Tim Walz Again Defends State Sponsored Censorship; Julian Assange Recognized As Political Prisoner; Post-VP Debate Interviews
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Walz Condones State Censorship (5:39)
Political Prisoner (51:03)
Michael Tracey Post-VP Debate Interviews (1:14:24)
Backstage [1:15:39]
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) [1:19:15]
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison [1:33:03]
Co-Chair of Trump Transition Team Howard Lutnick [1:35:49]
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) [1:40:19]
Outro (1:44:14)
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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... Democrats have been increasingly embracing a regime of censorship for years now, ever since the emergence of Donald Trump.
And that's not news. We've covered that at least as much as any other topic.
In last night's presidential, vice presidential debate, Kamala Harris' running mate, Democratic Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, offered a spirited and vibrant defense of the virtues and the constitutionality of state-run censorship, and it was far from the first time he has done that.
In this case, Governor Walz invoked one of the worst, dreariest, and most deceitful clichés used by censorship advocates All throughout the democratic world now, quote, one can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater, and that's the same as the censorship we're doing.
This is the moronic battle cry of wannabe tyrants around the world.
Meanwhile, to ensure that conservatives don't become high and mighty upon hearing all this, the post-October 7th censorship orgy that has also emerged in the United States, all to protect the foreign country of Israel, continues apace.
The University of Maryland, a state school under the direction of the state's Democratic governor, Wes Moore, banned a group of students from holding an interfaith vigil on October 7th in order to commemorate those killed in Gaza.
The school's reasoning was that it was too insensitive to allow a pro-Palestinian protest on October 7th, even though the students chose that date because that was when the bombing of Gaza began.
Thankfully, a federal court today rejected the university's attempt to ban this student group's event, holding something that once barely needed to be explained, that the First Amendment's free speech clause is violated when the state attempts to ban protests On the basis of viewpoints, Governor Moore decried this ruling because the once bedrock and virtually instinctive defense of free speech in the United States continues to crumble.
Then, one of the most inspiring moments in some time took place as the now free Julian Assange traveled with his wife and their two young children from Australia, where they live, to Strasbourg, France in order for Assange to address the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe about the ordeal he suffered And the issues that emerged from it.
We'll show you key excerpts of Assange's remarks as well as report on the vote of that body to declare Assange to have been a prisoner of conscience or a political prisoner at the hands of the U.S. and the U.K. And then finally, for the vice presidential debate, we sent our now familiar dynamic duo, the intrepid independent reporter Michael Tracy, As well as a producer on our show, Megan O'Rourke, to the after-debate spin room.
There, they were able to interview a wide range of surrogates, including members of Congress from both parties, a leading fundraiser in the transition chief for the Trump campaign, as well as the chairman of the DNC, Jamie Harrison.
As always, when we send those two to such events, the resulting interviews are in equal parts entertaining and revealing, and we will show you some of the key highlights.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It probably is very familiar to viewers of this show that Democratic Party leaders,
almost to a person, have spent the last eight years inching closer and closer,
with more and more velocity, to explicitly embracing theories of censorship to justify
both in terms of censorship in our country generally and as well as, more importantly, censorship online.
That does not just include big tech censorship.
But as two courts concluded, the very unconstitutional effort by the Biden administration to pressure and coerce and cajole big tech platforms to censor all sorts of dissent published by citizens of the United States, especially on the COVID pandemic, but also on things like the war in Ukraine and just general critiques of the Biden administration.
Now, it has gotten to such a point that this Debate this conflict between the foundational value of American democracy, which is the free speech guarantee that is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution on the one hand and the Democratic Party's propensity to continuously look for new theories and new means to justify political censorship on the other has, and I think very productively, risen to the level of the presidential campaign because it was raised last night In the vice presidential debate when the topic of the quote-unquote threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump Was raised,
and J.D. Vance pointed out, I think quite adeptly, that when you want to talk about threats to democracy, there are few graver threats to democracy than the systemic attempt to implant a regime of political censorship designed to censor political speech.
And in response, Tim Walz didn't deny that the Democrats are doing that, but instead defended it and did so in a way that I think is very notable.
Here's part of that exchange. We're good to go.
You can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
That's the test. That's the Supreme Court test.
Tim, fire in a crowded theater.
You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn't wear masks.
That's not fire in a crowded theater.
That is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.
Okay, there's so much there.
First of all, when J.D. Vance was speaking, Governor Walz interrupted in order to say, no, disinformation and hate speech, meaning there's no First Amendment protection for disinformation or hate speech, which is an absolute falsehood.
There's no First Amendment exception for hate speech, in part because any ideas can be classified by whoever has the power to do so as hate speech.
Hate speech is, of course, protected speech under the First Amendment.
There's not even a question about that.
And the fact that Governor Walz believes that hate speech can be constitutionally banned or censored is very disturbing, but it's also illustrative of the ethos that is emerging and has emerged within the Democratic Party And there's a lot of this in the Republican Party that we've been reporting on for the last year and that we're going to get to as well, so don't think I'm exempting them.
But it has become a systemic framework, a systemic system within the Democratic Party to use this solution increasingly as a means of controlling speech and although Those two moderators chided J.D. Vance for saying that the governor has the floor even though Tim Walts was done speaking and there was a back and forth that they didn't like.
The first interruption actually came from Tim Walts when he interrupted and said, yeah, it's disinformation and hate speech.
In other words, that's all we're trying to ban, just disinformation and hate speech.
And then when it was actually time for him to speak, he said, you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater and that's First Amendment doctrine.
Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, first of all, has nothing to do with expressions of political opinion.
There are limits on speech, meaning laws that limit words that come out of your mouth.
For example, if I'm holding in my hand a fake diamond, a cubic zirconia, and I tell you that it's actually a diamond and convince you to buy it for $50,000 rather than its actual value, which is, say, $50, I can be criminally liable for the crime of fraud even though it was conducted solely through words that came out of my mouth.
If I right now accuse somebody of being a pedophile with absolutely no basis for believing that it's true, I can be sued for defamation.
So there are limits on the sorts of things that you can do in yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, although we'll get to why that's such a A hallmark of ignorance to raise that, especially in the way that Tim Walz did.
None of those have anything to do with the expression of political opinions.
Like, I'm not convinced that the COVID origin was Zoonotic from leaping from animals to humans.
I believe there's a good chance that it actually leaked from a lab in Wuhan, something that you were banned at the behest and pressure of the Biden administration from expressing or questioning the efficacy of social distancing or masks or school shutdowns or the efficacy and dangers of the vaccine.
Questioning all kinds of things about the war in Ukraine and whether the propaganda that we're being fed is actually true, those are political opinions.
Those can never be constrained under the First Amendment.
Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater has nothing to do with any of that.
Even worse is Tim Walters' claim that, oh, that's what the First Amendment, that's what the Supreme Court doctrine says about Free speech and that somehow that justifies banning and censoring people who are expressing dissent from U.S. government policy.
As I said, the yelling fire in a crowded booth there has nothing to do with that, but also it's not Supreme Court doctrine at all.
It came from a non-binding decision from roughly a hundred years ago in an opinion that was not even binding And that has been considered to be one of the most disgraceful decisions of the Supreme Court and has been repeatedly and progressively not formally overturned but effectively overturned by a series of court rulings that came after it, rejecting the premises of that case and its conclusion.
There's a whole body of First Amendment law that renders the decision from which that idiotic phrase came To be basically bad law, old law that no longer applies, and yet people like Tim Walts go around who wants to be the Vice President of the United States, who would have to put his hand on a Bible and swear an oath to the Constitution when he has no idea what the Constitution means or what it says.
One of the best articles that has actually been written about this is an article by the litigator, the criminal litigator Ken White, who is better known in political circles by the name that he adopted for Twitter, Pope Hat. He became popular for a while and then he became a fanatical Trump hater and that's all he ever did and became known for eventually and then he ended up Very melodramatically announcing his exit from Twitter.
But in any event, he wrote this article basically trying to explain why it is that anytime anybody invokes this idiotic, vapid cliché to justify censorship as Tim Walsh did, you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater, demonstrates that they actually have no idea what they're talking about.
It's pretty much the, it's like a neon sign above somebody's head when they says that.
With a huge sign that says ignoramus or historically ignorant or moron with an arrow pointing to the person out of his mouth, this phrase is coming.
And here you see the article he wrote in December 2022, quote, the First Amendment is an absolute.
Sure, but so what?
Understanding the limits of the First Amendment and how they apply to free speech analysis.
And this is what he wrote, quote, it's inevitable.
Whenever there's a debate over whether the government can punish or regulate some instance of controversial speech in America, someone pipes up with, quote, well, actually the First Amendment is not absolute.
Sometimes they say, quote, quote, well, in fact, there are limits to the First Amendment, or the First Amendment doesn't protect all speech, or if they really hate me and want me to suffer, quote, you can't shout fire in a crowded movie theater.
The proposition that the First Amendment isn't absolute, that it has established limits, is true, well known, and, at least now that Hugo Black is dead, practically undisputed.
Hugo Black was a Supreme Court Justice who was an absolutist on free speech.
But then he goes on, but this observation is readily useful in resolving a dispute over whether any particular speech is outside of First Amendment protection.
Too often people use it as an argument that it's not.
They use it to suggest, quote, the First Amendment doesn't protect all speech, therefore it's perfectly plausible to suppose the First Amendment doesn't protect this speech, but that's not how the First Amendment works.
That's not how any of this works.
In short, quote, actually the First Amendment is not absolute, is most often deployed to make a point that's false.
So what's true? How can the recognition that the First Amendment has limits inform sensibly a discussion of whether any particular speech is protected on any specific government action and whether it's prohibited?
He went on to basically outline how it is that even though, as I said, there are limits on free speech, such as not being able to defraud people through the use of words, not being able to threaten them with violence, And those types of things, political expression, the expression of political ideas or dissent from the government, isn't always, in every case, protected.
He also has a separate article specifically tracing the history of this phrase, you can't yell, fire in a crowded movie theater, that I would also recommend because he goes through the history of where that phrase came from and specifically how it's been eroded and why it has almost no applicability any longer.
And it came from one of the most disgraceful Supreme Court cases ever.
in the 20th century.
You may recall that last week we had Nico Perino on who's the vice president of the free speech organization fire.org basically they've become what the ACLU once was a highly principled organization that defends free speech no matter where it's being encroached and on without any regard to partisanship or ideology and in response to Governor Walz's invocation of that phrase He went on to Twitter today and wrote the following, quote, And this is what he says.
I think it's very important to understand this history because this is such a misplaced and deceitful phrase based either on utter ignorance about the nature of the First Amendment in the United States and how the Supreme Court has applied it, or just a malicious attempt to justify censorship.
This is what he wrote, quote, A bit of history.
The story of the phrase, you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater, began on August 17, 1917.
When the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Philadelphia resolved to distribute 15,000 leaflets opposing military conscription during World War I. Let me just emphasize, the controversy that led to this insidious phrase by the Supreme Court, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater, emerged from an attempt by the U.S. government to prosecute people For circulating leaflets opposing the use of the draft for the United States under Woodward Wilson to enter World War I. That's when the Espionage Act of 1917 was enacted.
One of the most disgraceful laws that is still on the books.
It was used to prosecute Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and all sorts of whistleblowers including Daniel Ellsberg.
It's being used now to prosecute Donald Trump in that documents case.
So it was one of the worst moments of Outright brute censorship in our country's history when they tried to make it illegal to oppose Woodrow Wilson's policy of entering World War I and they did end up imprisoning people for that reason.
Nico Gazan, quote, the leaflets that they wanted to circulate argued that, quote, a conscript is little better than a convict.
He is deprived of his liberty and of his right to think and act as a free man.
The anti-war socialist group further reminded readers that in a democracy, citizens have the right to demand the repeal of any law and that as citizens of Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, they are doubly charged with the Duty of upholding the rights of the people.
The leaflets concluded by sharing the address for the Socialist Party headquarters on Arch Street, where Philadelphians could sign a petition to Congress to repeal the Selective Service Act, the law that permitted the draft for World War I. These leaflets were classic political pamphleteering, leaflets that were widely circulated throughout Philadelphia during America's colonial period and the early days of the Republic.
It's his core classic political speech of the kind that was used by America's founders and colonialists to agitate against the British Crown and then to activate themselves and organize on the basis of a whole variety of causes.
early in the republic, it was exactly what the First Amendment was designed to enshrine.
He goes on, quote, they called on citizens to engage in the democratic process, to contact
their legislatures and to exercise the First Amendment rights to speech, assembly and petition.
For this, Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Bair, two socialist party leaders, were charged
and convicted with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibited, quote, obstructing
the recruitment or enlistment services of the United States.
There was one of the most repressive free speech periods in the history of the United
States under Woodrow Wilson.
Thank you.
And they took this Espionage Act, which was designed to basically criminalize dissent.
It's why it's used through today for whistleblowers.
And they made it a crime to, quote, obstruct or impede the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States.
And they decided that anybody who agitated against Woodrow Wilson's desire to enter the United States into World War I or used the draft to do it That that somehow constituted a criminal offense.
The government imprisoned the people who were distributing these leaflets against Wilson's policy in World War I. That is the case that reached the Supreme Court where Oliver Wendell Holmes, defending the imprisonment of those people, issued this This phrase, this cliché that is used by people more than 100 years later, as Tim Walz did last night, even though they have no idea where that phrase came from, what it means, or how the Supreme Court sees it now.
He went on, quote, So, that phrase was first invoked.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Supreme Court decision in 1919 to defend and justify one of the most egregious acts of political censorship in our nation's history.
So I guess it's kind of unsurprising and in a sense quite appropriate for the modern day versions of extreme censors to invoke that phrase given that was its origin, its genesis.
It was used to justify pure censorship of political speech.
He goes on, quote, In the century since Holmes first used the phrase falsely shouting fire in a theater, it has become the go-to mantra for those arguing that there are limits to First Amendment protections, and those doing so, like Waltz, often omit the, quote, falsely part. To be sure the First Amendment has its limits
but they are few and narrowly defined. They include defamation, incitement
to imminent lawless action, and true threats. Today's Supreme Court is
unlikely to rule that peacefully handing out leaflets opposing the military draft
is not protected by the First Amendment let alone compare it to falsely
shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. Indeed shortly after writing the
majority opinion that sent Schenck and and Baird to prison, Holmes confided in his
friend Harlad Lasky that he thought federal judges quote got hysterical about World
War one and speculated that quote the president when he gets through
with his present might do some pardoning.
Then, that November, another political leaflet case came before the court.
This time, Holmes dissented from his Supreme Court colleagues who voted to uphold the conviction of Russian immigrants who circulated leaflets opposing America's military support for Tsarist Russia.
Quote, time has upset many fighting face, Holmes wrote.
He changed his mind and so should anyone inclined to use the phrase, quote, shouting fire in a crowded theater.
So, whenever you hear somebody invoking that phrase, remember where it came from and the insidious and sinister purpose to which it was applied, namely criminalizing American citizens who opposed Woodrow Wilson's war policies and Recall as well, though, as I said, the Ken White article that delves into it is something we didn't show you, but it's a very clear case.
But Nico's thread alludes to it.
Over the next 100 years, that precedent that permitted the imprisonment of socialist anti-war activists in 1917 has been very clearly eroded to the point that it barely exists anymore.
So when Tim Waltz says that that is...
The law of the land and that somehow justifies the kind of censorship J.D. Vance was condemning the Biden administration for not just defending and encouraging but essentially inducing and enforcing.
It shows not only that Tim Walz has no idea what he's talking about in terms of what the First Amendment says or what the Supreme Court believes but also it just shows a profound lack of Just instinctive belief in one of the core foundational values of American democracy, which is so ironic given how often the Democratic Party incessantly claims that they're the only ones who believe in democratic values.
Now, as I said, this is not the first time that Tim Walz has made clear that he thinks the First Amendment is somehow consistent with Punishing people for expressing either misinformation or hate speech, something he repeated on the stage last night, in case you think that it was just a byproduct of nervousness or some kind of quote-unquote misspeaking.
Here he is on MSNBC in December of 2022.
He's on the very prestigious show of Joy Reid, and they were discussing the kinds of censorship that had been taking place in the United States, and in defense of it, here's what Tim Wald said.
I think we need to push back on this.
There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.
There's no First Amendment guarantee to disinformation or hate speech.
This is blatantly false.
You think you can put people in prison in the United States for disinformation or misinformation that the government thinks is wrong?
Oh, that person said that they think the COVID pandemic came from a lab leak.
Whereas we've already concluded that it didn't and therefore they're spreading disinformation and now we can punish them because disinformation falls outside of the scope of the First Amendment.
That's called the Ministry of Truth when the government can declare truth and falsity and punish people for expressing ideas that they claim is false.
And it's even worse to say that the First Amendment doesn't protect quote-unquote hate speech since obviously all sorts of people express hateful sentiments all the time that are well within The protections of the First Amendment and that would have to be Tim Walz isn't the only person who thinks the First Amendment, falsely thinks the First Amendment, excludes speech that governments consider to be hate speech.
His running mate, Kamala Harris, seeking to be the president of the United States, be elected president in 36 days, said something quite similar when she was running for president.
This is before she had to drop out, before the first vote was cast because her campaign was such a debacle.
But she was giving a speech.
To the NAACP and she expressed very similar views about this extremely cramped, limited, ahistorical and false understanding of what the First Amendment does and doesn't protect.
And we'll put the Department of Justice of the United States back in the business of justice.
We will double the Civil Rights Division and direct law enforcement to counter this extremism.
We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.
And if you profit off of hate, If you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable as a community.
Honestly, that seems very hateful to me.
That whole clip that we just watched her spouting, threatening people, That if they say things that she thinks constitutes disinformation, she's going to unleash the Justice Department on them?
Or they're going to punish social media platforms for permitting ideas that Kamala Harris thinks is disinformation?
Punish them for not censoring it?
Not only, by the way, is that hate speech, it's also profound disinformation.
To suggest that the First Amendment somehow would permit the Justice Department to be weaponized and abused that way.
The difference between myself though and people like her and Tim Walts is that I don't actually think she should be censored despite spouting massive amounts of disinformation and hateful speech as she did just in that clip alone, let alone all the other times she's done it.
Tim Walts has been caught lying continuously.
About half of his biography, so is Joe Biden.
And these people want to say that it's somehow consistent with the First Amendment to punish people for spouting disinformation as they do that continuously and all the time, including Tim Walz doing it on the stage last night and Kamala Harris doing it in that clip.
Here is John Kerry, who, for those of you who don't remember, was a longtime Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
He was the Democratic Nominee to be president in 2004.
He became the Secretary of State in the Obama administration and has now served in all sorts of capacities, including being the climate czar under the Biden administration.
So he's been a central figure in Democratic Party power for 20, 30 years.
And he spoke at the World Economic Forum just a few days ago, last week, and he shared his views about how to, in his words, basically, crush misinformation out of existence.
Just to show you how pervasive this is, not among mid-level or obscure Democratic Party followers, but among the top leaders of the Democratic Party, it's just a consensus view about how they want to deal with free speech.
And I think the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing.
It's part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue.
It's really hard to govern today.
You can't, you know, there's no, the referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a fact, they've kind of, you know, been eviscerated to a certain degree.
And people go, oh my god, the U.S. government can no longer foster consensus among people, meaning getting everyone to think the same way, the way they want.
And he's lamenting the fact, accurately, but he's lamenting the fact that this tiny little group of people Who, prior to the internet, used to be able to be the arbiters, as he put it, of what's true and false, namely the gigantic corporations that controlled media outlets that work hand-in-hand with the government all of the time to deceive people and lie to them and mislead them on behalf of US government officials.
He's lamenting the fact that they have lost their authority to arbitrate the truth.
There's too much dissent going on.
There's too many sources of information that they can't control.
This is a huge problem for someone like John Kerry for obvious reasons.
John Kerry, as you recall, married the widow of his billionaire colleague, Senator Hines, when he died, I believe, in an airplane crash.
John Hines was a billionaire.
His widow, Theresa Hines, inherited those billions of dollars and then John Kerry swooped in and married her.
So not only has he been at the center of political power for a long time, he's also been living the life of a billionaire.
As a result of marrying a woman, an heiress who inherited billions of dollars.
So if you're somebody this ensconced in the ruling class, obviously the last thing you want is messy dissent.
You want consensus and orthodoxy.
You want a tiny group of people with whom you're aligned and whom you can control to arbitrate, as he put it, to dictate to people what it is that they should believe is true and what they should believe is false.
And he's very upset, as is pretty much every Western elite, That mostly because of a free internet, this can no longer happen.
And that's the reason why a free internet is their number one target.
And here's what he goes on to say about that.
People self-select where they go for their news or for their information.
And then you just get into a vicious cycle.
So it's really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I've been involved in this.
There's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you're going to have some accountability on facts, etc.
But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick, and...
of disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability
to be able to just hammer it out of existence.
All right, so there was a little problem with the audio there at the end.
But first of all, this idea that, oh, we used to always have consensus, and we could just
foster widespread agreement among the population, and now there's all this messy dissent that
makes it impossible for John Kerry to say.
I've never seen this before. Let's remember, there's just such a...
A illustrative example of how as somebody ascends up the ladder of power and wealth, they begin to completely forget who they were and what they previously believed because it's no longer in their interest to believe that.
Remember that John Kerry became a public figure in the 1960s because after having a fairly brief stint in the Vietnam War, he came back as a Vietnam veteran and denounced the war and participated in those protests that were anything but a reflection of consensus in the United States.
It was one of the most divisive and polarized times in American history, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the civil rights movement.
And he was part of that movement of dissent.
He was fueling the opposition to the policies of the Johnson administration and the Nixon administration to prosecute what he considered to be an unjust war in Vietnam, along with what millions of people also considered to be.
Then they get into the ruling class, and obviously their interest is in ensuring that there can be no more dissent to the ruling class because now they're heavily ensconced in it.
Speaking of people who are heavily ensconced in the ruling class, here is Hillary Clinton talking with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC just a couple weeks ago, and here is what Hillary Clinton had to say about the problems with free speech.
And boosting Trump back in 2016.
But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda.
And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence.
We covered that at the time, those comments in their fuller context and at great length.
When this interview first appeared, we're just showing this because, just to illustrate again how much of a pervasive ethos, a belief system, a goal this is for the most establishment people within the Democratic Party as evidenced by the fact that it just came out of Tim Walts' mouth.
Almost reflexively like when J.D. Vance said you accuse us of being anti-democratic and you people want to censor and he was like no just disinformation and hate speech.
That's all followed by the invocation of that moronic phrase about yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.
Now there is some good news on the free speech front.
Where actually a Democratic governor suffered a major defeat in his attempts to, in advance, ban a political protest by students on campus that he disliked.
Although this is the kind of censorship, as we've been reporting for the last year, that plenty of Republicans have been sponsoring and defending as well.
Here from the Hill on October 2nd, The Democratic governor of the University of Maryland, Wes Moore, was expressing his opposition to a planned event by students on the university of maryland campus to have a interfaith vigil as they're calling it for gaza and they scheduled it for october 7th marking the one year since the israeli bombing campaign began now obviously october 7th for people who love israel has a special meaning and there's probably going to be pro-israel students offended At the idea of scheduling a vigil for Gaza on October 7, who cares? Who cares if they're offended?
Remember all that discourse over the last 10 years that college students don't have a right to demand that the university protect them from being offended by banning offensive speech?
Remember all that? You can argue it's insensitive.
You can argue that it's poorly chosen, you might agree with it, but whatever else is true, the state has no right in advance to ban a protest because they think the date was poorly chosen.
And so here is Wes Moore saying he thinks that that October 7th vigil for Gaza is inappropriate and the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland prohibited this group from holding the protest that they wanted.
And Those students did what they ought to do, what people ought to do under the Constitution, which is they sued the University of Maryland and the Board of Regents for violating their First Amendment rights.
I mean, if holding a protest against a war that the United States government is supporting, fueling, arming, and funding isn't a First Amendment right, what is?
And the fact that they chose a date that people think is inappropriate, that somehow October 7th is this sacred date where the only view that's permitted is praise of Israel, it'd be like saying every September 11th you're not allowed to criticize the U.S. government and its foreign policy because that's a sacred date.
If you want to criticize the U.S. government and its foreign policy, you do it on September 10th or September 12th, but not on September 11th.
Again, maybe you think that would be a nice thing to do from the perspective of propriety or whatever, but everyone would understand that if the government tried to do that, that would be as egregious of a violation of the free speech clause as imaginable.
And fortunately, a federal judge who's 83 years old, he was appointed by Bill Clinton, so he comes from that generation where free speech was just instinctively instilled in Americans, issued a ruling that Concluded that the University of Maryland and its Board of Regents had violated the First Amendment rights of these students by discriminating against them or trying to prohibit a protest based, obviously, on their dislike of the viewpoint that they were trying to express in order this protest to be permitted to go forward.
You see the memorandum opinion.
It's the University of Maryland Students for Justice in Palestine.
Versus the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland.
It's in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.
And here's what the federal judge, in part, said in ruling in favor of the free speech right of these students.
has held that chilling speech ipso facto constitutes irreparable injury.
As stated in Elrod v.
Burns from 1976, quote, the loss of First Amendment freedoms for even minimal periods of time unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.
Moreover, even if pro-Israel groups see October 7th as somehow sacrosanct, It is at least a fair argument for pro-Palestine groups to see the data sacrosanct as well, symbolic of what they believe is Palestine's long-standing fight for the liberation of Gaza.
The facts remain that the Students for Justice in Palestine chose the October 7th date, complied with the reservation process, obtained the university's preliminary approval for the date, and then had the approval abruptly taken away.
No other date, as SJP sees it, can make the point of their mission quite as forcibly as October 7th.
To SJP, it is a unique date.
That, in the court's view...
Fortifies the group's claim of irreparable harm over and above the infringement of their First Amendment rights.
It is clear to the court That the University of Maryland at College Park's decision to revoke its permission for SJP to hold its event on October 7th was neither viewpoint neutral nor content neutral nor narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest.
For example, the school argued there was a risk of provoking some kind of conflict that might turn violent.
But every single political protest that expresses a controversial view has that risk.
And what the court said was there were alternatives for the school, short of just banning the protest altogether in advance, such as hiring more security.
And then the court went on, quote, the decision clearly came, the decision to cancel the protest clearly came in response to possible speech that several groups or individuals claimed would be highly objectionable.
These potentialities, however, in no way legally justified the revocation of the approval to have this protest.
The fact that we even have to have court rulings over whether state actors, which is the University of Maryland, it's a public school, can ban protests on the grounds that other people might be offended by the message shows how far we've come.
Thankfully, a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton Who's, as I said, 83 years old and therefore believed in and understands the First Amendment, was very emphatic in rejecting the school's attempt to ban that protest.
In response, the Democratic Governor Westmore went to Twitter and issued this statement.
On the planned protest at the University of Maryland, quote, I just learned of the federal court's decision allowing the protest to proceed.
While I deeply respect the rule of law in due process, I think October 7th is an inappropriate date for such an event.
Who gives a shit what he thinks about the propriety of the date?
He can denounce it. What he can't do is ban the protest because he thinks it's inappropriate.
He went on, quote, What I do know is Chad...
What I do know is that students at the University of Maryland have the right to feel safe and we will work with local university leaders to ensure their safety.
That's the... Safety argument that has been used by people on the left in academia and liberals for a decade now to say, oh, you can't allow people questioning the trans, new trans dogma about gender.
You can't allow people questioning Black Lives Matter because it makes people in those groups feel unsafe.
He went on, quote, We know that what happens around the world has direct implications on the Maryland community.
I've been clear. Everyone in Maryland has the right to peacefully protest, to voice their opinions, but no one has the right to call for violence against each other.
Terrorists target civilians, and that's what Hamas did a year ago on October 7th, and that's what that day should be remembered as, a heinous terrorist attack on Israel that took innocent lives.
The idea that the governor is trying to dictate What you're allowed to say about October 7th, how you're supposed to treat October 7th, whether you see it as this date of sacredness to lament what happened to Israel as opposed to using October 7th to lament what happens to Palestinians, it's just not the role of the state to do that, as thankfully this federal court concluded.
Now here's just one more example, just to show you how far this has all been going.
This is from the Oracle, which is the student newspaper at the University of Florida of South Florida.
Yesterday, there's the title quote, the USF administration shuts down a protest calling for free speech.
Quote, around seven Tampa Bay students for Democratic Society members walked to the MSC around 2 p.m., planning to chant and hold signs advocating for student free speech, SDS organizer Vicki Tong said.
Quote, I think it's ironic that we're trying to hold a free speech rally and they shut us down.
SDS was expelled as a USF organization over the summer after its involvement with the series of on-campus protests calling for the university to divest from companies that support Israel.
Because of the expulsion, SDS is not allowed to host events on campus, USF spokesperson Althea Johnson said.
Now, just to remind you of the most extreme expression of state censorship and protection of Israel, one that fire...
Not only vehemently denounced but urged administrators to ignore, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, banned pro-Palestinian groups from all Florida campuses.
Here is a New York NBC article October of 2023.
Ron DeSantis defends banning pro-Palestinian groups from Florida colleges.
Quote, this is not cancel culture, he said.
Quote, this group, they themselves said in the aftermath of the Hamas attack that they don't just stand in solidarity, that they are part of the Hamas movement, he said.
And so yeah, you have a right to go out and demonstrate, but you can't provide material support to terrorism.
DeSantis accused pro-Palestinian groups on campuses of having, quote, linked themselves to Hamas.
You're actually allowed to, in the United States, express Positive opinions about Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Russia.
Whatever you want.
Whatever opinion you want. Whatever political view you want.
That's the whole point of the First Amendment.
And the idea that Ron DeSantis tried to ban groups who expressed a view that he dislikes by claiming that it's the crime of material support for terrorism, meaning that It's a crime not just to fundraise for terrorist groups or to give them arms and weapons, but just to say things that the government thinks is somehow a defense of them, is to take political opinions and try and criminalize them, which is what's been going on, not just from the Democratic Party, but from all sorts of pro-Israel activists as well since October 7th.
And what Tim Walz said last night in defense of this, what John Kerry and Hillary Clinton And Kamala Harris said in those clips we showed you is really no different than the rationale being used by pro-Israel activists since October 7th to engage in censorship as well, which is this speech is so offensive it spills into hate speech.
It's too dangerous to allow.
It's too offensive to allow.
And regardless of the cause in which that censorship mindset is being invoked, I think all of us as Americans have as a primary duty, or should, the obligation to defend the First Amendment and its guarantee of free speech, which as JD Vance correctly said, is as foundational to the idea of American democracy and democratic values as anything else.
And unfortunately, when it comes to threats to democracy, It's not from what happened four years ago on January 6th.
It's from this ongoing and sustained and systemic and increasingly penetrating view that the solution to ideas that bother people in power is to use the power of censorship to suppress them and to punish those who are expressing them.
Speaking of foundational rights like free speech and its related cousin, the Free Press, that is the perfect transition to talk about the very inspiring events involving Julian Assange that took place earlier this week when he traveled with his wife and two young children, their two young children, to Strasbourg, France in order to appear before a European human rights group that invited him to come and speak About his ordeal and the lessons that we should draw from it about the dangers of free press in the West.
And not only have I always believed that Julian Assange is arguably the most pioneering and consequential activist and journalist in the last 50 years, given his unique insights about how in the digital age, transparency will be effectuated by anonymous leaks from people inside power centers, the one thing they can't guard against.
And his courage in not just creating that system but then using it to confront the most powerful people all over the planet despite the immense threats that he faced.
He's also always been, to me, one of the most articulate speakers and one of the most insightful analysts of very complex issues involving the role of the United States in the world, foreign policy, how profit relates to that, what wars are really for.
He's not just a hacker, he's a very, very smart and articulate defender of a whole variety of values that the world needs to hear more of.
And yet that Julian Assange, that extremely articulate person that I've heard speak in public, that I've heard when I met with him in private, visiting him at the Ecuadorian embassy and on other occasions throughout our 14-year friendship or so, is not the Julian Assange that appeared in France This week because he has been subject to extremely brutal prison conditions where he was put in a high security maximum security prison that the BBC called the British Guantanamo and was kept in sustained prolonged isolation which all sorts of studies show will drive you crazy because human beings are political animals we need connection with other human beings it's a form of torture to deny us that John McCain,
for whatever else his flaws are, I think said something quite profound about his captivity in the hands of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, where he said, I was physically beaten and tortured, but that didn't even compare to the suffering and pain I was caused by the isolation of sitting weeks and months alone.
in a prison cell with nobody to talk to and that was the same that was done to Julian Assange and so here he is prefacing his remarks to this body And while it was great to see Julian Assange being able to board a plane and freely travel the world to go to conferences to speak about his experience and the political values that it represents, watching him have to say this to excuse his inability to speak clearly or coherently at certain times because of what happened to him was very, very dark.
Listen to what he said. The transition from years of confinement in a maximum security prison to being here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and a surreal shift.
The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey.
It strips away one's sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence.
I am yet not fully equipped to speak about what I have endured, the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can I speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.
I apologize in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect from such a distinguished forum.
Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.
I mean, I can't begin to express how antithetical that is to join Assange's lifelong Self-possession, self-confidence, ability to express himself in ways that are sometimes quite stunning in terms of how effective they are.
And he's had doctors and psychiatrists attesting to the fact that he was dying in prison, that it was killing him.
It was causing mental distress.
There were reports from his doctor that he had a minor stroke.
There's no question that his physical and mental illness Condition deteriorated greatly, not just from the 5 plus years in the maximum security prison in the UK, but also for the 9 or 10 plus years that he had suspended the Ecuadorian embassy with no outdoor space because he knew That the British and the Swedes who wanted to extradite him to Swedish soil had only one goal in mind, which is to turn him over to the United States, which intended to imprison him for the rest of his life for the crime of doing journalism.
Let's remember that that is what happened to Julian Assange, the reason he was in prison for five and a half years in the UK without ever being convicted of a crime other than bell jumping, which is a misdemeanor.
That has a sentence of 11 months that he had served a long time ago.
He sat in a maximum security prison for five and a half years without being convicted of a crime just because the British said, oh, we can't let him out on bail, we can't let him out on any conditions, and they just stuck him there and tried to kill him.
And obviously, though they didn't kill him, made a lot of progress in weakening him and deteriorating him in ways that I don't want to say are permanent, but clearly are long-lasting.
Here is the part of his message, his address, where he speaks about the very menacing implications of what was done to him, not for himself, but to the cause of core democratic freedoms and the basic cause of a free press.
This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper, were not effective in any remotely reasonable time.
I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice after being detained for years and facing a 175-year sentence with no effective remedy.
Justice for me is now precluded as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a Freedom of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its expedition request.
I want to be totally clear.
I am not free today because the system worked.
I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.
I pled guilty to seeking information from a source.
I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source.
And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was.
I did not plead guilty to anything else.
I mean, I think there's so many important points embedded within that, beginning with the fact that one of the things that makes me sickest about employees of corporate media is how self-glorifying they are, how much they love to posture as these combative reporters defending a free press, when the reality is that if you actually do your job as a journalist in the West, if you actually confront power in a meaningful way, They will try to prosecute you.
They will spy on you. They will try and punish you.
And as Julian Assange says, that's exactly what was done to him and nothing else.
And the fact that he was finally released, as he says, was not a testament to the system working.
It was a testament to the fact that all of these principles and these laws that the United States and the UK claim they stand for and uphold are a farce.
Because the condition for him getting out of prison, avoiding life in prison in the United States, in some hellhole of a maximum security prison, for him to get back to his wife and his young children to try and rebuild his life was to plead guilty to doing journalism, to doing reporting. And that's precisely what he did, was reporting, and that's precisely why he was...
In prison. Now, I do think it's very important to remember who is the author of what happened to Julian Assange.
The Obama administration hated Julian Assange.
That was when he released all of those State Department members while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and released all of those Afghanistan and Iraq war logs while President Obama was In office.
And they were desperate, the Obama administration was, to find a way to prosecute Julian Assange.
They convened grand juries.
They looked under every rock to try and find some way that they could justify it.
And ultimately what they concluded was there was no legitimate way to accuse Julian Assange of a crime without also accusing The New York Times and The Guardian and Al Pais and multiple other media outlets around the world that published the same information.
There was no way to charge him but not all those other media outlets.
And so it looked like once the Obama administration decided not to prosecute him, that he was free and clear.
And as he explains here, what changed was the ability of two people in particular, Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr, to burrow their way into the Trump administration by pretending that they shared Trump's ideological outlook, even though they didn't.
And that is who concocted these dangerous theories, Mike Pompeo in particular as the head of the CIA, in order to justify criminalizing Assange's reporting and that it was the Biden administration that continued that effort by prosecuting him and refusing to drop the case.
Here's what Assange has to say about that.
President Obama's Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed.
The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information.
To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution.
In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.
However, in February 2017 the landscape changed dramatically.
President Trump had been elected.
He appointed Two wolves in MAGA hats.
Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive as CIA director.
And William Barr, a former CIA officer as U.S. Attorney General.
So I just need to, in case there's some ambiguity there, just clarify one thing, which is it was absolutely true.
That Trump, upon being elected, selected Mike Pompeo, a very standard, classic, warmongering Republican, and made him the director of the CIA. And one of the very first things Mike Pompeo did, I reported at the time, was went to the CIA headquarters and gave a speech vowing to destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
And to particularly destroy the notion that they have any constitutional right to do reporting or anything else, that they are a criminal organization, an arm of the Russian government, and therefore should be treated as a criminal organization.
Trump didn't appoint Bill Barr as Attorney General at the start of his administration.
He actually appointed Jeff Sessions.
And it was Jeff Sessions who greenlit the indictment that everyone understands Mike Pompeo engineered along with then engineering pressuring the Ecuadorian government to withdraw its asylum protection so that the London police could go in and arrest him, which is what happened. That was when Trump moved Mike Pompeo from the head of the CIA to running the State Department as Secretary of State.
And it was only a couple of years later when Jeff Sessions left and Bill Barr became Attorney General.
And it was both Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr whose Justice Department then pursued those charges.
Here's what he says. Here's the rest of what he says.
By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties.
It's spying on French and German leaders.
It's spying on the European Central Bank, European Economics Ministries, and it's standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.
We reveal the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of anti-virus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.
CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.
It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo's explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorise going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks and the planting of false information.
My wife and my infant son were also targeted.
A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six-month-old son's nappy.
He essentially then went on to accuse both Mike Pompeo and Jeff Sessions, and he suggested that here, or rather Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr, of being basically Frauds masquerading as MAGA but in wolf's clothing, which has always been the number one danger and flaw of Donald Trump is empowering people who have ideologies flagrantly different than the one Donald Trump claims to believe in.
Remember, Donald Trump went around in 2016 heralding WikiLeaks and Assange as a hero for having enabled the reporting on Hillary Clinton and the DNC that helped Trump win.
And then the first thing Mike Pompeo does is get in as part of this embedded arm of the deep state or the national security state and vows, as one of his first acts, to destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
And one of the things that Assange discussed in this speech was that he had a certain kind of naivete, as he called it, because he really did believe that the law, the Constitution of the United States and the law in Europe, Would prevent anyone from criminalizing the reporting that he did.
And as it turns out, he said, he realizes now the law is a fraud.
The law exists as a kind of thing on a parchment or a piece of paper, but it doesn't actually impose any real guidelines, principles, or limits on what powerful people can do.
In fact, that's one of the reasons I stopped practicing law, was because I quickly saw that all these principles you learned in law school, all these precedents, all these rules, Get instantly disregarded the minute some judge or some court wants to do it.
It's a fraudulent game where the rules that you learn, govern it, have actually no role to play in at all.
It just serves as a cover or pretext for weaponizing the law in the way that they want.
And I've obviously seen that in my own work.
I remember very well during the Snowden reporting, lots of lawyers saying to me, oh, there's something the U.S. government can do to you.
You're protected by the First Amendment.
Only as the reporting ended up suggesting that the CIA was advocating that both myself and Laura Poitras be reclassified as a journalist into an information broker so that we could be prosecuted.
Both the US and British government spied on us based on that theory.
Same thing happened when I did reporting in Brazil.
All I ever heard from my lawyers in 2019 and 2020 is, oh, you have nothing to worry about.
What you're doing is absolutely illegal.
There's no way anyone could criminalize it.
And at the end of that reporting, I ended up being criminally prosecuted by the equivalent of the Justice Department, even though the court ended up dismissing it.
I was still prosecuted with something like 126 felony charges.
And then recently in the The reporting that I'm doing in Brazil now on the Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Marais, I'm hearing from lawyers as well, you have nothing to worry about, and yet almost immediately he opened a criminal investigation as part of his pending criminal investigation to fake news and included our reporting in it.
So it absolutely is true that the law Are nice principles.
They're things you want to believe actually protect you.
They're things you kind of instinctively are indoctrinated to assume do place limits on what people in power can do in the West and very quickly you see that it's utterly illusory.
It's worse than non-existent.
It's affirmatively dangerous because it takes radical abuses of power and prettifies them and justifies them under this fraudulent cover of the law and legal principles.
Just to remind you of what happened in the proceeding that the United States under both the Trump and Biden administration has pursued from Reuters in June 2024, quote, the U.S. calls Julian Assange's actions dangerous even as a judge notes there's no victims.
Quote, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday that Julian Assange's actions put lives at risk Even as the judge who accepted the WikiLeaks founder's guilty plea to resolve his case noted that no victims had ever been identified, a State Department spokesman was repeatedly asked by reporters to give examples of harm caused by the WikiLeaks releases, but he did not provide any.
There were never any victims to any of this.
One of the only good things to come out of all of this, besides seeing Julian Assange again speaking in public, able to travel...
even if he doesn't have his full faculties yet, enough to do what we just watched him do,
is that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the body to which he spoke,
voted to recognize him as a political prisoner.
Here is from that group's release yesterday.
Quote, Pace recognizes Julian Assange as a political prisoner and warns against
the chilling effect of his harsh treatment.
Quote, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has expressed deep concern at the, quote,
disproportionately harsh treatment faced by Julian Assange and said this is, quote, had a dangerous chilling effect
which undermines the protection of journalists and whistleblowers around the world.
A proving resolution based on a report by one of those officials who investigated it for them.
I'll leave it to you to try and pronounce that name.
It's on the screen. Feel free to have at it. The assembly said mr
Assange is treatment warranted his designation as a quote political prisoner under a definition it agreed to in
2012 citing the severe charges brought against him by the United States of America exposing him to possible
imprisonment life imprisonment Combined with his conviction into the US Espionage Act
quote for what was in essence news gathering and publishing The assembly which brings together parliamentarians from
the 46 nations of the Council of Europe also called on the US to investigate the alleged war
crimes and human rights violations disclosed by him and we could wiki leaks
There was a lot of criminality exposed by Assange and WikiLeaks, the role of journalists.
None of them was convicted or charged.
The only one who got charged in this incident was Julian Assange, because unlike Journalists, corporate journalists who work in Washington and serve the government, or who pretend to oppose it only in the most trivial and performative ways, actual dissidents in the West, actual journalists in the West are threatened with and often subjected to The kind of treatment to which Assange was subjected, although for many reasons, including the fact that WikiLeaks was a massive threat to the U.S. security state,
that Assange himself had made clear he would refuse to back down, the ease of demonizing him because he wasn't an American citizen, he was instead an Australian hacker, throwing in these sex crime allegations that never amounted to anything made it a lot easier to demonize Julian Assange, and more than anything, The 2016 release of documents incriminating about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, though not part of what he was charged with, turned basically every Democrat, every liberal, into a sworn enemy of Julian Assange who believed he was an arm of the Russian government and wanted to see him imprisoned for the crime of reporting in a way,
truthful, authentic documents in a way that reflected negatively on Hillary Clinton in their view, Helped to commit the gravest crime in American history was having Donald Trump win the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton.
So it's good to see Assange back and it's even better to see him back in a way that really illustrates the extremely serious and ongoing threats to basic press freedoms that that case by design justified not just in his case but future cases as well.
All right, so as you know, after presidential debates or vice presidential debates, they have this thing that has a very rare type of candor for political discourse that's called the spin room.
And basically, surrogates of each party, each candidate, each campaign go there and argue why their candidate was so fantastic and the other one was terrible.
They have talking points about what one candidate said and the other one said that was so terrible or so great based on who they're there to hack for.
And one of the things that we do is send Michael Tracy to these events along with Megan O'Rourke who's a producer and a member of our team at Citizen Update precisely because those aren't the kind of questions that Michael tries to ask.
So we're just going to show you a few of these, the ones we don't get to, though they're very worth watching.
We're going to put on our Locals platform, so if you want to see those and you're a member, you can.
If you want to see them and join Locals, you can do that as well, where we have a lot of exclusive content that we don't get a chance to put on the show.
But here is Michael just giving you a little bit of a look about what the Spin Room actually is.
All right, I have to keep my voice down.
I don't know why exactly, but it seems like the right thing to do.
Because we're in the CBS network corridors, I guess.
I kind of want to bust into the Drew Barrymore show set.
That might be more exciting than watching the vice presidential debate, which might be down that way.
I think that might be where the debate's happening.
The spin room is in here, which we were just kind of walking around there, doing some interviews.
Help yourself to a beverage of your choice.
And, yeah, I mean, this studio, this whole building kind of reminds me of like a high school basement or something.
I don't know. It's a little bit weird.
But, you know, hey, we're making the most of it.
Why are people gathered over there?
It might be, yeah, I mean, let's go take a look.
I think it might be people who are like photographers or stuff or who are allowed to...
Yeah, let's not even test our luck.
I don't want to even get involved.
I don't want to run afoul of any Secret Service.
Yeah, that might be the...
What is it?
The spray? It's like the photographers would go in and take the photos.
Okay, so...
There you go. Drew Barrymore Show.
CBS. Apparently this is typically where the CBS sports, like NFL and stuff, is filmed.
I don't know. I'm just going with the flow.
All right. Goodbye. So, it's always incredibly entertaining and fulfilling to watch Michael's stream of consciousness observations without any purpose, as he did there.
But actually, the reason we like sending Michael so much to these events is because all of these things run on this very strict protocol, like this very strict kind of unwritten rules about how everybody's supposed to conduct themselves, what journalists are supposed to do and not do, who they're supposed to ask, what kind of questions they're asking.
Yeah. And Michael, in part, has no idea what any of those are because he just never bothered to learn them.
And even if he did know them, he doesn't care about them at all.
So it's really just like letting a bull loose in a china shop.
And given that this China shop is filled with the worst people on the planet, it's, I think, something always revealing to do.
So let's show you an interview that he was able to conduct with Jasmine Crockett, which I found very fascinating.
Jasmine Crockett is a young I believe she's in her second term Democratic member of Congress from Texas.
She's a black woman, so therefore she's often considered to be part of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
She's known for her very combative, sort of spicy rhetoric about Donald Trump that usually is a little more extreme than what most members of Congress are willing to express about Trump.
And so she's had this reputation for being sort of a kind of like a Marjorie Taylor Greene type, but of the Democratic Party.
And yet, Michael decided to ask her not about how great Tim Walts did or how terrible J.D. Vance is, but instead about her consistent votes to authorize billions and billions of dollars to fund the Israeli military and to pay for its wars and how that can be reconciled with the values and views she typically claims to believe in and the way in which she defended Israel It basically sounded like he was talking to Marco Rubio.
Let's watch what happened. Congresswoman, Governor Walz started out tonight by repeating this refrain that Israel has a right to defend itself.
Israel has just invaded Lebanon.
Israel is now intimating that it could attack Iran.
So Shouldn't we be looking for a little more than just these platitudes about Israel having a right to defend itself?
What is the limiting principle, especially when the U.S. is the one providing the armaments for Israel to wage these military campaigns, as you know, having voted for the national security supplemental back in April, which underwrote Israel's war effort?
I absolutely did vote for it.
I voted for that along with every other supplemental that was available.
And I will tell you this.
It is important that people understand what diplomacy looks like.
And it looks like the fact that this relationship between Israel and the United States has existed since before I was born.
And guess what? This relationship will continue on in perpetuity even after I'm gone.
And so when you look at Israel, I think it is important that people start to talk about the fact that The state of Israel versus their leadership.
Because right now, or when I went to Israel, I know that the people were protesting Netanyahu.
Because Netanyahu was reforming the courts.
In addition to the fact that Netanyahu was under investigation along with people in his administration.
Sound familiar? Does it sound like somebody else that you know?
It sounds like Donald Trump to me.
Somebody that has reformed our courts.
It's courts that have decided that he now has a level of immunity that he should not be entitled to based on our laws, as well as somebody who is under criminal indictment, as well as somebody who has criminal convictions.
And so different people do their votes for different reasons.
But for me, when I'm looking forward and I'm trying to figure out what is going to happen, if for some reason, let's say we say, well, you know what?
You had your democratic election and we just don't like your leader, so we will leave you.
Will that give permission to our allies to leave us if, God forbid, Donald Trump come back into power and then they leave us?
And then that leaves us more insecure.
So, I mean, everybody has their reasons for why they do stuff, but I will also tell you this, because the issue today has to do with the fact that Iran ended up firing missiles over into Israel.
Okay, I just need to stop it there.
Even though there's so much more to go, as bad if not worse.
But I just want to break down how incoherent and internally inconsistent everything she just got done saying there was.
So the question was, Tim Walts defended Israel in the debate and said that they would keep funding Israel for whatever they wanted to do.
And he said to her, is there any limit on what Israel can do, given that you're one of the people who voted for the supplemental to send billions and billions of dollars to Israel?
And she started off by saying, yeah, I did do that.
I'm happy I did it.
She had this bizarre rationale that the US's relationship has been like this, but since before she was born and that for some reason it will exist in perpetuity, so why should she try and stop it?
She might as well just go along with it since it's, I guess, inevitable anyway.
But her point was to try and say that Benjamin Netanyahu is like Donald Trump.
That he, when she went to Israel, was the subject of protest.
I don't know if she knows this or not, but the reason Benjamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel is because he was elected democratically.
He's actually been the Prime Minister of Israel.
For the last 20 years with only a little bit of time off in between the very short spurts where he's not running the country because the Israeli people have chosen to support Netanyahu and while yes it's true there are tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand or so people in Tel Aviv protesting Netanyahu's failure to get the hostages back They're not protesting the war in Gaza.
There's almost complete unanimity on the part of Netanyahu and the opposition leader and pretty much every party in Israel about the nobility and justification of this.
So if you're looking for a reason to oppose funding Israel, then you can cite the fact that Netanyahu is like Trump.
You don't support Netanyahu or trust him because he's like Trump.
Why would you compare Donald Trump to Netanyahu on your way to explaining why you believe that the U.S. should continuously fund what Netanyahu is doing in all of these different countries?
This obsession with Trump and her ability to understand things only by reference to him, comparing Netanyahu to Trump, and then trying to pretend that the people of Israel are these repressed people, Trying to overthrow the chains that have been imposed on them by the Netanyahu regime when the reason Netanyahu is prime minister is because they've not only elected him but support his war policies and have done so for a long time along the way to explaining why she wants to continue to give money to Israel makes no sense.
The other thing I just want to say is that she's been in Congress for about seven seconds And of course she has already made one of those official propaganda trips to Israel.
Is there any member of Congress at all in the United States in the Senate or the House who doesn't very quickly go on one of those trips to Israel where they get instructed slash indoctrinated slash propagandized about all the things the Israelis want them to believe?
I mean, other than maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, I don't know if there's a single member of Congress, the 535 people who formed the House and the Senate, who haven't gone at least once, probably multiple times, on these trips to Israel.
It's like a rite of passage to be a member of Congress in the United States.
You have to go visit Israel.
She's been there a very short period of time and everything she knows, as she says, is based on her visit to Israel.
So let's hear a little bit more from Congresswoman Crockett about why she's so fervently in favor of arming and funding and financing a country that she says is basically led by a corrupt figure akin to Donald Trump.
Iran ended up firing missiles over into Israel.
After Israel invaded Lebanon.
But is Iran Lebanon?
No. But it's a spiraling catastrophe that the Biden administration has done nothing to rein in.
Let's be clear. When the attacks, which I will say, everything that happened in Lebanon or the initial attacks, at least that was more calculated and it was more, it was specifically intended for who?
For terrorists, correct?
You've got to clarify what you're saying.
I don't follow. Hezbollah.
So Israel was attacking Hezbollah, correct?
Well, they've done a ground invasion into Lebanon now.
They have now done one, but to be clear, they were attacking Hezbollah, who is a terrorist organization, correct?
They've invaded the entire country.
They've bombed Beirut. Well, they've bombed the country.
So you think everybody who's been killed in the Israeli bombardment has been Hezbollah?
I didn't say that.
I'm telling you that what I am saying is that at least when Lebanon, we talked about what?
They had the pagers, correct?
Right. And so they were literally more calculated and trying not to do- Those pagers blew up in grocery stores and a little girl was killed.
I understand and I'm not disagreeing with it and I want to be clear.
No one should ever be okay with war.
You voted to fund it. No, I did not vote to fund war.
What I voted for... Yes, you did.
You voted to supply Israel with armaments that they're using in their prosecution of the war.
Do you understand that we took more than one vote?
Let me ask you, since you know about...
I know all about it. I follow it very closely.
So tell me about the rest of my votes.
On this national security supplemental?
Can you tell me about all the votes that we had?
Because we had... Yeah, you voted for Ukraine, for the Indo-Pacific, for...
Because we had three votes on Israel.
There have been like a million votes on Israel.
We had three votes. Let me clarify.
We had three votes as it relates to funding for Israel.
So let me make sure that your record is very clear.
The very first vote was to fund Israel and defund the IRS because that's what the Republicans put on the floor.
Because the Republicans run the House.
Correct. Okay? What was my vote?
It was a no. No.
But you ultimately voted yes on the bill to fund Israel.
The second vote was to fund Israel and no other funding, okay?
The third vote, was it just for funding Israel or was it also to get money to the people of Gaza?
Which, yeah, which...
And that aid has been consistently blocked.
I mean, you can complain about Netanyahu, but he's the one administering the funding that you said.
This is about the debate.
Governor Walz, he seemed shaky at times.
Do you feel like he was an effective messenger tonight?
I do. I think he was there to deliver on policy.
It's one of the things that people complained about in the first debate is that they weren't able to get a lot of policy because there were so many restrictions as it relates to Trump and things like that.
Make sure you get your debate question in.
Much more relevant. I am.
You interrupted me.
I have for a 10-minute diatribe.
About a foreign policy issue?
What, you object to that? I also have questions I want to ask about.
Alright, I'm sure they'll be fascinating.
Not quite as good as the Tammy Duckworth one, but giving it a run for its money.
I love how... Not only does Michael just go and completely disregard the whole purpose of this stupid spin room, which is where you're supposed to say, who did better?
And she's like, clearly Tim Walz.
He gave a clear, consistent defense of the working class.
He always ends up fighting with everybody around him, too, when they object.
Like, if there's an assistant or a handler who comes in and stops his interview, he'll start trying to interview them.
Or in this case, there were journalists So, anyway, I just found that Amazing, because even the Biden White House will at least pay a little bit of rhetorical acknowledgement, oh, that too many people in Gaza,
too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, that Israel has gone too far in certain cases.
She didn't do any of that. And I think one of the things that really is important to understand here is that if you're a member of Congress And you look around.
You know that being an incumbent is basically a guarantee to be re-elected for life.
And pretty much the only exception, the only thing that you can do to jeopardize your ability to stay in Congress forever is to step out of line on Israel.
And everybody just watched.
AIPAC poor. Millions and millions of dollars.
$15 million in one race, $10 million in another to remove Jamal Bowman from Congress and then remove Cori Bush.
And obviously members of Congress see that and they understand very well what the rule is, the only rule is, which is you don't speak critically of Israel if you want to keep your job.
And so here you have this person who is a young member of Congress, representing the supposedly liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Young liberals have been very clear in polling and other ways that they don't want the U.S. funding in the Israeli war.
They don't believe those Israelis. She has no interest in representing any of that.
She just wants to keep her seat, and she knows the way to do that is by repeating everything she heard on her one trip to Israel as of now, one and counting.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot more coming, where she'll learn a little bit more about how to speak about this issue.
Anyway, we covered all last night, the whole issue of how Iran actually targeted only military targets, whereas Israel has been flattening apartment buildings and schools and refugee camps, killing huge numbers of civilians in Gaza for a full year and Beirut for the last 10 days.
But she's here to say that, no, actually, Israel is incredibly targeted as opposed to the terrorists in Iran who just bomb indiscriminately.
All right, so that's that.
Let us look now at Michael's interview with Howard Lutnick, who I believe is the—actually, no, we're going to look first at his interview.
It's just a minute and a half with Jamie Harrison, who is the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Jamie Harrison, as you might recall, was a very vocal defender of Joe Biden's right to stay in the race, of the fact that Joe Biden should stay in the race.
Until more powerful people than he decided that Biden shouldn't and now he's of course a very blind booster of Kamala Harris and here's the exchange that those two had.
Chairman Harris, I recall you very staunchly defending Joe Biden remaining as nominee back when there was controversy over whether he should stay in that role.
Do you regret so strongly standing by him?
Why would I regret supporting the guy who's probably the most accomplished legislative president that we've had in my lifetime?
Because a lot of the Democratic Party decided that he was not cognitively fit to remain as president for four years.
That's a bunch of BS. Why do they want to remove him?
In the end of the day, this is the situation.
If you take a look at Joe Biden's legislative record, compare it to anybody else.
Compare it to Donald Trump.
Did Donald Trump do anything compared to Joe Biden in terms of legislative achievements, given what he got?
Then why did so many Democratic donors and people want to remove him?
Regardless of what donors wanted or whatever.
Well, they got their way, didn't they? Joe Biden, in the end of the day, made a decision about what he wanted to do.
And he believed, probably the most selfless act in American politics ever, to have the greatest gavel of power and to give that up to the next generation to move forward.
Donald Trump, his vice president, who was trying to protect democracy and he was willing to let his vice president risk his life in order to do that.
Selfishness versus selflessness.
I'm proud of Joe Biden each and every day and will always have his back.
I love the conceit that Joe Biden voluntarily left the race in an act of noble self-sacrifice because he wanted to pass the torch to the new generation.
The 60 year old Kamala Harris.
We all watched that play out in real time when Biden was like, I'm not leaving under any circumstances.
I don't want to leave. I'm furious at the people who are trying to make me.
And we all know that Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and the Democratic donors increasingly threatened him to basically suffocate him and do worse to him.
If he didn't leave the race, Nancy Pelosi notoriously said to him, we can either do this the easy way or the hard way, but either way it's going to happen that you're going to be leaving.
And then the minute they forced him out against his will by threatening him repeatedly, they then turn around and have the audacity to say, oh no, he left voluntarily because he's such a man of great character and sacrifice.
He sacrificed his own power for the sake of the nation.
He was desperate to be re-elected and serve until he was 86, knowing that his brain was barely functional.
That's how desperate he was to cling.
To the levers of power.
Here is Michael's interview with Howard Lutnick, who is essentially the person who is going to lead the Trump transition into Trump's second turn if he wins the election.
For Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
Give us a sense of what your prognosis is in the national security and defense sphere in terms of personnel, maybe also policy, insofar as you can convey what Lyndon McMahon has been up to.
Is it still going to be emphasis on increasing defense spending?
Elements of the Republican Party are skeptical of what they call the military-industrial complex in a disparaging way.
Other elements of the party may be more favorable toward that.
How is that tension being navigated, if it is, in your work thus far?
So we bring in talent, right?
So talent, so how does it go?
People with deep, deep national security experience.
People with deep, deep defense experience.
Give us some examples. No.
Why not? Because that's not the way it works.
Okay. The way it works is I build Basically, the way I say it, it's a mosaic of talent.
And the President of the United States is going to choose from that mosaic of talent.
So that's my job.
But you think about it, we have technology.
Huge focus on the capacity to improve the technology of the U.S. People who have vast experience across his first administration in business, the prior administrations.
I mean, they're all coming.
Is Jared Kushner coming back?
I don't comment on people.
I told you that's not it, but Jared Kushner is a big help to me.
He's actively helping you on this project?
He's absolutely actively helping me because everybody's helping me.
J.D. Vance is helping me.
Everybody's helping find the most talented people they have.
And they are recommending them to serve in the government.
And everybody, how about this, everybody who serves in the Trump government will have been vouched for by some world-class talented person who says, this person we have confidence in will do a great job in the government.
And that is just... All right.
If you find that reassuring, I'm happy for you.
It's kind of strange for the person in charge of the Trump transition to say that, oh, we don't care about Ideology in terms of, has the United States been pursuing too many wars?
Are we too involved in the Middle East?
All the things that Trump said were his priority in 2016.
He's actually saying, no, we're going to take people from the deepest bowels of the deep state, of the U.S. security state, with all that experience in foreign policy, people like Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner, he's helping.
If you look at the Trump campaign and the foreign policy dogma he's asserting, the promises he's making to people like Miriam Adelson, who are giving him $100 million and her only political priority is that the U.S. do everything possible to defend Israel, the people who he surrounded himself with, It sounds a lot like a more traditional Republican campaign, certainly as compared to 2016.
The one pushback against that is that people close to him succeeded in convincing him to choose J.D. Vance instead of, say, Mark Rubio or Tim Scott or some other standard Republican who at least does have that populism on both economics and politics.
Foreign policy that shaped and defined and I think was responsible for the success of the Trump 2016 campaign.
But the question that Michael asked was, how are you navigating this conflict between the Republican establishment's views on foreign policy on the one hand and the people in the party who want to put America first and don't want the U.S. involved in countless wars or wars for other countries in the Middle East and Ukraine?
And he wasn't saying, oh, we're going to follow Donald Trump's vision.
We're saying, oh, no, we're just going to get the best people around him.
You know, like Nikki Haley with all her foreign policy experience, who was the A U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under the Trump administration.
Or people like John Bolton. He has a lot of experience as well.
So I find that disturbing.
We have a bunch more, including interviews with multiple members of Congress that, being a Michael Tracy interviewer, are well worth watching.
But we're just going to have time to show you one more on the live show.
We'll put the rest of them on our Locals platform.
Here is Michael interviewing the Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who led the way in getting The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania fired for their refusal to promise to limit the speech of Israel critics on their campus.
Here is his interview with her.
So, tonight the very first exchange was about Israel and obviously the events of today with Iran firing the salvo missiles into Israel.
J.D. Vance has some of the effect of, look, Israel should be able to do whatever it decides is correct, but wouldn't the U.S. inevitably be involved in whatever military operation Israel may undertake against Iran, whether it's supplying the armaments or the intelligence or diplomatic backing.
Doesn't the U.S. have a role in weighing in on whether it might be worth entangling the U.S. in some kind of retaliatory strike against Iran?
Well, J.D. Vance was correct in to say that Israel has the right to defend itself.
Israel has been under attack.
Its very existence has been under attack by Iran directly in the unprecedented hypersonic ballistic missiles that were launched from Iranian soil to Israel today.
And it has been under attack through Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.
Of course, U.S. resources when it comes to our critical military aid to Israel, when it comes to our funding for Iron Dome.
That is an overwhelming support, including from J.D. Vance, and most importantly, President Trump.
But we voted to pass that.
But the reality is it's the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, who not only slow-walked that military aid, but have been turning their backs at every opportunity, demanding a ceasefire and not wanting to allow Israel to defend itself.
I believe Israel should defend itself, and certainly those are the policies of President Trump.
Hasn't the Biden-Harris administration supplied more military resources to Israel than any administration ever?
The United States Congress forced that through.
Joe Biden slow walked it.
Kamala Harris slow walked it.
So it's because of the leadership of the United States Congress.
Don't forget there were multiple veto threats that were issued by Joe Biden when we passed the Israel military aid.
Not once, not twice. Two veto threats.
And it was only when it was combined in a package of other priorities for the Biden administration.
So no. At every opportunity, they have blocked critical military aid to Israel at the most significant time of need.
None of that is true.
Absolutely none of that is true.
Joe Biden went to Tel Aviv The week after October 7th and stood with Netanyahu and vowed, as he's done his entire career, to give the Israelis every last thing they want.
Every weapon, every bomb, every amount of money that the Israelis have demanded the Biden administration has given them.
There's been no slow walking of anything.
The Israelis are drowning in American bombs and American weapons and American money because both political parties in Washington Are fully behind that.
And it is amazing sometimes to me that Donald Trump ran on a platform of America first.
Think about what that means. America first.
We put our own country, our own communities, our own citizens and their needs above those of foreign countries.
And yet if you listen to the Republicans Who are in greatest proximity to Donald Trump, and Elise Stefanik is absolutely one of them.
She was talked about as a potential vice president.
Their critique of the Democratic Party is, oh, we're not that we're giving too much to Ukraine, we're giving too much to Israel.
It's that, oh, they haven't given enough.
They should have given more to Ukraine.
They should have given more arms to Ukraine.
They should be giving more to Israel.
It is basically saying we should be doing what Dick Cheney and George Bush were doing, which is involving the U.S. military in essentially every spot around the world in order to assure our dominance through the use of military force, and that's where our resources should be going.
And not only is that message different From the message on which Donald Trump ran and won in 2016, it's essentially the exact opposite, leading to a very significant question and doubt about which Donald Trump will actually appear and which will be expressed in the event that he wins.
Alright, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our program there, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday nights, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive aftershow.
That aftershow is available only for members of our Locals community.
So if you want to join, which gives you access not just to those twice a week aftershows, but to a whole variety of interactive features, and we put a lot of exclusive original content together.
There, when I reacted to the Price presidential debate, immediately following the conclusion of it, we streamed it exclusively on Rumble.
It's now available, I think, on, or rather we exclusively streamed it on Locals for our members.
It's now available on Rumble.
We're going to take all the interviews that we wanted to show you but didn't have time to show you tonight that Michael conducted with members of Congress and others and we're going to put those on Locals as well.
