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May 25, 2023 - Lionel Nation
11:11
Lionel — Mr. Gray Area
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All right, my name is Lionel.
Lionel, one name like God.
That's not meant to be sacrilegious.
I actually had a cab driver one time ask me.
He says, your name is Lionel, right?
Lionel what does it?
Lionel, one name, you know, like...
Elvis, Cher, Liberace, a bad example.
And he said, oh, like God.
I said, well, there you go.
I'm a legal media analyst.
I'm a former prosecutor.
I'm a licensed trial attorney, licensed in the states of New York, New Jersey, Florida, the District of Columbia, the Supreme Court of the United States.
I've been a lawyer for about 40 years?
Well, something like that.
Yeah, about 40 years.
Yep.
No, strike that.
Yeah, 40 years.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
After 30, what's the point?
This is the gray area.
By the way, may I define gray area?
I think this says it so perfectly.
Gray area.
An ill-defined situation or field not readily conforming to a category or to an existing set of rules.
Well, that says it all.
Three areas I would like to discuss with you.
Number one, this idea, this gray area called abortion.
And a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, reproductive rights, whatever it is.
I know this is not exactly a fun topic, but it's a gray area.
First, individually, I happen to be pro-choice, whatever that means.
Specifically, I think people who say that they're pro-life, they don't really mean it because if you're pro-life, and if you believe that a fetus or a blastocyst or whatever particular iteration of humanity this is, if you believe this is a human, then consequently, you would believe that murdering a human is murder, right?
Terminating a life of an entity that's a human is murder.
So therefore, you wouldn't want women to go to prison who would...
Well, they don't mean that.
So consequently, they're not really pro-life.
They say they are, but they can't be pro-life if they don't advocate the incarceration and the punishment of a mother and a physician and a nurse.
So that's it.
Now, pro-choice?
I don't know what that means.
I guess that's the opposite of this.
So I'm sort of legislatively pro-choice.
However, Constitutionally, I'm absolutely not, because there is no right, there is nothing constitutional in the Constitution as to termination of a life, of an abortion.
Sorry, the Constitution mentions in the 5th and 14th Amendment three particular rights.
Actually, three guarantees.
You cannot be denied of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
Meaning, you can be denied life, Liberty and property.
So long as you are accorded some procedure which is, I guess, falls under constitutional muster.
Okay?
So this is ridiculous.
And the reason why Roe v.
Wade actually came about was because of this ridiculously stupid and specious doctrine that William O. Douglas came up with called privacy.
In this case in 1965 called Griswold v.
Connecticut.
This was a case that prohibited adults from possessing, using contraceptions, even married people.
Well, that was obviously stupid, so what is the answer?
You go to the Connecticut legislature and say, pass a law allowing it, or banning the prescription.
But no, they had to go to the Supreme Court, and this nonsense came up called...
Privacy.
So, the gray area, if you will, is this confused area between legislative right, which is what you have, constitutional right, which you don't have, and the confusion from people waddling about in the middle of these gray areas, confused.
I don't want to belabor the point, but the Constitution is not what you think it is.
It doesn't even mention how many justices are in the Supreme Court.
It doesn't even mention the Air Force.
The Constitution is not what you think.
So that's the gray area.
The gray area is the Constitution.
That's it.
Second gray area, hate crimes.
Hate crimes.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
Are you against hate crimes?
I hope so.
Isn't that redundant?
Isn't that tautological?
A hate crime?
I would think in a way.
Love crimes don't make any sense.
And what they are is, They are, again, a kind of a gray area because there are laws that prescribe particular behaviors.
There's a law that prescribes and prohibits, for example, battery, assault, the impervisible touching of another against their will.
There's another law That guarantees you the right to hate people.
You can hate Alsatians.
You can hate people from the Barbary Coast.
Anybody you want.
You can hate Democrats and Republicans and members of ISIS.
It doesn't matter.
Hate is protected.
So where's the gray area?
What happens when you accompany hate, which is a constitutionally protected idea, with something that's cognizable at law, namely a crime called battery?
And what you do is they're trying to up Aggravate the offense by making it a hate crime.
It's stupid.
You either charge the crime or you don't.
Your motivation, what led you to commit the crime, is irrelevant.
Now, if you want to take it up in sentencing, if you particularly offended or bothered or scared or terrified a victim, bring it up in sentencing.
Maybe it might be then that we can get into the motivation behind your particular behavior.
So that's a gray area.
The idea of trying to find compromise between hate and something which is already prohibited.
And the third, and this is the best.
This is the best.
Can you tell somebody on social media that they can and can't say something?
What about this First Amendment thing?
What's the gray area?
Well, one gray area may be the fact that the First Amendment applies to the government, where the government tells you you can't say something.
The government goes after your religion and your ability to publish your freedom of the press and expression.
Is Twitter the government?
Is Facebook or Instagram or whatever the government?
Section 230 of the CDA that provides statutory immunity to these folks.
Does that mean they're kind of acting as maybe proxies for the government?
Well, it's a gray area.
I don't really know.
I have a very simple way of handling this.
Very, very simple, where we can eliminate this gray area and make it a very black and white area.
And that's by declaring social media platforms utilities.
Let me ask you this question.
Let's assume you're on your phone.
And you're saying something about vaccines, or you're saying something about the 2020 election, or something which is considered verboten, or you're daring to espouse a conspiracy theory.
Another gray area.
What's a conspiracy theory?
Well, as George, as George, as Gore Vidal said, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a conspiracy analyst.
But I digress.
But let's say you're on the phone, and all of a sudden, there is this click, and your phone goes dead.
And you call back and say, excuse me.
I paid my bill.
Why did you terminate my call?
Oh, because of the subject matter.
What?
The subject matter.
You were espousing misinformation, disinformation, data information regarding face masks or viruses or whatever.
So we took it upon ourselves to stop this.
We don't want to be a part of disseminating and actually furthering the dissemination of false and misleading information.
Wait a minute.
Can they do that?
I don't think so.
Well, why can they cut you off on Facebook?
Or Twitter?
What's the difference?
What?
Tell me why.
I suggest, and I believe, that Twitter, for example, is a utility.
And under the civil rights legislation that prohibits somebody from being kept out, Of a public restaurant because of their race or their gender or their religious affiliation.
I think that should be extended to this forum, if you will.
This forum, this meeting place called social media.
Okay?
Let me explain something to you.
Everything is a gray area.
Let me leave you with this final one.
You're going to love this.
I'm going to give you the answer.
To every legal question that you can ever, ever, ever opine or present, this is guaranteed the perfect answer for everything.
Ready for this?
It goes something like this.
Somebody asks you, is this legal?
Is that illegal?
Can you sue?
Whatever.
The answer is, it depends.
And you're always right.
Why?
Because everything is a gray area.
How do you like that?
The name's Lionel.
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