Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
Israel kills more journalists in a horrific double tap attack on a Gaza hospital. Then: does Trump's Executive Order on flag burning violate the Constitution? Plus: Glenn takes your questions. --------------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of The System Update, our live nightly show that air is every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, as we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong.
Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of southern Gaza.
When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering as well in what is known as a double tap strike, widely considered to be terrorism.
In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News, and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded.
As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express, oh, very sincere, quote, regret.
And he vowed to have Israel investigate itself.
But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza.
And there is nothing they regret about it.
And yet the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it.
Then Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues, including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do, criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment.
Trump absurdly tried to draft this order and to impose this ban in ways that he feels are consistent with Supreme Court precedent.
As has happened over and over, leading conservatives who spent years posturing as free speech crusaders instantly cheered Trump's attack on free speech.
We'll analyze the executive order, the relevant Supreme Court precedent, the values of the First Amendment, and the reasons why this is so blatantly unconstitutional.
And then finally, each day this week, we usually do a QA session on Friday night.
But because I was really under the weather last week and we can only do a couple of shows.
I thought once I was back on Thursday, we would have a show on Friday, but I just wasn't up to it.
We didn't do a Q ⁇ A. So each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try and get to a couple of Q ⁇ A questions that have been submitted by our locals members.
And then on Friday night, without doubt, No possibility otherwise.
We will have a full Q ⁇ A where we take questions from our locals members who submit questions throughout the week.
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Now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza and that is what it is.
There's just no avoiding that word as Israeli scholars of Genophat side themselves have now said in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is.
It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news because on the one hand, There's not much more you can say about the horrors and the atrocities and the crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into as sustained and prolonged a hell as can possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it.
A population of 2 million people.
was 2.2 million where half the population are children, half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children.
And on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it.
I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the UK and Germany.
And there's not a lot more to say.
On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities.
And you feel compelled not to ignore it, because it's still ongoing.
And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing.
And you feel compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shined on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it or haven't yet been convinced of it, become convinced.
And although it seems repetitious, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse.
It would be like in World War two.
If you went and condemned the Nazi extermination of Jews and other groups of people, and you did it forty and fifty times and you expressed your indignation, you wouldn't get to the point where you would just say, you know what, I'm going to stop covering it because I've said everything I have to say.
It's an ongoing atrocity.
I'm not equating them or not equating them.
I'm simply offering an analogy.
And today, in particular, when things happen that are of significance and of high consequence, that you hope at least are of high consequence, I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention.
Unfortunately, the world pays most attention when Israel slaughters not just ordinary Gazans or Gazan civilians or Gazan physicians, but when they slaughter people who, for whatever reason, have some value.
for or some connection with important Western institutions.
That's when a lot of media attention gets focused on it.
That's when Western governments feel particularly compelled to speak out even when Western journalists feel an obligation to raise their voices and that is an important event relative to just the ordinary slaughter and killing and atrocities that take place there every day and such an event happened within the last 24 hours here from the Financial Times There you see the headline, Israel forces kill five journalists in Gaza.
At least 20 people, including media, are dead in strikes on Southern Hospital Complex.
Quote, Israel has killed at least 20 people, including several journalists, in a double strike on Nasser Medical Complex, the largest health facility in southern Gaza.
According to the health ministry in the Palestinian enclave, the Gaza health ministry said the fourth floor of the hospital was targeted in the first strike.
This was followed by a second hit as ambulance crews arrived to retrieve the dead and wounded.
One doctor, Mahmoud Al-Habibi, was killed, according to the ministry.
Miriam Abu Dhabi, a visual journalist who worked with the Associated Press during the war, was one of five journalists killed.
The agency said in a statement it was, quote, shocked and saddened to learn of her death along with those of other journalists.
Al Jazeera said one of its cameramen, Mohamed Salama, was among the casualties.
He is the latest in a series of journalists working for the Qantari controlled news network to have lost their lives in Israeli strikes.
The attack also killed Husam Al Masri, a cameraman who worked with Reuters, photojournalist Moaz Abu Taha and journalist Ahmed Abu Aziz, according to the Foreign Press Association, which represents journalists working for international media in Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
So I just want to spend a second talking about double top strikes.
They're things that we actually saw the United States doing during the war on terror.
And for a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.
And the essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch of people, and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, then you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers, journalists, and that's exactly what happened here.
And there's footage of what is considered to be the second, what is the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed on the fourth floor of this hospital and they are looking for the wounded they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike because there were journalists there filming it including several who were killed I think the video is pretty graphic it's kind of horrifying you see the people as they're working on the wounded and then the next second you
see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate so watch it based on your the use of your own discretion but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly instinctively automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Barry Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial, masquerading under journalism.
She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people, and so we'll probably respond to that tomorrow.
But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with, is these people who are loyal primarily or solely to Israel will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in.
it.
And so it's important to show the truth.
And here's the video of this is from Al-God TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight in southern Gaza.
The
it's a tabir al-an So first of all, you actually see the people who are killed in that second strike.
There are people who are helping carry the wounded, look for the wounded.
There are people who are filming, who are documenting.
Those are the journalists.
There are people treating the wounded.
Those are the physicians.
It was a very precise second strike.
It happened exactly the same place the first strike took place.
And those are the people who ended up being killed, the 20 people.
That's how five journalists died.
Because they know that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists, not like Barry Weiss who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza including children are dying of starvation.
These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder one after the next.
And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers go there, and the aid workers as well as doctors.
And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill.
And that's exactly who they killed.
Here from CNN on August 11th, just to show you how repetitive this is, Israel kills multiple journalists in Gaza, including prominent Al Jazeera reporters.
Here's the Committee to Protect Journalists.
We need to get this date because there's no date on here, and the numbers have increased since then.
I believe the number currently of journalists killed in Gaza is 280.
I think the Committee to Protect Journalists has a much more rigid form of counting.
So they have 192, at least as of the date of this article, which we'll check on.
And it says, Israel-Gaza war.
Israel is engaged in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.
Let me read that again.
Israel is engaged in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.
Palestinian journalists are being threatened, directly targeted and murdered by Israeli forces and are arbitrarily detained and tortured in retaliation for their work.
Media infrastructure in Gaza is systematically destroyed and censorship has been tightened throughout the West Bank and Israel.
And here you see the number of journalists who are killed.
And as I said, it's definitely above 200 now, 192 and another 90 in prison.
So this is one act of is obviously wars always entail a lot of horrific acts, a lot of suffering.
But there are conventions and laws of war that are observed.
There are some wars that entail isolated violations, and then there are wars that are just genocidal, that disregard all constraints and limits on war because the people they're killing are not regarded as human beings.
And so there emerges unique evils.
Remember we had the scholar of famine on who said that this was the most minutely engineered famine imposed by man since World War II.
There may have been famines where more people were starving, where more people died, but he said this was the most engineered, the most deliberately constructed and imposed.
And here you have Israel that, and I want you to just think about this, which blocks all international media from entering Gaza.
So you have journalists from all over the world that want to go into Gaza.
They want to report on what they see there.
They want to report on the storm.
starvation They want to report on the number of children in danger of dying of malnourishment and famine.
They want to report on the nature and the amount of the destruction in Gaza.
They want to document what they're seeing.
Or they'll say, oh, look, there's only three kids in a hospital who are malnourished, and all three aren't really malnourished because of a lack of food.
In fact, they have degenerative diseases that have nothing to do with food, and there's food everywhere.
And if that were true, Israel, of course, would want them to come in and document that, but Israel doesn't let them in.
They hand picked a couple of puppets like Douglas Murray or a couple of people they pay.
They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF.
They're attached to the IDF and they show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say and they bring them back to Israel and they go on social media or shows and say it.
But real journalists, they don't allow real journalists, any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF.
Why would you do that?
Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done?
Now, there are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job.
It's remarkably heroic and admirable.
of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza.
So we have had journalists document it.
The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder, and they're often murdered.
There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world.
in gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the idf so they're on the one hand preventing independent media from entering and then on the other slaughtering all the people who are documenting inside of gaza what's taking place and the message they're sending is obvious which is that if you want to show the world what we're doing inside of gaza the reality of what we're doing you are likely to be the target of uh one of our missiles or bombs as well and not just you but your family will blow up your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and
children as they've done many many times Western media has been shamefully and disgracefully relatively silent.
There have been a few noble exceptions.
I've said before, Trey Yinks with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family, has been loudly protesting the amount of thousands of journalists being murdered by the IDF, but very, very few others have.
The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement given the five journalists that were killed.
And it says this, quote, a group of journalists from several major international news outlets, including Reuters, AP, and Al Jazeera, have been killed together in Israeli military strikes.
This is among the deadliest Israeli attack on journalists working for international media since the Gaza War began.
We demand an immediate explanation from the IDF and the Israeli Prime Minister's office.
We call on Israel once and for all to halt its abhorrent practice of targeting journalists.
This has gone on far too long.
Too many journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel without justification.
Israel continues to block international journalists from independent access to Gaza.
This must be a watershed moment.
And that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours.
Because unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention.
When the dead, as part of Israeli's massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing, are not just ordinary Gazans, but our people who for some reason have value to Western institutions.
Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people who he murdered work for AP and NBC News and Reuters.
He doesn't care about Al Jazeera.
And so he has to pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it.
So here's what he said, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital.
And God, we deeply regret what we do every day, every single day when you don't care.
We deeply regret this tragic mishap, a mishap.
A mishap, they bombed a hospital, and then when rescue workers and doctors and journalists gathered as they always predictably do, they bombed that exact spot a second time.
And that's a mishap.
Israel values the work of the journalists we've been murdering.
We value the work of journalists, medical staff, and all civilians.
We love all civilians.
We value their lives so much.
The military authorities are conducting thorough investigation.
The Israeli military authorities, don't worry, they're investigating the IDF, so you'll know soon enough what happened here.
Our wars with Hamas terrorists, our just goals are defeating Hamas and bringing our hostages home.
The hostages' families know that that's a lie.
They don't care at all about the hostages.
They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back.
In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a ceasefire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing.
The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext.
So Israel does this every day and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object.
The German Foreign Office, and this is the foreign ministry of a government, Germany, that provides 30% of all of the weapons Israel has used to destroy Gaza and kill as many Gazas as they can over the last 22 months.
They just keep feeding Israel money and arms.
Germany does.
and their foreign office today also had to feign shock and horror, whatever, and this is what they said.
We are shocked by the killing, shocked.
by the killing of several journalists, rescue workers, and other civilians in an Israeli airstrike on the Nasser hospital in Gaza.
This attack must be investigated.
Journalists and media workers play an essential role in putting the spotlight on the devastating reality of war.
We have repeatedly called on the Israeli government to allow immediate independent foreign media access and afford protection for journalists operating in Gaza.
Okay, first of all, anyone who says they're shocked by what happened in Gaza today is completely lying.
This is what Israel has been doing every day, every single day, since October 7th, other than the couple of ceasefires that happened temporarily.
They do this every single day.
People only care a little bit more today and they'll forget about it tomorrow because the people who were killed worked with media institutions in the West and they'll have to raise their voices.
So the idea that we're shocked, we're shocked by what Israel did, that is pathetic.
It would be shocking if a day went by when Israel didn't do this.
That would be shocking, way more shocking.
And what value do these statements have from Germany, this shock, when Germany is the one that provides the weapon and continues to provide these weapons?
It's like what the Biden administration used to do every day.
We are deeply concerned about these humanitarian crises.
We've asked Israel to be more careful in targeting civilians, but who cares?
The U.S. just kept feeding them the weapons and the money.
And it was all just theater to clean their conscience.
Here, just by the way, is the article in Deutsche Welle, which is a German newspaper in July of 2024, war in Gaza.
Germany supplies 30% of Israel's arms import, second only to the United States.
Here is, and this actually probably requires a trigger warning even more fervent than the one that I provided for the actual killing.
It's an Israeli defense force official.
His name is Efe Defrin.
And here he is saying that Israel would never, ever target civilians.
It's just not what we do.
We're the world's most moral army.
And we really lament the accident that you're paying attention to because it happened to be people who work with Western journalists.
Here's what he said.
Earlier today, IDF troops carried out a strike in the area of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis.
We are aware of reports that harm was caused to civilians, including journalists.
I would like to be clear from the start, the IDF does not intentionally target civilians.
The IDF makes every effort to mitigate harm to civilians while ensuring the safety of our troops.
Any incident that raises concern in this regard is addressed by the relevant mechanisms in the IDF.
We are operating in an extremely complex reality.
Hamas terrorists deliberately use civilian infrastructure, including...
Actually, I can't take his accent.
I can't take his face.
We've heard it all before.
Hamas intentionally hired behind.
It's all Hamas' fault.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
There is nowhere for Hamas to operate except in the civilian infrastructure.
They're part of the civilian population.
They're the government of Gaza.
They administer the government of Gaza.
It's not like Israel where you have large open spaces where you could put your military facilities and of course Israel doesn't do that Israel buries their military headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv so that when countries strike back like Iran did and aim at military facilities, they're forced to target the civilian in areas where the IDF purposely places their military and Mossad installations.
You just watch what they did.
They bombed the hospital once, and then when they saw the people coming to rescue them, they bombed it again.
And at this point, whether Israel quote unquote intentionally targets civilians, and of course they do, they've targeted many, many journalists, just to put as one example, it doesn't really matter.
reality is that they don't view Gaza as having innocent civilians.
Many officials in Israel have said that, part of the government, there's no such thing as an innocent civilian in Gaza.
So they don't need to target or not target civilians.
They're willing to kill everyone recklessly because they place no value on their lives.
And this is what they've been doing every day.
Israel has been targeting civilians for years, well before October 7th.
Here from the United Nations Human Rights Council in February of 2019.
It's the report on the Independent International Commission.
of Inquiry on the protest in the occupied Palestinian territory.
And here you see that From the text, there's a section on journalists, and it reads as this.
Between March 30 and December 31, so that's seven months, eight months.
In 2019, Israeli forces killed two journalists and wounded 39 others with live ammunition as they covered the demonstrations.
Israeli snipers shot four journalists in the abdomen just under their vest marked press.
A journalist from Gaza City was shot in the lower abdomen by Israeli forces at the Khan Yunus site while he was filming the demonstrations for a documentary.
He was wearing a blue helmet and a dark blue but bulletproof vest clearly marked press.
He died the following day.
Ahmad, a journalist from the Jabalia refugee camp, was shot by an Israeli sniper in the lower abdomen at the North Gaza site while he was taking photographs of the demonstrations approximately 300 meters from the separation fence.
He was wearing a blue helmet and a blue vest, clearly marked press.
He died of his injuries 12 days later.
Israeli forces shot a freelance photojournalist who was wearing a blue vest, clearly marked press, from Khan Yunus twice in the lower abdomen in the back while he was taking a break with two other photojournalists from international news agencies standing around 300 meters from the separation fence.
And then it goes on to characterize persons with disabilities who have been deliberately shot.
And by the way, this was, you know, we always hear, oh, why are there no nonviolent protests from Gaza and from the Palestinians against the occupation, against the denial of statehood?
This was a peaceful protest.
They symbolically made a nonviolent, peaceful march up to the Israeli border wall.
And then they were sniped by Israeli snipers, shot in the head, shot in the abdomen.
Holding no weapons, just a peaceful protest.
They weren't trying to breach the wall.
They weren't trying to climb the wall.
They were trying to generate international attention for the fact that they're kept in a prison, in an open-air prison, by the Israelis who trapped them in, who bombed.
who trapped them in, who bombed their airport, who will kill them if they try and leave by sea.
And they marched up to that border wall to demonstrate their plight.
And Israel just opened fire on them indiscriminately and killed huge numbers of civilians, including journalists.
And this was before October 7th.
Israel has been doing this for a long time now.
Here is CNN.
in September of 2024, just to indicate that it's not just Palestinians who they kill.
This way, the IDF kills Americans all the time with the weapons that we're forced to buyy for them.
Here from CNN, September of 2024, American activists shot dead by Israeli forces in the West Bank at a protest, eyewitnesses said.
A young Turkish-American woman, Asnir Aiji, was shot and killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Friday, according to U.S. and Palestinian officials, while she was taking part in a protest near Nablus.
She was shot in the head.
by Israeli forces responding to the gathering.
According to two eyewitnesses who spoke to CNN, the 26-year-old woman had been participating in a weekly protest against an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian village of Baitha, they also said.
So she was just peacefully protesting what the world considers to be this illegal occupation of the West Bank, and the IDF just came along and shot her in the head and killed her.
And none of these super patriots, America first, America first, we only care about Americans, we love Americans, very few of them object.
But yeah, we'll give Israel weapons, and if they kill Americans, who cares?
They're probably not real Americans, they're against Israel anyway.
What country cheers or justifies or defends when another country murders their own civilians the way so many in the United States cheer or defend Israel or at best ignore Israel when they slaughter American citizens they do quite frequently.
Now there have been so many lies told, so much propagandistic constructs as happens in wars, but especially wars involving Israel since October 7th.
Let's remember that October 7th flooded the world with absolute total complete lies about the number of civilians who were killed on October 7th, about the number killed by the IDF versus Hamas.
just utterly fabricated stories designed to horrify the world on purpose like Hamas burning babies in ovens.
or beheading dozens of babies, or cutting babies out of wombs, all utter lies.
And the reporting on the quote-unquote mass rape, much of it has turned out to be a hoax, just filling the airwaves with lies constantly.
But of all the lies that have circulated about this Israeli attack on Gaza, the one that I think angers me the most, because it's the most demonstrably false, is the fact that Hamas started the war on October 7th by attacking Israel.
Because what that implies is two things.
One, that on October 7th, 2023, Israel was just a peaceful country minding its own business.
Everything was nice there, peaceful in the region.
And out of nowhere, Hamas attacked Israel and thus, quote unquote, started the war.
Just an absolute complete lie.
Israel was bombing the West Bank and Gaza, killing huge numbers of civilians and children all throughout 2023 before October 7 took place.
And then the second claim implicit in that lie.
is that because Hamas started the war on October 7, 2023 by killing Israeli civilians, it means that everything that follows, namely what Israel has done to Gaza, is somehow justifiable, similar to how a lot of neocons said that whatever the United States did for years after 9-11 was justified by 9-11, even though we came to regret so much of it strategically, politically, ethically, and morally.
But the reason this makes no sense is because if Hamas killing civilians in Israel on October 7 justifies everything that came after what Israel has done in Gaza, why isn't the killing of Gaza and West Bank women and children and innocent people throughout all of 2023 and years earlier,
to say nothing of the illegal occupation of the West Bank and the decades-long blockade of Gaza, where Israeli troops don't occupy Gaza, or at least didn't, but control what comes in and out, controls all internal life, controls the borders, routinely prevents food from coming in and medicine, routinely bombs Gaza and kills civilians, but just in 2023 alone, before October 7th, bomb after bomb, killing after killing.
Why don't all those killings of civilians by Israel?
in Gaza and the West Bank justify October 7th as a response.
If all the killing that Israel is doing since October 7th, including of civilians and medical workers and doctors and journalists, bombing mosques and schools and hospitals.
If all of that is justified by October 7, why isn't October 7 justified by everything Israel did previously?
Someone explain this to me, please.
I really want to understand the answer.
Here from The Guardian, May 9, 2023.
So this was just a few months before October 7, the October 7 attack.
four months before.
Israel bombs the Gaza Strip, killing three Islamic Jihad leaders and nine civilians.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad vow to retaliate after Israel launches overnight strikes despite a ceasefire.
So there was a ceasefire.
Israel ignored it.
They bombed the Gaza Strip.
They killed at least nine civilians.
Doesn't that justify an attack back on Israel?
Why doesn't it?
How about this one, the New York Times, July 2, 2023?
Israel launches the biggest air attack on the West Bank in nearly two decades.
This was three months before the October 7 attack, three months before it.
Israel said it used drone-fired missiles and ground troops against militant targets in the Janine refugee camp.
The assault killed at least eight Palestinians, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
Here from the United Nations Human Rights Council, July 5, 2023.
So again, just a little above three months, three months and a couple days before the October 7 attack.
Israeli airstrike and ground operations in Janine may constitute a war crime, according to the Special Rapporteur's press release.
Here's AP, September 23, 2023.
So now we're just two weeks before the October 7 attack.
Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza for the third day in a row as the West Bank violence intensifies.
There was actually a bombing on October 6 as well.
So Israel spent months in 2023 bombing Gaza and the West Bank from the air, killing a lot of civilians, including children.
And their response was October 7th.
If some foreign group or foreign country were bombing the United States all throughout 2025, repeatedly bombing the United States, killing civilians, killing American children, do you think we would consider the use of violence in response infinitely greater than October 7th to be unbelievably and self-evidently justified?
Of course we would.
So if Israel's massacres after October 7th are justified by October 7th, why wasn't the October 7th attack on Israel justified by everything that came before it, including not in the distant past, but in just the few months prior to October 7th?
This idea that when Israel has to apologize because the West cares, they're going to investigate itself is an absolute joke.
Here from the Jerusalem Post, April 20th, 2025, the Red Crescent report.
which notably charge which nobody charge or seriously held accountable the IDF fires Golani commander censors brigade chief over killing of 14 Gaza medics you may remember, it's one of the worst atrocities.
They massacred and slaughtered 14 unarmed Gaza medics and then buried their bodies and their vehicle underground and then lied about what happened.
They said that these vehicles had approached them in an aggressive way with their lights off.
But it turned out that when they excavated the bodies, one of the medics filmed what happened, the last few minutes of his life.
And everything Israel said about it was a lie.
It was just a complete massacre.
And that video released and Israel was proven to have lied.
And so the IDF said, oh, we're going to investigate ourselves.
And of course, nothing happened.
The military also admitted that its initial reports on the incident based on reports from soldiers on the ground were false.
Do you think anyone paid a price for slaughtering those innocent medics who were risking their lives to save the lives of other people?
You may remember in April of 2024 when the World Central Kitchen convoy led by this chef, Jose Andres, who's a very celebrated chef in the West.
This is his organization that goes and feeds people where there's hunger.
They had a convoy of cars that were marked World Central Kitchen Aid Workers.
They had cleared their path with the IDF.
And yet the IDF came and droned them, their cars, and killed all seven of their aid workers.
And because they had connection to the West, the West was indignant, and the IDF had to pretend like they did today to express regret.
Politico, April 5, 2024, Israel military admits, quote, serious mistake in killing of seven aid food work, food aid workers.
The IDF removes their two top officials after bombing of World Central Kitchen convoy sparked a global fury.
That's what they do.
They kind of just will transfer somebody out briefly from one office to the next.
Nobody goes to prison.
Nobody goes gets any real accountability.
We never get the real truth because the idea that Israel would honestly investigate itself is laughable on its face.
The Economist, August 7, just two weeks ago, asked, Israel is on trial.
Can the country police its own war crimes?
Israel's legal system claims to be fiercely independent on the Gaza war.
It is largely silent.
Quote, Israel has been accused of all manner of misdeeds in Gaza.
To the extent they admit wrongdoing, they argue that Israel's internal procedures can be relied on to rectify the problems and punish those responsible.
Since the war began, the fact-finding and assessment mechanism team has been beefed up and now includes, according to the IDF, dozens of investigators led by a former major general and six former brigadier generals dealing with, quote, hundreds of cases.
Yeshdeen, an Israeli human rights organization, has called it the, quote, whitewashing mechanism, pointing out that only 7% of their complaints to the IDF in the nine years before the war led to criminal investigation against soldiers.
So they have basically all these incidents that took place in Israel's campaign back in Gaza in 2014, including horrific massacres, the worst massacres in 2014 since 2023 happened, and many of them are being quote-unquote investigated still nine years later.
So I think what is important to note here is that there are times when the world pays attention to what Israel did because the lives of the people they exterminate for whatever reason have value to the West, not great value, but some value.
And that's when Israel is forced to admit, yeah, we made a mistake, we regret it, sorry, we're going to investigate.
This is what Israel does every single day in Gaza.
There's nothing remorseful about it, there's nothing regretful about it.
It's what Israel does deliberately.
They don't value human life in Gaza.
They don't regard Palestinians as human.
They regard them as subhuman.
They're slaughtering them indiscriminately, regardless of who they are.
There's no remorse or regret about it.
It's part of the plan.
It's the war.
The war is to destroy all civilian life in Gaza, to force them all to leave, to make it uninhabitable, and to keep the few that are there in concentration camps under the That's the plan.
And so killing civilians is part of the plan.
It's necessary to brutalize them psychologically, to break their will, to keep their land, to make it so that there's no choice but to leave, that's the Israeli war plan.
And they're carrying out an act of genocide.
That's what genocide means.
Genocide does not mean, as so many defenders of Israel try to imply, that you go and you exterminate as many, a group of people as quickly as you can in a certain place.
That would, of course, be genocide if you tried to do that, but that's not the only form of genocide.
Genocide also means the systematic elimination, the intentional elimination of a group of people, including from a particular place.
I mean, if you went and killed all the Jews in Ukraine, that would, of course, be genocide.
Your goal is to eradicate all Jews from Ukraine.
And you did that, that would be genocide.
And you don't have to do it fast.
You don't have to do it all in like a week.
Of course, you're constrained by world opinion.
You're constrained by the lies you want to tell about what you're doing.
But if the goal is to eliminate this entire group of people, to eliminate Palestinians really as a group of people that exist as an identity, They're going to annex the West Bank too.
There's not going to be Palestine.
There's not going to be any Palestinians.
And in Gaza, the goal is to do it through mass slaughter and then expulsion.
That is genocide under any definition.
And that's why even Israeli scholars of war crimes, Holocaust, and genocide have said, we rejected this title, this term, genocide.
We did not like this term being applied to what we're doing in Gaza.
We argued against it for months, and now we're forced to admit that this is what it is.
This is the only term that can be applied.
It is a genocide.
And genocide is the worst war crime, the worst crime against humanity that can be committed.
And it's not just Israel committing it, but the United States under both administrations, the Biden administration, the Trump administration, and other Western governments as well, including in Germany and the UK.
And whether the world is ready to realize that, whether the world is ready to stop it, however long it takes for there to be a consensus that that's the case, whether it's going to take international journalists finally entering Gaza and documenting the true extent of the destruction and the death caused by the IDF, whenever it's recognized, whenever history decides to consecrate that truth, that is still a truth, that is a fact.
And no matter what Israel's efforts have been to hide the truth, including by banning all media from entering and slaughtering the people in Gaza who are showing us, The evidence is now overwhelming.
The people who don't want to see it are people who either are so loyal to Israel that they'll defend anything Israel does, including genocide, or people who are just determined to remain ignorant because it makes them feel better or it relieves them of the obligation to do anything about it.
The conservative movement under Donald Trump spent the last decade waving the flag of free speech, a cause very important to me.
and often did so with very valid reasons.
There were all sorts of systemic attacks on free speech under the Biden administration under various institutions opposed to Donald Trump, almost all of which, if not all of which, we spent a great deal of time documenting, reporting on, denouncing.
And part of the pledge of the Trump administration and the Trump movement was we're going to win the 2024 election and we're going to restore free speech in America.
And ever since then, there's been one assault on free speech after the next on college campuses, imposing hate speech codes on American students and American faculty who criticize Israel.
deporting people because they criticize Israel, protest against Israel, but no other country, and on and on.
We've documented all of those as well.
This may be the most blatant one of all.
There's been decades of politicians who want to demagogue by saying the burning of the American flag is repugnant and repulsive and therefore it should be a crime.
Hillary Clinton advocated that when she was getting ready to run for president.
It's a favorite of political demagogues.
Because obviously if you're a citizen of a country and you pledge allegiance to the flag and the flag is the representative of your country, Most people are going to be enraged and disgusted watching somebody else burn that flag.
That's normal.
It's a normal reaction.
But the whole idea of the free speech guarantee in the First Amendment is that it protects not the views that most people are comfortable with or like or tepid about, but the views that you most hate, the views that anger you and disgust you most.
That's where free speech protections are needed.
And burning an American flag in and of itself is an expressive act.
It conveys ideas.
And therefore, the Supreme Court has been very clear that it can never be criminalized.
Now, it doesn't mean that every act of burning a flag is immune from being prosecuted.
For example, if you go and burn a fl flag with the intention of setting someone's house on fire, the fact that you burned a flag as the initiating cause of the fire doesn't immunize that act from being prosecuted because you're using it to burn it down.
If you go and steal somebody's flag, you climb up on the roof and you steal their flag, and then you go on their property and you burn it, either to endanger them or to scare them.
You don't have the right to steal somebody else's property.
You don't have the right to burn someone else's property.
You don't have the right to burn it in a way that will cause them damage or put them in damage or in harm's way or to deliberately intimidate them on their own property, that of course can also be prosecuted.
But the act of burning the flag itself is expressed protected expressive speech and therefore cannot be prosecuted.
Yet President Trump today signed an executive order and it was written, it's a ban on burning the American flag, but it's written with the understanding that the Supreme Court has already said you cannot ban the burning of American flag.
So it's basically a long list of justifications for why it's okay and when it's okay to burn the American, to ban the, to criminalize the burning of the flag, when the Attorney General is required to go and investigate that or state authorities are required to go and investigate it, trying to create a bunch of theories about why and when the burning of the American flag is so likely to lead to or incite violence that inherently it must be criminal.
It's just an obvious attempt to dance around what the Supreme Court has long said is a core First Amendment right, not a very convincing or adept one either.
My guess is the Supreme Court would very quickly deem this unconstitutional, especially as it's applied.
But it's the sort of thing that you do when you're trying to distract attention from your supporters, like dumb red meat that you feed to dumb supporters.
Like, I know you're still mad about that Epstein thing, but look here, we're banning the burning of the American flag.
You love America.
You hate the burning of the American flag, so we're banning it.
This is, it's an idiot.
It's idiot theater.
It does nothing other than attack, ironically, the core defining values of America in the name of honoring and venerating America.
Here's the executive order title, Prosecuting the Burning of the American Flag.
So in case anybody wants to say, as I've already heard, oh, you haven't read the executive order.
It doesn't really prosecute the burning of the American flag.
The title of the executive order is Prosecuting the Burning of the American Flag.
Can it be any clearer for you what is the purpose that they chose to describe this executive order?
In their words, prosecuting the burning of the American flag.
Quote, by the authority vested to me by its president, by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered our great American flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America and of American freedom, identity and strength.
You know what?
I don't agree with that statement.
I don't agree that the American flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States, nor do I agree that it is the most cherished symbol of the American of American freedom, identity and strength.
I think that would be the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.
The flag symbolizes the country.
These rights that are being attacked is what makes the country worth loving, worth venerating, worth having loyalty to.
So in the name of protecting the flag, they're assaulting what actually are the most sacred and cherished values and symbols of American freedom, identity, and strength, which are the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
and the Declaration of Independence.
This executive order goes on, quote, over nearly two and a half centuries, many thousands of American patriots have fought, bled, and died to keep the stars and stripes waving proudly.
You know, it's funny if you listen to any, I mean, invoking the troops here as a justification for violating the Constitution is repugnant because if you listen to most troops about why they believe they're going to war and why they, when they come back, why they talk about to the extent that they are proud of what they did, and they're often not proud of what they did, but often they are.
I don't ever hear them saying, oh, I did it to protect the American flag from being burned.
them saying I did it to protect the freedoms our country offers, the freedom that our country guarantees, the freedoms that we were all raised to, to respect.
Not the flag itself, but the values and the rights that it represents.
Trump goes on.
The American flag is a special symbol in our national life that should unite and represent all Americans of every background and walk of life.
Desecrating it is uniquely offensive and provocative.
It is a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence against our nation.
Let me stop there.
I agree.
Can we just go back a little?
I agree with Trump when he says, and by the way, the Supreme Court does too, that desecrating the American flag is uniquely offensive and provocative.
I agree with that and I also agree that it is often let's even say usually a statement of contempt hostility and violence against our nation that's precisely why it's guaranteed and protected because it's expressing ideas it's intended to be offensive and provocative that's what radical speech does it offends and it provokes that's the speech that the first amendment above all else protects from being criminalized.
And Trump is saying that what he wants to ban is a statement of contempt and hostility toward our nation.
You're allowed to express contempt and hostility toward the nation.
Trump ran on a platform saying America is disgusting, it's broken, it's filthy, it's decadent, and he wants to return it to some prior glory.
He constantly mined the country.
Politicians have the right to do that.
Everybody has the right to do that.
That's an opinion.
It's an expression of belief.
But you're also allowed to say, I just think America is inherently evil.
I think it's an evil project.
It began with an act of genocide against American Indians.
And ever since, it has.
been imperialistic and spread.
Martin Luther King in 1968 in a speech that he gave about opposing the Vietnam War said that the United States is the single greatest conveyor of violence anywhere in the world.
Is that a statement of contempt and hostility against our nation?
Yes, it is.
It's saying what the United States is doing in the world is something that deserves contempt.
But Trump's movement has been based on that.
The United States has become this Marxist nation with cultural decay.
These are all expressions of contempt against the United States.
Even if the burning of the American flag sends a different message, it's still a message.
It's a political message.
And therefore, no matter how uniquely provocative it is, it's still a protected mode of expression by the First Amendment is.
justices on the Supreme Court across the political spectrum have repeatedly said, including probably the most popular right-wing judge on the Supreme Court in five decades, Antonine Scalia.
Here, I just want to show you before we get to the rest of this text what he had to say.
This was him in July of 2012, and he was asked on CNN, I believe this is Piers Morgan show.
Yeah, Piers Morgan, I don't know if you remember, had a show on CNN for like three years.
It wasn't good, but who cares?
And he interviewed Anthony Scalia and asked him exactly this question.
Should the burning of the American flag, is the burning of the American flag protect its free speech or does the government have the right to ban it and criminalize it?
And here's what Scalia said.
If I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag.
However, we have a First Amendment.
which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged, and it is addressed in particular to speech critical of the government.
I mean, that was the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress.
Burning the flag is a form of expression.
Speech doesn't just mean written words or oral words.
It could be semafore.
Burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea.
I hate the government.
The government is unjust, whatever.
Exactly.
It expresses an idea, obviously.
And that's what Trump's saying.
He says, the reason we need to stop this is because it expresses an idea that I find offensive or that most Americans find offensive.
How can you on the one hand claim to be so devoted to the American ideal and American values and American identity and on the other say that you want to criminalize and ban a certain act because it expresses ideas that you find uniquely offensive?
You think Antony and Scalia liked the burning of the American flag any more than Trump likes it?
Of course he doesn't.
He began by saying if I were king I would ban this.
But we don't happen to live under a country where someone is the king.
we live under a constitution, under that constitution, these ideas are Here's the rest of this executive order.
And again, it's written obviously with the understanding that the Supreme Court has said repeatedly that you cannot criminalize or constrict, legally constrict, the burning of the American flag as the act of the burning of the American flag.
Again, you can criminalize it if it's part of some crime.
Right?
You can't burn down someone's house and be like, oh, I burned it down with the American flag and the Supreme Court said that was protected speech.
Obviously, the question is, can you punish the act of burning the American flag as punishment for burning the American flag.
And this whole executive order is designed to say if somebody is committing a crime, even a minor crime, punish them harshly, prioritize this because they're burning the American flag.
In other words, punish them more because of this idea they're expressing.
Or it's even saying if they do it in a certain way, that seems likely to be providing It's just a banning of the burning of the American flag expressed in terms slightly differently to pretend that they're comporting with Supreme Court standards.
So this is what Trump says.
Quote, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's rulings on First Amendment protections, I really don't like statements from the U.S. President that begin with this phrase, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's rulings on First Amendment protections, because you know what's coming after that is an attack on free speech.
He says the court has never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to fighting words is constitutionally protected.
This is a very cheap, transparent lawyer trick.
Probably Stephen Miller came up with this, if I had to guess.
The Supreme Court has said you can restrict speech or punish speech in two extremely narrow cases.
One is the Brandenburg standard where you incite immediate, imminent violence.
So it doesn't mean that you're Donald Trump and you give a speech on January 6th where you say those bastards in Congress stole our election and then you incite the crowd to go there and beat up cops.
That's not enough.
And that's why I defended Trump from the attempt to try and charge him for that speech on Brandenburg grounds.
That's not imminent incitement.
It's deliberate incitement to imminent violence.
Especially since he said do it peacefully.
But you could pretty much predict that speech riled people up.
And they were going to go and take action in his name.
But still, it wasn't the kind of speech that you could criminalize.
The only kind of speech that you can criminalize under Brandenburg is where you literally gather a mob.
mob on a corner and you say, go burn down that house.
And they're a mob that has flames, torches.
And then they go burn down the house.
And then you try and say, oh, you can't arrest me.
I just gave a speech.
I didn't burn down any house.
Well, no, you said words designed to incite imminent violence, meaning more or less immediately.
Like right after your speech, you gather this crowd and you go and incite it.
You purposely instruct them to go commit violence.
That's it.
And in Brandenburg, they said even the abstract advocacy of violence is protected.
So if you say, I think it is now justified because of President Trump's continuous assaults on our Constitution to go to Washington and pick up arms against the U.S. government, that is clearly protected speech.
That is not speech that will incite imminent violence.
It's abstract advocacy of violence.
So it's an extremely narrow exception to the First Amendment where you're inciting imminent violence, or there's another one that is fighting words, where you're basically, you know, in somebody's face.
and you're saying the most awful things you can say to them, accusing them of the most awful things that you can do in a way that's essentially basically inevitable to incite physical force.
And then you can't be heard to say, well, I just used words.
These are two extremely narrow definitions.
And so they're trying to pretend that only in those cases are they instructing the prosecution, but they go on to make clear that they do a lot more than that.
They want to prioritize this if it involves they want to prioritize any crimes that involve the burning of the American flag.
So they're punishing the burning of the American flag through treating those acts differently.
And they're also essentially saying any burning of the American flag fits into these exceptions.
Here's what the executive order says.
The Attorney General shall prioritize the enforcement to the fullest extent possible of our nation's criminal and civil laws against acts of American flag desecration that violate applicable content neutral laws while causing harm unrelated to expression consistent with the First Amendment.
So they're basically saying any burning of the American flag is uniquely provocative and insightful of violence.
Therefore, we can punish any act under this incitement exception of Brandenburg.
And if you're just kind of engaged in disorderly conduct and at the same time you burn the American flag, then law enforcement is required to crack down extra hard on you to prioritize your prosecution, to elevate the charges against you, in other words, punishing you for your expressed views.
Now, it's such a sloppy, clumsy, unsophisticated attempt to dance around the First Amendment that especially if it does get applied, it's going to go to the Supreme Court and get overturned.
I'm quite confident of that.
But why do you want Donald Trump?
Why would you cheer Donald Trump?
Why would you support Donald Trump saying that?
that it is permissible to engage in an act that violates the First Amendment.
He's been calling for this for years.
Here in June of 2020, when he was running for re-election, Trump called for the Supreme Court to reconsider flag burning laws.
So back then, he acknowledged, look, there's nothing we can do.
We can't pass any laws until the Supreme Court overturns these laws.
So we want the Supreme Court to reconsider.
Then he understood you can't actually do anything given these Supreme Court precedents.
Here, 2006, when Hillary Clinton was getting ready to run, Senator Hillary Clinton and Liberals split over flag desecration.
She had Hillary Clinton propose that flag burning be criminalized to show what a patriot she was as she ran for president.
And American Liberals said, we're not the kind of people who want to censor political speech.
That was back then in 2006 when Liberals still had a belief in free speech before they decided defending free speech made you a fascist.
But that was something Hillary Clinton tried to do way before Trump did for the same reasons.
Here's Fire.org, the organization that plays the role the ACLU once did.
immediately objecting to President Trump's executive order.
They issued this statement today.
President Trump may believe he has the power to revise the First Amendment with the stroke of a pen, but he doesn't.
Flag burning as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment.
There's nothing new.
While people can be prosecuted for burning anything in a place they aren't allowed to set fire, the government can't prosecute protected expressive activity.
Even if many Americans, including the president, find it, quote, uniquely offensive and provocative, you don't have to like flag burning.
You can condemn it, debate it, or hoist your own flag even higher.
The beauty of free speech is that you get to express your opinions even if others don't like what you have to say.
It's just sad that even has to be said.
Here's one of the Supreme Court cases governing this issue.
It was now 35 years ago.
It was the Supreme Court in 1989 in a majority decision delivered by Justice William Brennan in the case of Texas v.
Johnson, where Texas passed a law trying to punish flag burning.
Quote, the First Amendment literally forbids the abridgement only of speech, but we have long recognized that its protection does not end at the spoken or written word.
While we have rejected, quote, the view that apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled speech, whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea, we have acknowledged that conduct may be, quote, sufficiently imbued with elements of communication to fall within the scope of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
We perceive no basis on which to hold that the principle underlying a prior decision does not apply to this case.
To conclude the government may permit designated symbols to be used to communicate only a limited set of messages would be to enter territory having no discernible or defensible boundaries.
Could the government on this theory prohibit the burning of state flags, of copies of the presidential seal of the Constitution?
In evaluating the choices under the First Amendment, how would we decide which symbols were sufficiently special to warrant this unique status?
To do so, we would be forced to decide which symbols were sufficiently special to warrant this unique status.
To do so, we would be forced to consult our own political preferences and impose them on the citizenry in the very way the First Amendment forbids us to do.
There is, moreover, no indication, either in the text of the Constitution or in our cases interpreting it, that a special judicial category exists for the American flag alone.
Indeed, we would not be surprised to learn that the person who framed our Constitution and wrote the amendment that we now construe were not known for their reverence for the Union Jack, meaning, of course, the founders also revered the flag.
And they go on, the First Amendment does not guarantee that other concepts virtually sacred to our nation as a whole.
such as the principle that discrimination on the basis of race is odious and destructive, will go unquestioned in the marketplace of ideas.
We decline, therefore, to create for the flag an exception to the jousta principles protected by the First Amendment.
That was the argument Texas used, was, look, we understand we can't punish speech, but the American flag is so sacred.
It's kind of like almost a religious figure in the United States, like a religious symbol that it stands on its own.
We should be able to ban it, which is what Trump started out by saying.
The American flag is above everything.
It's the most sacred and revered symbol of our country and the defining symbol of American identity.
And The court said, no, actually, that may not be true.
How about the Constitution?
How about the presidential seal?
How about the Bill of Rights?
How about the Declaration of Independence?
Why, if you can ban the burning of the American flag, can't you also ban the burning of the Constitution?
Unsurprisingly, because we've seen it so often, when Trump now attacks free speech, and this is, if you defend free speech, this is what you see all the time, the people out of power, love free speech.
They love the First Amendment.
They go around marching about the importance of protecting free speech and opposing censorship.
The minute they get into power, they start jumping.
They start justifying why their censorship is actually good, why it's not real censorship, while the things they're banning are not real ideas.
When liberals were in power, they said, no, we're not banning political speech.
We're just banning dangerous denialism of COVID vaccines that will kill people.
Or we're just banning fascism or insurrection.
Or we're banning threats to the national order.
In every country, you go to Saudi Arabia, they said, we don't censor political speech.
We just ban ideas that threaten the national order, the social stability.
In Brazil, that's what.
this judge, Judge Moraes, who's sanctioned now, he always does exactly that.
No, I'm not banning political ideas.
I'm banning speech that is a threat to the democratic institutions, that threaten the democratic institutions.
You can always invent theories as to why your censorship is justified.
But the one used by conservatives today was extremely odd.
It was kind of like, yeah, liberals censor.
We're not going to do what we said we're going to do, which is when we win end all censorship, we're going to start censoring the ideas we dislike to make it equal.
And I heard that a lot when it came to censoring criticism of Israel on college campuses, oh, well, the left has been censoring, so why shouldn't we?
When I thought the idea was, no, you're going to end censorship.
You're not going to expand it.
Chris Rufo, in response to Trump's announcement, I'm sympathetic to the argument that burning the American flag is protected speech.
Oh, that's so generous, given the Supreme Court has said so for decades.
But right now, we are putting people in prison for spinning their tires over the Pride flag.
So it might be a good idea to have the debate about which symbols are sacred in America today.
As you're going to see, the American right has invented this narrative that it's illegal to burn the, Therefore, shouldn't the American flag also deserve the same protection?
Here's Matt Walsh.
Doesn't really comment on politics.
He's just obsessed with culture war issues and controlling the private lives of other adult Americans for reasons that a psychoanalyst ought to question.
But that's what he does.
Here's what he said.
Yes, make it a crime to burn the American flag.
Desecration of the gay pride flag is already prosecuted as a hate crime in this country.
No more double standards that the sacred symbol of the LGBT cult is protected.
American flags should be too.
Simple as that.
Sean Davis, if it's illegal to burn pride flags, where did they get this from?
If it's illegal to burn pride flags or to do burnouts on the rainbow crossworks, then it should be illegal to burn the American flag.
And if it's illegal to burn a dollar in protest of fiat money, there should be no issue with making it illegal to burn the American flag.
Either arson is speech or arson is a crime.
No more of this.
It's okay when we burn your symbols, but a crime when you burn our symbols nonsense.
Huh?
That's their whole argument.
Now let me just say, That is preposterous.
If I went out onto the street, if I bought a rainbow flag and I went out onto the street and I said, I'm utterly against same-sex marriage, I'm utterly against the rights of trans people, whatever, and to express my disagreement with that agenda, I'm burning this pride flag that I bought.
You arrest that person, you try and prosecute that person, it will instantly be thrown out of court as a violation of the First Amendment for the same reason that criminalizing the banning of the American flag is.
constitutionally protected.
Now, there have been cases where people go and steal a rainbow flag from some house or some group, and then they burn it in a way that's designed to be threatening, as we talked about before.
If you went and stole an American flag from someone's house and burned it on their yard to intimidate them, the fact that you're burning the American flag doesn't justify or render legally permissible.
the theft of the American flag, the burning it on someone's property.
So I'm sure there are cases where people have been prosecuted for burning a private flag that they stole from somebody else.
And I'm also sure that there are probably excessive prosecutions that shouldn't be brought under hate speech laws where they say, oh, the burning of the American flag, the rainbow flag in this case was designed to convey hate.
So we're going to take what was a crime, a minor crime like taking somebody else's flag or burning it on private property, and we're going to escalate the damages, the punishment that they get because now we're going to define it as a hate speech crime.
And to the extent that's being done, that ought to be battled on the same First Amendment grounds that criminalizing the burning of the American flag ought to be.
The solution isn't to say our opponents.
violate the Constitution, so now we're going to violate the Constitution too.
That's moronic.
And down that road lies tyranny.
Just every time there's a change of government, somebody else escalates further their attack on core liberties.
The only way it makes sense is you take a principled stand in defense of free speech.
The rainbow flag is burned and that is prosecuted.
I disbelieve that's happening.
without other acts like stealing the flag or doing it on private property.
But if that happens, or even if they take some small crime and escalate it because now they're adding hate crime charges simply because they burned the rainbow flag, fight that.
Go to the Supreme Court.
Use these precedents and argue against it.
Don't impose your own censorship.
And the idea that, oh, we have to debate which flag is sacred, doesn't matter which flag is sacred.
You can have the most sacred flag in the world.
You're still allowed to burn it in the United States under the First Amendment.
By the way, there is an actual case, but these people are afraid to bring this up, of a flag that is treated differently.
Just a couple weeks ago, in the United States, there was a court that held I actually been meaning to go read this decision, so I don't want to comment too aggressively or assertively on this, but I've seen many media reports on it, so I'm just mentioning it.
Here from the Times of Israel, from August 14th, like eight days ago, nine days ago, being away last week, I just haven't had a chance to read the opinion yet.
Legal groups hail as a breakthrough as a U.S. judge equates the Israeli flag with Jewish identity.
A federal court says that attacking the Star of David is, quote, racial discrimination, not political protest, setting legal standard for future cases involving anti-Sionist targeting of Jews.
So they're basically saying if you take a Star of David, which happens to be the flag of Israel and you burn it which of course you should have the right to do that because that flag is not just the flag of Israel but somehow representative of the Jewish people it can be prosecuted as a hate crime that is preposterous that does create a standard that says you can burn the Israeli flag in the United States but not the American flag But by the way,
the hate speech codes that Trump is imposing on American colleges that have now been adopted at Columbia and Harvard and many other places have exactly that double standard in place.
You can't call Israel a racist endeavor or compare the acts of Israel to Nazi Germany, but you're free to compare acts of the United States or any other country in the world to Nazi Germany or say it's a racist endeavor, special protections for Israel is embedded in the Trump administration's policies.
And it's one of the reasons we've been objecting so vehemently, because there shouldn't be a carve out in the First Amendment for the rainbow flag, for the Israeli flag, for criticisms of any kind.
And if you actually believe in free speech, that's the only position you take.
You don't shear censorship when your side is in power because there was past censorship against you.
It's utterly disingenuous.
It's wanting to censor and pretending you're doing it, oh, so reluctantly, simply because it was done to you.
That's what the Supreme Court is for.
Go to the Supreme Court and challenge it.
One of the people who actually believe in free speech and who is one of the very few people in the American Congress who has consistent, universally held, and universally applied principles is Thomas Massey.
Not coincidentally, the person in the Republican caucus, Donald Trump, is determined to remove from Congress.
And not coincidentally, the person who's And here he is showing his consistency.
And he says, flag burning, whether it's the American flag or the Israeli flag, and I'll say, or the Pride flag, is covered by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Neither Congress nor the president nor a judge can make it illegal.
Why is that so difficult?
Why is that so difficult to...
If we just all applied it that way, the First Amendment would be radically more fortified in a way that would redound to the benefit of all of us.
So again, I don't think the significance here is that Trump issued an executive order, the application of which is almost certainly certain to be declared illegal or unconstitutional rather.
It's this ethos of the Trump administration and his supporters continuously justifying all sorts of attacks on free speech.
For me, the most sinister being hate speech codes imposed on American campuses, limiting the speech of American students and American professors to protect the foreign country of Israel.
But there's many other examples as well, this being the latest.
And while some of his supporters stand on principle and follow Thomas Massey's lead and object to all instances, way too many who spent the last decade defining themselves and often branding themselves and profiting from posturing as free speech amendments now contort themselves to justify every act of censorship in which Donald Trump and the Trump administration engages,
And this is but the latest example.
All right, so as I said, I want to try and duke a Q ⁇ A when we can do it.
We have a few minutes left, so I'm going to try and get to at least one question, and each day we'll try and do them, and then Friday., we'll have the whole show devoted to your questions.
We have a bunch of them lined up, all very good ones.
I have not read these, so I'm reading them as you see them, which I think is the best way to do it, so I don't prepare my answer ahead of time, which even if you don't want to do, your brain just automatically will start doing.
This is from Noah.
Are we going to do this one or some other?
All right, we'll do this one.
Noah Mendex, who says, Glenn, your analysis of whether Obama officials should be indicted, episode 498, was interesting because I feel it was at odds with what you said before about lawfare.
You mentioned in the episode that you disliked the legal attacks on Trump because they were legally spurious.
However, in the past, you have derided legal attacks, law fair, on elected officials purely for being undemocratic, not just because those attacks were legally pathetic.
So if there was a well-founded legal case to be brought against an elected official, should that case be pursued to achieve justice or disregarded because it denies the populace their elected choice?
Is your answer different for unelected government officials?
I could.
I'm glad you asked that.
Probably some people are a little bit maybe confused or lack clarity about my view.
So I'm going to explain it this way.
Back in 2006, I wrote my first book, and it was a year after I began writing about politics.
And I began writing about politics primarily in strong objection to the attack on civil liberties by the Bush and Cheney administration carried out in the name of the war on terror.
And I strongly believed and still believe that at least several of those acts were criminal and deserve, therefore, criminal prosecution, notwithstanding the fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney were president and vice president, because I don't think being elected to office immunizes you from prosecution if you commit a crime.
And among the two, Axel, let's just use an example.
I highlighted them in the book.
One was they ordered the NSA.
There was a criminal law in place, FISA, that said you cannot spy on the conversations of American citizens unless you first get a warrant from the FISA judge.
And Bush and Cheney in secret told the NSA, no, if you're eavesdropping on an international call and there's an American on the call, keep listening and save it, record it, even if you don't have the warrant required by law.
That was illegal.
As was ordering torture.
People had been criminally prosecuted for waterboarding, for using stress positions and sleep deprivation that could drive people crazy or injure them.
But there was a sense in American political life that I really only heard for the first time, and we talked about the debate I had with Chuck Todd over this in Washington that no, you do not prosecute meeting Washington officials no matter what they do, because to do so is a banana republic.
It's law fair.
It just leads to a cycle of retaliation.
So now the Obama administration prosecutes.
Bush and Cheney, and therefore whoever follows the Obama administration, Trump will then prosecute Obama, et cetera, et cetera.
And my view was and is that that's not a banana republic where you hold people accountable equally under the law if they break the law.
A banana republic is actually the actually the opposite of what we have, where top officials are immunized from consequences if they break the law.
That somehow if you're the president, the vice president, or secretary of state, or whatever, head of the NSA, that you can violate criminal laws and you don't get treated the same way other citizens do.
That to me is a Banana Republic.
So my view was that, and when Obama ran, he was asked this during the campaign, would you be open to having your Attorney General investigate crimes committed under the war on terror?
And he said, absolutely, no one is above the law.
And then he got into office and he immediately announced, Rahm Emanuel started immediately signaling, and then Obama ultimately announced there will be no prosecutions.
We have to look forward, not backward, which again, that phrase justifies never prosecuting anyone since prosecuting people always requires looking backwards by definition.
And so my view was always that if the president commits crimes, he should be prosecuted.
My problem with the attempt to put Trump in prison was not that, oh, he's president, therefore he should be immune.
My problem was that I thought all four prosecutions were loobuses.
Who cares?
Under no circumstances was that a felony.
That was at best a misdemeanor.
And then the cases about him trying to institute a coup, the one brought in Georgia, the one brought by Jack Smith in Washington, for many reasons we've gone over many times before, that I do think he exhausted all of his legal remedies.
that he genuinely believed that the election was stolen.
I don't think he could have proved intent.
That was a political question, whether the American people thought that was appropriate.
I don't think there was anything criminal there.
And then a lot of people think the documents case in Mar-a-Lago was the most valid, the most credible, but I just the idea that there's only one person in the world with the power to classify or declassify documents in Washington.
That's the President of the United States.
He could literally take a group, a box of documents and say, I hereby classify this.
This is classified, secret, top secret.
He could conversely take a box of documents and say, I hereby declassify these.
These are no longer classified.
So the idea that that person who has the power to classify and declassify anything could be prosecuted because he took documents that had said classified at one point, even though he has the power to declassify them, to Mar-a-Lago, and without any malicious intent, didn't sell it, didn't disclose it to anybody.
That was a preposterous case to me, especially given that Washington runs on leaks of classified information.
You can pick up the New York Times or Washington Post every day and see authorized leaks of classified information based on a need to propagandize.
So my view of why Trump's prosecutions were invalid and a threat to democracy and why they were lawful was not a view that presidents can't be prosecuted.
My view was simply that all of those cases were dubious at best.
And it all went back to 2016, 2017, where Democrats were obsessed with putting Trump in prison.
They used to fantasize openly on TV every day about having Robert Mueller frog march Trump out of the White House in handcuffs and Trump Jr. and everyone, Steve Bannon, for what was a total hoax of colluding with Russia.
They were determined to put him in prison.
They didn't care how they went about that and they invented four cases that were extremely weak to me.
That is why I opposed his prosecution.
Just like over the weekend, there was this raid on John Bolton's house and a lot of.
people said, oh, this looks like retaliation.
John Bolton is a public critic of the Trump administration.
This looks like retaliation.
Maybe.
Or maybe John Brennan really, John Bolton really did take highly sensitive classified documents and leak it in order to harm the Trump administration.
I don't know.
I want to see the facts.
I'm open to the idea that this is political retaliation, like they tried to put Trump in prison.
or that it's just intimidation to other people who might criticize Trump, that the FBI could show up at your house and take your things.
But I'm also open to the idea that maybe John Bolton really did break the law in his treatment of classified documents, and that will be what determines my view of that case, not whether John Bolton himself is so high and important that he should never be prosecuted.
I think you have time for one more because it relates to something I want to do tomorrow.
So let me just quickly clarify this.
This is from MathG, who says this.
Let me preface the question by saying I have no sympathy for Barry Weiss or anyone who defends Israel at this point.
However, in today's show, at some point you said one thing that I found alarming.
The first thing is when you suggested that her shameless defense of Israel and denialism could amount to crime.
I find this to be quite surprising given your usually consistent defense of free speech.
While I do think Barry Weiss is an immoral lying piece of trash.
I think we can all agree on that.
I always find it alarming when people start suggesting that other people's political discourse should be treated as a crime.
What am I missing here that I still think this falls well within free speech, but that even you now seem to have crossed the threshold of what you can tolerate as protected speech?
All right, great question.
We're going to cover this more tomorrow, actually, because Barry Weiss wrote an editorial on this.
I actually posted a tweet over the weekend where there was yet another article.
maligning the idea that there's famine in Gaza, which disgusts me to my very core, the attempt to deny that and call it into question given the abundance of evidence.
The Israeli newspaper Heritz, in fact, just did a virtual tour of the clinics and hospitals in Gaza.
They can't enter Gaza, but they did video calls with Western doctors and nurses, with aid and care workers and hospitals, and they filmed and photographed the numerous children on the brink of death from starvation or obviously very malnourished, dozens of them.
And old people as well, and they published photos of them because people keep saying, oh, there's no such thing.
They don't exist.
And they read this huge article saying, pervasive starvation all over Gaza, and they documented it with interviews and documents and photographs and then there's Barry Weiss nowhere near Gaza shoving her mouth full of food with those people in the free press saying anyway I think this person probably had a this child probably had some other disease that contributed to the starvation or oh that one got shot in the head by the IDF a few months ago so that doesn't count and I will admit being a little
emotional about what's being done in Gaza I think I'm pretty open about that fact.
I try to make sure that it doesn't permit me to depart from what I consider to be journalistic standards of accuracy.
But I don't pretend to be cold and neutral about it.
I think it's genocide.
I think it's unbelievable sadism.
And so watching Barry Weiss do what she's been doing for the last week, obviously in service of this foreign government for which she's really a foreign agent, did cause me to speak a little bit in anger.
And I at one point suggested that what she's doing is amounting to such genocide denialism and atrocity denialism that she could be tried at The Hague or the free press could.
And there is precedent for that, not just the Nürnberg trials and what happened after World War II, but that's the most famous example.
where Julius Stryker, who was the publisher of the deeply anti-Semitic newspaper Dear Strumer, was put on trial in the Nuremberg trials as a anti-Semitic propagandist who incited so much hatred of Jews and did so in coordination with and as part of the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews that he was found guilty of war crimes and executed, even though in theory he was nothing more than a newspaper publisher.
And there are other cases, I think in Rwanda, and other cases as well, where propagandists for what were found to be war crimes, just propagandists, were put on trial.
So by saying Barry Weiss could be, and the free press should be tried at The Hague, I was using hyperbole, probably speaking.
from emotion.
My strong belief is that at the end of the day, my absolute belief in free speech and free press would cause me to oppose that, no matter how much contempt I have for Barry Weiss.
And when I tweeted it this weekend and people said, what do you mean?
You think journalists should be put at the Hague if they deny war crimes?
You've even defended Nazi Holocaust denialists before, which I have.
No, I immediately said, look, you're right.
That's a very valid critique.
I was speaking more out of anger and disgust than reason.
Of course, I see the First Amendment, free speech, and free press values there and I'm sure at the end of the day I would defend those.
So it's a good question.
I admit I was speaking just probably, I was speaking hyperbolically and maybe even a little angrily, which is why it's not a good thing to do, to let yourself be driven by anger, but I'm human.
So I don't think Berry Wise should be tried at The Hague, although I do think if you look at the precedents that we accept, including Nuremberg trials, you can get to the point where you can start making that case, even though I've always been uncomfortable, even with Julius Stryker and that whole theory that because he was a Nazi propagandist, he became part of the war crimes and part of the regime.
I've always been uncomfortable with that as well.
So if I'm uncomfortable with Julia Stryker being executed at Nuremberg, my strong guess is I would be uncomfortable with Barry Weiss and the free press as well.
I was just trying to express what I really do think is the view that they are actively and consciously and deliberately engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Israeli government, which is committing a genocide, and that crime is genocide denialism.
And I was simply saying under precedent, she's getting to the point where you could treat her that way, but yes, reason would definitely prevail, and I would probably vocally defend Barry Weiss as much as I would choke on my words as I did it, but I'm glad you asked that question.
We're going to definitely address her editorial tomorrow where she claims that she's just doing journalism and people criticizing her.
She name checked me and saw Granjeti and Crystal Ball and Ryan Grimm and Ben Rhodes, the former Obama national security advisor who has been very outspoken to his credit on Israel's war in Gaza.
So I'm going to address that and that was part of what I was going to address so I'm glad you did since she mentions in passing, O'Glenn Greenwald, who claims he's a free speech absolutist, wants us...
There were other similar comments from the people I just mentioned along those lines, but ultimately my view is, I think, pretty clear in terms of how I would apply it even to Barry Weiss and the free press for exactly the reason we talked about in the Trump flag-burning segment that as hard as it is, you have to force yourself to defend the right to express even the ideas that you find most despicable.
That's for me right now, Barry Weiss and the free press.
Human beings struggle with it.
That's why you need a First Amendment and why you have to not just say you agree with it in words, but really work to ensure that you defend it even in those cases where it's hardest.
All right.
So we got through a couple of questions.
I will continue throughout the week to try and do that and then on Friday it will be solely a Q ⁇ A session where we'll get through as many of your questions as you can.
Please keep submitting them, local members, as things happen, as we cover things throughout the week and we'll definitely include those in the list.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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