All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 8, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:23
Defamation, Deplatforming and Deep State Whistleblowing: Robert Barnes and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain here with Robert Barnes, caped superhero extraordinaire of the legal system, who has put together a website and an approach that I think it's fair to say is designed to help with some of the challenges of, you know, if you're not on the left or if you criticize the left and you've been in the public eye for more than 8 to 12 minutes at a time, then the tsunami of lies and falsehoods and slander and libel just comes pouring at you like some hell-sense tsunami.
And then you say, oh, well, I'm sure this can be easily corrected, given that lying about people and harming their reputation seems to be not good in the legal system.
And then you run, you know, straight into these problems of having to prove actual malice and all these other kinds of things, especially if you're a public figure, of course.
So the recourse in America, I think, tips a little bit more towards the First Amendment rather than reputational protection.
But you're, I think, taking an approach that is very interesting.
So I wonder if you could get us up to speed on your lawsuits and the approach that you're taking.
Absolutely. So in the American legal system, there are certain parts of our legal system where people do not have equal access.
And what that does is that helps protect big institutions.
So you look at defamation, you look at deplatforming, You look at deep state whistleblowing.
In those contexts, there's no real way for ordinary people to have access to the legal system that is in any way affordable, given the unique aspects of America's legal system that include anti-slap law protection, various forms of special protection for big media, in the defamation context, Section 230 immunity, in the deplatforming context, all of those, the various administrative rules that apply to deep state whistleblowing context.
So the goal was we needed a legal institution that was sort of the counterpart to the Southern Poverty Law Center, sort of the antidote to the Southern Poverty Law Center, sort of the equivalent of the ACLU, but the equivalent of it for all people, not just people on the left, not just causes on the left, not just cause celebs on the left, which unfortunately is what the ACLU has mostly done these days.
We needed something like that for people on the political right, for libertarians, for independent people, for people who aren't part of the cultural cache of the left.
The second thing the left does well is because virtue signaling matters so much to Donors and contributors on the left, they're willing to fund, crowdfund liberal causes in ways that generally conservatives just haven't.
Most conservatives want some value for what they give their money for.
Well, that makes it difficult to be able to crowdfund for lawsuits where the only value is knowing that the lawsuit's going to move forward.
So the goal was to create a legal organization that serves the needs and meets the interests of people all across the political spectrum to fight the three Ds, deplatforming, defamation, deep state whistleblowing.
To equalize and democratize access for all of those people.
So we created Free America Law Center, which people can look up, find out more online about at FreeAmericaLawCenter.com.
And the goal was to not make it as donor-driven or as contributor-driven, but to make it membership-driven.
So to make it subscription-driven.
So people sign up for a monthly subscription at a very affordable, accessible rate, $17.76 a month to recognize our great American patriotic history.
And to help create an organization that can last.
I've aligned the lawyers who are willing to either discount or donate their time to help make this organization viable.
And the best way to make it viable is that members, that we have the broadest group of people, join on a monthly basis.
And that way they can cover the court costs.
They can cover the risk of anti-slap fees.
They can cover various things that are aligned with court costs, which include transcript fees, service fees, summons fees.
As you research, it's very expensive just to file a lawsuit It's even more expensive to maintain it, not even including the cost of a lawyer.
And in the context of defamation, deplatforming, and deep state whistleblowing, none of the contingency fee or other models really work for protecting ordinary people in this country.
And what's happening is big tech and big media are colluding in ways to suppress and censor dissident voices using their superior lawfare and their superior legal acumen and talent on their side of the aisle because of their ceaseless bench and endless retainers.
To make the legal system a weapon.
And they're weaponizing the law against free speech and against independent members of the right.
And so the way they're doing it is, ironically, in the name of protecting free speech, they're actually violating free speech by defaming and deplatforming people who have different independent views from the establishment mainstream.
So the goal of Free America Law Center is to monetize the independent political movement on the right.
But to go even further, we're providing actual direct benefits to people.
So people that are monthly subscribers get to vote.
On what kind of cases get pursued.
They also get weekly podcasts where only members get to ask questions of lawyers and legal experts to answer those in Q&A podcasts.
They get weekly books that are going to be a Bill of Rights bookly series.
They'll be issued at least monthly to people that are self-educated or self-armored in the law, can better protect their own rights and defend their rights.
So we're giving them tangible value that's personal to them.
Well, at the same time, trying to create a law center that can equalize and democratize access to the law against big media and big tech.
Well, those aspects, I think, are really powerful because I think a lot of people, at least I get messages like this all the time, I'm sure you do, a lot of people feel that they don't want to engage in public debates for fear of the giant, sore-on eye of the mainstream media landing on them,
them, as we saw from the smoking remnants of the reputation of the Covington kids, that the laser eye of the media is going to land upon them and is going to shred their lives, that they're going to get their employers are going to get harassed, they're going to get chased off the public square, they may even get doxxed, and there's this genuine they may even get doxxed, and there's this genuine terror.
And, you know, it's hard to say that people are really wrong about that, because the media just seems out of control in their reputational attack.
And, you know, the left used to be like, well, you know, the David versus Goliath stuff will always side with David, because Goliath has so much power.
But now you see the left really siding with the giant corporations intact, with the giant corporations in media against the little guys who don't seem to have any particular capacity to push back against these lies.
Absolutely.
I see it as sort of a parallel pattern.
That what's happening in defamation and deplatforming is also happening with Antifa, which is sort of a violent, street-violent mechanism of trying to enforce orthodoxy in speech, limit what people can say, limit, scare people into self-censorship.
I mean, the most effective form of censorship is self-censorship.
And so if you can get people afraid of, man, if I say that, I might get sued, I might lose my job.
I mean, there was a guy representing the Free America Law Center who was going to support that was just working at a gas station.
And he got fired just because he asserted political beliefs related to Trump.
Because some other customer created a storm about it.
So they're using their mechanism of doxing, deplatforming, defamation, and the fact they have superior platforms and they have bigger benches of lawyers to be able to destroy people overnight.
And the goal isn't to destroy them.
The goal is, as you note, it's to get them to self-censor, to get them afraid to express themselves, to share their ideas, to talk with friends and family and other people about their ideas.
Because if you can get self-censorship, that's the most effective censorship of all by far.
Well, help me understand this aspect of American law, if you would.
So there are various sections of law which recognize that a wrong that is done can be judged against you in a court of law.
The motive may have something to do with it, but it's not the defining aspect.
So if you drunk drive and you hit someone's pet, well, you don't mean to.
So your intention, you know, you didn't mean to hurt someone, but it's still, you know, unintentional manslaughter.
You don't mean to, but you were careless and so on.
So when it comes to something like defamation, how did it get to the point where you had to prove actual malice if there was defamation against the public figure?
I find that very confusing because if that's the standard, then everyone who has actual malice just never records it and says it never happened, right?
I mean because they know that that's the standard.
So they're not going to write there and say, well, I know this is false, but I hate that guy.
And so because of that, you've got a standard which I think gives pretty much carte blanche to say whatever you want because they know that if you can't prove actual malice, which they're never going to record, you can't get far.
That's true. And I think what's interesting is what actual malice was supposed to mean in the legal system has evolved because of the poor phraseology that the Supreme Court engaged in.
So the actual legal basis is only supposed to be about whether or not you can prove someone knew what they were saying was false at the time.
And all actual malice is supposed to mean within the law is whether or not someone acted recklessly in knowing what they were saying was untrue.
And their actual motivation, their malevolence, their personal dislike is not something you're supposed to have to prove in defamation.
But because they unfortunately chose the terminology actual malice, a term that the New York Times lawyers were trying to push, many courts have misconstrued that with great frequency.
As to whether or not the person's motives were good.
So to give you an example of how this works in the reverse, in the Alex Jones cases in Sandy Hook, they allowed all this invasive discovery against Alex Jones on the grounds of not whether what he said he believed was true or not, but whether or not he had the right motives, when in fact that wasn't the relevant legal standard.
But it's because of this misappropriation of the phrase actual malice, they should really change it.
They should change it to say knowingly true or recklessly true in terms of their intentional standard, because that's technically what the Supreme Court intended the legal standard to be.
And it's effective at protecting against true—the idea also is also to protect ordinary people and dissident causes, not to be a license for big media to lie and libel people.
But unfortunately, that's how it's been construed and applied by courts.
Largely because the people fighting big media in the courts don't have the legal toolbox to meaningfully resist.
Often they're even pro se cases when they're up against the media, big media institutions or others or big tech institutions.
And that's why it became clear that we needed to have the same skill set of soldiers on the battlefield in order to make sure defamation and deplatforming were not being used as partisan ideological tools to silence and suppress independent dissident thought.
And that's what Free America Law Center is all about.
Well, I obviously have somewhat of a personal motive in supporting somebody or a group who's out there trying to balance things like the SPLC, which to me, you know, has become a completely ideologically driven institution that lists people like, you know, PragerU and me and other people who are just making arguments and doesn't list Antifa.
I mean, this is just crazy... And I think there is this general sense, you know the rule, right?
Any organization that's not specifically anti-left gets progressively more left over time as the activists get in to enact their collectivist, anti-free market, anti-freedom agenda.
And so I really like the idea, you know, the SPLC to me is beyond reforming, but having a counterweight to it I think is really important because it really is such a one-sided battle at the moment.
No doubt about it. I mean, it's amazing.
Like, the founder of the SBLC, Morris Dees, I'll give him credit, he was originally started off in a credit in a certain way.
He started off as a Klan lawyer in the 1960s, and then he figured out there was more money if he was suing the Klan.
It wasn't driven out of ideological predilection or anything else.
And I have personal, professional interaction with the SBLC in multiple contexts, but it's to just give one illustration.
I defended Wesley Snipes in a tax case that the government deliberately brought in a jury pool that they knew would have the most hostility to Wesley Snipes.
It was the community that had the highest per capita incidence of racial hatred incidents in the country.
And their national forest, they renamed their local, they put a statute to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan outside the courthouse.
They put it up in the 1950s and they even misspelled the guy's name because they thought it was the same as their local forest where a lot of things were happening.
The SPLC, which had previously recognized that this problem existed in this particular venue, went completely silent and mute.
Wouldn't say anything about what the government was doing because it was the government targeting someone that was considered a political dissident.
And so they were more than happy to allow the government to target, to use racial manipulation according to their own supposed standards to do so.
The Anti-Defamation League did exactly the same thing, even though they had previously identified this particular jury pool as problematic for cases involving African-American defendants.
So the SPLC has been fake for a long time.
It's not what they purport to be.
I have done all kinds of cases on civil rights across the board, representing people on the left, the right, the middle, everywhere in between, from Libertarians to Tea Party, from Green Party to Socialist Party, you name it, because I want people to have equal access to the ballot, equal access to the public square, equal access to public participation.
The SPLC has shown no such inclination.
They serve a select set of donors for political partisan causes that are meant to really be an amplifier of big media corruption in order to defame and destroy the reputation of anybody who just happens to voice an independent dissident view.
Ninety percent of the people they list on their so-called hate watch are not haters.
They're just different dissident views that are often within the political mainstream on the political right.
None of them are racist. It's extraordinary the number of people they were putting on there and the list they were putting on there.
I mean, at one point, they even considered putting Wesley Snipes on there.
That's how insane they are.
So we need a counterpart to it, but it needs to be organized.
And the best way to do that is to have it be a little d democracy, little d free market.
And that's why I built it so that Free America Law Center is not going to be...
Not going to be big donor driven.
Not going to be sugar daddy driven.
Not going to be billionaire driven.
Not going to be secret donor driven.
Not going to be a public charity that's organized and controlled by the IRS who can dictate what terms you do.
It's going to be little d democratic driven by having as many people join in support as possible so that we can keep this alive and make it sustainable against all the threats that people of independent political spirit and mind like yourself face on a daily basis in the modern world.
Because they can't win in the public square They're trying to silence your voice and other voices like yours from the public square.
Okay, so let's dive into – I'm still naive enough to have hope sometimes.
In particular, this $250 million suit from the Covington kids against a variety of people.
Now, that just got – it got pushed back.
It got dismissed.
And come on. I mean, you've got big, giant establishment calling these kids the most appalling names, setting them up as the most appalling people.
These are children.
They're not public figures.
They're just trying to not be harassed in the Lincoln Memorial.
How is it possible that it's so hard to make headway when you could say, well, early reporting was blah, blah, blah, but then the video came out and they could see that what they said was false.
Still, very few, if any, retractions, very few, if any, pulldowns, and of course, no apologies.
And so that to me is the definition of malice.
I mean, if you get the facts and don't correct what you've said about people, clearly you're driven by ideology and hatred.
I mean, to me, at least from the outside.
Oh, precisely. I think one of the things that we're doing is my theory about the Covington cases.
So I represent about a dozen Covington families.
Eight of them have already brought suit.
Several more are going to bring suit.
And I only wanted to target individuals rather than institutions.
And the reason for that was twofold.
One is Kentucky law has a lot of peculiar legal protections for media institutions.
So you have to prove all kinds of special things against an institution that you don't have to prove against an individual.
But the second part is my view is all of the lies and libel that are taking place.
Ultimately, start with an individual.
Institutions can't speak except through an individual.
And my view is that people have been trapped and suckered into suing institutions, knowing that when those institutions know they have a very deep bench, they have strong favoritism within the judiciary, just a natural proclivity of people.
Judges don't want to take easy legal shots at institutions that could in turn put them on the front pages tomorrow.
Well, and institutions don't hurt the way that individuals do, because you sue an institution, it just comes off the bottom line.
It doesn't come out of anybody's savings.
Exactly.
They just shrug it off their shoulders.
And what I found in prior suits when I represented Cassandra Fairbanks trying to establish that calling someone a racist in a certain way could, in fact, be sued, which the assumption was that that couldn't happen, and we were able to establish that precedent.
Weren't able to get past actual malice, but establish the other precedent.
But I noticed that just by suing an individual, that the media paid a lot more attention.
Because the media didn't really care about the big institutions, because the big institutions have huge insurance policies, big lawyers.
They just shrug their shoulders, as you know.
It's not going to impact them one way or the other.
By contrast, individuals can lose their life savings.
Individuals can have their permanent reputations crushed.
So when you expose individuals for what they're doing, that's when all the other individuals in the press who ultimately control the keys We're good to go.
Reza Aslan, who's out promoting more violence today on social media, sued him individually because we want people to feel individual responsibility and accountability so that they have to face the consequence and cannot hide behind the big insurance policies and the big legal benches of their big institutions.
They have to face a jury personally with their own financial well-being on the line.
Well, that's interesting, of course, because then the question arises, are they acting on social media as representatives of their institutions or as individuals?
Exactly. And what's interesting is, so far the institutions, some have said they'll defend, like the New York Times says they'll defend Maggie Haberman, but I happen to know that their insurance policy will allow them to not pay for Maggie Haberman.
So if they want to, at any time they can decide not to indemnify her, they can decide not to pay for any verdict or judgment.
Because she made these statements in her personal, individual capacity on her social media pages, I'm sorry to interrupt, but just before the thought leaves my brain as they want to do.
But it doesn't go through any vetting process.
It doesn't go through an editorial board.
It doesn't go through proof checkers.
It doesn't go through any of that stuff.
And so I don't see how the organization, if you're going direct to the web without going through the organization, I don't see how the organization would be implicated.
Exactly. And in my view, if the organization defends them, they're really making just sort of a contribution to them, which will have certain tax consequences.
But on top of that, the individual will know that the institution doesn't have to defend them, and a push comes to shove, won't defend them.
And so I think that's the key, and that even if the institution does defend them, they have to defend themselves individually in the trial proceedings.
They have to take the stand themselves.
They have to be deposed themselves.
They have to be subject to personal discovery.
And I think that's what really educates and empowers the legal system for ordinary people to take remedy when it's big media doing the lying and the libeling.
And I think that's what will work.
I think, like, they just even asked Senator Warren, who didn't know yet about the suit at the time that they asked her about it, and you can tell by the reaction on her face there was a degree of shock and surprise, in the sense that she didn't think she could get sued personally.
She thought she was politically immune under the Speech and Immunities Clause, When talking about the Covington kids was not part of her official duties as a United States senator.
So she can be sued.
So you see the reaction even in powerful people like that.
When they're personally named, they pay attention in ways they wouldn't pay attention otherwise.
And at a minimum, these lawsuits will discourage individual members of the media from trying to defame and deplatform people in the future, even if the verdict isn't a big verdict.
But I think ultimately they're going to face a Kentucky jury, and I think a Kentucky jury in Covington, Kentucky is not going to take well to the ways they try to destroy the lives of these little innocent kids.
So let's talk a little bit about the platform versus the publisher distinction, which you can get the history far better than I can, but I think a lot of people are still somewhat in the woods regarding how powerful a set of protections the media giants have, the tech giants in particular have.
Exactly. So way back in the mid-1990s, there was fear that America would have a technological disadvantage in the big tech competition market.
In the new technology market, if they could be held liable for everything ever published on their new platforms.
So Twitter's concerned, Facebook's concerned, YouTube, Google, all of them were concerned that there was no way they could financially manage if they had to be responsible for everything everybody ever said on their platforms.
And so their pitch was, hey, we're just a platform.
We're like the convention center, where different people hold events from all different walks of life.
We shouldn't be held responsible for whatever a speaker says on that platform.
Yeah, like if somebody drunk drives, you don't sue the road company.
You don't sue, right? It's just, hey man, don't sue the car company, right?
Exactly. It was just the digital version of, like the old public square where they still have those in London, where you actually have a little physical platform that you step up onto and speak within that free speech zone.
What they were saying is, hey, we're just like the builder who built that little wooden platform.
We're not responsible for the speaker.
And that was a very effective and persuasive presentation.
So they got Congress to pass a law that became known as Section 230.
And it was basically said that platforms on big tech will be immune from any kind of liability.
For anything anybody says on their platforms.
But that is only because they're not exercising editorial control.
And there's a difference between Facebook and the Rolling Stone magazine, right?
Rolling Stone magazine got sued because they were exercising editorial control and therefore are responsible for what comes out of the magazine.
Whereas Facebook is saying, hey, you know, people just post stuff.
We can't possibly review everything.
And so you can't get mad at us.
Exactly. They're saying they were a platform, not a publisher.
And that meant they wouldn't have the privileges of a publisher, because a publisher has the privilege to censor what voices get heard.
The publisher has the privilege to decide which voices to amplify.
And so, for example, in the Google context, they can use their algorithms, and people believe their algorithms will produce an honest, accurate reaction.
So if I search, say, Alex Jones, I'll bring in the other sites that other people are searching for when they find Alex Jones.
What Google's pitch was, don't worry, we'll never manipulate our algorithm to create a false impression about an individual.
But if people today go to Google and then compare it to, say, DuckDuckGo or Bing and search Alex Jones, on Bing or DuckDuckGo, Alex Jones' websites and networks will come up.
Infowars.com will come up four different times in four different contexts.
By contrast, if you search Alex Jones on Google, Infowars doesn't even appear on the whole first page.
Instead, just a bunch of hit pieces.
The Huffington Post is listed.
The Independent out of the UK is listed.
CNN is listed. The most negative news stories are listed.
So they're manipulating their algorithm to create a false impression about an individual that deprives people of access to what they're actually searching for.
That's the privileges a publisher could do.
A publisher could do that in where they rank headlines, what headlines they choose to run, what stories they choose to highlight, what editorials they allow to be written about, what quotes they put in their paper.
But publishers were also always liable and responsible whenever they lied about someone, such as defamation, whenever they invaded somebody's privacy by putting their name in a false light or by disclosing something that might be true but that should have been private about their private lives.
They can be sued for consumer fraud if they mislead people into buying their newspaper or their TV station.
They can be sued under equitable theories of relief, such as unjust enrichment, by getting people under the premise they were going to do one thing and then they did something else.
What's happened is big tech misused and abused Section 230 immunity to claim they were not only immune from what other people said on their platforms, but that they could now exercise First Amendment freedoms as if they themselves are an editorial publisher.
And they could censor, they could suppress, they could manipulate, they could meddle.
They could meddle in elections.
They could meddle in the economy.
They could favor certain businesses over other businesses, depending on whether or not they were giving kickbacks, such as what Yelp was accused of doing.
So all of these claims, they also said they were immune from consumer fraud claims, unjust enrichment claims, breach of contract claims.
They said that Section 230 immunized them across the board, that it was Congress giving them a green light to do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted, however they wanted, simply because they were a big tech platform.
And that's where Section 230 got badly abused, but the courts misconstrued what Congress meant.
They saw Congress as saying, hey, protect this industry because we want them to succeed, not make sure they, as long as they're acting as a platform, they get treated as a platform, but not if they start acting like a publisher, that they get to have all the privileges of a publisher and have none of the burdens or obligations of a publisher.
So that's where the legislation meant to modify it, being brought by Senator Hawley, being brought by members of Congress is critical and essential.
And it's still possible in our court system if we bring the right creative theories to force the court system to deal with this honestly.
What big tech has got away with is they know that the great legal minds are in their pocket.
They've been hiring them, employing them.
They've been hiring university people, putting funds into law schools, buying off big law firms across the country to make it almost impossible and making litigation very expensive to make it almost impossible for the ordinary person to fight back with smart, skilled lawyers.
And that's part of where Free America Law Center is trying to bridge that gap between the need for legal representation of skill and consequence against big tech and its current lack of availability in the legal marketplace.
Yes, but you see, Robert, what you don't understand, of course, is that power corrupts unless there are computers involved.
If there are computers involved, it's like a massive purity shield against any corruption of power.
I mean the amount of power that tech companies have is...
It really is unprecedented outside, I would say, perhaps of governments in the midst of a war.
I mean, the amount of influence, because it's soft power.
You know, someone breaks into your house, it's like, oh no, something's going on.
But this kind of soft, you know, massaging towards particular perspectives, and you're not banning people, but it's really hard to find any positive information about them and so on.
I mean, it really is a very soft and therefore, in many ways, the most dangerous kind of power does have the power to sway elections and does have the power to make or break reputations and does make people feel very nervous against going against the tropes that are in the big tech companies.
And a lot of the big tech companies do seem to be pro-Democrat.
They were pro-Hillary a lot of times.
We saw these weepy videos and so on.
And the idea that nobody's ever going to push that giant...
Hidden button that shifts public perceptions 90 degrees, 180 degrees sometimes.
The idea that people are going to resist that temptation in the absence of any negative consequences to me is worse than a pipe dream.
No doubt. It reminds me that the subtlety of it reminds me of sort of the inquisitorial state during the dark ages.
It also reminds me of what I studied when I was a scholarship student at Yale, which was studying cultural phenomenon in the 60s and 70s.
Where particular groups tended to be demonized within the popular media.
And back then the targets was interesting was you had both African Americans and poor whites from certain parts of the country tend to be portrayed disproportionately in dangerous and frightening ways.
And what the theory that I came up with that seemed to be an overlap is that the big cultural institutions tended to try to demonize those communities and constituencies that had a counter narrative to whatever the establishment narrative of the day was.
And so if you came from a community that reflected that, that community tended to be demonized in the popular cultural representation.
In the last 15 years, that has shifted heavily towards white men in general, but also as religious people.
There's a disproportionate targeting, even like a show like Big Little Lies on HBO would represent this bad maternal character as being a religious figure.
Well, sorry, let's be specific here.
By religious, you mean Christian?
Exactly. Okay, just because, you know, there are other religions out there that, despite having some negative beliefs in general, are almost universally portrayed with rapturous positivity, like somebody's either a cult member or a groupie.
So let's just be real specific that it's the anti-Christian, which, you know, the left has had for many, many decades.
Oh, exactly. And so, like, when they were anti-institutional church, there were people of free mind and free thought that agreed with some of their criticisms.
That aspects of the church can be abused when institutionalized power takes place.
But they've gone far past that.
Now they're just attacking people for belief structure, trying to demonize any affiliation or association.
It was really a sub-motivation taking place in the Covington case.
The message was, what are these institutions that are successful at resisting sort of the elite cultural liberal institutions of entertainment and education that are almost monopolized by the identitarian left?
Well, that is places like religious schools and Catholic schools.
They're one of the last repositories of independent education, which will challenge the establishment narrative in a wide range of cultural contexts.
So by trying to demonize Catholic schools, by trying to scare parents, and saying, man, if your kid goes to a Catholic school, someday maybe the New York Times will ruin your life just because he really goes to a Catholic school.
That was really, in fact, there were writers for the New York Times who were planning on follow-up hit pieces Against Catholic schools across the country.
And this isn't to say all Catholic schools are perfect.
I went to an evangelical religious school growing up as a kid.
It had its problems. I was one of the protesters against aspects of what the school did.
But as a whole, those schools were better than public institutions.
And not only just basic education, but giving independent information, independent mechanisms and methods of thought.
My brother, who went through that experience, went to Bob Jones.
He ended up leading in protest because of some of its bad habits.
Now he's a philosophy professor in upstate New York.
But because of his life experience, he has a unique perspective that would not have been afforded to him if he had been crammed through the public educational system.
So that's where all of this is part of a form of mind and thought control.
That if you can prevent certain ideas from being thought of or spoken or heard, and most importantly, a lot of what you do, if you can prevent people from having the methods of independent thought, the methodological approach to being able to develop thought independent of some established narrative, whatever that established narrative may be.
Then you have the capacity to exit Plato's cave and see the world as it is.
And that's what they don't want to have happen.
They want you to sit there in the cave, looking at the pretty shadows on the wall, seeing it as reality.
And if you hear something dissonant, to be afraid of that person.
That's what the defamation campaign come in, along with the deplatforming campaign.
To sort of associate this person with a bad, scary label.
To say, I better not listen to what they say because they're frightening or they're attached or associated with something frightening.
I've always said whenever I see somebody being attacked with some label for their ideas, I'm immediately more curious about their ideas because to me it's the quality and the content of their ideas that matter, not the individual voicing the ideas.
Either the ideas are good or they're not.
That doesn't matter who it is that happens to be expressing them.
So if they're saying something is factually true, then maybe their credibility comes into play.
But what saying something is conceptually true is just whether the concept is a good concept or not.
And so it's all part of this broader picture Where the cultural institutions are trying to completely dominate thought, and these institutions of big technology were supposed to explode the freedom of independent thought.
I mean, Jack Dorsey for Twitter said Twitter would be the free speech wing of the free speech party.
Well, that's the biggest lie that anybody's told in the last 20 years, because they've become one of the key means of suppression and censorship.
For example, if anybody goes to Twitter and tries to look up me, Barnes Law, they won't be able to find me unless they're already following me.
I've disappeared from the searches of Twitter.
So I guess apparently they took offense to me suing them a couple of times.
But it's the same process of trying to control thought, trying to suppress thought.
They're trying to recreate the Inquisition, but do so very much in a sort of communist status model, but trying to use private institutions to accomplish it so that they're outside the scope of legal remedy that a public or state institution would be subject to.
Well, there's a lot in what you said.
I just really want to touch on the anti-Christian stuff because I think it was really hard for me to get a clear map of American politics until I really understood the anti-Christian side of things.
So, for instance, there was a lot of critiques of the Catholic Church for the...
Priestly pedophilia scandals and so on.
And right, good. You know, let's get those guys away from kids.
When I point out to people who bring this topic up, it's like, yeah, you know, that's been attacked and dealt with and a lot of that's been really focused on.
It's been all great.
But, you know, children are hundreds of times more likely to be sexually assaulted in government schools than they are in a Catholic church.
People like Short Circuit.
So it's not that this desperate desire to protect children.
It's this desperate desire to attack Christianity.
Why does the elites, why do they hate the South so much?
Why is there all of this deliverance, you're kind of redneck cliches about the South?
Because the South is pretty Christian.
Why is it that the coastal elites that generally are leftists or atheists or at least not Christians...
Why do they hate flyover countries so much?
Because that's where the churches are.
And when you sort of see this seething resentment towards Christianity, and of course Christianity historically has stood between the leftist collectivists and their thirst for state power.
I mean that's straight out of the French Revolution.
First thing they did was kill the priests, kill the nuns, rape and kill the nuns and so on.
So those who seek power have a great deal of issue, and the church and the cross and Christianity stands in the way of their thirst for power, which is to me, as Ann Coulter has characterized, is pretty damn demonic, and it's kind of hard to argue against that.
And so once people process just how much hostility there is, not just towards Christians, but to those with an anti-statist mentality, there's Christians, libertarians, and so on, Absolutely.
I mean, I grew up in evangelical cultural tradition, had my problems with aspects of the institutional church, but believed that the fundamental theology behind it was a very humanitarian theology.
Particularly if you compare it to aspects of Islam and other major religious systems that have been politicized of late in the world.
So you don't have certain things in Christian tradition that you do, unfortunately, have in aspects of the Islamic tradition.
But what's fascinating is the left has, I tell people, look at the 1930s communist model.
They're trying to replicate that model, which is get involved, like control human relations and advertising departments as part of your popular front.
Infiltrate those institutions to help reshape people's thought prospects.
And as you look at all of that, they've mostly been wildly successful, the left has, at taking over almost every form of education that exists in the United States, almost other than religious parochial schools, taking control over almost all of TV and Hollywood and major books and almost all of the news industry, With the sole exception really being the church as the last repository of traditional beliefs against their statist and sort of revolutionary mindset.
And it's a revolutionary mindset that's a dangerous mindset.
It's one that attacks tradition, attacks ideas simply because of their associations with either the past or with religious traditions, particularly Christian religious traditions, because they see them as their biggest obstacle to thought control.
The left really thinks if we could get rid of churches like the communists were able to do in the 1930s in places like Russia, though they weren't able to fully succeed, but partially succeed, that that's the best way to be able to have complete thought control over how people think and perceive the world.
And that's why they have always seen religious institutions as an obstacle.
And one of the best examples of that is what you just pointed out.
There are two areas where you have major pedophilia scandals.
One was aspects of the Catholic Church, but the other was disproportionately Hollywood.
But only one has been extensively investigated.
Only one has been extensively covered.
Only one has been extensively prosecuted, in the legal arena particularly, civil suits and criminal cases.
It's been the church has been the focus.
And it's definitely the case their motivation wasn't protection of children, because if it was, they would be obsessed with why Dincor, a private defense contractor, keeps showing up with scandals of human trafficking in various war zones where they get contracts, as displayed well in the movie The Whistleblower, and has occurred in other places around the world.
They would be equally concerned with Hollywood, particularly Hollywood, because they have more access and more ability to abuse children in many respects than the Catholic Church or other institutions do today.
And yet they don't.
In fact, they suppress news about that, censor news about that, repress public disclosure about that, seal court records about that, don't bring indictments, don't bring civil suits concerning it wherever, whenever, however they can.
Try to reinstate People like the director, James Gunn, who got put back in even though he made comedic jokes that normally would have been totally inappropriate if he'd, say, been a Catholic priest.
So the amazing dynamic of the inconsistency and hypocrisy and duplicity revealed that their true agenda was not the protection of children.
And I've been doing pro bono work for victims of domestic violence and other forms of abuse going on 20 years.
So I've seen it extensively, understand which institutions and psychologies are at foot.
Know who is more likely to be vulnerable and susceptible, what institutions pose a greater threat and risk, and disproportionately Hollywood acting, young fashion industry, those were filled with people who tried to target those individuals, because it's where pedophiles go, they go where they believe they can have power over children.
Unfortunately, foster homes and orphanages run through the state system can be disproportionately targeted by these kind of sick actors, yet too frequently they are not meaningfully prosecuted and investigated, whereas the Catholic Church was.
It's because their goal was, how can we demonize the church, not how we can protect children?
And they're doing the same thing using their superior big media and big tech platforms, using that power of those platforms to target certain people really solely because of their belief systems, to suppress and censor speech, thought, and ideas, and mostly not to prevent me or you from talking, as preventing the audience from hearing this.
That's what free speech is really all about.
It's protecting the audience's rights and respecting the audience's rational capacity to make good decisions and good judgments.
Their moral capacity to make good decisions and good judgments.
That's what the left doesn't trust.
It doesn't trust the ordinary person, the ordinary human being's ability of thought and conscience to process information to make good and wise decisions.
That's why they have to suppress and censor speech by any means possible.
And that's why we need a legal means to start to counteract it and fight back.
Well, listen, man. If I've got to go up against Mike Tyson in his prime, I'm going to spike his drink.
You know, I'm not going up against those fists of fury without him being kind of groggy.
So, of course, you know, if you can't answer the argument, you try to silence the debater.
Okay, so let's close on this if we can.
You know, the big poster boy for banding is, of course, Alex Jones.
We just passed, what are people calling it, the bandiversary, like we just passed the year that he was pretty much deplatformed from everything except corporeal existence.
And so where do things stand with regards to Alex Jones and the work that you're doing with him?
So, yeah, no question.
Alex Jones is the typical... Hey, your voice just got raspy when we started talking about Alex Jones.
Just pointed that out.
Okay, go ahead. I've been around him so much.
You're talking about probably the most important independent member of the press over the last 20 years.
Probably has the only democratized press.
Like, you know, he's entirely backed by his own supporters.
He's not backed by big corporate advertisers.
He's not backed by big billionaire donors.
He's totally...
He's been suppressed and censored by every means possible and practicable.
He's the most banned individual in the world.
On Facebook or Instagram, you cannot even reference his name unless you're attacking it or being derogatory.
There's been no example historically of this degree of censorship and suppression outside of communist states for what they're doing to one man, Alex Jones.
And what's interesting is Jones is sort of the tip of the spear for all of it.
So he's the target for their deplatforming.
And their goal is not to stop with Alex Jones.
A lot of people in what I call sort of the The mainstream establishment right was pretending that this would only happen to Alex Jones and so they could ignore it and go along with it because by golly, it would never happen to them.
And then they're all shocked when it starts happening to them and when they're using the exact example of what they got away with with Jones to go after them.
But they're doing it in parallel, deplatforming and defamation, and doing it both ways.
They're not only when they deplatformed him, they deprived him of his ability to fight back in the court of public opinion on those public platforms.
So what did they do? They started lying about him in the craziest ways.
They said that he had child porn.
Completely false. Said he sent child porn to people's families.
Totally false. Said he sent child porn to lawyers.
Totally false. All of it was totally false.
He had actually been the victim of somebody trying to plant it on his servers of people who hate him.
So here's a guy who's a victim of an assault, who has instead lied about throughout the entire world.
And this was confirmed by the FBI, by the way.
This is not just an opinion. The FBI confirmed that there were, if I remember rightly, correct me where I go astray, of course, but there were unopened emails in defunct or unchecked email accounts.
And if I understand it correctly, they were turned over as part of discovery.
But this was not as it was portrayed.
But as you point out, he can't really fight back because he's been silenced.
Exactly. So they're able to lie about him with impunity.
There are people that said he lost a lawsuit that had nothing to do with him.
There are people that said he published a book that had nothing to do with him.
There are people that said he had anti-Semitic statements that he never did.
He made a reference to a lawyer being a white Jew lawyer.
And they refer to that, they changed that to white Jew lawyer.
That had nothing to do with it.
The guy wasn't even Jewish. There was no anti-Semitism at all.
So every means of defamation he's been the victim of, but he can't defend himself because of the deplatforming.
And then on top of that, they've been suing him For defamation.
Many of the people that are suing him, he's never even talked about in his life.
And they're suing him because they're saying, you know, if you have anti-establishment, counter-establishment narrative about any big public event, and it turns out that anything you say in that is inaccurate, now whoever was a victim or related to a victim of that public trauma event can now sue you into oblivion and bankruptcy.
So they're creating these sort of crazy legal standards that have never applied before.
So he is the tip of the spear for lawfare as the victim and target of big media, big tech collusion to be able to completely suppress and censor him.
And the reason is because he is the most independent media voice out there.
People don't have to agree with him, but they always know I'm going to get an independent perspective when I listen to Alex Jones.
Not only that, I'm going to get a perspective I likely don't hear almost anywhere else.
I'm going to get information I don't hear from anywhere else.
And I, the audience, should have the power and the choice to decide whether I agree with it or don't.
Whether I like it or don't, or whether I research it or don't.
Years ago, a great professor, Christopher Last, University of Rochester, said the reason why we subject their ideas to people who disagree with us is that in the process of them challenging us, we'll go and research better and be more diligent in our arguments because we've been challenged and contested.
And that's what the safe space echo chamber culture It negates the mere methodological approach of philosophical knowledge that you've been about.
Probably the biggest threat you present is the method that you teach as important as the ideas you present.
Because it's that method the state and the left wants to suppress and censor because they know it's the key to controlling minds, thoughts, and behavior in the future.
So that's why I've been proud to be a part of trying to defend Alex Jones and the Court of Public Opinion.
We are going to be bringing legal actions of all kinds.
To assert his free speech and free press rights.
And his audience has been behind him.
But his cases will likely shape the future of free speech and free press in America.
Ultimately, some of them will end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
And that's why it's so important that he have the best representation, the best legal arguments made, the best offenses presented.
Because ultimately, we are Alex Jones.
Alex Jones is everyone.
Because that's how the law is going to treat us.
And that's how big tech and big media will try to treat us.
Now, I appreciate that perspective.
And can you tell my listeners and the people who are watching this, Robert, about your website?
You know, feel free to pitch away because, you know, it's important stuff and how they can get a hold of you, how they can support what it is that you're doing.
Sure. So I helped co-found Free America Law Center.
I'm donating all of my legal time, legal services, and actually donating some capital to make it happen.
The goal isn't any sort of funding mechanism for me.
It's to create a permanent organization that will pay for all the court costs, administrative fees, and other things so that ordinary people can have full, complete access to the legal system and legal remedy when they are the victims or subject to defamation, deplatforming, and also to protect deep state whistleblowers.
So Free America Law Center, which people can find at FreeAmericaLawCenter.com, it's based on a monthly subscription.
People get podcasts and digital books and a lot of information and self-education is part of it, but they also get to participate in and support the most important organization fighting for free speech, free press, and free thought in America.
And the goal is to build an institution that will last, be bigger and beyond me, and will last into the decades, supported by thousands and thousands of people that make real the constitutional rights we're all supposed to have by making sure they have access to the legal system in an affordable, equitable manner.
People can find out about Barnes Law at barneslawllp.com.
I do a wide range of cases and try to take as many pro bono cases as I practically can each year.
I'm doing the Covington case pro bono because it's important that those of us that have law degrees use those law degrees to help ordinary, everyday people defend themselves against big, powerful institutions when those institutions want to suppress and censor their rights and their remedies.
And that's what we're all about.
We're pleased to be part of it.
Well, thanks very much. I really appreciate your time.
It's clarified some things to me.
I'll, of course, be expecting a bill because you are a lawyer.
But thanks a lot, Robert. A great deal of pleasure to share.
▲
Export Selection