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May 29, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

02:00:43

Ep. 63: Dersh v. CNN; No Whites Allowed? Whitmer Scandal; Epic v. Apple; Trans & CRT

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Time	Text
	Gokunaru, you said I was going to be 42 seconds late.
	I was almost tempted to start 42 seconds late to make your prediction look all the more prophetic, but no.
	Viva is neurotically, meticulously, obsessively on time.
	He says it.
	No, I was not late.
	Hold on.
	I was not late.
	I believe.
	I hit go live before it even went live.
	Good afternoon.
	Good evening, people.
	Pale.
	It's because we went to the amusement park today in Montreal.
	La Ronde.
	It's called La Ronde.
	L-A-R-O-N-D-E.
	It's a Six Flags Now thing.
	Six Flags.
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Partnership.
	Enterprise.
	Anyways, I went with the kids.
	They have social distancing rules that are very interesting, which I'm going to discuss in a bit.
	I'm going to make a separate video for my Viva Family channel.
	They're virtually giving away the season passes now, like $50 for a season pass, because all they want to do is get people in there so they can buy the food, which is ridiculously overpriced, and that's where they make their margins.
	$50 for a season pass, and if you don't get the season pass with parking, they screw you on the parking.
	But I had to wear a face mask outdoors at an amusement park all day, and I don't do the face masks because I work from my basement or my car, so I don't have to wear a face mask every day, and I'm not accustomed to it.
	It's nauseating.
	It's nauseating.
	I mean, I like the smell of my own breath, but in small doses, not for six hours on end while you're...
	Imagine, I mean, I was just trying to think of the logic, the science behind the face masks on a roller coaster at an amusement park.
	And I was thinking about it as I was flying through the air on one of these rides called The Vampire, which is fantastic.
	If you happen to be of such poor judgment that you go out to somewhere, If you happen to be one of those people who goes out knowing that you are infectious and positive and displaying symptoms,
	if you go and you happen to be one of those people and you go on a roller coaster and you happen to aerosol your breath into the air and then the person behind you or beside you captures that, that is what the mask would be useful for or against.
	And they were making people wear face masks outdoors on roller coasters.
	And I gotta tell you, spinning in circles is nauseating enough when you're smelling your own Nespresso breath for the better part of an afternoon.
	It can get to even the most hardest of stomachs.
	Lil Panda Cub says, It's my birthday today.
	I'm spending it on Viva Live.
	Lil Panda Cub, happy birthday.
	I would ask how old you are, but I don't know if that's the impolite question to answer.
	Ask, is there no sound?
	Okay, I would be seeing a lot more in the chat.
	Okay, no, I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing this.
	Is Winston von Schittenhaus of Dutch?
	He is, and Winston von Piepen everywhere is his French counterpart.
	Let's see what we got here.
	Before I get into a bit of a Canadian rant, just to kick things off.
	Happy birthday, little panda.
	He poopy, hip poopy.
	Okay, so let's start with the Canadian stuff.
	The Canada stuff.
	I put out a Viva on the Street yesterday, which if anyone thought the Viva on the Streets were going to end just because the curfew ended, I changed my mind yesterday because sometimes I can't get a video out in the day and it's just easy.
	It's physically easier on me physically, spiritually to just rant into my phone while walking the dogs at night.
	And the irony was that after I put out that video, On Friday, you know, welcoming the end of the four-week curfew after five months, and a profitable curfew it was, 21,000 tickets issued since January for health violations, whatever, public health orders, $31 million in tickets levied against Canadian citizens.
	People were saying, sending me links, Viva, did you not see that all of your MPs, your members of parliament, voted to not have elections in a pandemic?
	And I see this video, which, no context, it's an 11-minute video.
	They're voting on a motion to not have federal elections so long as the pandemic is ongoing.
	I'm saying pandemic because it's a defined term.
	They say when the pandemic is over, then you'll go back to regular voting.
	And this motion was passed virtually unanimously.
	There was one nay, and that was Derek Sloan.
	And I didn't know the context really, and I had to look up some of the law because I started to think that we had just fallen into literal tyranny, whereas up until now it had only been perspective tyranny.
	And it turns out that it's a motion of members of parliament, largely symbolic because you can't change substantive law, election law, by way of motion.
	But it nonetheless gave you a clear indication that all but one of our members of parliament supported this motion in principle.
	That we should suspend federal elections because of the risks posed by COVID.
	And that should tell you something.
	It should tell you something.
	But for anyone who saw...
	I saw a few videos on YouTube and people were saying, that's the end of Canada.
	We're not going to have federal elections ever again.
	No.
	They passed this symbolic motion.
	Apparently because they can't get this Bill C-19 through.
	Bill C-19 would make it easier to vote.
	Mail-in ballots issue certain securities for voting during a pandemic.
	And that bill apparently is being held up by the Conservatives, if you believe the political rhetoric.
	So they haven't gotten that bill through, which would issue certain rules and protections for elections in a pandemic.
	And so apparently, according to some, the consensus is that this is like a political maneuver.
	To force Justin Trudeau to say he will not hold federal elections until the pandemic is over because apparently people think that the Liberals and Trudeau have actually gained support in their response to this pandemic and that if we called elections tomorrow, the Liberals would actually gain or at the very least would not lose, which I can't wrap my head around that, but that's the consensus.
	So anyways, check out my video from yesterday if you haven't seen it.
	Let me just get to some super chats before we get into the disclaimers and before I bring Robert in because I see him there.
	Any thoughts on who, which...
	I say this, and I don't say this as a joke.
	I never tell people who to vote for.
	I've expressed enough of my opinion that everyone can know who I'm not going to vote for, because I would rather be in the dentist's office having a tooth removed than voting for the Liberals or the Conservatives or the NDP.
	And if anybody needs any reason to know why, just watch my last video on Jagmeet Singh calling anybody who doesn't want to wear a face mask extreme.
	Right-wing, selfish, doesn't care about community.
	And then lo and behold, Jagmeet Singh stepping out of his beamer, hugging his friend, breaking his bubble, breaking health orders.
	But he's not extreme, selfish, right-wing.
	He just needed a moment to relax.
	He reverted back to what it's like to be a human.
	When they break the rules, it's human.
	When other people break the rules or don't agree with the rules, they're selfish bastards.
	So I won't tell you who to vote for, but when the next federal election comes, the choice in my district might be obvious.
	Stay tuned.
	Okay.
	I lost this one here.
	Did you just assault me by asking my age?
	I'm 28. Happy 28th.
	That's a good age.
	Still in your 20s.
	Enjoy the youth.
	Okay.
	And I saw one more super chat before I get the standard disclaimers in.
	Captain Yolo says, here repping Pantelis Nation.
	Pantelis.
	For anybody who doesn't know, Pantelis has got a great podcast.
	I've been on it twice.
	Great Montreal stand-up comic, does a lot of work with Mike Ward.
	Mike Ward is the comic who got fined $43,000 for insulting Jeremy Gabriel, or not insulting, making jokes at the expense of Jeremy Gabriel, who is a celebrity kid who suffers from Patrick Collins syndrome, became an internet, not internet, but a celebrity because he sang for the Pope.
	Mike Ward is awaiting the judgment from the Supreme Court on his appeal of that decision.
	So, Pantelis Nation, welcome.
	Now, standard disclaimers.
	YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats.
	If that shocks and egregious anybody, I might understand it.
	There's other ways to support us.
	You're going to hear it 5 or 10 times during the stream.
	VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com I'm going to shut down my Patreon, I think, sooner than later and my Subscribestar and just refer everyone over to Locals.
	YouTube takes 30%.
	If you find that shocking and you want to support us other ways, there are other ways.
	I'm not going to get to all the Super Chat, so if I do not read or bring up your Super Chat and you're going to be miffed, don't give it.
	I don't want you being upset.
	Super Chat is not a paid access to be abusive, insulting, degrading, demeaning, etc.
	So if I happen to be able to read your Super Chat and it is offensive, if it's a free pass to insult or not a paid pass to insult...
	I may not bring it up either, and that's not because I'm censoring.
	You can put it there, and everyone can see a highlighted, abusive super chat if that's your thing.
	But freedom of speech does not mean I have to highlight that, which I don't necessarily want to highlight for an audience, which I do know includes some kids, some of my kids' friends who watch, and we're trying to make them smarter, not more jaded and cynical, although that might just happen to happen as they get more educated.
	Okay, the menu tonight is huge.
	I don't think we're going to get through it, but we're going to get close to it.
	I'm just going to list some quickly.
	Dershowitz had a victory against CNN.
	I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm extremely wrong on this one.
	Lori Lightfoot getting sued by Daily Caller for her arguably, arguably racist policy of saying that she's not doing sit-down, one-on-one interviews with white reporters.
	Only journalists of color.
	Okay, FOIA lawsuit over nursing homes coming out of Pennsylvania, going to D.C. A lot of stuff.
	It's good.
	Okay, transgender treated a lawsuit.
	We're going to be talking about some transgender issues tonight as well.
	A lawsuit.
	I forget the state now that wants to ban or that wants to contest a transgender ban, basically.
	A ban on medical procedures for kids to transition.
	Now, there's a lot more.
	We'll get to it.
	You guys must have seen it.
	Now, I see Robert's in the house.
	He's looking dapper.
	Same position, same chair.
	Let's bring him in.
	Robert, how goes the battle?
	Good, good.
	Now, okay, it's been a week, Robert.
	Now, we're not going to bring over the debate.
	There was the debate.
	I know there's going to be some people in the chat who want to talk about the debate.
	We have silos.
	We don't deliberately create silos, but there are silos on YouTube.
	And people can bring over the discussion here, but that is not going to be a subject of discussion tonight.
	There are certain things that I've told you, Robert.
	It does no good discussing them.
	You know, it is like...
	To go back to my anecdote, it is like discussing schmushmortion at a college party when you're trying to make friends.
	It never goes anywhere good.
	So with that said, there's been some fun stuff this week, and we'll see some lingering effects in the chat.
	But tonight is the law.
	We're going to do some Canadian and a lot of U.S. law.
	You know what?
	I think we've been forgetting.
	Let's start off with the book references behind you, because I know people are going to ask, and I don't want to forget.
	Sure.
	So this one is Confessions of a Tax Collector.
	And I thought it was apropos and timely because in Biden's budget proposal is a massive, massive expansion of the IRS to go after people at a level they've never done before.
	And it almost reads like Lord Conrad's going into the heart of the jungle.
	So it's very insightful.
	It's someone who worked in the IRS for a long time and how kind of crazy he went.
	But it's also insightful about the IRS regulatory process.
	And this one is Digital Fortress.
	It's a book by Dan Brown, which was talking about the NSA and Echelon and all the rest before Ed Snowden was.
	And that's because Dan Brown's the author of the controversial book and movie The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and all of that.
	But he had a lot of students who went to Andover, Exeter, those kind of schools.
	I forget which one he taught at, but it was one of the old New England schools.
	And so at least I suspect he had certain contacts through life that gave him some insight ahead of the curve before anyone else knew about some of these things.
	So Digital Fortress is a fun read, but also informative at the same time.
	And Confessions of a Tax Collector, if you want to see how crazy the IRS can get and who they're about to unleash on you, that might be a good text as well.
	Okay, well...
	This past week, I think, was tax filing.
	I think last Monday, maybe.
	Or maybe it was two weeks ago.
	The extended deadline was this month.
	Okay.
	Let's start with the one that is the most interesting, because I couldn't have been wronger.
	But I like to say I was wrong for the right reasons.
	But in this case, I think I was just wrong.
	Alan Dershowitz versus CNN.
	For anybody who doesn't know, I mean, going back, way back, nine months.
	Dershowitz sued CNN and didn't just sue them.
	He sued them for $300 million, which I had an issue with from the get-go, but I seem to have been wrong on some legal issues, not the monetary issue.
	Sued CNN for defamation.
	And if anybody doesn't remember this, Dershowitz represented Trump during the first impeachment.
	One of Dershowitz's arguments was that...
	The act of impeachment itself, if it didn't have to be a crime, it had to be criminal-like or something of like a crime.
	And when he was asked a question, I keep saying Nunes, but I think it was...
	Oh, jeez, who asked him the question?
	I forget who asked him the question.
	Cruz.
	It was Cruz who asked him the question.
	As to whether or not, when a president does something with the hopes of getting re-elected, could that be the quid pro quo that can get him in trouble impeached?
	And Dershowitz said, subject to the quid being illegal, every president, every elected official says that their getting re-elected is in the public interest, so doing something for the purposes of getting re-elected cannot be the wrongful act in the quid pro quo that could warrant impeachment.
	CNN, being the real news, fake news, enemy of the people that they are, cut out the first half of Dershowitz's statement, which said that it can't be an unlawful act, period.
	And only ran the second half that said a president can do, you know, whatever they think is necessary to get re-elected and that can't be impeachable to then say that a president, Dershowitz is implying that a president could commit a crime if he thinks it's going to get him re-elected.
	He can't get impeached for it.
	So Dershowitz, and then the pundits on CNN and the pundits, pundits, you know, went haywire, Dershowitz lost his mind.
	He says a president can commit a crime if he thinks it gets re-elected because, and can't be impeached for it.
	Dershowitz sued for $300 million.
	Defamation.
	CNN filed a motion to dismiss, which I didn't cover.
	I didn't even know about it.
	And ultimately, CNN's motion to dismiss was dismissed.
	A Trump-appointed judge, but the reasoning was good.
	The judge basically said separating one half of the statement, omitting one half of the statement, could be misleading.
	At the very least, to get past a motion to dismiss.
	They don't benefit from the fair reporting privilege.
	And he's going to be able to...
	To discovery.
	Now, I had asked you about this at the time.
	Defamation by way of omission in quoting someone.
	And the issue was that Dershowitz, in his motion, referred to a judgment where they artificially put quotes in something the person didn't say.
	And I said, that's sort of different.
	But defamation by omission.
	You gave a couple of examples when we talked about this nine months ago, but explain that, how it works, and what you think of this judgment.
	Yeah, so I mean, I went back and looked back in September.
	What I said was, it's a judge lottery case.
	That if he gets the right judge, he's in the game, but there's only about a one in three chance he would get the right judge.
	Well, Dershowitz won the judge lottery.
	He got a Trump judge, which was perfect for him in this case, involving CNN, involving Trump's impeachment, involving all the media lies about it.
	And so where Dershowitz case was strong, I thought it could have been a worded a lot better in the original complaint was that they misrepresented what he had stated.
	And so that fundamentally doesn't matter whether you misrepresent by omission or commit.
	He always said that a criminal act was impeachable and that a quasi-criminal act was impeachable.
	He just said having a motivation of re-election doesn't make it a quasi-criminal or criminal act.
	And they deliberately misrepresented that because they knew that...
	Every politician acts in their own self-interest of re-election.
	So if that makes something impeachable, everybody's impeachable forever for everything.
	And they couldn't represent his opinion honestly in order to bash it, so they represented it dishonestly.
	And so defamation by omission or commission is equally credible.
	The reason why it was potentially risky as a case, aside from the verbiage, aside from the fact that I'm not a big fan of suing for crazy amounts of money, I think some judges look.
	I'm scant at that.
	But I think the other reason was that it was kind of an opinion of an opinion.
	In other words, they were giving an opinion of his opinion, and a lot of judges get confused in that area of defamation law.
	But at the end of the day, when you say somebody's opinion was X and you misrepresented it, that's really a statement of fact.
	Not a statement of pure protected opinion.
	And it's also a misunderstanding out there that opinion is always protected.
	But courts get that confused all the time.
	It's only pure statements of opinion that are protected.
	Hence, when someone said this person committed perjury, well, that's an opinion.
	But the U.S. Supreme Court said you can sue for defamation over it.
	So I think the judge's decision was the right decision.
	But Dershowitz need to get a little lucky to find a friendly court to make that right decision.
	But if I was CNN, I would not be looking forward to Discovery against Dershowitz, who is clearly gung-ho on looking for getting all the facts.
	And he's more concerned about justice than money or reputation at this point.
	And about them, I'd be a little nervous.
	No question.
	Now, people are seeing your cameras off by a touch, Robert, but I don't want you touching your camera because the last time you touched it, it got worse than off-centered.
	It's an interesting thing.
	One of the arguments that I think I raised, but maybe not so eloquently, way back, was that if they want to misrepresent his opinion, do it.
	Everybody knows that they're just misrepresenting his argument.
	And CNN basically raised that argument, and now I sort of feel stupid because CNN actually raised it in their motion where they said, look, everyone watched the debate.
	Everyone watched the impeachment.
	They know what...
	They know what Dershowitz said.
	So if they think our interpretation is wrong, well, they have all the facts.
	And the judge actually said, no, because you are deliberately omitting, you're not reproducing what is necessary for the discussion at the time you're having it.
	So by deliberately omitting a material fact, you're not going to get away with the assumption that everybody who's listening knew that material fact that you were omitting to misrepresent.
	And, you know, I understand both arguments and I understand what the judge said.
	It was just interesting to the judge basically said at this point, yeah, no.
	And so you cannot presume that your audience knew the fact that you deliberately omitted when you arguably deliberately misrepresented what he said.
	The only question here, Robert, people are going to accuse, let's say both of us, of objecting to judge bias or the judge lottery when it goes one way, but then being happy when the judge lottery or the judge bias goes another way.
	Do you even smell that this judge had bias, or is this as sound of a legal judgment as could be under the circumstances?
	Well, I mean, I think fundamentally, Dershowitz clearly established a defamation claim.
	So the way I would put it, it was an old famous story of a New York judge that a law professor of mine in Wisconsin told, which was he said he brought him in, and he was a young lawyer.
	And he, to the chambers, and he said, you know, your opposing counsel here just offered me a $10,000 bribe to rule in their favor.
	He goes, but if you pay me $10,000, I'll rule on the merits.
	And so the, you know, that kind of, that's my version of judicial bias in this context.
	I think he did rule on the merits, but I think that his being skeptical of CNN, his being a willingness to entertain.
	Arguments that a lot of judges would have, in my view, got confused about.
	Because, for example, fair reporting privilege requires that you actually accurately report.
	So it didn't apply in this context from the get-go.
	Which is hilarious.
	I mean, that is the ultimate meme that they don't benefit from fair reporting privilege.
	I mean, the judge says you didn't report fairly, period.
	At least at this point in time.
	I wouldn't have even used that defense if I were them.
	Usually that's an affirmative defense for later on anyway, because it's fact contingent.
	But the other one is, here's where you can get out of defamation.
	Let's say you quote something, but you put the link with the quote so the person can look at the underlying statement or video.
	If CNN had done that, then they would have had an argument like, this is just our opinion, you can look at the underlying video.
	But the judge's point was, you didn't do that.
	So instead you're saying, well, someone could research.
	Or go independently watch the impeachment proceedings and come to a different conclusion.
	That doesn't excuse you from defamation to put a due diligence obligation on the audience.
	And that's where the judge's decision on the law was the correct one.
	I didn't see any obvious weakness with any of the judge's legal argument.
	My view as to why the judicial lottery mattered was just getting a judge who would actually rule on the merits rather than be impacted by perceptions of Trump that they might get confused on defamation and libel law or be just deferential to the press, which a lot of the judges are these days.
	Well, have always been, actually.
	There are two things, actually, Robert.
	It wasn't just that he said the judge dismissed the argument based on fair reporting privilege.
	The judge also basically said, CNN viewers, you can't take for granted their knowledge.
	You can't take for granted that they have all of the underlying facts to know that what CNN is doing is...
	Prima facie at this stage of the proceedings is not on the merits.
	At this stage, arguably defamatory.
	It's such a glorious thing.
	Had it been reversed and it had been Fox News, you know that the mainstream media would be all over this.
	Fox News not benefiting from fair reporting privilege.
	But this is a slap in the face, like a backhanded in the forehand where it says no fair reporting privilege dismissed, which is a meme on its own.
	And CNN viewers cannot be presumed to have the knowledge to know when CNN is misrepresenting.
	It was glorious all around.
	And now they're going to proceed to deposition.
	I mean, presumably.
	I mean, I guess we have to find out.
	But I would imagine that there was some internal discussion about, you know, the talking points.
	Maybe not as like, you know, evil stroking a cat saying, let's go out and paint him as a liar.
	But some talking points.
	You know, regardless of what he said, these are the points we want to get home.
	And those pundits, those independent pundits, are not going to be so independent and not so pundity.
	So it'll be fun to see what happens.
	What is the time frame on things like this once the motion to dismiss is dismissed?
	Discovery starts up.
	So that, you know, you send out requests to admit, interrogatories, requests for production of documents.
	You start scheduling depositions.
	You usually want to get to the written discovery before the deposition so that the depositions are informative.
	You might retain experts, find out who the other side's experts are.
	That usually comes at the very end of the discovery process.
	Motions for summary judgment after all of that is done for the most part.
	But I think, you know, Dershowitz has made clear.
	That he's not interested in a quiet private settlement.
	He's interested in a public admission of CNN's wrongdoing and a full retraction or otherwise justice.
	He cares more about that.
	I think that was why he sued for as much as he did.
	I kind of understood it more later when you were interviewing him.
	I was like, okay.
	He didn't sue for the big amount of money to draw attention, which I think is often counterproductive.
	He sued to tell CNN, there's no amount of money you can pay me for me to go away.
	That I'm going to get justice one way or the other.
	And if I was CNN, I would not be happy with the position I was in right now.
	I'd be offering retractions, corrections, admissions, public self-humiliating, self-flagellating apologies.
	That's what I'd be doing.
	Because you know there'll be text, emails.
	We know from Project Veritas' exposés of CNN, Alison Morrow had an exposé of CNN's...
	Very interesting forced vaccination policy that is littered with legal loopholes drafted by a lawyer that she talked about on her show last week.
	You can find at alisonmorrow.locals.com.
	We know they have a history of writing and saying dumb stuff because Project Veritas found many examples of Zucker saying really dumb stuff.
	Dershowitz knows how to look for where the bodies are buried.
	If I was them, they have a grave digger coming for them.
	So I would be a little nervous.
	And it is interesting to think, like, I don't think people fully appreciate how old Dershowitz is, and I'm not saying this to mock at all.
	I'm saying this as in, I think Dershowitz, he's over 80 now, right?
	He was 80. He was 84, 85. I thought, I knew logically he had to be that old, but I still thought he was in his 60s because his mind is still exceptionally acute.
	Yep.
	And so you bear in mind, everybody who's thinking about this, Dershowitz is at that stage of his life right now where...
	Ten million dollars will not change much, but his legacy and what he was and how he was regarded and how he was lambasted by the media just for defending Trump, this is a personal vendetta and not monetary, and we're going to see.
	I suspect it will not settle anytime soon unless there's some serious admissions and retractions.
	Now, I'm just going to bring up this because I started reading it.
	And then I saw the second half.
	We're going to stick to the first half of Matthew Jordan.
	Barnes, do you support Lightfoot banning white reporters?
	Good segue into our second discussion point.
	Talking item?
	Subject.
	Lori Lightfoot, everybody.
	Another one I did a video on this week.
	And the lawsuit came two days later, which is great.
	Lori Lightfoot, to celebrate her two years in office as Chicago mayor.
	To celebrate, to promote diversity.
	Because what she feels is a lack of representation of journalists of color in the Chicago Press Corps, says that she was only sitting down to do one-on-one interviews with journalists of color.
	Now, like I said in my video, I don't know if that was a day thing, if that's a week thing, if that's for the year.
	Nobody knows.
	But she publicly, she's a government official, publicly said, I will only give one-on-ones with journalists of color, which excludes white reporters and maybe even white female reporters.
	It's reverse racism as tongue-in-cheek.
	It is just egregious racism, which her justification may not even make any sense because the representation of people of color in the journalist room seems to be proportionate to the overall population of the U.S. But regardless, She issued that rule, order, whatever, principle
	So two days later, Thomas Catanacci from Daily Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation sued for First Amendment violations and 14th Amendment violations on the basis that it's a racist discriminatory policy that deprives news agency reporters of their right to report and equal protection under the law.
	Straightforward lawsuit, five pages, basically very minimal facts.
	She said it, she did it, or at the very least, she did not grant Thomas's request for an interview.
	She granted a one-on-one with a reporter who identifies as Latino.
	First and 14th Amendment violations.
	I think you need to explain...
	The law on this, because some people are going to say, and rightly so, they're not owed anything, the reporters.
	Lori Lightfoot had no positive obligation to sit down with any reporter, so if he's not being denied something that was guaranteed to him, what could his prejudice be, and how is it an equal protections violation?
	Yeah, so I mean, it's an interesting question, because I don't know if anyone's ever done it before, but there's a little bit of precedent for it in a different context, which is when...
	That reporter was excluded from the White House press corps.
	He sued and successfully got back in.
	And I thought that was a stretch at the time to say that he had a right to be part of the White House press corps just because he'd previously been established.
	And that was a Trump judge who made that ruling.
	So the suggestion is that once a relationship is established that you can't breach it outside of certain...
	So there's at least that context out there.
	Generally speaking, a mayor cannot, or any state official, state actor, or anyone acting on behest and that the behalf of the state, as an agent of the state, cannot overtly and openly discriminate based on race or gender.
	And here the mayor's saying that only people, well, no whites allowed.
	And I think that issue does appear to me to be, well, it is a civil rights violation under 42 U.S.C.
	1983, violation of the 14th Amendment right to equal protection of the laws that prohibit and preclude racial discrimination, as opposed to a federal lawsuit that's against the federal government.
	So in credit to Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch, who took up the case very, very quickly for the Daily Caller Foundation.
	And so, I mean, on paper...
	If she would have done it differently, maybe she wanted to draw public attention to it and doesn't care too much about the lawsuit, minor fees, settle it, even if you lose.
	Taxpayers front the bill anyhow, so it's no skin off her back.
	Yes.
	But to me, I don't think you can overtly and openly discriminate.
	The way I would put it is, let's assume the shoe's on the other foot.
	And somebody said, let's say you had a certain person named Mayor that said, I won't allow certain ethnic or religious groups to interview me.
	That would probably be against the law, right?
	Like if someone came out and said, no black journalist allowed, wouldn't we assume that's a racial discrimination by a city or state or county official?
	So I think given that, I don't see how when the shoe's on the other foot, it changes.
	You know, it'd be different if what she was doing was trying to establish increased presence of African Americans or Latinos within the journalistic core by some city policy.
	Then it depends on whether they establish the history and the factual predicates because that goes into the farmer, COVID relief, bar, restaurant over COVID relief kind of analysis.
	But she didn't do that.
	She just came out and said, I don't think it's as representative as I want.
	No white people need apply for these set of interviews in the future.
	And so even though no one's normally entitled to such a one-on-one interview, once you provide it and once you say you're going to be racially discriminatory in your application of it, it sure seems like a civil rights violation.
	And that's the thing.
	Once you say it...
	Then any refusal, any non-response itself becomes suspect, whereas had you just not said it, not that it would be any better, at the very least, it becomes much more difficult to prove that it's overt discrimination as opposed to just disguised or secret discrimination.
	And like you say, if the idea was to promote diversity, there are a dozen other ways you could have done this that would promote diversity without being exclusionary, but by being actually inclusive, as opposed to exclusive, saying...
	We'll grant, I don't know, a bonus or two to one or whatever.
	Something interesting, it wasn't in the lawsuit.
	We'll see if it ever gets there, if it ever gets there.
	But one of the entities that was not being granted an interview, Southside News, I think I might be making a mistake on the actual name, but it was one of the news outlets complaining about it.
	Seems to be, you know, black-oriented in terms of the news.
	It said it covers black and Latino stories and issues.
	They weren't being granted an interview, and it seems that because they were critical of Lori Lightfoot, so setting aside the overtly racist and potentially civil rights-violating aspect of this, it's that old, awful exploitation of minority issues for potentially corrupt motives, as in, now I get to handpick who I get to interview and who gets to interview me, so they know, you know, don't bite the hand that allows them to interview me type thing.
	What are your predictions on this?
	I mean, I couldn't make a prediction if I tried.
	I mean, I could.
	I'd probably be wrong.
	But what do you think happens with this?
	I'm curious if her real goal is to defend it.
	It just seems like a tough policy to defend unless there's something I'm missing.
	So it's just so overt, so open.
	It's not a guess.
	It's not inferential evidence.
	She made it clear.
	No whites need apply.
	I don't know quite how you legally justify that under the existing law.
	And then the problem is, bigger problem, apologize and retract.
	You still don't know if the decisions are being based on this type of underlying, fundamentally racist policy, internal policy perspective.
	It colors the entire process, taints the entire process.
	Okay, what's a good segue into next?
	Let's see.
	I mean, well, there was a couple of cases on.
	The racial preferences in COVID relief packages that came out this week.
	One was out of the Eastern District of Tennessee, and that judge ruled and said it was okay, the racial preferences that exist.
	I cannot be critical of that judge because he is a lifelong friend of mine.
	So I obviously don't agree with the opinion that was reached.
	But you won't hear any.
	The guy's a sweetheart of a human being.
	So it doesn't surprise me why he has been a civil rights guy his whole life.
	And that's the focal point that he took.
	And I understand why he took it that way.
	I just think legally that's not the ultimately correct analysis.
	I don't think they went through enough to establish the factual predicate.
	It doesn't really matter much because Tennessee's in the Sixth Circuit.
	And the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing a Michigan case.
	It issued what I thought was a legally correct opinion and said racial preferences in the COVID relief package bills is clearly unconstitutional.
	And so that will reverse the Tennessee decision soon enough.
	So it affirmed ultimately the decisions we talked about last week.
	It looks like the attempts to do race-based financial policies, at least under the facts that they tried to establish here, For COVID relief are not going to work.
	Now, there's a chance that Sixth Circuit case goes all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, though I doubt they necessarily jump in or are eager to jump in.
	But that was a good affirmation of the race-neutral principles we're supposed to have.
	And I understand why the Tennessee judge did what he did, but I just don't think it was the legally correct decision.
	What was the rationale?
	First of all, in which...
	Which case was this in, or what was the principle, and what was the rationale?
	Bottom line rationale, certain minorities are going to get hit harder by the COVID restrictions that affect everybody than other people, and that's the rationale for certain preferences?
	He gave, yes, he gave great weight to the factual record concerning the history of discrimination against minority restaurant owners and bars.
	And so to him, they had established a sufficient factual record To prioritize funding in that direction.
	Even though in this case it looked like it was going to be 100% of the funding ultimately.
	But that was his interpretation.
	And that he thought they established the factual record.
	I did not.
	But that's because I have a higher constitutional threshold than a lot of people on his side of the aisle politically or ideologically.
	So I think the Sixth Circuit was right.
	That you really should almost never allow race discrimination outside of exceptional.
	In extreme circumstances, not just, hey, look, there's some good grounds here to show that these people have disproportionately suffered, so they should disproportionately benefit.
	I think the nexus has to be a lot tighter.
	Also, their policies didn't require that.
	Wisconsin Law School used to have a policy that was very individual-based.
	And it would include your experience of being victimized by discrimination as part of your application process, but it was individualized.
	Like Henry Louis Gates once said, if we talked about affirmative action in the modern world, for Harvard, we would have to call the movie straight out of Brookline rather than straight out of Brooklyn, which joked about with Dershowitz, and he was saying, well, these days Brooklyn ain't Brooklyn, but he wasn't Brooklyn like when he grew up.
	But the principle being that...
	Just because there's been African-American and Latinos that have been disproportionately discriminated against doesn't mean the one getting the money back under the program was discriminated against.
	And so that was part of my problem.
	There wasn't a tight nexus.
	If they'd done a tight nexus, they would have had plenty of money for everybody.
	They didn't do a tight nexus because, in my view, they want racialized politics.
	This was setting up the predicate for reparations-type policies that are only tied to race, not tied to actual experience of oppression.
	I'm bringing up Theophrastus 3.0.
	Please say something about people referencing Lightfoot's looks like racism.
	That's criticizing someone for superficial characteristics.
	First of all, I mean, everybody knows the way I feel about that.
	I totally agree.
	It's the reason why I didn't make what would otherwise be obvious jokes about her hypocrisy, about having gotten her hair done during the pandemic.
	I mean, there's obvious jokes that people can make there based on superficial stuff.
	It's not my thing.
	Some comics, some sassier, snarkier people do it.
	I don't do it.
	That being said, it's the internet, and everybody else does it, and they make fun of Robert for physical, superficial attributes.
	They make fun of me.
	I can take it.
	I don't dish out those types of things.
	I generally think it's just childish and whatever, but the internet is what it is.
	Okay, and Robert, just explain to me why the Tennessee lower court you think is going to get reversed or there's going to be a precedent being issued by the higher courts that are basically going to solve this bad judgment of a problem?
	Well, it's because Tennessee's within the Sixth Circuit, and the Sixth Circuit, while I was addressing Michigan, was addressing the same legal question.
	And they said that, no, this doesn't meet the standard.
	So that means the Sixth Circuit en banc would have to reverse that Sixth Circuit panel decision.
	Otherwise, the Tennessee decisions...
	Automatically struck down, basically.
	So at this point, the law of the land is that no racial preferences in COVID relief packages meet constitutional scrutiny.
	I think that's the right decision based on their policies and the existing record.
	There's an outside chance it goes with the U.S. Supreme Court, but maybe the Fifth Circuit will come back with a different decision, but so far I think...
	Four of the five courts, if I recall correctly, have all ruled this way.
	So that's where I think it's going to stay.
	Okay.
	Going to hear some noise coming from upstairs.
	Now let me just get the next...
	Oh, you know, another...
	Let's say another good one about government overreach.
	The FOIA lawsuit coming out of...
	I'm going to get the districts mixed up.
	I know that the FOIA request is for correspondence between the Pennsylvania government and the federal government.
	It was quite...
	It happens to be that the Pennsylvania health official is now the federal health official.
	So that, you know, there's an interesting overlap.
	This is the, what's, Levine?
	Rachel Levine, who is also transgender, I believe, and another thing which I don't make fun of people for, period.
	I'll make fun of them for the terrible work they do as elected officials, and that's legit because that's what they're there for.
	This is the official who got their own mother.
	Out of a nursing home, right before Pennsylvania instituted its, let's send all the COVID-infected patients back to the nursing homes.
	And what it is, is like Michigan, like New York, it appears Pennsylvania was playing games with what documentation and information they were giving to the feds.
	And for people who don't remember or are unaware, both Michigan and New York are under federal investigation over whether or not they falsified documents and information.
	To the feds because they didn't want the Trump administration to know how bad their COVID policy in nursing homes is working.
	Credit to Jack Posobiec, who's now at Human Events, also at One America News Network, also a Claremont fellow, who was one of the first people to document and detail this in the court of public opinion.
	He was talking about this back in April and May of last year.
	And just so everybody appreciates this, because I don't think people know or they may have forgotten, because at the time I was paying...
	It didn't mean as much to me then as it does now.
	Rachel Levine took her mother out of a long-term healthcare facility, put her in private care while implementing policy that we don't know yet because Pennsylvania is sort of a little bit behind the curve or behind the transparency front compared to Michigan and New York.
	New York, we know what happened.
	We know what Cuomo did.
	How that was not the end of his political career and the beginning of his potentially other criminal career is beyond me.
	Whatever.
	We know what happened in New York.
	We're now discovering Charlie LeDuff.
	Anybody who doesn't know him, follow him.
	Great show.
	He's got the No BS Hour on Facebook.
	He's been doing the God's work with Michigan's Whitmer and uncovering the fact that they may have underreported their long-term healthcare facility deaths by twofold or underrepresented by half.
	It's twice what they've been reporting.
	And why is that relevant?
	Well, it's relevant.
	Some people are going to say, what difference does it make if they died here or died there?
	And I said in my analysis, you know, when you're trying to identify the source of an outbreak in a pandemic, it kind of does matter where the people who are dying are coming from.
	And Michigan's reason for why they didn't determine that they were coming from long-term healthcare facilities, it was too arduous and painstaking to determine who died in hospital, where they came from.
	Bullcrap, but whatever.
	So that's New York and Michigan.
	It seems like Pennsylvania is right on the same track, but we're a little bit further behind because they've been refusing to communicate documents.
	Which is now the object of this FOIA request.
	Another good short lawsuit.
	Bottom line, they're asking for...
	Who's the plaintiff in that again?
	I forgot now.
	Oh, it's again Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton.
	They were real active this week.
	They were filing suits all over the place.
	So they were doing yeoman's work.
	For people who don't know, Judicial Watch and Tom Fitton in particular were the ones that outed the Clinton email scandal.
	Which they only found out about and was uncovered because of all their FOIA requests.
	And it's another reminder to everybody out there.
	I had a hush-hush at vivabarneslaw.locals.com, which was a lot of the great information and intel that's in that first one and that will be in future ones about 9-11 came out of FOIA requests.
	People have found out all kinds of interesting things.
	So it's a reminder.
	It's a white pill.
	To remember that ordinary people using the Freedom of Information Act are the ones that often uncloak all kinds of interesting things about the government.
	And this is going right to the heart of what exactly was disclosed.
	Also, it shows the conflict.
	Biden put in charge of a key position of public health in the federal government an official who should be under investigation for what they did when they were in the Pennsylvania government.
	And now they're apparently hiding information in their role as a federal official from the Freedom of Information Act scrutiny.
	So it's also another place where Republicans are useless, but that's another story for another day.
	And this is something interesting for people to appreciate.
	And people are going to jump on.
	There's a number of, call it, I don't want to call it conspiratorial thoughts one can have.
	There's a number of questions one can have.
	Did Biden hire or appoint this person, Rachel Levy, because of what she did or just being totally oblivious to what she did because it would look good on paper for him to...
	Appoint a transgender official to his administration.
	He'll get to check off one of the identity politics box.
	And he had no idea of what had been going on under her supervision.
	And now that it's going to come to the forefront, they're going to do their best to hide it because they don't want to show the fact that they basically...
	What's the word when you give someone a better...
	They promoted someone who was not just incompetent but might be responsible for thousands of deaths as a direct result of their policy.
	So you don't know which way to go with this, but either way, it's bad.
	And the bottom line is, I'm more inclined to think Joe Biden quite literally has a checklist of diversity.
	He wants to pick certain candidates based on entirely superficial attributes, just so he can say that he does it.
	And then when the stuff starts coming out, then it's damage control, because you can't fire them right away, although it might lead to Rachel being dismissed, demoted, whatever.
	But now it's a fight for the government to hide its own wrongdoing, to protect its own reputation.
	And it's just the idea that you make a request.
	And they made the request months ago.
	And don't get any response.
	And these are issues of national importance, of public health, of policy.
	If you know that the outbreaks and the spreads are coming or originating in long-term healthcare facilities, maybe you don't need to lock down the entire province or the entire state and shut down small business.
	Maybe you just need to focus on where it's coming from.
	But you don't know it because you don't look into it or you don't do whatever.
	And then you try to obstruct any attempt of...
	Actual reporters and actual journalists and actual people who are trying to make the world a better place.
	You try to obstruct their efforts to do so.
	That's the stank of corruption of government, and it's terrible.
	How does it work with these things?
	The government's going to piss and moan, drag its feet, but a judge is going to say, communicate the documents?
	I think so, because the grounds to withhold this documentation is pretty weak.
	So this is not like a legal Eagle FOIA suit.
	Judicial Watch has a long history of winning these suits.
	They don't win them all, but they win a bunch of them.
	And from my review of it, they got strong ground.
	It's not like they're asking for national security.
	So these records are records that really should be turned over, should be publicly known, and should be fully vetted and disclosed to the world.
	And the fact that they're delaying and stalling means there's information there that makes key Biden officials look bad.
	Because they were once the Pennsylvania officials.
	And it's terrible.
	Everybody should appreciate what they were doing.
	But at one point in time, they knew that by bringing in COVID-positive patients to nursing homes, it was bad and it was causing problems.
	They knew that they could not do enough in these nursing homes to segregate sections, to have floors for COVID-positive patients.
	Because like Charlie LaDuff discovered through his research in Michigan...
	They had separate floors.
	The staff were intermingling in the kitchens.
	They knew what they were doing was killing people, and they didn't stop doing it.
	And then they refused to disclose the information.
	They further hid it, and they further apparently might have falsified documents, at least in New York and Michigan.
	And they probably did the same thing in Pennsylvania.
	And then they turn around, cripple the entire state, cripple the entire nation, and try to pass the blame onto other people for political purposes.
	Disgusting.
	There's no other word for it.
	And the truly disgusting thing about it is that there will probably be no meaningful repercussions for the responsible officials, and people are just going to forget about it and go back to the easy thing to blame.
	Orange man, bad.
	It's all his fault, and all these other politicians get a pass.
	One of our locals' questions was, will the Third Circuit ever rule on the Stickmin decision?
	Probably sometime in the next century.
	But it turns out, you know, if the state of Pennsylvania had to follow his decision and the logic would have ultimately led to, none of this may have been here.
	And ironically, corrupt Pennsylvania politicians might have had their record covered up for them.
	The way Wisconsin Supreme Court prevented the Wisconsin governor from making mistakes, they could have also done the same in Pennsylvania had they actually abided by Judge Dickman's ruling.
	But, you know, it's also, though, it is a broader pattern.
	Everybody that's from a state...
	That was a big lockdown state.
	New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California is facing political blowback.
	Whereas politicians and governors who decided not to follow lockdown laws, for the most part, such as in Florida and Texas, are experiencing record approval ratings.
	So I think that this may continue to blow back, especially in light of new information that, you know, apparently Biden was originally trying not to do an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.
	And that was also a hush-hush from several, several weeks, maybe a month or so ago, that was about where this COVID-19 came from.
	And you can go to vivabarneslaw.locals.com and watch that hush-hush along with some others if you want.
	But basically, Biden's been forced to re-examine his desire to shut down that inquiry.
	And if I was Fauci, I'd be looking at vacation plans in Brazil right about now.
	Not that he's likely to face consequences, but public consequences are probably coming.
	And there's been some highlights of clips of Fauci saying things eight years ago, four years ago.
	I was on Eric Hunley's channel with Nate Brody on Friday.
	Eric Hunley is also on Locals, unstructured.locals.com.
	And we were talking about it, and Eric put up an article from 2017, which said Trump is likely going to face a pandemic in his presidency.
	Not scripted, might be the better word, authored by Fauci.
	And so, you know, we're all like hypothesizing.
	Nate says, look, every president has faced a pandemic.
	Obama did.
	You know, Trump did.
	They happen pretty much with every presidency, to which I said, well, if it happens with every presidency, it's kind of an ominous thing to remind then, because if it happens all the time, it's, you know, it's not newsworthy.
	But the fact that it's Fauci saying it comes off a little weird and suspicious and certainly can lend to some creative thoughts.
	But now, what's the bigger deal?
	The bigger issue, in fact, Robert, yeah, maybe enlighten everybody as to what the big deal was.
	Who was cross-examining Fauci?
	Rand Paul.
	Rand Paul.
	So he was asking Fauci about financing of this Wuhan lab.
	Can you explain to everybody what the significance of that cross was so that we can actually put this all together now?
	Sure.
	So essentially it's called gain-of-function research.
	So it's, in my view, disguised as biosafety.
	People can look up Francis Boyle.
	He was one of the key lawyers.
	He's a law professor at the University of Illinois who's raised a lot of questions about so-called biosafety labs because essentially biological weapons were supposed to mostly be getting rid of and not doing anymore.
	Nixon helped get rid of them back in the early 70s.
	And there's various treaties that impact it, U.S. domestic laws that do it.
	So they don't call them bioweapons anymore.
	They call them biosafety.
	The problem is gain of function is when you take a virus that's natural to the world and you add a function to make it either more deadly or more able to contaminate people.
	And from the get-go, there were people saying that they believed, including Francis Boyle, that COVID-19 had the hallmarks.
	Of a bioweapon, not something naturally produced.
	Brett Weinstein was raising issues with this very early on, saying that this is a theory that should be explored and so forth.
	Also, you know, great guy, Dark Horse Podcast on YouTube and elsewhere.
	And so given that context, the question was whether that could have happened.
	The issue is this became controversial.
	It's sporadically controversial because most Americans are clueless about it.
	They don't know that we still develop bioweapons.
	We just call them biosafety.
	The theory is this.
	I'm designing this gain of function to see because I think somebody else might design it.
	And so I'm going to design it first, then design the vaccine for it so that we can't be impacted by it.
	The critics would say, no, this is just developing bioweapons.
	And maybe you want a vaccine for your own population, but not for the other population that you're going to use it against.
	The issue with Fauci...
	Is that this became controversial during Obama's tenure in 2014 because some of this research was being done at some U.S. facilities.
	It was shut down and it appears that Fauci at the National Institutes for Health continued to fund it indirectly by funding it in Wuhan instead at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
	It's one of the only...
	What's called BS Level 4. I love it's called BS.
	It's BS Level 4, right?
	Yes, exactly.
	Biosafety Level 4. So it's one of the highest levels in the world of what kind of experimental research you can do.
	They were researching coronaviruses in particular, doing gain-of-function research there.
	And that's why from a very early stage, there were some people who immediately were raising questions about what's the likely coincidence of one of the only...
	Bios weapons labs in the world being within the same city within miles of where this virus emerged when it concerns the same kind of coronaviruses that they've been experimenting with.
	And so China did a good job of shutting it down.
	Then the media helped and big tech helped.
	Until this week, we probably couldn't even go into this detail here on YouTube.
	Because this was, it would have been shut down.
	But because they're now being so embarrassed by so many people around the world recognizing that this is the more likely than not, not just a viable theory, but a more likely than not theory of its origin, even YouTube and Facebook this week had to backtrack from its prior, and they've done this many times.
	Initially, the WHO said this wasn't even a contaminant.
	It can't go between human to human transmission.
	At the behest of the Chinese, January 14th, people can look it up themselves.
	So that's the backstory.
	And the implication for Fauci is what exactly he knew, whether he was skirting U.S. law, because in his initial answers to Senator Paul, many people saw it as very misleading.
	And that would set him up for potential federal criminal prosecution for lying to Congress.
	For much less consequential supposed misrepresentations, they tried to put Roger Stone in prison for eight years.
	So let's see if they're willing to put Fauci under inquiry.
	I doubt they'll put him under legal inquiry, but it might be time for Fauci to look at early retirement and not a bad time to look at places that don't have extradition to the U.S., just to be sure.
	And I have to make sure that I can bring up...
	A proper chat, not an accidental one.
	But yeah, suddenly misinformation about COVID.
	In fact, I feel more comfortable talking about it now that it's come out of Joe Biden's mouth.
	The President of the United States.
	Had it been...
	You know, I don't like playing that game.
	But had it been Trump, you know what everyone would be saying.
	Censor it, shut it down.
	You know, that's an excuse.
	The media's excuse for why they got it wrong was they hated Trump.
	There was that, Trump, you can't trust Trump, and he was talking about this.
	It always goes back to orange man bad.
	And imagine...
	When we talk about censorship and why censorship is bad, even when the ideas are objectively bad, how much could this have potentially exacerbated the problem, hampered the response, hampered the crowdsourcing of knowledge and information to respond more properly?
	Had this not been censored from the get-go, you'll never know.
	It'll always be hypothetical.
	But it is not hypothetical to say that...
	It would have been better off to have had these discussions a year ago as opposed to having big tech playing our medical government information overlords as they did.
	And now a year later, half a million people in the States, 600,000 in the States, 22,000 in Canada, whatever in the world.
	Now we can start having this discussion now that all the damage is done and now that this information could be useful for other things, potentially justifying military or sanctions and others.
	It can be useful for that politically, but not for any response purposes.
	We'll also look at how the political fallout could have been radically different.
	For Trump, who's anti-China, to say that this was a biological weapon released by the Chinese deliberately or accidentally to harm the U.S. economy and society would have totally shifted the political narrative.
	That's the real reason why the media couldn't touch it and allow it to be discussed, in my view.
	It becomes increasingly difficult, Robert, to not get black pill jaded.
	I don't know.
	The white pill is the good one, right?
	Yes, the white pill is the good one.
	Black pill is doom and gloom.
	Okay.
	The red pill is the Matrix Awakening.
	And by the way, everybody, I think we're at like 1,500 people watching live on Rumble.
	Rumble, we're also live.
	I forgot to mention that in the beginning.
	We're live on Rumble.
	Rumble has chat now.
	Although I think you have to have an account to chat and people don't like having to give their number to have an account.
	Totally understand.
	No system is perfect, and there's always going to be something to complain about.
	Okay, so that's the Fauci and Iran thing, which is fascinating.
	And then he said there was a clip that surfaced from 2012 about Fauci talking about, I think, talking about how to make it more aerosol dispersant or something along those lines.
	I forget exactly what the clip was, but a lot of stuff that's coming out now, and you start connecting the dots, not in terms of...
	Creating some grand, deliberate conspiracy, but rather some overt bad decisions and then the political cover-ups to cover up those bad decisions, bad policies, and just misinformation.
	Because right now, the one thing that's abundantly clear, it is mainstream media and the big tech that are guilty of the misinformation in a material sense.
	But, you know, what's going to happen?
	Probably nothing.
	I don't know if Apple has Super Chat now, but that is definitely coming, and that's coming to locals also.
	Oh, let's get it up to 2,000.
	Yeah, get it up to 2,000 likes and drop a comment out so we can make the chat go crazy.
	Before we get into the next subject, Robert, we have a couple of issues on transgender law, transgender issues.
	I guess we'll start with the lawsuit, which I want to make sure.
	Yeah, there's two of them.
	One is Arkansas, which is about whether a doctor can provide certain forms of medical treatment.
	For people who identify as transgender, particularly hormonal, any treatment that can change their body, hormonal treatment, other treatment of that nature, surgical procedures, if they're underage, if they're under the age of 18. And the other one is in West Virginia, where someone is suing to be a cheerleader because they identify as transgender, but a bunch of states have passed some version of West Virginia's law, which is that they're going to keep girls' sports and biological sports defined by biological gender, not gender identity.
	And the ACLU is a lead in both cases.
	And definitely the West Virginia case.
	I believe they're involved in the Arkansas case.
	And their argument is that transgender is a sex protect is a form of gender, a form of gender and effectively.
	And consequently, they're protected under the 14th Amendment and that's protected under the federal civil rights laws.
	And the question is and but particularly the Constitution.
	And it depends on the level of scrutiny.
	and historically, The Supreme Court has been skeptical.
	I think they saw an opening in the Bostock decision, or maybe it's Bostock decision, maybe mispronunciating it, but that was a strict interpretation of how certain gender laws are written by statute.
	It wasn't in the constitutional interpretation.
	Historically, they've been unwilling to expand the protected class under the 14th Amendment to be only groups that have immutable In order to prevail, they need to argue that being transgendered is an immutable characteristic, in my view.
	Otherwise, they don't fit.
	What is the degree of scrutiny?
	Strict scrutiny for race, which means the government has to show a compelling...
	And it's got to be narrowly, the means they're using narrowly tied to that compelling basis.
	Intermediate scrutiny is where gender classifications generally fall, which means they need to have a strong reason that's reasonably, pretty decently tied in.
	Rational basis is always very hard to win on.
	And if they're not a protected class, it just has to have a reason for their decision.
	And that's going to come down to, at least under historic Supreme Court precedent, Is being transgendered a...
	I think they'll be able to show they're a minority and they've suffered discrimination historically.
	I just don't think they fit the immutable characteristic definition, or at least historically have not.
	Well, so the Arkansas lawsuit, actually, I'll give the background on that for anybody who may not be aware of it.
	It's actually pretty interesting.
	It's interesting in what they allege in the lawsuit.
	Basically, there was a law that we're calling the...
	In the lawsuit, it's called the healthcare ban.
	And it was a law passed by the government.
	I don't want to mix up the words of his legislature or Senate or whatever.
	It was a law that was passed by the government, which basically said, you're outlawing medical treatment, puberty blockers, etc.
	for children under the age of 18 who want to use it to transition or to treat gender dysmorphia.
	And so the law says...
	Outright ban.
	You cannot do these certain medical procedures on children under the age of 18 who suffer from gender dysmorphia as treatment.
	Apparently the governor, what's the governor's name, tried to veto it and the veto was, she vetoed it and then the legislature passed it anyhow by majority vote, which is interesting.
	I want to know the procedure on that if you know if it's a legit procedure, if they're going to get struck down on a procedural issue or if it's going to go to the substantive issue.
	I mean, he vetoed it.
	His veto was very controversial.
	And they overrode it.
	Arkansas is a very culturally conservative state.
	Now, the additional ground...
	What's interesting in that particular...
	So West Virginia will really be whether it's an immutable classification that deserves intermediate scrutiny.
	And then the second question will be, well, we've always differentiated and discriminated by gender in sports and public schools.
	So usually they've always said that's a permissible basis.
	So how is it not permissible now?
	And so, to me, I don't think that they should be able to do the law, but the federal courts have been very deferential to the transgender approach in law, in a lot of cases that I was surprised at the outcome, and I thought they stretched the law beyond where it existed.
	But in the Arkansas case, their medical basis is that there's very few clinical trial-based research on this.
	And there's a suit now, I think it's in the UK, that we discussed previously, not in great detail, but where someone, there's more and more people object as adults, objecting to doctors recommending they use these biological changing techniques, and in part they're alleging medical malpractice on grounds that these are not clinically proven medical treatments.
	And in the suit, they apparently concede that part.
	They just argue that shouldn't be the necessary basis for it.
	And it'll come back to...
	Is this intermediate scrutiny or is this rational basis?
	And I asked a question and people sent me links to change PDFs into websites or links that we can share.
	I'll do it.
	I think this one I can share.
	But the lawsuit itself is pretty interesting because they make some admissions, which I think if anybody else said those things, it would lead to some form of public cancellation where the entire Arkansas challenging of the healthcare ban.
	It defines transgenderism as gender dysmorphia, as a mental issue that causes distress, as a psychological issue that causes distress, gender dysmorphia being recognized by the DSM-IV, whatever we're up to now.
	In the lawsuit, it qualifies it as gender dysmorphia, which is to qualify it as a mental issue.
	And they say, but it can cause such distress that sometimes the only treatment, and they call it medical treatment, is puberty blockers, depending on which way the situation goes.
	So they call it something of a mental issue, and they say that it's medical treatment and not...
	I don't want to use inflammatory rhetoric.
	It's not psychological treatment.
	I thought the weakness of their claim was the First Amendment claim because I thought it was unlike the Washington case.
	There's no prohibition on speech.
	There's only a prohibition they can't refer the person for this particular medical procedure.
	But that's not a speech limitation, nor are they coercing speech.
	They're not telling them they can or can't say certain things.
	They're just saying you can't provide this medical service or direct them for that medical service.
	I didn't see that as speech.
	And so then it comes down to, is there a rational basis for it?
	I think they do meet that standard.
	Or does intermediate scrutiny apply if we're going to treat transgender identity as equal to gender identity?
	Then does it meet intermediate scrutiny?
	And I think it does based on what I saw so far.
	In other words, the fact that this medical treatment is kind of, at least at some level, experimental because it doesn't have a lot of medical research behind it, doesn't have a lot of clinical background behind it.
	I think a lot of people that have been recommending this treatment, it became very chic within the parts of the medical community, I think for political purposes.
	They should be paying attention to these suits that are being brought by adults who are saying, no, you screwed up because you biologically changed me in ways I can't undo.
	One of the issues is pregnancy, for example.
	Apparently unable to get pregnant later in life.
	Pregnancy, osteoporosis, and to some extent it's an irreversible change, which we want to call it not mutilating one's body, but it is causing a physical irreparable change in the body.
	In the lawsuit, The lawsuit purports that by prescribing puberty blockers, if the child changes their mind, you can stop it and then undo it.
	But my understanding, I may be wrong.
	I don't think I'm wrong.
	My understanding is that it does cause irreversible issues.
	There's people filing suit on that basis.
	So I don't know the science to this.
	I've seen and heard people's reports on it.
	I'm not a doctor.
	I just know people are suing saying they did irreversible damage.
	Oh, did I say gender dysmorphia or gender dysphoria?
	Sorry, I meant to say gender dysphoria if I said dysmorphia.
	Gender dysphoria.
	And that's a clinical thing.
	So in the lawsuit, they refer to it as that.
	They make some affirmations that the treatment, medical treatment, they qualify it as medical treatment.
	I think a lot of people are going to take issue with that.
	And they say that it's reversible.
	All you have to do is stop the treatment and puff, it goes back to normal, which it doesn't from what I understand.
	There are some serious fertility issues, osteoporosis issues, among other things.
	Now, the issue is going to be, and I see some people in the chat already bringing it up.
	It's the obvious one.
	If this is some form of body mutilation, then why is circumcision allowed and this should not be allowed?
	This is the type of discussion where confusing two situations is not going to add clarity to either of them.
	You can feel the way you feel about circumcision and whether or not it's distinguishable from FGM.
	You can feel the way you feel about this and then question why it's different than circumcision, whatever.
	This particular issue, the question is, what's the proper treatment and is this ban on treatment constitutionally justifiable?
	Are you protecting kids or are you harming the kids?
	And we're going to see what the courts have to say.
	It's interesting.
	I know where I side on this if it were to be a question of policy.
	Kids need to wait until they're 18 to get tattoos.
	They need to wait until they're 18 to smoke and drink and to do other things that will have lasting impacts on their body.
	Then the issue would be if a doctor and their parents say, it's okay, are you intruding on the parental's right to do what they think is best for their child?
	And then you get into whether or not it's child abuse versus a parent making the decision that they think is in the best interest of their child.
	And can you prevent a parent from doing that?
	And can you prevent a parent from circumcision?
	Whatever.
	So it's complicated.
	I mean, I think it will come down to, well, these cases will establish, is transgender identity the same as gender identity?
	I don't think it meets immutable characteristic standards at this point, but maybe that's a medical determination rather than a legal one.
	So we'll see.
	And maybe they'll drop the immutable standard requirement.
	But I think that's where...
	Well, whatever they decide in these individual cases about sports and schools and certain forms of medical treatment, because there could be independent grounds, those could meet that scrutiny, even if it's the intermediate level of scrutiny.
	The big legal impact will be what level of scrutiny they apply.
	It would not surprise me if one of these cases ends up at the U.S. Supreme Court.
	Well, the immutability is also interesting, considering some of the gender identity issues are fundamentally mutable.
	They're fluid.
	And they're defined as such.
	So it's interesting how you would...
	Can you be immutably fluid?
	I mean, this is like the Zenonian power dots.
	Maybe why they're embracing the gender dysphoria language that they normally reject.
	Because a lot of people in the trans rights movement consider that pejorative and discriminatory.
	But if you're going to try to argue it's an immutable characteristic, you almost need to argue that it's a psychological condition you're born with.
	Because otherwise, it's not immutable, or at least wouldn't appear to be.
	That's fascinating.
	Now, I want to bring this one up because this brings up a point, a totally separate debate.
	Circumcision doesn't affect functionality.
	That's the difference.
	And some people would argue with that.
	Some people will say, it affects pleasure.
	It affects sensation, yada, yada.
	So, different debates, but I just wanted to address that particular point.
	That's the legitimate response, and then you know what the other response is going to be.
	Okay, so what do we move into from here, Robert?
	They got fired for raising issues about critical race theory.
	Oh, okay.
	That'll be a good segue.
	Okay, so fill us in on that.
	That'll be a good segue into another person who got fired for doing something on social media as well.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, it was a football coach.
	I think it's in Massachusetts.
	And he and his wife raised just one, like, basically they announced a seventh grade class that was going to, you know, the teachers wearing BLM or putting up BLM slogans and a bunch of stuff like that.
	And they just thought it was age inappropriate.
	They weren't even arguing so much against critical race theory's ideas.
	This is not appropriate for a 7th grade class.
	I think they had problems with critical race theory, but that wasn't the core of it.
	Petitioned to have that resolved, and based on that, the football coach was fired.
	Not only people forget, Justice Amy Coney Barrett forgot in the Senate hearings.
	So-called brilliant scholar, purportedly, forgot all the First Amendment rights.
	And one First Amendment right that a lot of people forget, though, if you're going to go to the Supreme Court, ideally you don't, is the right to petition your government for the redress of grievances.
	After all, the Declaration of Independence was fundamentally, the whole process that started that was petitioning the government for redress of grievances.
	So, of course, it would be critical, essential, and fundamental to the First Amendment.
	And you cannot, as a state actor, discriminate against someone, take punitive action against someone because they have petitioned for redress of grievances.
	This is what protects.
	Not only that, it can also protect in certain contexts.
	It can be applicable in the defamation context and a wide range of other contexts because you can't be sued for certain things.
	You say you had a city council proceeding, typically, things like that.
	For filing a whistleblower complaint, generally, you can't be sued.
	Depends on the place.
	Same right can come into play.
	And it particularly prohibits state actors from taking action that can be courts under certain circumstances like libel lawsuits and whatnot.
	But so it seems to me it's a good claim because, I mean, it's basically the Massachusetts school superintendent was unhappy that there was anybody challenging or exposing this radical shift in seventh grade kids' education about history towards a sort of critical race theory type history.
	And the other problem that they were complaining about is it happened, not only the age being not the appropriate age for this particular method of teaching, but also the open politics of the teacher, but that the parents were not told about it.
	And this is just happening repeatedly, where they're just usurping children's education without advanced parental information or consent, which for these kind of dramatic shifts, they're supposed to be.
	So that was the other protest.
	So it was a legitimately well-granted protest, but either way, it appears that he was fired because of and in response to and in retaliation of his petitioning the government.
	So I think he's got a good claim.
	I may have to break that one down.
	I didn't get to read that lawsuit, but we're just seeing more and more of it.
	It's political reprisals that cost someone arguably one of the most important things in their lives, their livelihood, and their ability to support themselves or their family because they dare speak up against...
	Speak out against what they think is not proper.
	And it is the chilling effect, the outright silencing of any form of dissenting discourse.
	And it's not what a free country should ever be about.
	Actually, Robert, before we do that, I'm going to do Cleopatra's super chat here.
	Good evening, gentlemen.
	I'm testing YouTube and Apple.
	Amex has taken care of the problem.
	There was a problem of double charging for super chats.
	And I chatted with YouTube today to try to have them resolve the issue.
	And I think it was yesterday.
	How does one support you on this platform?
	Other than using YouTube, Apple, please.
	If too long, please send a message.
	Thank you.
	MX should run our elections.
	I don't know that there's any way to support on YouTube without using a credit card.
	So, you know, other than that, Locals.
	It's a good place.
	The cop.
	Oh, man, one of these days I'll get this right.
	There we go.
	I had to look at the camera and make sure that was at 1 hour and 14 minutes and 30 seconds so I can clip that for my next end bit.
	Speaking of dissonance, speaking out against dissonance, two interesting cases.
	One that's on a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't been taken.
	One, it appears the California Supreme Court is now going to take, it appears, which is, I'm not a fan of arbitration in general, but a lot of contracts compel arbitration.
	But what happens when they compel arbitration to a religious organization?
	And this is what Scientology does.
	Scientology requires people submit any dispute they have to Scientology to a Scientology board, even for people who are complaining about the treatment of lead actors within Scientology and have exited Scientology.
	And it's a unique, unusual confluence of issues.
	Right now, there's a prominent former actor.
	Who's facing multiple rape charges in California.
	Several of those victims have also sued him.
	There's other people that are prominent in the Scientology skeptical movement.
	Man, I'm encouraging a lot of trolls now.
	Nothing official against the Scientology movement.
	Just saying maybe, you know, shouldn't compel arbitration.
	I'm just reading some of the comments in the chat, which I'm not going to bring up.
	First question, base level question.
	In the United States, Do these civil courts enforce religious law or sanctions under religious law?
	No, they can't.
	And that's a First Amendment issue.
	So the state cannot enforce it, cannot enforce religious law.
	And so what happens, though, in these disputes, they haven't figured out how to resolve it.
	If a court has to do something religious or determine religious doctrine, then they say we can't enforce this contract, usually.
	Even if it's a contract to arbitrate or to arbitrate under a certain subject matter of religious rules and say, no, we can only do civil rules.
	Or sometimes they say, because we can't get involved in religious issues, we will grant the motion to compel arbitration because that's for them to decide.
	So they haven't figured out there's been this bad judicial bias.
	Now, part of it's federal and state law, where Federal Arbitration Act, there's a bunch of rules that have made it very hard.
	To challenge arbitration, the arbitration almost always favors institutional actors.
	And you're stuck with the whim of a single person.
	So people who think judges are better than juries almost never are judges better than juries because you're stuck with the random whim of one person.
	Give me 12 people any day of the week rather than the random whim of one person unless I really, really know that one person exceptionally well, which is going to be rare in the case of judges.
	Most people who experience arbitration are disappointed in the process.
	The only people that are happy with arbitration are repeat actors, who the arbitrators either tend to favor or because if it's a sports dispute, they tend to be evenly split because...
	Both sides are repeat actors.
	So corporations love arbitration.
	Big institutions love arbitration.
	But ordinary people rarely benefit from arbitration.
	And the wackiness you get of people who are pretending to still be judges is off the charts.
	But here it's a really unique context because people forget religiously, part of your religious freedom is first the state cannot impose any religious obligation upon you and isn't...
	The state doing so when it compels you to an arbitration with the religious organization that you have left.
	The second part of it is you have a First Amendment right to leave a religion.
	That's part of your religious expression choices.
	I mean, heck, the whole country was founded on people who were leaving some major group and were minority sectarian religious groups.
	To me, I don't think any court should compel any arbitration.
	And again, I'm a skeptic of arbitration in general, so that's my bias.
	But definitely not in this context, because I think it inevitably and inescapably becomes the state forcing religion upon someone, particularly a religion they have left.
	And I think it's a violation of public policy to say you can ever enforce an arbitration clause.
	That includes a religious organization making a determination when you have left that religious organization.
	It's an interesting thing.
	In Canada, we had this famous case where it was a Jewish couple and the husband refused to give the wife the religious divorce, which is called a get.
	It went to the Supreme Court and they basically said they came to the conclusion that refusing to grant the wife the religious divorce They didn't approve of it or affirm it on the basis of affirming religious beliefs.
	They said it was basically a contract that they made and that he was defaulting on his end of the contract.
	So it wasn't enforcing religious law.
	It was enforcing contractual law, which happened to be based around religion.
	So what is going on with the Scientology?
	Basically, they include an arbitration clause which forces arbitration even on matters relating to alleged assaults of a sexual nature.
	Correct.
	I mean, all kinds of extraordinary torts.
	And those people challenging Scientology say they will never get a fair arbitration hearing from the Scientology leaders because they're embarrassing Scientology by bringing these claims in the first instance.
	And that the last thing they want to do is to be forced to re-interact with the Scientology leaders that they now oppose and object to.
	Now, in the States, we've avoided the arbitration religion issue in cases of marriage and children by saying that we'll never compel arbitration or rules of religion to apply because those are issues that the courts always have to handle.
	My own view is if someone's exited a religion, it's intertwinement with the state, it's state-forced religion, and violating the right to exit a religion to compel an arbitration clause.
	And there's a New York case that's on point on this, to enforce an arbitration clause.
	That requires you to go to the same religious body to adjudicate your claims.
	Claims that don't arise under the religion.
	It would be different if that was what was happening.
	If you were saying it was a religious contract, say, and it was something under the contract that's religiously oriented or religiously defined.
	That's not what's happening.
	They're bringing claims that arise under state law.
	Or in some cases, federal law.
	And in either instance, they should be able to go to a state court and a federal court to adjudicate it.
	Not arbitration in general, but definitely not arbitration by the organization they're effectively kind of suing.
	So even if they're suing individuals, you have to be careful with Scientology.
	They sue like mad.
	But I'll give them credit.
	One credit for Scientology.
	They fought the IRS better than anybody.
	So they got real skill there.
	But I don't think they should be the ones adjudicating these disputes.
	It looks like the California Supreme Court is going to step in.
	But if they don't, this case and then another case may go up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
	I can understand the arguments for compelling the arbitration clause freely negotiated between the parties.
	You signed a contract.
	You agreed this is how you would resolve any dispute.
	End of story.
	I mean, I know Canadian law and arbitration.
	I've done some.
	I haven't done it in five years, maybe more.
	But the courts, if there's an arbitration clause, they will defer to arbitration even to determine the extent of their own jurisdiction.
	Is the deference the same in the United States?
	Like, if there's an arbitration clause, send it to arbitration, let them figure out whether or not they have competence?
	It's even worse.
	I have two cases going up to the California court system where they compelled arbitration where my client never agreed to either arbitrate that dispute or didn't even sign a contract in the first place.
	The reality is it's a lot of lazy judges saying, oh, I don't have to decide it.
	I can shove it off on these people.
	The other problem is arbitrators, you have to pay.
	They take a long time sometimes to rule and they kind of drag it out.
	Typically, they're either retired judges or senior lawyers who are On the outs of the practice who have great experience.
	I've never been an arbitrator in my life that I would have confidence in.
	I'll put it that way.
	And in the United States, same principle that the arbitral award is confidential unless it has to be homologated by court, which is why I presume some entities, Scientology in particular, might prefer the confidential route as opposed to the before open court route.
	That's part of the argument by the people bringing suit.
	My argument in general is that arbitration is privatization of justice in the hands of corporate...
	Corporatized hands that are going to favor institutional interest and repeat actors that suppress information, disguise the rights of court.
	Your right of public access disappears as far as a citizen.
	Your right to public information vanishes.
	Your right to public justice goes away.
	And you have no jury trial rights.
	So if arbitration would include all those things, I'd have a lot less problem with it.
	But, you know, basically it becomes, you know, royal edict rulings.
	And I can see why it's deeply problematic in this context.
	And that's not saying anything bad about Scientology.
	I would say that about any religious group, even my homegrown Baptist friends.
	So I don't think any church group should be deciding a matter of state or federal law.
	Again, not a matter of church issues, state or federal law concerning someone who has exited the religion.
	Who is suing them related to claims that don't arise under that religion.
	Interesting.
	Now, I'm pulling up this because I have to read this in real time.
	You guys catch Alison Morrow on Phil DeFranco calling for censorship and is now crying now that he had some censorship on one of his videos.
	Was Alison Morrow on Philip DeFranco?
	And I asked this not because...
	Oh, no.
	She was discussing Phil DeFranco.
	I was going to say because I don't like Phil, but that would still be a great thing for Alison.
	Is Philly complaining about censorship now?
	Or who's complaining about the censorship?
	DeFranco is.
	So, I mean, he's previously liked censorship, and now he's whining about it.
	Because he assumed it would never impact him.
	But what is it?
	He's offending people higher up the food chain than him.
	And he's discovering that he really thought it was just because he's been right all this time, not because he's been picking on people lower than the food chain than him in terms of YouTube's food chain.
	I mean, he made completely false statements initially about the Covington kids.
	I had to correct that.
	So he's made multiple false statements about a wide range of matters.
	But yeah, I'm not in favor of YouTube censoring him because, again, I think they're a platform.
	But that might be a good transition into the big...
	The Florida suit.
	Yeah, you're going to have to...
	Well, first of all, so nobody complains afterwards.
	What specifically did Phil get censored for?
	I wasn't aware of that news.
	Oh, we probably shouldn't talk about it much because we'll be censored the same.
	Watch Alison Morrow for that, folks.
	Okay, I'll Google it afterwards.
	Okay, talk about the Florida suit because I didn't do my homework on this one.
	Bad boy, but I was too busy riding roller coasters today.
	What's going on with the Florida suit?
	So this is the big tech law that was passed by Governor DeSantis that limited the ability of big tech in particular.
	It doesn't apply to all social media platforms.
	It only applies to social media platforms with 100 million subscribers and makes over, I think, $100 million a year, annual revenue, something like that.
	So it only applied to the monopolist.
	Effectively.
	And they exempted Disney, which they complained about in the lawsuit.
	But because they said anybody that operates a theme park can still do whatever they want.
	Disney being very big in Florida, obviously.
	So that's where that came from.
	But their focus was clearly Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube.
	And the two things they really couldn't do is they couldn't censor candidates especially.
	So part one.
	And they couldn't censor them directly or indirectly.
	So they couldn't stick things on their account.
	Warnings, notices, whatever.
	They couldn't editorialize over someone's candidate account.
	Couldn't remove the candidate's account.
	And couldn't manipulate the algorithm.
	Which was really interesting in this suit.
	Now they call it algorithmic moderation.
	Let's call it algorithmic fortification.
	Yes, indeed, exactly.
	And so what they effectively did is they claimed they want to manipulate.
	They talk about how important their algorithmic moderation, fortification, manipulation is throughout the case.
	Their argument is twofold.
	They argue the Section 230 preemption argument.
	The Section 230 preempts this whole area of law.
	And so the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, it says federal law.
	We'll preside whenever there's a conflict between it and an individual state.
	They say that that precludes any state law that contradicts or conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is the main immunity for big tech in this space.
	But the other claim is that it violates their First Amendment rights.
	What's interesting is the implicit admissions made throughout their case, that they engage in algorithmic...
	Moderation.
	That it's a major role of what they do.
	That they do it directly and deliberately toward candidates.
	They do so to manipulate public perception of those candidates.
	Again, moderate it for misinformation.
	All of that is fascinating.
	Basically, they're saying they have a First Amendment right to do so.
	So on the preemption issue, and to a certain degree, the First Amendment claims, Justice Thomas wrote one of his concurring opinions, but his most recent one about big tech.
	He lays out the basis by which this could be outside of First Amendment protections.
	So I'm almost sure DeSantis has already hinted at this, that they'd already prepared their argument to make the law.
	So they wrote the law in anticipation of litigation and have already come up with their defenses, likely using Justice Thomas's, a large part of Justice Thomas's arguments.
	One of Justice Thomas's arguments was in a footnote.
	It might have been footnote four, if I recall right, in his latest opinion, where he just wrote a concurring opinion on a petition to cert that was denied.
	Where he points to Eugene Volokh, who we've been on before.
	I may be mispronouncing his name, but I mispronounce everybody's name.
	Volokh, Volokh, yeah, Eugene Volokh.
	Volokh, yeah, Volokh.
	I want to remember, I think we mentioned this footnote and opinion in another vlog, but sorry, go ahead anyhow.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So basically what he said is that he believes Section 230...
	Preemption provision might violate First Amendment rights.
	Basically, it can't be applied to preempt the state's abilities to protect people's speech because of his interpretation.
	It's a long article he wrote in Reason, and Thomas went out of his way to cite it.
	I had not even seen that argument before Thomas cited it.
	But it's actually a very creative argument for getting around Section 230's preemption principle, which when I first heard about this law, I thought, well, it'd be tough to get past Section 230, but you might as well pass it to set up the legal argument and to set up the political argument if the legal argument doesn't prevail.
	But once I saw Justice Thomas' argument, I was like, ah, they actually have a fighting chance on that legally.
	And he, Justice Thomas, has given basically the roadmap to challenge this.
	So it's going to be a massively fought case.
	All the big techs, big corporate firms are lining up.
	So it's a massive battle.
	And we'll see what happens.
	I think initially the law likely won't be enforced and the judge will grant the injunction.
	But I think over the long haul, this is a case that's exactly written the way Thomas wanted a case to be designed.
	And because it presents a unique set of factors, can a state government protect people's free speech against big tech censorship, particularly in the election context, where they're now admitting they're using their power to basically change whatever they think is misinformation, probably is whoever disagrees with them, is being suppressed and censored in favor of their opponent.
	I mean, it's arguably a massive in-kind donation that would be prohibited under the law.
	But I'm not in favor of the expansion of those laws because they'll inevitably punish speech and dissident ideas.
	But it's real election fortification going on.
	And this will be the case to decide how that...
	Can a state put a stop to it or do we have to wait for the feds to do something?
	And that's the interesting distinction.
	So it's going to be a state law.
	Okay, it's going to be a state law, then the argument is going to be, I mean, to oversimplify, the argument is going to be whether or not the state has the authority, the jurisdiction to compel big tech to not do certain things within that state.
	Correct.
	And particularly as to, can they protect their candidates?
	In other words, if you treat them like a common carrier, or treat them like private malls were treated in California, like old school...
	Corporate mining camps were treated back in the day, even by the U.S. Supreme Court, and say, look, you're a platform.
	You're not a publisher.
	It's critical that candidates have access to your platform.
	Once they're qualified as candidates, you can't manipulate that at all.
	You just have to let the platform go its natural way.
	And they're saying, no, that's forcing speech upon us.
	That's limiting our speech.
	That's a commerce clause violation because this is going to impact past your state, and Section 230 preempts it.
	And screw you, we're big tech, basically.
	So that's an amazing thing.
	And they're saying it's going to be compelled speech on us or infringing our First Amendment rights as private corporations while we sign up.
	They admit they're editorializing.
	I mean, there's no more playing games that they're doing anything but editorializing.
	No more playing games.
	Nice things in the case is it forced, smoked them out to admit, yeah, we're editorializing.
	Yeah, we're manipulating.
	Yeah, we're changing the playing field.
	We're big tech.
	We can.
	That that's their legal, constitutional, and statutory defense, but no longer a factual defense of, no, no, no, no, we're not doing anything like that.
	Okay, I mean, that's interesting, but then they say, you know, you're violating our First Amendment rights while we, through Section 230 immunity protection, get to do that to others.
	They have the immunity of a publisher, but none of the responsibility of a publisher.
	They want the immunity...
	I'm sorry.
	They have the immunity...
	As if they're a platform, but the rights as if they're a publisher.
	They want both.
	They think Section 230 entitles them to that.
	That's where the footnote by Justice Thomas raises serious questions in reference to the article.
	The article lays out some really good counter-arguments as to why that really is a violation.
	That you can't under the First Amendment prohibit a state from expanding protection of free speech.
	I think there's a good argument.
	I thought that was the better argument.
	And then I don't think, I think you can regulate big tech platforms that are monopolies of the digital square, the digital public square, because that's different than any other small actor.
	And because, I mean, if you extend big tech's argument, couldn't you require that, couldn't you turn on or off phone service or electronic service or water service based on someone's politics?
	What stops that?
	Well, I mean, that's my problem with the people who say, oh, you know, the big corporations have all the free speech in the world.
	I've never believed in that from the get-go, by the way.
	Individuals have free speech.
	Corporations are state-chartered entities.
	I'm with Nader on that.
	They should be governed and limited as much as the states want them to be because you get special immunity.
	You choose to operate under a corporate charter.
	It means you as an individual can't be held responsible for what that company does, which is just a collection of individuals making decisions.
	You should have different responsibilities and more limited and more restricted rights.
	But that ship has kind of sailed.
	But I think on the common carrier, it's like if these guys can do whatever they want, and even the states can't limit them, even in the context of elections.
	I mean, this is like being able to put up a sign.
	Well, what if they said, no, you couldn't even put up your sign?
	What if the TV station said you can't put up advertising?
	What if the radio station prohibited you from putting up radio broadcast?
	They're effectively doing that.
	I mean, they've done it and they've shut down, you know, smaller political candidates.
	They shut down the President of the United States.
	It's mind-blowing.
	Oh, Dr. Shiva, I'll give you a quick breakdown.
	He's brought suit in Massachusetts based on, because that was also a Locals question.
	He, Viva Barnes Law at that, Locals.com.
	He brought up basically...
	He thought state government actors were conspiring with social media, Twitter in particular, to suppress him during a campaign and his candidacy and other speech-related issues.
	I reviewed the suit.
	Some people had asked me whether I could represent him.
	I can't because he sues too many people.
	Because he sues somebody who I represent.
	The answer is no.
	God bless him.
	Maybe don't sue everybody, Doc.
	But the second thing is his suit has not got passed.
	It's still in motion to dismiss stage.
	What happened is the judge requested that he get a lawyer.
	Because he's been representing himself pro se for a big part of the case.
	And the people were pointing out information he's brought to the public attention, which is good, but it's not from discovery.
	There was some misapprehension out there.
	He's also not got passed the motion to dismiss stage.
	It's still pending.
	Waiting for him to get a lawyer for them to do another hearing on that.
	Let's back it up right to the beginning, though, just so it's clear for everybody.
	Dr. Shiva is not suing Twitter.
	He is suing the government directly on the basis that the government basically colluded with Twitter and that it wasn't Twitter censoring under its 230 immunities bypass that by alleging that it's actually the government working with in concert directing Twitter and therefore going straight after the government for First Amendment violations.
	At the stage of a motion to dismiss, the judge apparently, if I'm taking Dr. Shiva's summary of the situation at face value, the judge ordered communication of documents and apparently Dr. Shiva received something of a manual, if it's not like a...
	What he got, though, wasn't that.
	So I don't know if he misunderstood or someone else misunderstood.
	The documents he's citing are from 2018, and they're public documents that I saw in the court docket.
	So there is a request for discovery, but the judge hasn't ordered it yet, and everyone's objecting.
	And somehow Twitter has been made apparently a party to the case now, and there's a bunch of amicus briefs being filed.
	It's unfortunate.
	Brennan Center and other people are taking the big tech side that's saying controlling election misinformation is critical.
	So the short answer is Chivas' case hasn't got very far yet.
	It hasn't got past the motion to dismiss, hasn't yet got into discovery.
	He cited some useful information and has cited a good legal theory, but it's...
	To be frank about it, the better case is the case that Bobby Kennedy and the Children's Health Defense is bringing against Facebook.
	So that case is a little bit better developed from a factual legal perspective.
	You know, credit to Dr. Shiva for trying to do what he can do.
	But there are some public beliefs about the case that at least I didn't see on the docket, put it that way.
	Okay, and the document that Dr. Shiva, you know, either stumbled across or whether or not it was always public, the document that Shiva is referring to apparently basically is...
	It illustrates that the government is a special partner with Twitter and they have a direct line to Twitter to, you know, on the recommendation of government, go after specific accounts or specific posts.
	And the argument is going to be, you know, the government is using, the government is basically directing Twitter.
	Particularly in the election context.
	Yeah.
	So this was public.
	They actually discussed this before Congress in 2018.
	And Harvard put out a report saying they were going to do it in 2018.
	But it was supposed to be, it was under the premise that they were targeting foreign disinformation.
	So they were never crystal clear, but they made various statements throughout 2020.
	They said they were going to do this, and then they did do it.
	I mean, I don't think Laura Loomer ever got it.
	I think she was taken off of Twitter, and even though she was a congressional candidate, a Republican nominee for Congress, in a relatively high-profile race, I mean, probably in terms of media coverage, one of the top 100 elections contests, still, I don't think she ever got reinstated.
	So it's part of that.
	Part of what happened to her is why...
	Florida passed that law.
	But in terms of challenging big tech, I wish Dr. Shiva the best of luck.
	Bobby Kennedy's case and the Florida case are much stronger cases for challenging big tech right now.
	And we've talked about this before.
	Pro se litigants, oftentimes they can be just as competent and even more competent than many lawyers.
	There is an impression that goes into things when you're dealing with a highly litigious pro se litigant.
	Justice is human and judges come to conclusions even before any evidence has been adduced.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	It's the judge who basically wanted him to get a lawyer.
	And credit to the judge, that's the judge wanting to make sure all the arguments are really fully heard because you talk about an underdog, man, he's up against it.
	I mean, they brought in, I mean, there's all these amicus people appearing, there's all the big corporate people, Wilmer Cutler's involved, that's always Twitter's lawyer.
	You talk about a David Goliath.
	That's definitely a David Goliath.
	So credit to him for trying to fight it out.
	My advice to him, quit suing everybody else, Doc.
	And I'm going to say, we just hit 2,100 live viewers on Rumble.
	So that's 10,000 people watching between Rumble and YouTube, and that's phenomenal.
	So that's Dr. Shiv, everybody.
	I looked into it briefly.
	We'll cover it when there's news.
	We weren't avoiding it for any particular reason.
	Just waiting to see what would happen on the motion to dismiss.
	And the lawsuit itself, it's pretty straightforward.
	It's alleging that the government is basically directing Twitter to censor for its own benefit.
	Now, one we missed a couple weeks ago, Epic versus Apple.
	And this will probably segue into another one.
	So, everyone's been following it.
	The trial has occurred.
	I guess we're waiting for judgment now.
	Epic was suing Apple because, long story short, I guess Epic does the Fortnite thing.
	Runs Fortnite or ran Fortnite through an app on Apple, through an app on Google Android.
	And the game Fortnite, for anybody who doesn't play, I tried.
	I could never actually kill anybody in that game.
	I could only make it to the top two by not getting killed.
	And I could never win because I couldn't kill anybody.
	It doesn't matter.
	You have in-app purchases in that game.
	And YouTube, not YouTube, sorry, Apple.
	Takes 30% of in-app purchases.
	Are they called in-game purchases?
	In-app purchases.
	Basically, when you buy Shields or whatever, any transaction, microtransaction, in the context of the app, goes through Apple and goes through Google, and they take 30%.
	What Epic did, basically, was create their own platform for the in-app purchases.
	I mean, you'll correct me on some terminology, but basically, they bypassed Apple and Google.
	Directed everyone to their direct in-app purchases or purchases off their website.
	It was called a type of coin or change or something.
	They gave a 20% discount and told everyone to go buy directly through Epic and not through the in-app purchases on Apple and Google.
	Apple and Google, who have their terms of service with any app designer app on their platform, said you violated our terms of service.
	We're shutting your app down.
	And they did.
	They pulled it.
	And nobody can get...
	Fortnite on Apple or on Google.
	And they sued, not on the contractual basis, they sued on antitrust violations, things we've seen in the past, basically saying that Apple and Google are abusing of their effective monopolies in the respective fields to stifle competition and to suppress competition.
	And they had the trial, and you'll have to give us some of the big revelations from the trial because we were looking for some of the market share of Apple, confirmation of some of these deals that Apple has with other parties.
	Tim Cook testified, and I think that was apparently some of the big deals.
	So that's as much as I understood and appreciated from this lawsuit.
	You fill us in on what were some of the revelations, what were some of the big things we learned during this trial, and if I missed anything else, correct me.
	Well, the big thing, I mean, unlike, you know, a lot of antitrust trials tend to be bench trials.
	And this trial is another bench trial.
	So there's no jury involved.
	And that's why there's no verdict yet.
	And so usually the judges take their time.
	They review the entire record and make a full determination.
	And there's a lot of people watching this to see where he goes.
	And there were certain arguments.
	A lot of people thought, well, what was interesting is often both sides thought they won each day.
	From what I could see from the public discussion of it.
	I don't know as much about the technical details, so I didn't know how as well to interpret some of that information.
	But my take, well, what I did is I followed people who do follow the technological details and could interpret it for me.
	And what was interesting is there was a real split of opinion.
	So people that came in leaning Epic were still leaning Epic.
	People that came in leaning Apple were still leaning Apple.
	So that suggests it's really whatever the judge thought.
	But I think that it could be a major breakthrough against Apple if Epic wins at any level or if there's any good factual findings.
	Sometimes these antitrust cases, even when the monopolist wins, quote unquote, legally, they're...
	There's factual determinations that set them up for major problems down the road.
	So I think this will be a roadmap to whether big tech can be deconstructed and their power taken apart, or whether these monopolists are just going to run roughshod over everybody.
	So there were a lot of people that said Epic's suit.
	Way back at the beginning when we discussed this, there were people saying Epic's going to be dismissed.
	It's a bunch of garbage.
	You don't know what you're talking about.
	And I said I thought it would get past motions to dismiss and summary judgment to trial, and it did.
	So that tells me that they had a strong suit out of the gate.
	It sure seemed like it, and it turns out that way.
	Otherwise, there wouldn't have been a trial.
	This would have been dismissed earlier at the proceedings.
	Well, it's interesting.
	And this is one of those cases where I'm torn in that I can very much see both sides, where...
	Like JetACFT says, Apple owned the platform, period.
	Go somewhere else if you do not like the 30% in-app.
	Chinese company Tessent owned a percentage of Epic.
	So some people are saying Epic's not doing it out of the goodness of their own hearts.
	They make a ton of money off these in-app purchases.
	Something obscene.
	I don't want to say a billion dollars, but I think it might have been upwards of a billion dollars a year on this.
	Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that so I don't look too stupid.
	Obscene amount of money.
	And so there's like, yeah, Hey, you're making $700 million and Apple's getting its $300 million.
	They facilitate your platform.
	It's like these video licensing agencies take 40%, if you can negotiate a good contract, 30%, but they make sales for you.
	They give you exposure to a market you would never otherwise have had.
	So to say that they're abusing of their monopoly when they're enabling you to reach the world, okay, questionable.
	One of the arguments which I didn't understand is they said that this negatively affects app designers, app programmers, or software designers.
	And I didn't understand how that happens because it's basically saying it deters innovation in app building.
	It penalizes app designers.
	I didn't understand that argument, and I still don't.
	Maybe you do, and maybe someone in the chat does.
	Well, it's because of the tying in and the monopoly behavior.
	So the concern with monopoly behavior is it discourages entrepreneurialism, discourages customers.
	Disproportionately penalizes and punishes them.
	And so the question is, how much is Apple getting paid because of its reach versus how much is Apple getting paid because no one's allowed to effectively compete with them?
	Because Apple, and particularly what becomes problematic is when they leverage one.
	Now, my own view is, I've never agreed that monopoly laws, antitrust laws should be limited effectively to time.
	You read the actual law, the law just says no monopolies, period.
	And it's clear Apple has a monopoly, so that should be illegal, period, in my view.
	But our Supreme Court has not enforced that for many, many decades, gone the other direction.
	So the more the focus tends to be in these trials on whether or not you're using your monopoly power to create an unfair advantage by tying something you may have a natural monopoly into something you don't have a natural monopoly in.
	And there's definitely a lot of evidence that Apple does that.
	In other words, how effective is it to compete?
	And you sort of see it with Rumble trying to compete against YouTube.
	You see it with Bing trying to compete against, or DuckDuckGo trying to compete against Google.
	You see it in a wide range of contexts where they've leveraged one monopoly to gain a monopoly in another space or to enhance their existing monopoly.
	And that much I appreciate.
	And I appreciate the monopoly in the sense that...
	It leaves you with absolutely no alternatives, or it crushes any viable alternative.
	It looked like Epic had an alternative.
	It just wanted access to that market out of convenience, not out of absolute necessity.
	But as far as the programmers go, it's the same thing.
	They'll get access to that which they could never otherwise access if they try to build it themselves, but they're not actually being suffocated out of existence.
	If you can effectively compete when you're going to be shut out of the main market, if you try to compete.
	But again, my core position, that's the tying principle.
	I think they have evidence that Apple tied in ways that impacted Epic.
	Maybe not to the degree that it could have impacted Epic, but that still did.
	But I think the bigger, broader problem, in my perspective, is it's just too much monopoly power.
	We shouldn't allow monopolies to exist, period.
	Outside of exceptional circumstances.
	And where they do, they should have to pay the freight for the economic consequence of their monopoly.
	And that was one of the bigger questions that people were waiting with bated breath, I think is the expression, when Tim Cook was testifying.
	The confirmation of what market share Apple iPhone has of the market.
	Apparently he said they have less than 40%.
	Other pundits were saying, no, Apple has much more than that.
	And they're downplaying their effective control over the market.
	It's interesting.
	Okay, well, that was the Epic versus Apple.
	We're going to see that the next step is going to be a judgment.
	It might take a fair bit of time.
	The judges in the States have six months to issue a judgment, or is there a time limit?
	No, no time limit.
	I mean, other than practical, but there's no specific time limit in general.
	Okay, now, oh, I missed one Super Chat that I wanted to read.
	Fabien Cartouche.
	Cartouche in French means cartridge.
	It's a clinical thing, quote.
	I'm not sure someone claiming to be emperor of Jupiter could be given an established clinical diagnosis.
	Does that entitle them to treatment due to the emperor of Jupiter?
	It was a chat from way back when, but I missed it and I wanted to bring it up.
	It wouldn't fit a protected status.
	That's the key.
	The key linchpin to the two different transgender lawsuits is the idea that transgender is equal to sex as a protected status under the Constitution.
	And that usually depends on having an immutable trait.
	And that's where I'm...
	I don't think they quite meet that at this juncture, but we'll find out.
	And I said dysmorphia where I should have said dysphoria.
	So let's just also go back and correct that.
	From Kelly on Locals, where is Durham?
	That's what Trump keeps asking.
	I think a lot of people are asking, where is John Durham?
	It's like, what was that game you played?
	Where is...
	Where in the world was Carmen Sandiego?
	Where's Waldo?
	Where's Waldo?
	That's basically Durham.
	Someone should create a Waldo meme.
	Maybe the brilliant meme maker, Talix.
	There were some other great meme makers this week putting up memes on our board.
	Where's Waldo version of Durham?
	Nobody knows where that guy is.
	I'm still very skeptical he does anything.
	Some people keep telling me he's still going to do something.
	I'll believe it when I see it.
	I think I did a vlog way back in the day.
	The benefits of arbitration.
	Yeah.
	Arbitration just costs an arm and a leg.
	It goes faster.
	It costs an arm and a leg.
	And if you thought you're benefiting from confidentiality of the arbitral award, if you want to go get it homologated, you've got to make it public there anyhow.
	Unless the law has changed in recent years, which I don't think it has.
	At least not in the U.S. I can't say this person's name because it has Roll Tide in it.
	Asking whether, can Texas enforce immigration law?
	Arizona tried to do that under Sheriff Joe, even passed some state laws, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said, no, federal law preempts it.
	So, for the most part, no.
	Texas can enforce its state-local laws, but its ability to enforce immigration law is right now restricted under existing jurisprudence.
	The dog was just eating something very dangerous.
	I think I may have a pair of broken headphones behind me.
	Robert Barnes for AG.
	And one more.
	Beavis Wallace says, from McKellen, Texas, does Barnes have any law news on the status of unaccompanied children crossing our border?
	Are these children going to be adopted by American families, or will they be used to allow their parents into the country?
	We still don't know.
	I mean, at this point, they're being allowed.
	There is no...
	Their catch and release appears to be back, and there appears to be no effort to really preclude that degree of immigration coming in.
	I mean, Obama actually tried to discourage it much more than Biden has.
	And I know people are asking, and they asked earlier, the audit, audit updates, I'm not up to speed on those at all.
	Yeah, so the, I mean, nothing major legally since last week.
	So they're just still ongoing.
	There's still the Georgia proceedings ongoing.
	There's still the Arizona proceedings ongoing.
	There's going to be appeals in the Michigan case.
	So now I did see apparently Sidney Powell was at some sort of Q-type conference where maybe she was misinterpreted or misunderstood, but the statement sounded like Trump could become president again.
	That's not happening.
	And I don't know the legal basis for that.
	Unless it means 2024 after the...
	Yeah, I mean, but it sounded like she was saying something else.
	I hope not.
	But, you know, some people just died down that rabbit hole and didn't come back.
	Someone asked whether or not there's a legal fund being set up for the issues about January 6th.
	They're just prohibiting a lot of the fundraising there.
	That's what's hard.
	And a lot of these people don't have money.
	So it's become difficult for them to mount a defense, which is unfortunate.
	Are there, Robert, and again, it's something I don't know now, but are there still people being detained pending their trial?
	Oh yes, yes, yes.
	Many, many.
	It blows my mind.
	Have there been any substantive decisions except for the mother and the son that we covered a while back?
	Have there been any substantive decisions?
	Justifying the detention?
	Yeah, there was a D.C. Circuit that said it was just fine in another case, which was unsettling.
	So they're finding every excuse possible to hold them as long as possible, which is unfortunate.
	Look, I think it makes the American legal system look bad no matter what you think about January 6th one way or the other.
	But yeah, there is limitations.
	And people have asked me whether I can represent anyone, not at the point because of other cases that I have.
	I can't get involved in those right now.
	You imagine this is what's going on in the United States while simultaneously the United States wants to poo-poo on Russia and Putin for their issues.
	And it's not to equate.
	It's to say, my goodness, doctor, heal thyself.
	And then maybe you will be in a moral position to comment on what might otherwise be objectively offensive stuff in other countries.
	This is...
	It's madness.
	I never appreciated the bail issue until we started discussing it.
	It's egregious.
	And people are saying in solitary confinement as well, which is...
	Yeah, in many cases, yes.
	And there's reports of them getting beat up by officers and things like that because of the politics of the situation.
	And almost all these people had very little criminal record, so they're not experienced with dealing with jails in federal facilities.
	And I know who tends to run those facilities, and it ain't the Boy Scouts.
	And I'm not referring to the guards and whatnot.
	I'm referring to the other inmates.
	New Hampshire audit, someone asked?
	There's been more explanations, but again, no evidentiary conclusions.
	I'm waiting to comment on all those until there's evidentiary conclusions from them.
	Someone actually asked about the snifter, but we had a good answer.
	Or other board members had great answers, great info for them.
	And then someone asked about vaccines.
	There is a vaccine mandate lawsuit that's been filed in Texas.
	And it raises a lot of the claims that we've talked about.
	I actually have a big, long description of what that argument can be.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com.
	It's in one of the barnstorming episodes that you can look at the content page for.
	Because this is YouTube, I won't get into lots of detail.
	But there you can go into what the legal arguments are concerning whether or not a COVID vaccine can be coerced.
	You can also go back and watch my debate with Dershowitz about what the constitutional limits are in being able to coerce a vaccine.
	But it's a good lawsuit.
	It could be shored up here or there, but it's a suit out of the gate because it's a medical facility requiring everyone to take a vaccine as a precondition of continued employment.
	And it raises the emergency use authorization argument, Nuremberg Code argument.
	It argues a public policy exception that is recognized in almost all employment contexts in most states.
	Which says most states in the United States are at will employment.
	You can't sue because somebody fired you unless there's contractually prohibited or protected class discrimination.
	But also most states have a public policy exception that says if you're being forced to do something illegal, you can't be fired.
	It's probably a little bit of a stretch to argue that it's illegal for you to take the vaccine as opposed to illegal for someone to force it.
	So I think that'll be the tricky part there.
	But people are exploring every alternative theory out there, and I think that's a good thing for how to legally protect people, informed consent rights, as I see it under the Constitution and the Nuremberg Code and the federal and state law.
	All right, we've got two more chats here.
	Can Texas enact their own immigration laws that mirror or substantially follow federal law and thereby enforce them?
	Think CARB and EPA.
	Not really.
	Nope.
	It's almost all federal preemption.
	Okay, and we got Cleopatra again.
	Can't help it until I figure it out.
	What are the chances O 'Biden will get his 46.8% capital gains tax and retroactive it?
	And the quid pro quo about putting the state-city taxes back as deductions in order to get it, which only benefits blue cities.
	The latter is almost nobody's discussing it.
	So most of the high-end tax legal analysis that I've been reviewing, because I do a lot of tax law, of course, is saying that the...
	Deduction for state taxes is not coming back.
	But that the capital gains tax being retroactive has a high chance of passing.
	The rate probably will be moderated and is negotiable.
	But the capital gains tax is definitely going up.
	Retroactive taxes.
	There should be nothing more unconstitutional than that.
	Let's just say some lawyers' clients had advised people in March to take certain preactive...
	Certain actions so that they would not be impacted by this and some before January 1st.
	Because if you, you know, let's say if you left, let's say if you decided to exit the country, for example, then you're not covered under that.
	So there's a lot of people that took protective actions based on this.
	A lot of people were taking it back in the fall.
	As soon as it was clear that it was likely that Biden would be declared president, smart people were taking action with good smart tax lawyers were taking action in November and December.
	All right, now we're going to end it on this one.
	This is a rhetorical super chat, but everyone can read it.
	Robert, this was another great one.
	Let me just take this down.
	That dog.
	Wednesday.
	Wednesday's sidebar is going to be Nick Ricada is going to be in the house.
	Oh, man.
	Mr. Rackets.
	So we got Mr. Rackets next week.
	And I believe we have...
	Or Wednesday.
	I have to confirm.
	Runkle of the Bailey the week after.
	And...
	We have a lot of big commitments from other people, but it's putting them in different time slots.
	Everyone's been asking.
	Get Runkle on.
	Runkle, if you're watching, confirmation we're good for the week after next, but I'm going to go message him right now if I didn't already do it.
	Another great stream.
	We've got great sidebars coming up, great streams coming up, and there might be some impromptu live streams along the way.
	Everyone in the chat?
	Well, first of all, Robert.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much for the support, tuning in, comments, etc.
	Share the streams away so that people can see them.
	Robert, let's end the week with something and lead us into the new week with something good.
	Well, tomorrow in the United States is Memorial Day because the United States is back-to-back World War champs.
	And so just as prior generations protected American freedom, and that's who we honor tomorrow, we have an obligation to do the same for future generations.
	And I believe we will continue to do so and win.
	Just like our four bears and four founders did.
	Excellent.
	And with that said, Robert, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, enjoy what's left of the weekend and have a great...
	I'll be over at a live chat after the show at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Just look for the live chat button.
	All right, everybody.
	Good night.

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