carnage, she obviously is somebody who's not going to accept a little AOC cliche in order to give her support to the Democratic Party.
Here instead is what she said.
And final question for you.
Again, I guess this is slightly politically oriented, but again it bears on the everyday events that are going on, which is that there have been these ongoing supposed ceasefire negotiations, which again, to play the role of a cynic, which I guess is part of my job, you could interpret as Israel just kind of doing as a ruse Because they've nominally participated in these ceasefire negotiations in Doha with representatives of Hamas, but no progress has ever made.
Additional conditions are added.
And we heard just a day or so ago that this latest round of them has yielded nothing.
I guess the question for you is how, if at all, are those supposed negotiations perceived within Gaza, which international journalists, as you mentioned, have largely not been permitted to go.
I was in Israel myself in November.
I would have liked to have gone to Gaza, but it was just impossible.
And, you know, could it just be a smokescreen, I guess, to continue the war effort in perpetuity?
And we also see potentially another front of the war opening with Hezbollah and Iran, so it's kind of on the precipice, potentially, of yet another cataclysm.
So, yeah, how do you address that?
I mean, I first want to start off by pointing out how absurd it is that international journalists are not allowed in, and that in and of itself is very telling to me.
This is all happening in a black box.
Some have been allowed in, but with special chaperones provided by the Israeli military.
Correct.
Told what to see, when to see, and how— And who have ideological affinity with the current Israeli government.
Correct.
And their reporting is screened.
Like Douglas Murray, I'll just name a name.
So I just want to highlight how absurd that is, the fact that all of this is committed in the dark.
The second thing, in response to your question, how are these ceasefire negotiations perceived internally by Gazans?
I know that some colleagues of mine in the past, when there have been sort of whispers of potentially a successful ceasefire, they've gone out and celebrated.
On one circumstance, I remember they had gone out and celebrated in the street and then subsequently been bombed, including some of the people who were out celebrating this final resolution of peace.
So, I think they're losing hope.
I mean, I spoke to one of my colleagues, a pain and rehabilitation doctor in Gaza, an Oxford graduate who I'd met in Oxford before and met multiple times in Gaza.
I spoke to him just minutes before I went in to be part of this panel.
And, you know, we were chatting about the latest discussions of a ceasefire and he said he wants to have hope in it because that's all they're clinging on to.
I remember being in the West Bank and on the wall there was an expression in Arabic that would translate to how constrained life is without the expanse of hope.
And that's what Palestinians are hanging on to.
It's hope in people's humanity.
For the actual ceasefire negotiations, They appear to be smoke screens.
I hope I'm wrong, but I do think that if the U.S.
exerted more pressure to actually reach a successful negotiation and put some arms conditions on this, you'd have a ceasefire in a second.
Right.
We have one instance.
I think that's really the key point is American leaders could have ended this war at any moment they wanted.
Every time the Israelis defied the Biden administration, told the Biden administration they didn't care about their limits, didn't care about their red lines, if the Israelis really wanted to help forge a ceasefire, they would have put pressure on the Israelis by saying that they're going to withhold arms and money since the Israelis depend upon American largess to pay for this war and to get the bombs from the U.S.
that they use.
And the fact that on the one hand, you have AOC claiming Kamala Harris is working tirelessly for a ceasefire in Gaza and to bring the hostages home and everybody cheers.
And on the other hand, if the U.S.
government actually believed that, even a small amount, let alone working tirelessly on it, they would do exactly that, which Kamala Harris has made very clear she will never do.
She completely opposes.
Which is using the leverage of withholding arms to Israel, refusing to pay for Israel's ongoing war, unless there's more serious discussion and negotiations over a ceasefire.
And again, this is the big difference between people who go to the DNC Two, lie for Kamala Harris to convince confused younger voters and leftist voters who have been saying they don't want to vote for the Democratic Party because of their views on Gaza to lie to them and say, oh, no, Kamala Harris is secretly different.
She secretly has a different plan.
She's not allowed to say it yet.
And the people who actually care about Gaza, this physician who has actually been there, who's saying it's an absolute joke for the Democrats to say that they care in any way about the people in Gaza.
Let me show you one more quick interview before we get to Professor Turley, who I'm very excited to talk to and whose book I'm eager to examine.
He is Jeremiah Ellison.
He's a Minnesota City Councilman.
He's the son of Keith Ellison, who was previously a member of Congress of Minnesota, as well as the Attorney General of Minnesota.
And what makes him worth talking to is that although he is a delegate to the Democratic Convention, he considers himself an uncommitted delegate.
One of those people who is saying, I'm not going to cast my support or vote for Kamala Harris until I see genuine movements toward ending this war.
Not just empty, vacuous, meaningless cliches from AOC.
Here's what he told Michael Tracy yesterday.
Are you anticipating becoming excited about Kamala Harris?
She hasn't really had to articulate an independent policy position on Israel-Palestine or really any issue before becoming, you know, effectively coordinated as nominee.
So, what hope do you have that you'll actually come away with this with excitement?
Has there been any progress thus far in your discussions with other members of the party?
Well, I can tell that there is an effort within the party to take the uncommitted movement seriously, to take uncommitted delegates seriously.
We have a lot of people who have already pledged to Harris or were previously pledged to Biden who are still wearing our buttons, who are still saying, hey, we'll sign a letter in solidarity with you all.
Even though we're not uncommitted, we still are pro-ceasefire.
We're still for an arms embargo.
We've talked to a couple of those, yeah.
It's a popular position within the party, and I think that the party has to contend with that, right?
And it has made it a lot harder to sort of ostracize us and say, that's a fringe group over there advocating for something that the party doesn't agree with.
No, we're not a fringe group.
A lot of us are lifelong Democrats.
A lot of us doorknock.
We phone bank as much as the next person, maybe more.
And so my experience so far is that yes, there's been some slow but definite improvement to the relationship, to what the party's willing to do.
Even this event that we're getting ready to walk into, it's not a part of our demands, but we recognize the party trying to validate our existence here, our experience here, giving us formal time, a formal event.
For the dignity and the humanity of Palestinians to be discussed as part of the DNC officially, that's a really big deal to us.
Now, it doesn't meet the demands that we have.
We want to see a Palestinian American speaking on the main floor.
That demand hasn't been met yet.
We want to see policy change.
We want to see an arms embargo.
That's a big one, right?
I mean, have there been any indications that some of the validation that you're talking about could actually bear on a tangible policy change?
Or is it just symbolic stuff?
Like a panel is, you know, not nothing, but ultimately it's just a panel.
It doesn't really relate to how the government works.
Look, the truth is that candidates take on policies that are extremely mainstreamed, right?
Candidates will adopt policies that they not only recognize as extremely popular, but that they get comfortable with as extremely popular.
These kinds of steps, right?
The fact that they felt compelled or pressured or whatever you want to call it to have a panel like this.
Yeah, that means that they are recognizing that these ideas are extremely popular.
Okay, so...
Look, here's my ultimate perspective on this is if you want to vote for Kamala Harris, despite the fact that she obviously has done absolutely nothing in the way of changing or suggesting any opposition to Joe Biden's policy on Gaza, even though you've been spending 10 months swearing that you won't vote for the Democratic Party unless they do, just don't be a cheap date about it.
Don't be a manipulated Drone and follower of the party because they throw you a crumb like they have a panel or AOC lies and says Kamala Harris is working tirelessly on a ceasefire and now you're all ready to renounce all the things you spent 10 months believing that you so saying that you would so passionately believe in.
Either extract some leverage and have some dignity in following through on what you say or just admit that you don't actually care about this issue enough to Negotiate it in exchange for vote, that you're going to vote for the Democratic Party no matter whether they show you any substantive concessions or not and admit that most of what you've been saying over the last 10 months is not really genuine.
But this middle ground of pretending that you're getting things when in fact you're getting nothing, I think is just a kind of a disgrace to the dignity of the people doing it and to the cause itself.
As All right, Professor Jonathan Turley is somebody whose work I have known and admired for many years now.
Sorry to make us sound both so old, but that really is true.
He has been one of the most stalwart supporters of free speech as well as other constitutional rights in the United States, and he has a new book out entitled The Indispensable Right, Free Speech in an Age of Rage, and we are delighted to have him as his debut appearance on System Update.
Professor Turley, it's great to see you.
Thanks for coming on tonight.
Glenn, I've been really looking forward to this because this may be a mutual admiration society, but I've long admired your work.
And of course, you're one of the great voices in defense of free speech in our generation.
And more importantly, you are the most consistent of those voices.
And so I have really come to respect you deeply, particularly about your view on free speech.
- That means a lot.
So I was thinking as I was reading your book about the first time I heard you speak in person.
I think it might have even been the only time.
It was many years ago, maybe 2010, 2011.
It was, I know, before the Snowden reporting.
And you gave up and gave a speech at an event I was also speaking out where you talked about the indispensable and fundamental importance of privacy.
And you kind of explained why people have trouble valuing that, but the reasons why they should.
Once I did the Snowden reporting and I was being asked a lot about privacy, I definitely borrowed from that night when I heard you make so many compelling arguments.
The book, though, that you just released is entitled not An Indispensable Right, but The Indispensable Right, meaning free speech.
So is that, is it fair to assume from that, that as much as you value a lot of the other constitutional rights, including privacy, to you free speech is sort of the one that stands above them as a guarantor of the rest?
I do.
You know, the thing about this book, it took me about 30 years to write it because I couldn't let it go.
There are wonderful free speech books out there, but I didn't want to write another free speech book unless I could answer in my own mind why it is we're still struggling over the concept of free speech.
Why is it that year in and year out the Supreme Court makes a mess of many of these issues?
And it took a long time, and I had to go back a long way, back to the first protections of free speech that were articulated in ancient Greece.
And in fact, when they did that, they had two different definitions of free speech, both of which were protected for different reasons.
But the reason I picked the title, The Indispensable Right, is for two reasons.
One is we all agree that, or most of us agree, that free speech is the indispensable right.
We just can't agree on why.
And the second thing is that it has a crushing irony to it.
I took that term from an opinion by Louis Brandeis, one of the great civil libertarians ever to sit on the Supreme Court.
And he used that term in the Whitney case.
And Charlotte Anita Whitney was an incredibly courageous figure.
She was one of the early American communists.
She fought for the right for women to vote.
And she was an outspoken critic of racial laws.
And she was arrested for a speech in which she was denouncing lynchings.
And she knew that she would be arrested.
There was a police officer on the stage with her stating the intention to arrest her if she gave another one of these speeches.
Now, here's the quintessential free speech moment.
You have this courageous person defying the government, speaking out against a terrible wrong, a scourge of lynchings.
And so it goes before Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
And Brandeis says that free speech is a really indispensable right.
And then he upheld her conviction and sent her to jail.
So did Oliver Wendell Holmes.
And that moment really captures what this book is about.
That we constantly say that we're a nation committed to free speech.
And yet we allow all these trade-offs, even the greatest among us, like Louis Brandeis.
And so the book attempts to explore the personalities and the periods that helped shape our view of free speech, to try to figure out what went wrong.
I mean, when did we lose the clarity that we had?
And we did have that clarity at the very beginning of the Republic.
One of the things that I think is provocative in your book and that presents a perspective that is not commonly heard, including among people who strongly believe that there's a free speech or censorship crisis in the U.S., is I think there's this kind of perception that, oh, we used to always honor free speech.
It was foundational to the American way of life.
It's kind of only recently with younger generations, first with political correctness and now with woke repression and the like, abandoning a belief in free speech and that we have this kind of unprecedented period now where people no longer believe in free speech and are willing to turn to censorship.
One of the interesting things in your book is that you kind of lay out the history of how that promise that was enshrined in the Constitution in absolute terms was actually abandoned and eroded fairly early on in a pretty consistent way all the way up until where Can you talk a little?
I guess what I'm asking, what I'm wondering about is, do you reject the idea that we are sort of now in a free speech crisis, unprecedented in American history?
No, in fact, the book goes into that very point, Len, that this is, in my view, the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history.
And what the book tries to show is that we've gone through periods of rage before.
And the strange thing about ages of rage is that what I call rage rhetoric It tends to become state rage.
So as you have people who are speaking out against the government, that often triggers the government in its own form of rage.
So this book is rather unvarnished history of the United States.
We're not quite as good as our advertising.
That is, we have repeatedly cracked down on free speech in our history.
But what is fascinating is the point that you raise, Glenn, which is The book explores how at the outset of the Republic, when the First Amendment was drafted for the Bill of Rights, we did have a moment of clarity.
The most revolutionary part of the American Revolution turned out to be the First Amendment.
No nation in the history of the world had ever made a statement like the First Amendment on free speech, that it shall not be abridged.
No one had ever done that.
It still is revolutionary.
You know, one of my colleagues is leading a movement to try to amend the First Amendment because she says that it's, quote, aggressively individualistic.
When my book came out, there were about four books.
That we're criticizing the First Amendment.
A Michigan law professor said it's the Achilles heel of our country, that is free speech.
So the very right that defines us is now being treated as the right that is threatening us.
But when that First Amendment was written, the framers believed that free speech was a human right.
That's what made it so revolutionary.
They believed that the right to expression was something that nurtured you as a human being.
You couldn't be completely human without it.
And so it didn't come from the government and it couldn't be abridged by the government.
So what happened is that within a few years, Federalist judges had a default moment to the Blackstonian or British view, and they adopted what I call a functionalist view or definition of free speech.
They said, we protect free speech because it's good for democracy.
Now, that may sound pretty good to most people, but free speech is more than that.
It most certainly is good for democracy.
But if you say that that's the reason you protect it, it means that you can protect some speech less because you don't think it is good for democracy.
It allows for trade-offs.
If you view it the way the framers did it, this is a human right.
It's harder to have those trade-offs.
And ever since we went to that functionalist, Blackstonian view, we've struggled with free speech.
And it has allowed these ages of rage to occur.
But getting to your last point, Glenn, the reason this is the most dangerous anti-free speech period Is that we have never had the alliance we're seeing today.
We've never had the government corporations, academia and the media all aligned with this sort of anti-free speech agenda.
And we cannot assume that we will get out of this period as we did those earlier periods.
Want to kind of probe into why it is that even with this statement, this proclamation absolute in nature about the fundamental human right that free speech is, that
Pretty quickly in our history, as you talk about the Alien and Sedition Act, and then there have been things like the Espionage Act in 1917, and imprisoning dissidents under World War I, and I remember when I was litigating First Amendment cases, a lot of the most important precedent came from the attempt to drive people who believed in communist ideology out of public life.
They weren't allowed to be members of the Bar, they weren't allowed to occupy all sorts of public positions, and the Supreme Court Over time ruled that unconstitutional in a way that serves as precedent to today.
On the one hand, all of us as Americans are inculcated with this history that you just laid out, this kind of inspirational view that one of the things that makes us unique as Americans is this belief in free speech, that it doesn't really exist anywhere else in that form.
And yet on the other, there's so many episodes, as you say, throughout history, and it's actually far worse now, where people seem very eager to renounce that right because they perceive that it'll only be applied to others, or maybe they even know that it'll be applied to them one time and they're not that scared about it.
What is it that causes a population or convinces a population to acquiesce to violations of that right?
You know, I go in depth into this modern anti-free speech movement to try to answer that question.
One answer is that it takes a lot.
It takes a lot to convince a free people to give up freedom.
They have to be afraid.
They have to be very afraid.
That's why you have articles.
Most recently, the Washington Post, New York Times, they ran articles.
One entitled, The Free Speech is Out of Control.
And that article even suggested your very lives, your livelihood, your jobs may be endangered by free speech.
It takes a lot.
But really, the anti-free speech movement we're seeing is the coalescing of two movements.
One is coming from Europe, which I've been writing about for a long time, and warning that this wave was going to hit our shores.
Free speech isn't a free fall in Europe.
Germany, France, England.
They've eviscerated free speech with the criminalization of speech.
We're seeing this week the arrest of people who simply blogged viewpoints that were considered anti-immigration.
We saw an English judge actually send a person to jail for toxic ideologies.
That is, just looking at what he had in his room and saying that those are dangerous thoughts.
The European anti-free speech movement is growing by the day.
But our movement in the United States originated in higher education.
That's the reason I have a very long chapter on higher education.
It was born there and it is now metastasized in the media and in politics.
And you know, I'm sort of a dinosaur now.
People call me a free speech absolutist.
That used to be a compliment.
I don't think I'm an absolutist, but certainly I admit that I really tolerate few limits on free speech.
But law schools now largely teach students that free speech is dangerous, and they've heard that since middle school.
We're raising a generation of speech phobics.
Who are told that they shouldn't have to hear opposing views, that they're triggered, and that those views can be harmful to them.
And that does worry me, because these are the citizens that have to fight for free speech.
One of the points that you make in your book that prompted a lot of mockery from the New York Times review of your book, which was very snide and dismissive, I think, predictably so, and one of the things it focused on principally was your claim that at least over the last decade or so, conservative speech has been the principal target of censorship, both on college campuses and more broadly.
I don't understand how anyone could even contest the truth of that statement.
And yet, the New York Times at least did, not through any data or anything, but just through mockery and dismissal.
But one of the things though that at least I perceive is that it is the American right that has long, has become through a whole bunch of circumstances, the most vocal defenders of the idea of free speech, in part because they have been targeted.
Since October 7th, though, at least in my view, There have been assaults on free speech based on the same mentality that has been driving censorship against conservatives, often cheered by or championed by or driven by conservatives in the name of punishing people who are critical of Israel or supportive of the pro-Palestinian cause.
Have you also noticed that and does that concern you in the sense that it seems like no faction now is immune to those temptations?
Yeah, let me address both points.
First, I thought that the New York Times piece was rather humorous because, first of all, they don't mention that much of the book criticizes the New York Times as leading this movement, which I loved.
I mean, as a columnist, I wouldn't feel right about writing on something without saying, yeah, the book talks about us a lot.
It also ignores the fact that I have data and studies on that.
It just doesn't mention that out of the book.
My favorite part is at the end where he says, you know, the real problem here is how are we going to censor disinformation under Turley's view?
Which I just broke up laughing because I'm saying, well, oh yeah, I mean, the whole point of the book is that disinformation is nothing new.
These are the same voices we've heard throughout our history for censorship.
And yeah, the book is about not using disinformation as the reason for censorship.
But The New York Times just says, but golly, at the end, I just couldn't see how we would censor under Turley's approach, which I suppose that means he may have gotten part of what the book was about.
Now, the second point that you raise is a very important one.
I've also written columns opposing efforts to ban certain groups, pro-Palestinian groups from campus, and to try to explain how we need to be very careful here, because people are Swinging too far to the opposite direction in trying to ban speakers and punish people for speech.
So there's a difference between conduct and speech.
If you go into a building and you trash the building and you occupy the building, that's conduct, right?
You can be punished for that.
It's even a crime.
If you threaten individuals, that's conduct and you can be charged with it or you can be expelled for it.
But you can't be, in my view, legitimately penalized because your views are viewed as hateful or that you support what many people consider to be terrorism.
We have to be very careful how we walk this line.
Because the one thing the book talks about is that free speech is a curious right because it's so much better at a distance, right?
If you ask people today, about the McCarthy period, when the left was blacklisted, arrested, and they will express absolute shock about it.
How could we have ever let that happen?
And when you ask them then about censorship today, they say, well, that's different, right?
Because we're facing an existential threat from disinformation or malinformation or misinformation.
And the funny thing is, even the terms we use are not that new.
One thing the book points out is that things like fake and false news, those were terms used at the beginning of the Republic.
So these really are the same voices.
But every generation believes that they are facing an existential threat because it gives them a license to do it.
And it gets back to sort of the point of the subtitle about being an age of rage.
The thing that people don't like to admit is that they like it.
Right?
They like rage.
It's addictive.
It's even contagious.
It allows you to do things that you would never otherwise do.
It gives you that license to silence others.
And so people truly like it, even though the rage itself seems righteous and they're uncomfortable with what they must do.
They're really not that uncomfortable.
This is unleashing something that lives within us.
The book talks about how James Madison was one of the few framers that got free speech right.
And he wrote a wonderful piece in 1800 that talked about the monster that lives within us.
And that monster is sedition prosecutions.
And what Madison was talking about is this monster that sort of comes out in periods when we are really angry or really afraid.
And it appears.
And so the book tries to suggest we need to slay Madison's monster that's within each of us.
And what you pointed out, Glenn, is really an example of when that comes forward.
So I actually wanted to focus on that part of the book.
I just have a few more questions out of respect for your time.
But I wanted to focus on that part of the book where you document that these terms are not new, that fake news, Disinformation, all of these things, all these terms have been around for a while and often play the same role in going back decades or even centuries in American history to try and justify censorship.
My hypothesis, however, is that in a lot of ways the internet has given a kind of new potency to this industry that has arisen that is very well financed and is designed to claim the ability to define what is disinformation and what is not.
It reminded me a lot, you know, one of the points I often made during the Snowden reporting, as I remember very well when we were doing this reporting, Members of the East German Stasi that were notorious for their surveillance were pointing out, wow, these are capabilities we didn't even dream of having.
You know, they could sort of manually read mail, but only maybe 15 or 20 percent of mail.
And the internet now, you know, can either be a tool of liberation or a tool of sort of unprecedented control if you turn it into a censorship machine.
I sort of see that Same thing with regard to speech, that speech is now concentrated, public speech on these handful of large platforms that, as you say, governments are implementing laws in order to control.
And to me, the disinformation industry sort of appeared overnight as an industry.
I don't mean as a term, but I mean as like suddenly there started being Disinformation experts?
I don't know if GW has a program where you can study and become a disinformation expert, just a general arbiter of truth.
I don't think so.
Seems like a fake expertise to me.
But the danger of it is that if you centralize that power to say, this is disinformation and this is truth, and then justify censorship based on that, it can have this sort of appearance of apolitical neutrality or somehow based in science, which I think is the purpose of it.
Do you consider those sorts of things, the internet-based censorship, the ability to kind of concentrate the flow of information and then control it through this industry of disinformation, a unique threat?
It is.
It's a new threat, and I do go into depth on this industry, and you're right, it is an industry.
People have turned free speech into a commodity where they can make money in helping others limit free speech or silence others.
And universities are making a lot of money.
What the Twitter files showed was not just Coordination by the government in targeting citizens to be silenced or blacklisted.
But it also revealed massive grants going from the administration to academic and other groups to help in the targeting of citizens, the raiding of sites, the effort to get revenue sources cut off from disfavored sites.
That's new, and it's very dangerous.
In many ways, the left is far more successful as censors than anything that came before.
I mean, in the McCarthy period, the left was the target of the censorship, but it was sort of clumsy.
You know, McCarthy was sort of clumsy.
The left today is far more sophisticated.
They're creating rating systems.
They're going after revenue sources like advertisers.
This is a comprehensive effort, and it is being successful to a degree that we've never seen before.
And that really came out, obviously, with the Twitter files.
And what you're left with is this metastasizing threat And, you know, when I testified in Congress about censorship repeatedly before the Twitter files, Democratic members just said, you've no proof that the government is coordinating or doing any of this.
We did have proof.
But then the Twitter files came out.
And I then testified again.
And suddenly those same members were saying, well, sure, the government's coordinating.
They have to coordinate to get rid of disinformation.
And one of them, Representative Goldman, Dan Goldman from New York, I said, look, Professor, this is just basically a crowded theater and we're trying to keep people from saying fire.
And I have a whole chapter of the book on that particular line of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Because that drives every free speech champion crazy is when people cite that fire in a crowded movie theater.
But I hope people read that chapter.
I took a look at it.
Thankfully you documented the emptiness and absurdity and sort of the invalidity of that cliche.
But go ahead.
Sorry.
Well, so Goldman said that, and I said, Congressman, could I just make a point?
You're quoting a line from Schenck, which was a case in which they sent a socialist to jail for opposing the draft by passing around a flyer quoting the United States Constitution.
You're quoting that line from that case.
Even Oliver Wendell Holmes moved away from that case and that line.
So is that really what you want to be citing?
And he cut me off and said, we don't need a law lecture here.
And I said, I think you do, right?
I mean, I think that the whole point of this is that there's the people that push disinformation spread disinformation.
And it's not just disinformation, right?
The administration claims that it must also censor something called malinformation.
And malinformation is information that is true.
So the Biden administration is saying, you can say true facts, but we still will try to censor you or blacklist you because we just think you're using those facts in a misleading way.
All right, I could go on all night.
I have one more question that you deal with a lot in your book, and I genuinely hope people get your book in part because we do talk about free speech a lot day to day, but your ability to do it in a scholarly way, a historical way, a kind of conceptual way, I think, gives people a new way to think and talk about free speech and the reasons why it's so often endangered.
And that last part is what I'm going to ask you about.
It's part of the subtitle of your book, which is free speech in an age of rage.
Not the age of rage, but un-age of rage, sort of like we're in an age of rage, but there have been others.
And I want to talk about that rage part of how that can so easily convince people to not just accept, but cheer for censorship.
I think the first time I really became aware of your work was when I had started as a journalist and was working on the civil liberties aspects of the war on terror and Bush-Cheney, and And I thought the lesson from that was to look back and say, wow, we were put in such a state of acute fear on purpose of terrorism and attacks that we ended up renouncing so many of our civil liberties because we had been so frightened to believe that that was the only way we could stay safe and that we were put in such a state of acute fear on purpose of terrorism and attacks that we ended up renouncing so many of our civil liberties because we had
And here in Brazil, I watch this all the time.
There's an incredible erosion of free speech.
And of course, it's always justified by, oh, there's this scary movement led by Bolsonaro that's going to threaten society unless you let us censor and silence people.
And then people say, oh, I'm scared about that.
I want to be protected from that.
Is that ultimately, because to me, that's sort of the authoritarian formula for anything.
Like, oh, we're going to scare you.
And as a result, you're going to give us more power.
Do you think that is what ultimately is at the core of a power center or government's ability to convince people to support censorship, getting them in enough of a state of fear and agitation that they need that?
It is.
And if you look at the periods discussed in the books, every single one involves state rage, and that was preceded by an effort to make people either very much afraid or very angry.
And that's the only way you can get a free people to give up their freedom.
And the weird thing is that there is not a case in history, not once, where a censorship system has worked.
Not once!
It's been tried so many times.
If you look at places like Germany as one of the longest-standing censorship systems in the West, there was a poll recently that showed that only 17% of Germans feel comfortable speaking their views in public.
Now, the neo-Nazi movement, which is the target of these laws, is doing great.
It's having record numbers.
It is burgeoning.
Thousands of neo-Nazis are marching in the street.
So Germany has actually silenced the wrong people.
They've actually silenced the rest of society with these types of laws.
It has never worked.
But this goes to your point, Glenn, that It's part of this industry.
There are people who are making a lot of money or they're getting a lot of political benefit from silencing others.
And you become a nation of chumps.
You believe this.
Now, the only thing I would say, Glenn, about that is that even as bad as this is, one thing I hope the book does leave people with is that if you believe that free speech is a human right, There is a natural optimism, because it means that we're hardwired for it.
I talk about the book, how if you're denied the right to speech, you can have physical changes.
Parts of your brain actually shrink.
We are physically, not just psychologically, committed to speak publicly.
We have a need to project part of ourselves in the world around us.
And if you believe that, Then all of these efforts can reduce our appetite for free speech, but it can never eliminate our taste for it, because it's part of being human.
Absolutely, and I think people can get a sense there from the fact that I've been studying free speech and talking about free speech as a lawyer, as a journalist for a long, long time.
I feel like I'm very steeped in it and that your book really did give me new ways to think about it, new ways to kind of conceive of it, to talk about it.
And I'm sure that's true for anyone who cares about free speech, which I believe is a good chunk of this audience.
That's one of the reasons they watch the show.
So I can't recommend the book highly enough.
It is always great to speak to you.
I hope people continue to follow your work and we hope to have you back on again.
We're going to be harassing you to come back.
So thanks very much and have a great evening.
Thank you, Glenn.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Richard Medhurst has become quite a popular independent journalist.
He has a YouTube show where he's been working year after year building an audience because he offers not just a scathing critique of orthodoxies of Western foreign policy, but an extremely informed critique.
I can't imagine finding very many people who will be more enlightening about things like Western imperialism in Africa, or the war in Ukraine, or the war in Israel, or the Western role in all of that.
He covered the Assange case extensively.
Basically he's doing what independent media is meant to do, which is offering perspectives in a very informed way that you can't get very many other places, and at the same time doing so in a way that is steep not in rhetoric or blowhard behavior, but just in very studied read facts.
And it's one of the things that has made him, his show so popular, not just among a large group of people who watch him, but also among myself.
We've had him on our show before and we are happy to have him back, although not necessarily under great circumstances.
Richard it's great to see you, even though it's not under great circumstances.
Thanks for taking the time.
Hi Glenn, thanks so much for having me and it's, your words are very much appreciated.
Yeah, they're very genuine.
So, alright, let's get to it.
We talked a little bit at the beginning of the show, but for people who didn't hear, On Thursday of last week, you flew to the UK and you were met by six police officers at the plane, so before you could even get off the plane and get to immigration, and they essentially placed you under arrest, under physical custody of the UK police under a terrorism law of 2000, though they didn't really explain why.
But you did about a nine minute video going into great detail about the treatment to which you were subjected.
Which we will link to so that people can go watch the full story of that.
But in lieu of that, can you tell me what it is during this arrest that lasted 24 hours that you were able to learn about why it is that you are being arrested?
Well, just from the get-go, I just want to say that I'm out on bail, effectively.
So, you know, I'm not at liberty to divulge exactly what they asked me and go too much into detail.
Let me just ask you, are you out on bail with restrictions?
Have you had to surrender your passport?
Are you able to leave the country?
Yeah, so here's the thing.
I was released on unconditional bail.
I was given my passport back.
The thing is, I do have to go back in three months and surrender myself to the police station, although I don't feel that the bail really is unconditional because, you know, essentially everything and anything I say, anything I do, it can be used against me.
So, you know, it's like they, I think what they wanted to achieve is to silence me as a journalist and stop me doing my work.
So, you know, they say it's unconditional, but it's not really unconditional, is it?
Well, as people know, and I talked about this a little bit, as you of course know, I'm very familiar with this terrorism law, the terrorism of 2000 law, because my husband was notoriously detained under it when coming back to Rio through London after having spent time with my reporting colleague, Laura Poitras.
And they were threatening him the whole time to put him under arrest as well.
I think the only reason they didn't is because the Brazilian government was so aggressive in demanding his release, but it was an act of great intimidation.
And he ended up suing and obtained a ruling that the provision under which he was detained, which was Section 5, as I recall, was unconstitutional when applied to journalists.
The section under which I understand you were charged is a different section, which is Section 12, and Reading that, it seems to me like it's intended to criminalize opinion, specifically opinion or reporting that is deemed to advance the agenda of a group that's designated as a terrorist organization by the UK.
Is that a correct understanding of the law under which you were detained?
Do you have any details about what they said you did that you can share with us that constituted a violation in their eyes of that law?
Well, to be honest, I thought that they had nicked me under section, sorry, Schedule 7.
That's what I mean, that's what I mean, Schedule 7.
Yeah, it's been a while, exactly.
Yeah, I thought it was Schedule 7 because that's when they make you answer every question.
You have to, you know, hand over the passwords for your devices on the spot.
And then, you know, at least, if I can put in quotation marks, you get to leave afterwards, right?
You're not actually, like, arrested.
Um, and, and that didn't really dawn on me until, uh, quite a bit that, you know, I, I wasn't, I wasn't being detained.
I was actually being arrested, like, you know, unbelievable.
Um, and, and it wasn't schedule seven.
Uh, it was section 12.
And so, I mean, I'd never heard of it.
And, um, Even though I was quite critical of the Terrorism Act, because in general, now I'm not speaking just about Section 12, I'm speaking in general, the whole point of it is that the threshold for any of the offences that they put in there are so low that journalists, and that's who the target audience usually are,
Can just be picked up and detained and arrested and this you know, it's it's just don't get me wrong There are there are some parts of the Terrorism Act that are actually made for fighting terrorism Which which are needed in in any country, but the the problem is that when you use this against journalists instead of you know actual Terrorists it becomes a political tool.
I think we can all agree on that and the threshold with this thing the way that they explained it to me is And from what I gathered is that it is really so, so, so utterly low that anything, I mean, can be considered a criminal.
You know, it can be skewed, it can be twisted into an offense of the highest order because we should remember that, you know, this is... I wasn't nicked for, you know, burglary or something.
They took me off a plane for terrorism.
I mean, I still can't even believe it.
You know, it's insane, really.
I was thinking about other cases like this, and in the U.S.
there's a statute called the Material Support for Terrorism Statute, where, and as you said, there are valid, obviously valid, functions of this law.
You cannot, for example, send arms or send money to groups that are designated terrorist organizations, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas.
You can bicker about whether some of those groups should be on the list.
Of course, the U.S. used to have the African National Congress on the list for the crime of fighting the apartheid regime that the U.S. supported.
But there is a list of designated terrorist organizations, and you can understand why the government would see that being a crime to, say, helping them get grenades or other kinds of sophisticated weaponry or paying for it, knowing that you're doing so, because then you're deliberately strengthening a terrorist organization. knowing that you're doing so, because then you're deliberately strengthening At the height of the kind of insanity of the war on terror, though, there were these prosecutions, I'm not exaggerating, where they were saying,
Where people would be arrested for material support for terrorism for the things they were saying that often were just critiques of U.S.
foreign policy.
So they would upload a video to YouTube where they would kind of show U.S.
bombing of the region.
They would show U.S.
support for dictators.
And of course, these are part of the grievances of a lot of groups that are designated terrorist organizations.
But it's also a critique that a lot of people who are not terrorists make.
And the free speech implications of this were so severe and so obvious because it means that you can become a guilty of material support for terrorism by expressing criticism of US foreign policy on the grounds that that helps promote the interest of terrorist groups in that region.
Is your understanding of the UK law in what you have been charged with similar to that sort of a framework?
Well, let me just put it this way.
You're heading in the right direction.
You know, once again, I'm not 100% at liberty to speak, nor am I a lawyer, but what you just described does sound eerily similar.
So, you know, it doesn't matter if you support or you don't.
You know, your opinion as a journalist or as a human being is apparently not taken into account.
It's just like, you know, you're criticizing your government's foreign policy and if they don't like it, they can turn it into something to mean something entirely different.
So that's why I feel this is, I feel like it's, you know, they're putting words in my mouth.
I feel like in a sense, it's a political persecution because I was doing a lot of reporting recently, for example, on this gang rape that Israeli soldiers were carrying out.
I did a lot of research on the Israeli Olympic team because, you know, they were putting out pro-genocide or like pro-war statements on their social media.
And as you'll recall, Glenn, all the Russian and Ukrainian athletes, excuse me, all the Russian and Belarusian athletes were banned over the war in Ukraine for things that, you know, were mild in comparison.
They didn't even things they didn't even say or do, whereas Israeli athletes were getting away with crazy things.
And so I think this was I think this was, you know, someone's way.
I don't know who.
And I'm not necessarily saying that, you know, some foreign power was involved, maybe foreign interests.
I don't know.
But I thought it was like, OK, you want to go through the social media of all these people.
Well, we'll go through yours.
And I don't know.
I just feel like it's kind of they're trying to stop me from doing my job and they're just taking things and turning them to, you know, into a completely different meaning.
And it sounds similar to what you just described.
Yeah, so I just wanted to make sure when I'm asking questions, I don't want to cajole or pressure you in any way to say things that you shouldn't say in the interest of this pending criminal charge, which I think you are taking seriously, and I don't blame you for doing so.
I just kind of, you know, I'm obviously interested in the case in part because of the effect that this law had on my family, and I remember very well, like it was yesterday, you know, how sort of traumatizing it is to have that word Be attached to what you're doing.
Terrorism, that is not a joke of a word, especially in the context of the US and the UK.
But I also have been interested in it because we've been covering very extensively this kind of increasingly and rapidly growing assault, aggressive assault on free speech in the EU generally, but in the UK specifically.
Saw a lot of that with the riots and the like and some of the bizarre threats that issued from the UK.
So I want to just get a sense from you.
Have you been told specifically, and I'm not saying please tell us if you can't, but have you been given pretty clear notice about what you're alleged to have done that violates this law?
Well, again, I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to say, but I, you know, the thing is that when I when I was arrested, I was I was basically asking him, like, you know, when can we get to what is it that you want to ask me?
Because I was, of course, worried and curious and and genuinely just like, you know, like saying, I'm trying to show that, you know, like, I'm not going to stand in your way or be uncooperative or give you any reason to, you know, stop framing me in a bad way.
Like, let's just get on with it.
And they just wouldn't tell me initially.
Right.
Initially, it was so vague and abstract.
They were just citing some some, you know, part of the law.
And I was trying to find out and no one would tell me.
And then they say, you'll find out later.
And so, you know, I was sitting in the jail cell and I'm just like I'm going through my head like, what is what did I possibly do or say that could qualify for anything that they're about to say?
And that's the thing.
It's that, you know, I was also thinking at the same time, it doesn't matter because the threshold is so low that no matter how innocent maybe, Or no matter how well-intentioned, apparently, they... So I'm not saying that I'm... I'm not saying, like, I actually did anything wrong.
On the contrary, I'm saying that they can just twist anything, anything they want and make it sound something, you know, completely evil and frame you, like, as if you're a monster, you know?
So I waited about 15, I don't know, 13, 14, 15 hours until, like, I was finally interviewed.
And then the interview took about an hour, an hour and a half, something like that.
And, you know, they played some things and read some things to me.
And, you know, that's how it went, essentially.
So, you know, I was just shocked that this word terrorism was being used to describe what I was doing, because they knew I'm a journalist.
I actually had all my journalist press cards with me in the bag.
You know, if you're going to arrest someone for something as big as terrorism, obviously you have some kind of an idea who they are and what their profile is.
And I find this just so, so, so exaggerated.
It's really gross.
And also, when you were talking about what happened to you, You know, to David, I mean, I was actually thinking of him while I was in jail.
I was like, you know, because that was like the first, the prime example of how the terrorism act was being used unfairly against people.
I always, always, always remember that.
And I was thinking, I don't know if it's the same schedule or the same section.
I don't know what's going on exactly yet, but like I said, they wouldn't tell me for most of the time.
But, you know, I could just, I just, yeah, I felt like it was.
Really, whatever they were going to tell me, I knew it was going to be taken out of context, blown out of proportion.
And, you know, I mean, if I can just maybe talk about actual terrorism.
You know, when my parents were working in the UN, we were posted in Pakistan, in Islamabad, and I was in the British school, and you had the Egyptian embassy.
Right next to my school, it was adjacent, so I was there when there was a double bombing.
That's terrorism, okay?
Not journalism.
I know I shouldn't have to say this and explain this, but the irony behind all this is that if you go and look back at who is funding al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, you'll find it's the British government and it's the CIA.
Yeah, absolutely.
They drop weapons all the time into the Middle East that are used by extremists.
They're a big funder of arms to Saudi Arabia, so that's just a whole separate issue.
Like I said, I hope that ruling helps, that David was able to obtain, that said journalism cannot be terrorism.
One of the things you had mentioned in the video was that they had seized all of your equipment including your drives, your cameras, your communication devices that obviously might involve communications with sources.
Have they given that back to you and did they compel you to give passwords to those devices so that they could access them?
Yeah, so I just want to be clear.
I don't want people to think this is any less serious than Schedule 7.
If anything, it's actually worse.
And I was compelled to hand over the passwords.
I refused.
And under this specific section, under Section 12, They can't make you give them on the spot, but again, this is still being hashed out, so I don't know where it's going.
As you correctly point out, they took all of my journalistic equipment.
I still can't even function properly right now because I have no way of reaching people, so they took my phone.
They took a wired, a simple wired microphone that has nothing to do with the phone.
They took some wireless microphones, you know, like Rode microphones or something.
They took, you know, my headphones also, some like wireless headphones for listening to music.
I mean, just, you know, and I even, I protested, I told them, what do you need to put all this inside of the bag?
And they gave me some excuse, like, yeah, actually it shouldn't be in there, but, you know, the bag is sealed now and we can't do anything.
They think I'm stupid.
I know how the police speak in England, and I know exactly what they're trying to do.
They're basically telling me in their own way, like, no, we actually don't trust you, and there's nothing you can do about it, and we're going to take it.
So, yeah, they took everything, and they really dehumanized me.
I feel like this is another important aspect that should be mentioned, is that There was no need.
First of all, the whole concept of calling a journalist a terrorist is absurd.
But then not only to detain them, which is bad enough, but to arrest them and then on top of that make them eat food with a piece of cardboard.
I mean, you know, I don't know if you wanted to go into detail about that, but I can offer more than, you know, more than enough.
And I really felt it was like designed to dehumanize and intimidate you.
You know, it's meant to leave a chilling effect.
on you and then people who are of course, you know, among your readership and viewership so that they think that, wow, if the threshold is so low, you know, I better be quiet as well, I suppose. - No, it's an absolute display of power with the intention of, you know, showing you what they can do to you without any real limits showing you what they can do to you without any real limits whenever they want for any real reason, simply because you have become a voice that in some way they find to be an impediment to That's what's so pernicious about it.
Just a couple of logistical questions.
I know you've lived elsewhere in the EU before.
Are you currently living in the UK?
Are you a citizen of the UK?
And do you have good legal counsel for this process?
Yeah, I mean, so I'm not living in the UK, but I am a British citizen.
I mean, I was born in Damascus.
My parents were working in the UN at that time in peacekeeping, but I'm British by blood, so to speak, right?
My father, basically, through my father got English citizenship.
So they, you know, basically, they don't like that I can just I think what makes them angry is that I'm English and I was supposed to, you know, become part of the whole foreign, you know, the diplomatic service because, I mean, my parents didn't work for any government, but they were diplomats.
And, you know, the whole plan was that, OK, I would go to like, you know, learn all these languages and then go and maybe become a diplomat or an ambassador.
And I mean, I did put all those skills to use, but I'm not.
But I'm not using them to further what is what is the current British foreign policy.
So I think I think they don't just see me as a journalist that they don't like.
They see me as someone who is like sort of a class traitor, if that makes sense.
Absolutely.
So go ahead.
Sorry.
Yeah.
And and and I'm not I'm not living in the UK currently.
So I think that was one of their considerations as well.
And, yeah, you know, we basically moved all over the world because of my parents work.
It wasn't even in my hands.
So, yeah.
So there are people in the chat, as I'm not at all surprised, who are asking how they can donate or how they can help you because obviously people regard this as a pretty severe attack on basic press freedoms and there are a lot of people who are fans of your work as well and want to get you back up and running as soon as possible.
So for those people who do want to support you and kind of help in fighting back against what's been done to you, what are the best ways for them to do that?
That's very kind of you, Glenn, and very kind of everybody in the chat.
I mean, basically, I'm on Patreon.
So it will be patreon.com slash Richard Medhurst.
And also on PayPal, although I don't know the link.
But if they go on Patreon or on YouTube, so youtube.com slash Richard Medhurst, they will find everything.
And sorry, I forgot to answer the last bit of your question.
Yes, I have good legal counsel.
I have some of the best.
And I'm very grateful to them.
Excellent, because it's not only important to you and to people who are followers of yours, but it's also an important precedent to be able to defeat this sort of thing for ways that they might want to do it in the future.
Richie, I'm sorry that this has happened to you.
We obviously intend to cover whatever it is that continues to happen.
If there's anything we can do for you, please don't hesitate.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
Really appreciate it.
putting you back on our show.
As you know, we're fans of your work.
We want to see you back up and running as soon as possible and do everything possible to combat this unjust assertion of police action, which to me at least seems very clearly designed to punish your journalism and punish your free speech.
So I really appreciate your taking the time to come on.
I'm sure it's kind of a stressful and busy time for you.
So thanks a lot and we'll see you shortly.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
Really appreciate it.
All right.
Have a great evening.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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