All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:44
CNN vs Trump! Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux here with a good friend, Mike Cernovich, lawyer, author, blogger, all-around heavy hitter in the realm of media.
Cernovich.com. You can check out Guerrilla Mindset, which we'll put a link to below.
Thanks, Mike, for taking the time today.
Always a pleasure. We're doing audio only today, changing it up a little bit, so that'll be more fun.
People... Can just hear our voices, or my voice anyway.
Well, and of course, I get to choose the image for you, which is always delightful for me.
It gives me a lot of power. And so...
I wanted to talk to you in particular because there are some legal issues floating around that I don't really get.
And the two important ones at the moment, I think, we're going to deal with the CNN one first.
So I'm sure everybody knows this.
Project Veritas had a massive, major mind-bending scoop recently when they had an insider at CNN deliver to them, I guess, a huge amount of recordings from inside CNN. And...
Trump has, as a result, through his lawyers, threatened legal action against CNN. And can you just step me through?
Because, you know, the first place everyone would go to is defamation.
But that's not the approach that his lawyers are taking.
So what's the background and what are they trying to accomplish through this?
Right. So that's a great question.
What are they trying to accomplish?
Because there are multi-layers to it.
In my view – and we'll take a step back.
I'm sure everybody has seen Project Veritas, but for those who don't, the 30 to 60-second download is that Jeff Zucker has told his reporters that they can't do news, that everything has to be the anti-Trump show, and that real news doesn't matter.
Now, a lot of people would say that that's not what the video is saying.
I go, go watch the videos.
And I was, in a way – Left kind of, I felt kind of bad for a lot of people at CNN who you can tell want to do real news and real reporting and they're just not allowed to anymore.
It's just the anti-Trump show and that proved then the videos established that CNN is not truly a news network.
So the question is what legal remedies, if any, are available and that's what brought us to the The letter sent by Charles Harder, the Harder law firm, they're the ones who got that massive bankruptcy verdict against Gawker.
They got a major multi-million dollar verdict against the Daily Mail for defamation because Melania was called a prostitute by the Daily Mail falsely.
So these are real people.
But, if you read the letter closely, they're not threatening to sue for defamation.
They're threatening to sue under the Lanham Act.
So, I guess before I go on, does this make sense to you, Stefan?
So far, so good. So, take us through the Lanham Act.
Yeah, so the Lanham Act is a law that prohibits false advertising.
And false advertising, you do a whole...
You have a whole class on this in law school, actually.
False advertising is very tricky.
So, I'll give you an example.
If I tell you I have the best...
Extra virgin olive oil in the world, you could say, well, I'm going to sue you for false advertising because you don't have the best olive oil.
Your olive oil isn't even top ten.
Well, that's just mere puffery.
However, if I say that I'm selling you olive oil, but it's really canola oil, which this actually happened, then I've actually sold a product with an adulterated ingredient, and that's fraud.
That's false advertising.
So the Intuitively, we understand false advertising, but puffery is allowed.
I bring that up because rather than threaten to sue for defamation, they're saying, well, CNN is engaging in false advertising because they call themselves the most trusted name in news, and we now know that they're not very trusted at all, actually, and they're not even doing news, and therefore, they're making the argument harder is that it's false advertising.
The reason I bring up mere puffery is because most lawyers looking at this case, including CNN, are going to say, well, I mean, we haven't made a false advertising claim because we're merely hyping our brand.
So, for example, I used to say, hey, I'm the most feared man in media.
I mean, do I really believe that?
No, I think probably James O'Keefe or someone else is doing probably more journalism than I am.
But you're hyping yourself, right?
Your own hype man. And companies, including media companies like CNN, are allowed to hype themselves.
Thus, the legal issue is going to be, are CNN's claims false advertising that are defrauding advertisers and viewers out of their money, or is it mere puffery?
Right. Are you advertising on a news network or are you advertising on a political activist network?
What kind of audience are you reaching?
And of course, are the people tuning in expecting to see fair, balanced, objective news coverage or are they seeing anti-Trump activism?
And those are really, really fascinating questions because, of course, for those of us outside the mainstream media, it's pretty clear that they've not been an objective news organization, in my opinion, at least for quite some time.
But do people who simply watch CNN without reference to outside sources, do they believe they're getting objective news like the journalism school teachers like you talked about or that fellow talked about in Hoax, which everyone should, of course, check out at hoaxmovie.com about how you're supposed to put your personal biases aside.
There's a difference between the news section and the opinions page in the news section supposed to be neutral and objective.
And that, of course, is CNN's claim.
And are people bamboozled into thinking they're getting something objective when they're not?
Right.
And the Lanham Act is what you would call consumer protection law because the primary goal of it is to protect consumers.
California, for example, has a consumer protection law, quite a strong one, 17,200.
One of the tests that they would apply is two things.
One is, would a reasonable consumer have been deceived And then, more importantly, did you suffer an injury by being deceived?
Now, the Lanham Act can also be brought by competitors.
So, in a way, it's a law, and this is why if people give legal analysis on, they'll go, oh, Trump doesn't have a case.
I'll say, well, actually, not to law-splain to people, but the Lanham Act has been abused in ways.
So, for example, Stefan Molyneux says Mike Cermich claims that he is the The most edgiest political commentator.
How dare he? I'm going to sue him because Cernovich is injuring his viewers by lying to them.
Well, really what you're trying to do is you're trying to shut me down using lawfare.
But there are a lot of those cases that do go forward and do go through.
So the Lanham Act is a lot more nuanced and complex than most of these people in the media are saying it, and Harder is a quite clever lawyer.
That said, I would put the probabilities of the Trump campaign suing quite low.
I would say it's probably – they're not going to sue.
If they did sue, they would almost certainly lose.
But what that letter accomplished – and in a way, it proved – this is what I love about this in a very meta-cognitive way is that the letter proved that CNN isn't news because CNN refused to cover the Project Veritas story, and the media refused to cover it.
Until Trump threatened to sue, based on the videos, and now they've covered the letter.
So in very Trumpian fashion, the Trump campaign has forced people in the media to report on something that they wouldn't have otherwise reported on.
Well, and there is a huge amount of revelations in there, like in the Veritas videos.
And I'm paraphrasing here.
I can put the links to them below.
But there are a number of people in CNN saying, man, I wish they'd let us do news.
I wish they'd just let us do the news.
And, you know, other people saying, hey, that's not going to happen.
That's not going to happen.
Now, of course, if the news people are saying they're not letting us do news, but it claims to be a news organization, you know, that seems like quite a contradiction.
And even as you say, if the lawsuit can't go forward or doesn't go forward or gets thrown out or whatever, it's drawing more attention to the fact that although it says it's news, there are people on the inside saying we're just not allowed to do the news.
Right. And so I'll just give people, by the way, as you're listening in, I hope that people are learning kind of the legal way of examining issues, and people – probably everybody listening here at one point may need to hire a lawyer.
One way you can tell if you're talking to an actually really good lawyer who knows the law is – lawyers will always speak in terms of probabilities.
They'll say – they'll never say, no, you can't do it, or yes, you can, unless you're just way off the wall.
But they'll say, well, there's a low probability that you would want to sue.
That would be worth it, and then if you – If you do file, there's a low probability because in law, there's so much uncertainty, and that's how this Lanham Act is uncertain, and that's why the media, they never call on – you ever notice this?
You'll read an article, for example, about the lawsuit against people we cannot even name because then the video will be banned just through the algorithm, but people involved in very high-profile defamation lawsuits.
You read these articles, and it's by some 25-year-old at CNN, and they don't even quote a lawyer.
Because if you actually quoted a lawyer, a lawyer would say, well, I think the lawsuit is not a very strong lawsuit.
And they all think they're experts on this.
So the Lanham Act, I've seen a lot of people become instant experts, as so often happens, right?
Nobody ever talks about the Kurds, ever.
And then suddenly, oh, how dare Trump do this?
We're betraying the Kurds. Like, bro, you've never talked about the Kurds your entire timeline.
Like, I'll even run searches for people.
And then Trump sues for the Lanham Act.
I'm like, wow, so you're You're an expert on the Kurds, which I'm not, and I don't pretend to be.
That's why when people ask me about what's happening in Syria, I'm like, I don't know, man.
And I don't know who to trust.
And that's CNN's fault.
Because I wish...
Right? I wish.
I wish that I could just go somewhere and say, okay, what's really happening in the Middle East?
I don't know.
And I actually don't know anyone that I can trust who will tell us all the truth or who has a good track record I'm telling the truth, and that again goes to the Lanham Act because I'm a news consumer, and as a news consumer, I have been deceived by the media and through their deception because this is how you analyze these cases.
Okay, are news consumers being deceived by CNN? Okay, yeah.
Is CNN profiting from that deception?
Sure, people are seeing their ads.
So there's a non-frivolous case that the Trump campaign could bring against CNN. Yeah, and I, of the obviously amateur opinion, I sort of was trying to analogize these things in my head because I kind of work on analogies a lot of times.
And I was thinking, okay, well, let's say I have a job that pays me $100,000 a year.
I quit that job in order to start up a restaurant.
And then someone spreads the lie that my restaurant is infested with cockroaches and rats or something like that, right?
And then my restaurant goes out of business.
It seems to me, like from a sort of justice standpoint, you should be able to say, okay, well, I quit my job, which was paying me $100,000 a year.
You lied about me. You destroyed my new opportunity.
So you're on the hook for the money I would have had if I'd kept working at my original $100,000 a year job.
And that probably is not a legal argument.
It just seems kind of moral. Yeah, that's defamation.
No, you're absolutely right. And that's why, you know, I sent you an article earlier, you know, we're talking about Why Trump went with the Lanham Act rather than defamation.
So if you sued them for defamation, one measure of damages would be your lost revenue and lost wages.
Right, right. So with Trump, of course, he claims to have given up a significant amount of money.
Estimates range from sort of hundreds of millions to billions in order to be president.
And if CNN is sort of key in destroying his president, he might as well have been back earning that money and that sort of lost income for something that didn't kind of pan out.
But that brings a smack dab into the whole mess and quagmire of defamation in America.
And we'll stay focused on America because the laws elsewhere are quite different.
But Man, oh man, I mean, it is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven or a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than to hold American media responsible for destructive falsehoods.
What is the story, particularly if you're a public figure, what the hell is going on in law that the media seems to be effectively above it?
Yeah, people always ask me, oh, they called you this, why don't you sue them for defamation, right?
And as a lawyer, I can't even say, well, because it'd be too expensive.
I mean, I would just sue them myself.
But under defamation, if you're a public figure, you can only sue if somebody stated something about you that was both false and defamatory, defamatory meaning damaging, and it was done with actual malice.
And people go, aha, they're malicious.
They had malicious intent when they criticized you.
No, no, no. Actual malice is one of those things.
In law, you call it a term of art, which means it doesn't actually mean what you would think it would mean.
It isn't the ordinary usage of the word malice.
It's a term of art, a term of legal art.
An actual malice means that you made the statement with knowledge that the statement was false or with reckless disregard for truth or falsity, and moreover...
It has to be shown that with clear and convincing evidence that you made that statement with reckless disregard for truth or falsity.
And reckless is a very high standard.
You know, again, we all have these, well, he was reckless.
He didn't even think about it.
No, no, no. Reckless, again, is a term of art, is a very, very high standard.
And it means that you have to be able to essentially read a person's mind to know that they were lying about you.
And that's only the first hurdle. The other hurdles are, and this is a bigger hurdle even than actual malice.
An opinion cannot be defamatory.
Now, we all think we know the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of opinion, but I'll give people an example.
I could say, Mr.
A is a pervert, and is that a statement of fact or opinion?
Well, these cases have been decided under the law, and they would say that's an opinion.
But if I said, one person told me Mr.
A was a pervert, Well, now that's a statement of fact that's actionable because I'm claiming one person told me.
Now, does this make a lot of sense?
No, that's why you go to law school for three years, and law really is a language in and of itself.
People think they can read one judicial opinion and be like, oh, I know the law.
It'd be like if you learned a couple lines of code, and then suddenly somebody tells you, well, it's great that you know how to code, but actually quantum… Rays from the sun can actually knock off your code.
You'd be like, wait, what are you talking about?
Nobody ever told me this before.
It's true. Same thing with law.
It's very intricate.
So you can not defame someone with an opinion.
And the reason I bring that up is because Gavin has sued the SPLC. A number of people have sued the SPLC. I sent you a case where a person, a church, lost a lawsuit against the SPLC. And I'll tell people the context.
If the SPLC... Determines you're a hate group.
Your life is pretty much over in many ways.
You're not allowed to raise money on Amazon.
You'll be banned from banking.
Law enforcement will spy on you.
And the SPLC made their bones, their reputation by saying we're reputable.
Everything we say is truthful. So people start to say, okay, well, in the example of a church, they're saying, I mean, we don't actually – we're not homophobic.
We just believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.
That was a mainstream view.
Barack Obama had that view in 2012.
So, yeah, actually Trump is the first president who at the time he ran for office was pro-gay marriage.
It wasn't Hillary Clinton. It wasn't Obama.
And they go, so we're going to sue you for calling us a hate group.
And the SPLC comes in and they sued for defamation.
And the SPLC sued – Or rather, defended the suit by saying, no, no, no, this is just an opinion.
And you can't sue us for our opinion.
And sure enough, the cases are being decided for the most part in the SPLC's favor.
It's unbelievable. If you're not a lawyer, if you're a lawyer, you're like, well, yeah, I don't think this is right.
Because the SPLC holds itself out as an arbiter of truth.
And people take the SPLC on its word, and that should be relevant...
But that's the argument, and that argument's being accepted by the courts.
Well, and the court's argument is saying, look, if you feel that you have been unfairly characterized by somebody else's opinion, the remedy is not the court of law, but the marketplace of ideas, that you need to exercise your free speech rights to fight back against information about you that you perceive to be false.
Yeah, that old school, you know, the remedy for bad speech is more speech, and I find that an ironic Argument for the SPLC to make considering that they are the ones trying to ban speech, right?
So the court is saying, well, the remedy for the speech the SPLC is saying about true is more speech, you're like, but I can't respond to them because I'm banned, right?
In the case of, say, we'll spell our name out, maybe the algorithm won't get it, but L-O-O-M-E-R, she can't even respond to speech about her with more speech.
The same thing with our friend A-L-E-X, J-O-N-E-S. He also cannot respond.
So the court, you would call it disingenuous if you're a lawyer because you never want to call a court dishonest or fraudulent.
You could get in a lot of trouble, but you're saying, well, your claim is that the answer to the SPLC's lies is to respond with truth, but the lies are believed, and therefore you're removed from social media and you can't respond with We're classic Catch-22 situation.
Well, I mean, there is also a problem, too, insofar as the way things are phrased, right?
So if you say such-and-such a group is a hate group, that sounds like more than an opinion.
You could say, I find what they say to be hateful, or they seem hateful to me, or they some indications that appear.
But when you say such-and-such is a hate group, that seems like an absolute statement of fact, more so than just...
Opinion. In the same way, if I say, oh, I think someone's perverted, okay, that's one thing.
If I say they've been convicted of pedophilia, that's a whole other thing, right?
So one is a statement of opinion, the other is a statement of fact.
But the equation and the way that it's put forward is, you know, it seems to imitate very closely a statement of fact, or a statement of opinion masquerading as a fact.
Yeah, and if you asked 90 – and that's why the SPLC is playing both sides here.
If you asked most people, hey, maybe this is changing, but at least we would say five years ago.
If you asked most people, if you said, do you believe the SPLC tells the truth about people, they would say, well, yeah, we believe that.
But the SPLC is saying, we're not saying anything truthful about the person.
We're just giving an opinion.
It's willy-nilly. Even though, and in that article I sent you, and if you have time, you can read the full opinion, one of the arguments made that should have prevailed against the SPLC was to say, no, no, the SPLC knows that people accept their assertions as being a truthful statement of fact.
So you can't use this credibility such that Amazon blanket bans organizations.
Amazon has an Amazon Smile program.
So the SPLC has said if you're declared a hate group by the SPLC, then you can't fundraise on Amazon Smile, so you're losing money.
So you can show damages. You can show that people believe the SPLC. You can show that people are accepting the SPLC's assertions as truthful.
You know, tough luck. And as a lawyer...
I mean I've – what judge wants to rule against the SPLC, right?
That's definitely where we are.
Now, there are some exceptions, and one notable one was – we're only talking about American law, but there was a fellow in the UK who was called an Islamophobic extremist, and the SPLC gave him $3.5 million because unlike America and the rest of the world, when you lie about people, you can be held accountable.
Right. Right, right.
Now, let's jump back to the malicious intent aspect of things, because unless, I don't know what the burden of proof would be here, Mike, but if the reporter says, like, types an email, and says something false about someone, and types an email to someone saying, oh, I know this is totally false, but I hate that guy so much, I'm going to print it anyway, right?
I mean, would that be the kind of thing that would be accepted?
Okay. Now, of course, all the reporters...
Know this standard, right?
All of the reporters know the standard.
And of course, if it's not documented, then you're engaged in a futile exercise in mind reading, usually months or years in the past.
What was your state of mind when you were writing?
So because the media in America knows this to be the standard, even if they are motivated by hatred and a reckless disregard, they're never going to say it to anyone.
They're never going to write it down.
They're never going to have any record of it.
So that they can deny it and nobody can tell anyone otherwise.
So the fact that this law exists makes it ridiculously easy to circumvent.
Yeah, there's an expression in law, it ain't what you know, it's what you can prove.
And we all know these far left-wing bloggers lie about people.
We know that they know they're saying they're liars.
But how are you going to prove that?
You know, get them under oath.
Is it true that you believed No, no, I believe that this person is what I called them.
And that's, again, assuming you can even get past the opinion aspect.
So, for example, if you're a reporter and you call someone a racist, the way those are coming out in the rulings and the court opinions is calling someone a racist or a Nazi is actually – that's being treated as an opinion because – There's – so, for example, you can say one plus one is two.
That's a fact. But how do you say that racist is actually enough of a term with enough context that people know what it means?
Now, again, that goes back to the disingenuousness of all of this.
We all know that if you're calling someone a racist, we all know what that means.
And it doesn't mean that you're Sarah Jiang in your writing that you want to abuse – commit elder abuse, which is a felony in many states, and you work for the New York Times.
We all know that that's not what it means.
We all know that racist is only applied to conservatives, and we all know what it means.
But the courts say, well, nobody really can tell what it means.
It's not really a factual assertion.
It's more along the lines of an opinion, and they're coming that way with Nazi too.
So if a reporter calls you a racist… There's nothing you can do about that legally.
If you call someone a Nazi, that's a very specific thing.
Racist is almost a state of mind judgment, but Nazi is like, well, have you joined the National Socialist Party?
Have you been seen unironically wearing swastikas?
Have you attended rallies and done the salutes?
I mean, it would seem like that.
Is such a strong term that you'd have to have more than just, well, he seems like a Nazi, which is very different from he is a Nazi, which is very different from I've got actual evidence that he's a Nazi.
But those cases are cutting against that.
The cases are coming out and saying that Nazi is kind of an opinion.
There was one case that came out that you would never think this would be the outcome, but a radio host called a person a member of the KKK. And you're like, well, I mean, that's as much of a statement of fact as you can be.
The KKK is an actual organization.
You're either a member or you're not.
And you can prove someone's a member or that you're not.
And the court held, well, Ku Klux Klan is taking on a new meaning and people don't think of it as much of...
An organization, they think of it as just a blanket term for kind of a racist.
And I was like, but that's the trend.
So in law, in America anyway, and also in the UK, we have what's called the common law method, where you don't really know what the law is.
It's being built and shaped in real time.
But then you can kind of find, it's called the path of the law, the trend of the law.
And the trend of the law is that almost everything you would say is an opinion.
I'll give you another example.
Most people, myself – not myself included, but most people thought that Elon Musk would have the case against him dismissed, and I'll tell you why.
Elon Musk went on Twitter, and he got into kind of a beef with a guy who was trying to rescue some stranded children in Thailand, and Elon Musk called him a pedo guy.
Well, there's – There is a lot of case law, not specifically as to pedo, but it's getting there to where it's just pedo, he's hyperbolic, because one factor in defamation analysis is the form it said.
So if the New York Times calls you a pedo, then because that's a very austere form, then you can sue.
And it goes through editors and fact checkers, and it's not just some guy tweeting at his underwear at the proverbial two o'clock in the morning.
Right, but if it's said on Twitter, there have been cases saying – nobody believes Twitter.
You can't sue for anything anybody says on Twitter.
There literally are cases saying that.
So a number of people thought that Elon Musk would have the case against him dismissed because, like, well, he called the guy a pedo.
He called him pedo guy on Twitter.
Was he really saying that the guy molested?
He didn't get specific enough.
It's just like a general kind of slur on Twitter, a forum that isn't really taken seriously.
Now, of course, what Elon Musk had going against him was that people take what Elon says quite seriously.
He's a public CEO of two multi-billion dollar companies, so he doesn't get the anonymous troll pass.
Sorry, was he beefing with a public figure or more of a private figure?
Totally a public figure.
So this case has been closely watched by a number of people, myself included, and I'll tell you why.
If the case comes down against Musk and is upheld on appeal, then people like you or I will have case law to support lawsuits against people in the media.
So the same thing happened in – there was a case in Montana where the Daily Stormer incited a bunch of harassment against a Jewish woman in Montana, and the SPLC sued under the theory that inciting harassment is emotional distress.
It causes emotional distress, and therefore you can sue.
And I thought, this is pretty great.
So I'm using actually in a lawsuit – and you and I are going to talk about this more after I filed it – but in my lawsuit against members of Antifa, I'm using the SPLC's arguments that were upheld in the court against Antifa.
So it's like the silver lining for us is that if this case against Elon Musk – It goes forward and it doesn't settle out of court and we do get case law, then we might be able to sue when people call us the N-word or the R-word and other kind of slurs.
Yeah, and the big picture view for me, Mike, let me know what you think of this perspective.
It's like, I would really like the law to be more prevention than cure, in a sense.
So if you look at the word racist, right?
So the first... People who get called racist, like it's pretty bad because it's a shocking new term and it's been associated with so many negative things throughout history and it's such a malevolent and toxic mindset according to general perception.
I don't think there's good arguments as to why it is.
So it's like the first bunch of people who get called racist, man, they're just destroyed.
And then people say, oh wow, this word really works!
So we're going to start hitting it on everyone we disagree with and everyone we dislike.
And then what happens, of course, is the word begins, there's this crest and this wave of destruction.
And then, as we can sort of see now, which is why everyone's becoming a Russian operative rather than a racist, the word gets so overused that it begins to lose its impact.
And now it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone's a racist, everyone's in the KKK and so on.
I think the same thing is happening to the word Nazi and so on.
But so much destruction has to get wrought in society for the word to lose its power.
It'd just be kind of nice if the law could sort of help defuse the power of the word before it ruins thousands and thousands of people's lives.
Yeah, I had a run-in with the foreign newspaper, and they called me something they shouldn't have.
I paid a lawyer 300 euros, and it was corrected within two hours.
Because in most of Europe, you can't just call people these things.
You can't do in Europe what you can do in the US. It's appalling.
I used to be very much in favor of the actual model standard because the reason it exists, and we'll give the devil his due, is that imagine you or I report on Jeffrey Epstein.
Well, he's got enough money to make our lives a living hell, right?
Well, he doesn't anymore. He's dead.
But like, say, Ghislaine Maxwell...
She sues us and we're like, no, I mean, we actually believe this kind of stuff and we have some evidence to support it.
The idea was to protect free speech, but the law, the ruling has gone too far on the other end, and they should bring it back a little bit.
I know Trump has talked about this a little bit here and there, but what would it take to...
I recognize the complexity, and it is such a fine balance.
You don't want people using defamation to silence others.
You don't want any of that stuff to occur.
But at the same time... I mean, some remedy for incredibly destructive lies would be not the end of the world, I think.
So what would it take?
Would it be precedence?
Would it be a change in the law?
I mean, how would this supertanker get to turn?
Of course, you'd fight massive mainstream media pushback against all of this stuff, but what would it take?
You would have to change the makeup of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
And you would have to change it in a way that almost certainly wouldn't happen.
So the idea of opening up libel laws – New York Times v. Sullivan is a United States Supreme Court case interpreting the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
So the only way to change it was you would have to change the First Amendment of the Constitution or you would have to convince five Supreme Court justices to overrule it, which they wouldn't want to do for a number of reasons.
One is the one we just talked about is they – in the US, you want to err on the side of free speech, and that's so ingrained in almost everyone.
But then even – the flip side of that too is hate speech is protected.
There was a Supreme Court case saying that hate speech is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.
So in a way, it's a deal with the devil is people are allowed to defame you essentially, but – You're not, you can't be arrested in the U.S. like is happening in the U.K. because you ask some questions about, you know, things that are happening in your country.
So, you know, in a way, it's like you can't have one without the other.
And it's unfortunate.
If I could just tweak the system a little bit, I would.
But the law is like a mule.
It's very, very hard to put in another direction.
Now, one other thing I wanted to get a little clarity on, you mentioned earlier, like what judge would want to rule against the SPLC. And what do you mean by that?
Well, there's a myth that there's just – a judge is just a referee, and within legal thought, there was a theory that came out in the 70s which was more consistent with reality, legal positivism, legal realism that Richard Posner and others have talked about, which was that judges are subject to the same pressures of all of us.
And if you rule against the SPLC, the SPLC is going to come after you.
They're going to try to destroy your life.
Maybe they try to get a Floyd Lee Corkins type of character after you.
Who knows?
So do you want to risk getting all those editorials writing about you and smearing you and attacking you?
Because we can imagine the headlines.
In Victory for White Supremacists, Judge Rules Against the SPLC, right?
Right. Right, right, right.
I mean, this is the old thing that's like a low-rent issue that if you're defending somebody's free speech, that means you agree with the content of their free speech rather than the principle of free.
It's just one of these low-rent things that everybody has to, well, I don't agree with everything he says, but all these caveats that people put in, and it is...
Kind of ridiculous. But okay, sorry, I said that.
One last thing that I'd really like to get clarity on.
Do you think it's possible, because a lot of people who've never skirted with the law or been involved with this kind of stuff, they don't really understand the discovery process, which again, I'm sure we're going to talk about when you move forward with Antifa.
Is it possible that Trump and CNN and so on, that if he gets past the first hurdle, he's going to start to be able to rummage around in the internal documentation within CNN and depose people under oath and so on, or his lawyers, I guess, and get even further into it than O'Keefe could?
Oh, he absolutely would be.
So the way the American legal system works is you say filing a lawsuit, but the actual document's called a complaint lawsuit.
And so you file a complaint in court, and then the other side files a motion to dismiss.
And in the motion to dismiss, they bring up the same arguments that I just brought here, which is it's not – it's just puffery.
It's just opinion. Everybody does it.
Everybody knows what they're getting, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the court rules as a matter of law as to whether or not your case can go forward.
But if you get past a motion to dismiss, then discovery happens, and – Yeah, that's where you get all of your emails and the real action happens.
So what could they ask for?
I mean, discovery is not everything back to your high school diary, I guess, except in the case of Kavanaugh, perhaps.
But what would they ask for?
Would they be limited in the search terms, in the timeframe that they would be able to ask for?
What would they be looking for?
You would... Discovery is actually quite broad.
So lawyers, when they fight over discovery...
They'll say Discovery's not a fishing expedition.
They'll say Discovery's not a fishing expedition, but the rule is that you can seek any documents that are reasonably calculated to get the discovery of admissible evidence.
And that's a very broad standard.
So even though they say that's not a fishing expedition, it is.
They can look for anything.
Now, again, it has to be relevant.
But in a case like false advertising and CNN, you could get emails, memos, staff notes, you know, direction.
You could get every Jeff Zucker call ever made.
Emails from him giving editorial direction.
Internal emails from reporters, at least that didn't involve a source because, you know, you couldn't outsource or anything like that.
There are, you know, privilege.
They're called journalistic shield laws.
But you could get – it's pretty much a whole enchilada.
Is an absolute disaster for people.
It's super expensive, and you can really get almost anything.
And would they be able, because I'm always sort of curious about this when it's like, oh, this was in discovery, and then it ends up on the internet.
I mean, what is the process if CNN is like, okay, we'll show you this stuff, but here's my private kimono photos, but don't put them out anywhere.
I mean, how does that work?
Right, you would file what's called a motion for a protective order, and that would demand that all documents remain sealed, and judges take that quite seriously.
So if they did, if the lawsuit were filed, and it did make it past a motion to dismiss and it got into discovery, then CNN would file a motion for a protective order.
One would be granted, at least as to any number of documents.
Now, as far as it getting leaked, If there's a protective order and it gets leaked, there's usually going to be, like, hell to pay.
People, you know, judges are very much, you know, people saw South Park, you know, respect my authority, huh?
Well, all the work that you had to do with the Miami Herald to get access to Epstein's files.
Right, exactly, and that never should have been sealed.
And even then, right, so if...
If too much was sealed, then people like me would follow motion to intervene and unseal to get these records.
So it would be – CNN, it would not be a happy place.
Now, the flip side is unless there's a – you can't always get a protective order.
So for example – and I feel so dumb that we have to do this, but that's the way these algorithms are set up.
But the deposition of A-L-E-X-J-O-N-E-S – It was posted on YouTube, and because there was no protective order, that was perfectly allowable.
That was perfectly authorized.
But if there had been – you can have certain material that would be subject to a protective order, and that goes to really deep private matters, not things that you've said publicly.
So it all depends on what the judge wants to keep private.
But in a lawsuit against CNN because, oh my god, the free press is so sacred – The judge would grant a very broad protective order.
Right. Maybe business practices and all that, right?
Right. Have you been following anything to do with the latest revelations about the Clinton emails, Hillary Clinton's emails?
Yes. I hate to milk you for time, but this is all such fascinating stuff.
What are your thoughts on a broad view for people who are not up to speed, and what are your thoughts on it?
Right. Hillary's emails, there was a determination, internal investigation in the State Department that found that Hillary Clinton and her people, something like 30 – it's either 38 people or 58 people, a lot of people.
The exact number escapes me, but somewhere a lot of people, dozens of people, mishandled classified information between 550 and 600 times, which we all sort of knew.
And we also know that no one will actually be held accountable.
And the Hillary Clinton email is so triggering.
Maybe isn't the right word because that's a little glib.
But it was very frustrating to people because anybody who knows the law knows that mishandling classified information is not – It doesn't matter if you intended to mishandle classified information.
If you were negligent or, you know, they try to say reckless, they try to play these little words.
Well, Comey came up with this whole magical intent thing, as far as I understand, it's not part of the law, when he basically decided not to pursue, or I guess was helping the DOJ decide not to pursue Hillary Clinton back in the day.
Right, and that's again those little magic words.
Because the way – it's funny to think of it this way, but lawyer law is very much like you go to – you watch the Harry Potter movie and you go into like magic school.
Certain words have certain magic to them and lawyers – so for example, actual mouths.
That's like a magic word because it doesn't mean what you think it means.
It doesn't mean you're malicious. It has a specific term of art and you have to learn all these incantations or maybe the priesthood is better than the magic.
Right. But to show to people you understand the language, you use these kind of terms and the way that everybody uses them, and now you're saying you're incantation, and the judge is like an old orthodox priest, and he's asking you for more incantations to prove it, and that's why Comey came up with all this fake language that nobody ever actually heard.
It's not actually in the cases.
And then, of course, people pointed out An example where a guy was in the Navy, he was on a Navy sub, and he just showed somebody a picture of the reactor, which I've watched on the Discovery Channel, right?
I've always thought it's interesting, like, how people live.
What's it like to be on a sub?
And then you watch the Discovery Channel, because you think, like, I don't know, there's 2,000 people there, they have to eat, go to the bathroom, sleep, what is that life like?
And then you go on there and you see the reactor.
So the guy wasn't revealing state secrets.
But it was classified information that he was not authorized to release.
Tough luck, buddy. That is the way the law works.
But Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was able to forward classified emails like a chain letter, like a meme.
And there is no case that would have given anyone a pass for that.
But the Clintons are – they're above it all.
We learned that. Above the law does have a certain intuitive understanding, and the Clintons are above the law.
Well, and of course, everyone says, oh, it's so annoying that the Democrats are above the law, and they keep committing so many crimes as a whole.
But of course, if you want to commit crimes, that's where you want to go.
I mean, you want to go to the party that is above the law.
So that cluster is not exactly, it's not a random selection of people who've joined.
All the people look at this and say, wow, Clinton's never got, oh, Democrats never get prosecuted for anything.
So if you want to do bad things, that's where you're going to go.
And that's why I think it's become such a radical party these days.
Yeah, that happened too with a member of the DC, was actually the DC clique.
I forget his name, Craig Craig or something like that.
He's one of those guys with two first names.
But he was prosecuted for violating the FARA Act for dealing with Ukraine.
And he was actually brought to trial and he was acquitted.
Yeah, Craig Craig was his name.
And in a jury, 90% Clinton voters in D.C., this guy was a former White House counsel for Obama.
He got a walk.
So even in the rare case where people are charged with crimes, which almost never happens to Democrats… The juries there are going to let you walk for anything.
That's crazy stuff. Alright, well listen, thanks for the analysis.
I feel that the fog has been blown away by the mighty winds of Cernovich's reason.
So Cernovich.com, is there anything else you wanted to mention about upcoming events or plans that you've got in the works?
No, I mean Cernovich.com, I've been posting that pretty often.
Everything from book reviews to natural childbirth, you name it.
I'm creating kind of a cultural space there.
A little bit of current affairs, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
So people, they still have to get in the habit of going to Cernovich.com every day, but all the good information is there, the podcast, summaries of this video, and more will be there.
Thanks. I really, really appreciate it.
Always good to get this kind of clarity.
▲
Export Selection