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April 24, 2022 - Viva & Barnes
02:14:39
Ep. 110: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Johnny Depp, Ukraine, Trump AND MORE! Viva & Barnes Live!
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Hey, everyone.
The Deputy Prime Minister delivered the budget, and I figured I'd run you through some of the big things in it.
And because it's budget 2022, I'm going to do it in 20 and 22 seconds.
So 42 seconds on the clock.
Here we go.
We're going to make housing more affordable, help Canadians buy their first home, protect your rights as a buyer, and build even more homes across the country.
At the same time, we're going to do even more to fight climate change.
We're going to help people make the switch to electric vehicles, make sure businesses can easily adopt clean tech, make our electricity cleaner and make your homes greener.
We're also working to keep our economy growing.
We're working to keep our economy growing.
Hold on.
Guys, I screwed something up.
I screwed it up.
People, hold on.
We're going to continue to invest in indigenous communities.
We're going to support rural communities across the country.
We're stepping up with even more support for Ukraine.
And what's my time?
Okay, so that was a bit more than 20 and 20 and 2 seconds.
But there's a lot in the budget for you and your family.
And there's so much more I didn't mention.
That's why I'll be talking about it over the coming many, many days.
So be sure to keep checking back in.
Take care.
Yeah.
My apologies, people.
I was actually trying to type that this is as painful for me as it is for you to watch the intro.
Then I accidentally took him out of the stream.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm not listening to that again.
Sorry.
Sorry.
It just started looping again.
Do you know what that was, people?
That was verbal diarrhea.
That was confuse and conquer.
That was...
Say nothing in as many words as possible.
By the way, because it's 2022, I'm going to do it in 20 and 20 and 2 seconds.
To whom does that make a lick of sense?
Other than people who are politically challenged.
Other than people who like shiny objects.
Summarize your budget for me, which I guarantee he does not even understand.
Summarize your budget.
Summarize your budget for me.
In 42 seconds.
42. You know what's a little bit more symbolic?
Dog, what are you eating?
Don't eat that.
42 is the meaning of life.
It's my age for the next...
Get over here.
Get over here.
The dog is eating paper.
What do you want to say?
You want to say hi?
I am Winston, master of the universe.
All hail Winston.
Thank you.
Okay.
It's confuse, conquer.
Here's another seven years of promises.
More aid for Ukraine.
Greener vehicles.
Whatever.
We've been in power for six years.
In 42 seconds, I'm going to highlight everything we haven't done in the seven years that we've been in power.
With the exception of giving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine.
That he's done successfully.
While bankrupting...
Our country saddling our children with crippling debt.
And I was going to kick off the show with another intro, which I have in the back burner.
I might run the clip with absolutely no commentary so that the YouTubes don't accuse me of anything.
You know, the standard disclaimers, no medical advice, no legal advice, no election fortification advice.
And all of those, all of those are going to come in particularly handy tonight because...
On the menu, people, what's up?
The dude, the dude abides.
On the menu tonight, we have a Dominion defamation lawsuit, sorry, an order on a motion to dismiss.
There will be no election fortification advice.
We have the Marjorie Taylor Greene situation.
Which is also...
There's not going to be advice.
I've just got questions.
There's going to be some mask mandate updates.
The striking down of the mask mandate over Florida.
Then the Fauci and the CDC getting involved in saying they want to re-implement it.
No medical advice.
Definitely no legal advice, people.
This is for education and information purposes only.
By the way, people.
I totally love you.
I'm using my mother's mug.
I stole it.
She does not yet know that I've appropriated this mug.
My mother, by the way, for anyone who doesn't know, has a...
She's got a very bizarre adoration for turtles.
So whenever we go anywhere, we know the thing to get my mother is anything related to turtles.
When we were in Florida, when I was in Florida for those brief 72 hours, we went to Gumbo Limbo, which is the...
It's like a turtle reserve, turtle rehabilitation center by the beach.
It's beautiful.
I got my mother a little metal road sign that says, I love turtles.
My mother was the original, I love turtles.
Standard disclaimers before I get into another video that's going to make you puke in your mouths.
Superchats.
YouTube takes 30% of Superchats.
Some people don't like that.
If you do not like that, we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
Rumble has these things called Rumble Rants, the equivalent of a super chat.
Rumble takes 20%, so better for the creator, better to support a platform that actually supports free speech.
If you want to support Robert Barnes and I, the best place, VivaBarnes...
I screwed it up.
Hang my head in shame.
VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com.
Let me get to some of the chats.
Law 15 in Quebec.
How likely is it it will come for the unjabbed children?
Teresa Tam said they're considering...
Andre Tuchulescu, first of all, I love your dog.
It's a good question.
We're going to talk about this.
Maybe I'll do it before Barnes gets in here.
This is my last vlog.
The latest vlog I did today was Bill 15, which removes parental supremacy as the supreme consideration.
Under the Youth Protection Act.
I have difficulty conceiving of parental supremacy when it's regarding the interest of the child, which would ever be anything other than the best interest of the child, but maybe I was just brought up with that principle from my parents.
The government has come in through Bill 15 and stripped parental supremacy as the ultimate consideration under the Youth Protection Act.
Now it's the Interest of the child.
The interest of the child, as determined by whom, quite obviously, the state.
The state system is going to determine what the best interest of the child is.
And look, I don't think it's as insightful as Jordan Peterson flagging, sounding the alarm with Bill, what was it, C-16, which was adding gender identity to aggravating factors in the criminal code and other, where he said this is going to result in compelled speech.
I don't think it's as insightful as that, but we know where this is going.
It is going to go to the unjabbed children if there's parental disputes, because we've already seen it.
All that has to happen in a divorce now is weaponizing the jab.
One parent says, I want to support my kid getting it.
The other one says, no.
The courts have been pretty consistently siding with the parent that says, I want my kid to get the jab.
They've been depriving parents of custody, of visitation rights, for not being jabbed, for not wanting their kid to get jabbed.
We know where else it's going.
Transition therapy.
It's going there as well.
At first, it's going to only apply...
First, they're going to say, look, this law only applies to abuse.
Fine.
Then they're going to say, well, look, certain things are tantamount to abuse.
Failing to recognize your child's gender identity, failing to support them in their transition requests.
It's going to start with disgruntled parents fighting among each other during a divorce.
Then it's going to go to both parents objecting, but the child saying, I want this, and it's psychological abuse for my parents not to give it to me.
They're going to go to the system.
The system's going to say, what do we deem as being in the best interest of the child, notwithstanding parental objections?
Both.
It's going to happen.
Prediction now, it's not that much of a prediction.
But Quebec passed Bill C-15 or Bill 15. I don't know.
I think it's not C-15, but Bill 15. Unanimous.
Unanimously, by the way.
Every member of the National Assembly, as they're called in Quebec, ASNAT, Assemblée Nationale, but it's a very fitting acronym.
Unfortunate, but fitting in French.
ASNAT.
Unanimously.
I think there's 200.
I forget exactly the number.
Not one.
Not one member of our National Assembly provincially said, why do we need this law?
Do we not have in place already the requisite legal framework to protect children?
Do we not question as to, you know, how do you determine the best interests of the child?
Not one.
Unanimous.
And to some, unanimity on thorny issues means it's so clear-cut black and white.
No.
It's Political Hive Mind.
That's the book I have to read next.
Obama admits...
Okay, hold on one second.
Okay, Viva.
I gave you a week off because I was on vacation.
Prepare to be peppered with bad takes in the name of Sacrarium Brit.
Thank you.
But now, let me just...
Okay, Obama admits I am making no comment on this video.
This is strictly words coming out of the mouth of Justin Trudeau and...
Obama.
Sharing.
I'm going to bring myself out while I do this.
Here we go.
Here we go.
There you go.
Take me out.
And people have also heard, well, these are new vaccines and they've been done quicker than it usually takes.
Years and years and years to approve a vaccine.
Well...
The reason it was able to be done quicker is because we threw more money and more people to do the work than ever had been done before to get a vaccine because it was so important to get it run.
There wasn't any shortcuts taken.
There weren't any steps skipped.
The full approval was done.
It was just done with a lot more people and a lot more attention on it.
Than ever before.
So that's how you can know that vaccines absolutely are safe.
And yet despite the fact that we've now essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide.
There wasn't any shortcuts taken.
There weren't any steps skipped.
And yet despite the fact that we've now essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide.
So, by the way, I'm going to leave this up just for a second, just so everybody understands why there are two children, unaccompanied by an adult, in the bottom, whatever side, you know, the bottom, the two kids, okay?
Why there are two kids here?
Because this interview was given on the person's channel on the top left.
I forget what it was on YouTube.
I posted the link to anybody who wants to see it, both in Twitter and...
Trudeau was fielding a question that was allegedly purportedly asked by these two young children who are unaccompanied by their parents who are being addressed directly by Trudeau.
So that's why his answer is in response to a question that these kids allegedly asked.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, it's speechless, but that's...
Damn, you autocorrect.
Sarcasm.
Okay.
Yep.
It's...
I mean, I have no comment.
There's no comment.
You just hear what the Prime Minister of Canada is saying in response to questions from children, and then you contrast that to what Obama said, you know, saying the quiet part out loud.
All right.
On the menu tonight, by the way.
So we're going to go over some Ukraine stuff.
We're going to go over some Johnny Depp stuff, but not too much of it.
People are asking me, Viva, you're not covering the Johnny Depp?
Here's the thing.
When I create the content, despite what might be popular at the time, I don't necessarily just cover that because it's popular.
I don't feel good about the Johnny Depp thing.
Legal Bytes, Alita is covering it.
Rakata is covering it.
I know it's popular.
I see some of the viewership on some of these streams and some of the clips.
I know it's popular.
I don't like it.
Other people are doing it.
People who want that information, go watch Legal Bytes.
Go watch Ricada.
And I pop into the streams every now and again, but I don't like it.
There's other stuff that I find more compelling, more interesting, even if it's not quite as popular.
I mean, I don't know what is quite as popular as the Johnny Depp right now, but...
So that's it.
I'm covering it.
I'm watching it.
I'm watching it.
I have my opinion on it.
I'll tweet about it every now and again, but...
It's not something I want to cover right now.
Other people are doing it well.
Go watch them.
But when Amber Heard testifies, I might be live streaming her testimony in particular because I've made predictions about it and I want to see that in real time.
There's a behavioral guy.
What's his name?
There's a behavioral guy doing a lot of stuff on Johnny Depp.
It's interesting.
I find watching Johnny Depp's testimony interesting.
I feel bad for him.
At this point, I actually genuinely feel bad for him.
Being imperfect does not mean that you get to be the object of abuse.
Johnny Depp has...
He's got a blessed, a fortunate, but also a cursed life.
And ugly stuff is coming out.
But the ugly stuff in Johnny Depp's life does not make him the legitimate subject of abuse.
And I believe that Johnny Depp was genuinely the victim of abuse in this family.
When you hear him testify about Amber throwing a bottle of vodka that chops the tip of his finger off, this man...
Society has a tendency not to look at him as much of a victim as if the sexes were reversed.
If that were a woman testifying about that type of abuse, it's not because women are less strong.
Johnny Depp's a strong man.
This man's a victim of abuse.
But he's still an actor.
And when he testifies, his testimony is very polished.
It's very actor-esque.
So I think what's going to be much more...
Insightful to watch, and I dare say legally entertaining, Amber Heard's testimony, and I'll get there.
Okay, what elected official party has or will pay a political price for lockdown policies?
So far, a short list.
Whoa, it's Dustin.
It's worse than that.
CAC is going to, the CAC, sorry, the Coalition Avenir de Quebec, CAQ in Quebec, they call it the CAC.
They're going to get re-elected.
This week, by the way, I'm going to be on Eric Duhem, the conservative leader of Quebec.
I'm going to be on his channel.
And I think he's coming on mine on Thursday.
I will get the time straight.
But my prediction is the CAAC, the Coalition Avenir de Québec, is going to get re-elected.
So not only will there not be any political retribution, there's going to be a political reward.
They're going to say, look, you mandated us again because you loved the abuse so much the first time.
You care so little about your own rights and your own freedom.
You re-elected us and you have empowered us retroactively for what we did to you in the past.
Check out The Turtle Lady of South Padre by Texas Monthly.
I think your mom will like this lady.
Screenshot done.
Let me get some chats before the barns he gets in the house.
Barns in the house?
He even laughs when he says, yeah, that's Obama talking.
We effectively tested on...
And where do you think those billions of people that they effectively clinically tested on in real time?
Developing nations.
The most tolerant, racially You know, promoting equality.
Man on Earth basically admits to testing on the most vulnerable people on Earth.
So I've read this quickly enough to thank you for the super chat.
I'm not going to read it.
But yeah, the world is...
The world is nuts.
Now, there is a red super chat that I have to get before Barnsley gets in the house.
I think I'm going to go make sure I sent Robert the...
There it is.
Okay.
Alex Daviduk says, Viva, since 2015 in Ontario, parent objects to a child of any age wishing to go transgender therapy?
Yeah, I've heard some of the stories.
I've heard some of the stories.
If I can't get something that confirms it officially, I try to avoid...
Talking about it, I don't want to, you know, people are getting duped into retweeting stories which are, you know, they might have some element of truth to them, but they're not sufficiently true or sufficiently exaggerated to make it somewhat inaccurate.
Britt Cormier, more money and more people does not take into account time.
Some drugs have been safe for years before we knew the long-term effects of taking it, but do not worry.
This time around, we got it 100% correct.
No comment.
No commentary.
That was my thought exactly.
So, Britt Cormier, thank you very much for the super chat.
And this reminds me of one of my more classic anecdotes from the practice of law.
The entire lawsuit is public.
The deposition is public, but I don't name anybody or anything.
I was involved in a patent dispute.
It was basically a shareholder oppression.
A minority shareholder says that they were kicked out of the company, that they helped develop this product that was then patented.
It was big-time stuff.
Tens of millions of dollars.
The individual who purported to be the oppressed shareholder who was kicked out of the company despite his contributions to the product, we deposed him.
And I asked him, what was your contribution to this product?
And he says, it was French, and I'm not going to make fun of the French accent because it was actually in French, but I was going to do it for effect, but that can be misconstrued as mockery.
The individual says, well, I told them to make it smaller.
That's amazing.
So you had this novel idea of taking a great product and telling them to make it smaller.
Well, what recommendations did you have technologically to make this device, which was already pretty compact?
What was your ingenious contribution to make it smaller?
He's like, well, I said put it in a smaller package.
It's like, okay, phenomenal.
And what else?
What were your other novel contributions to this patent?
Oh, I told them to make it lighter.
You told them to make it smaller and lighter.
How exactly did you recommend that they do that?
Technically speaking.
No answer.
Justin Trudeau saying, we did it this time because we threw more money at it.
Literally.
We threw more money at it.
We threw more people at it.
And therefore, there's one thing that you cannot substitute for.
And that is the mere passage of time.
And that's not to say one thing or another.
That is just to say, there is one thing that cannot be bought or bought back.
And that is time.
Oh, I like that.
It's beautiful.
Okay, I see Robert's in the back.
Let me get a couple more Super Chats.
In Ireland, the Justice Mister said that there will be no limit on Ukraine refugees, but cannot rule out making domestic properties that have scare rooms available.
Businesses will not be immune, so you will own nothing, etc.
Okay, so I have to reread that again more slowly next time, but thank you very much for the Super Chat.
Singing with Jesse Walsh.
I can't open or write a post on your locals for two to three days now.
Only Viva and Barnes.
It works fine on other locals I'm subscribed to.
I will check it out, Sarroise.
Okay, but now with that said, people, 20 minutes in, we're almost at 10,000 viewers live already on YouTube.
Let me just see how many we are on the Rumbles.
2,000 mules is playing.
I'm going to have to go watch that.
Okay, on the Rumbles, people, we are at 2,500.
So a 4 to 1 ratio.
Not terrible.
We can do better.
Robert, sir.
How goes the battle?
Good, good.
Okay, your audio might be low unless your mic is too far away.
Let's try that again.
Check, check.
That's better.
Okay, chat, let me know if the audios are not linked up and synced up and whatever.
Robert, okay, I'll get to this one afterwards.
Otto is trying to stop rolling thunder.
I'll talk about that maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.
Robert, first of all, book behind you, cigar on your mouth.
What are they?
Sure, so that's Fool's Aaron by Scott Horton, and that's Ratification by Pauline Meyer about the people's debates during the Constitution.
And this is a La Flore Dominicana cigar I haven't had before.
And a happy Orthodox Easter to everybody.
I found out they make these special cakes just for a happy Orthodox Easter.
Tried one, not bad.
Robert, you reminded me.
I wanted to get you something when I was in Florida, but I couldn't find it there.
So your belated birthday gift is coming, but it'll be worth it.
Robert, okay, the first thing first, before we even get to Ukraine sanctions, in as much as you can speak on it, or if you know anything about it, people are asking about Gonzalo Lira and what to make of the situation.
I've expressed my thoughts in as much as I think they're thoughtful and eloquent.
Do you have anything to add?
Any thoughts on?
The people saying it was whatever and others saying it was legit and he's lucky to be alive.
Do you have any insight on it?
I mean, I think it's because of public outcry that he was released.
So, I mean, I think that's pretty evident.
Okay, good.
Community, you can feel good.
For those of you who don't think Gonzalo Lira set it up or lied about it, you can feel good about it.
I do think...
When the Chilean embassy gets involved, I mean, this is why there's people involved or parties that got involved in this, that if it were a hoax, you would have known about it by now.
If it were a lie, you would have known about it by now.
The Chilean embassy got involved.
There was public outcry.
There was public concern.
There were people with big lenses, big spotlights looking at it.
So for those who think it was legit, I think we can feel good as a community.
This has nothing to do with politics.
It just has to do...
It could have been anybody, and had it been anybody, I think we would have done the same thing.
Robert, what is the latest?
Credit to the audience.
Credit to everybody out there who reached out.
And it shows the power of the court of public opinion that it can translate in demonstrable ways that can benefit people.
I mean, I think that they'll be a little bit more careful about who they go after.
I mean, the aspects of this regime in Ukraine.
So we'll see how all that works out.
All right.
Now, on that subject, what is the latest, Robert, coming out of Ukraine?
Nothing really big this week.
You know, the conflict continues.
Donald Trump called for peace.
Sorry.
Let the jokes in the chat commence now.
Exactly.
By the way, for anybody who doesn't know, that's an InfoWars mug.
The first time I realized it, Robert, I thought I was going to get kicked off YouTube because you were donning the InfoWars mug.
Sorry.
But yeah, no major news on that front.
There was some news on the Alex Jones front.
Some, I think, misunderstanding of some filings that were made.
And then a lot of news on a lot of other legal fronts.
But yeah, not much on the Ukraine-Russia front.
And for anybody who doesn't know necessarily, there was some confusion as to whether or not Alex Jones had filed for bankruptcy protection, whether or not Infowars is the main entity.
I talked about it last week.
Robert, I didn't get anything wrong.
These were three ancillary entities, and they did, in fact, file for bankruptcy protection, but they're not the main assets, they're not the main business, and it's not Alex Jones himself personally.
Correct.
It's because they're just continuing to harass them, these plaintiffs and plaintiffs' lawyers, and they're using the lawsuits for lawfare.
And they were interfering with the operations of the business by suing entities that, one, had nothing to do with it.
I mean, just nothing to do with the allegations.
But the courts are just so hopeless politically corrupt.
In both courts, in the cases involving Alex Jones, that they're unwilling to enforce the law in an impartial manner.
And so consequently, they left in, and the plaintiff's lawyers are just politically motivated lawyers who are pursuing these cases for politically motivated partisan purposes.
And they have plaintiffs they see as sympathetic.
I don't.
I'm not sympathetic with people who use their dead kids to line their pockets and advance their political interests.
Sorry.
I'm not going to be sympathetic to that.
Enough of it.
Enough's enough at some point.
We've got to call a spade a spade when we see it.
And they sued a bunch of entities they know don't have anything to do with it, don't have any assets, but that would interrupt and interfere with ongoing operations.
And so Jones had no choice but to put those businesses into bankruptcy.
Now, that's not the core in Fort Worth's business, not Alex Jones, personally.
But it's just done to interfere, and it shows the degree and the scale of lawfare.
And all this is because Jones has fully disclosed everything.
But the courts have pretended he didn't, like the plaintiffs have pretended he didn't, because they had a mythical, fictional theory of their case.
Their case was that Jones spread misrepresentations and misstatements to line his pockets.
Both of those are patently false.
And they knew it was patently false.
They had a reason to know it was patently false, because 99.9% of what info was ever published and said said Sandy Hook happened, and those kids died.
So from the get-go, the whole theory of the case was based on a lie.
But they had to pretend that he did all of this to line his pockets based on some caricature invented from the Homeland TV show.
So what happens when the evidence proves them wrong?
They pretend the real evidence has disappeared.
And the courts do too.
Oh, you must have destroyed the real evidence.
Even though he produced more documents, more discovery, more emails, sat for more depositions than anybody in an anti-slap case in American legal history.
And they pretend that he didn't have it.
And then...
Stripped him of his rights to bring motions to dismiss, stripped him of his rights to bring anti-slap motions, stripped him of his rights to even have a trial by jury on the merits, and then still demanded he continue to sit for depositions day after day after day when he's not being allowed to defend himself at all.
And based on the financial information he supposedly didn't produce, that was the grounds for the default judgments, but based on information they clearly had, they brought other challenges, claiming any transfer involving anything is all fraud, which is...
Patently ludicrous under the circumstances, since there's more than enough resources to justify any judgment.
And he had to file a bankruptcy as to three ancillary entities to maintain their operations due to the scale and scope of harassment with the pending judgment.
So that's where it is.
And what he did is very simple.
He said, look, we'll have a bankruptcy trustee look at this and see whether I fully disclosed everything or not.
They know, apparently, the plaintiff's lawyers have already been threatening the bankruptcy trustees, telling that apparently...
The word is that conversations were had where various trustees were told that the Biden administration wants Jones to be hit hard and so that they're under some political pressure.
That's at least the story that's out and about.
But what they should look at is a case we'll discuss tonight, a Texas Supreme Court case that's particularly pertinent for this case because the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled just recently that defamation cases have to have real damages attached to them.
And that even if it's a so-called per se case, defamation per se, defamation so bad it's automatically considered to be defamation, that that only allows nominal damages.
And by nominal damages, they mean $1.
If you're seeking more than that, you need to show proof of actual damages.
And they not only overturned a jury verdict in Texas, they issued an order that the plaintiff take nothing.
The legal basis of that case would...
I have seen no evidence publicly displayed that any of the plaintiffs against Alex Jones have proof of any actual damages at all, which will raise some questions.
That Texas Supreme Court case should have been a warning sign, despite the Austin political judge that's presiding over the proceeding probably not paying much attention to it.
I'm going to bring this up, Robert, and it's not because I think you're a liar or give credence to the accusation.
I want people to know that I bring up chats which are both favourable and unfavourable, and I want to address what Cor Ose has to say.
That's not what Jones said at all.
He said they were crisis actors.
Barnes is lying again.
You see, you could have made the point without the accusation.
Because A, it's false.
Barnes, I've heard you say it.
You can't deny it.
He did make certain statements.
That statement?
That statement's a lie.
It's a lie and a fabrication pushed by the plaintiff's lawyers.
Find where Alex Jones referred to all of the named plaintiffs by name as crisis actors.
Doesn't exist.
Never happened.
Never happened.
Let me push back a bit.
He may not have said about all of the plaintiffs by name, but he might have implied it at one point in time in one episode.
I think he did at some point.
Yeah, not really.
I mean, that's their problem.
In other words, defamation is, I identify you by name, number one.
And it has to be of and concerning you.
This is a constitutional requirement of colloquium.
It goes back to the second part of the New York Times case that was so critical in this.
And secondly, it needs to be as to you.
Here, what they said is that any statement Alex Jones ever made in any way, shape, or form...
That could have possibly, somebody could have researched it and interpreted this statement to possibly apply to an entire group of people.
And even though that group is bigger than what's usually permissible for bringing what's called a class-based defamation claim, that they could bring a claim.
That's never been the law in the history of the country.
And so any statement that he ever—and that mythology that's out there, they put a lot of words in Alex Jones' mouth over the years, the media has, that don't exist, that he never said.
You could extrapolate by six degrees of separation.
Well, he said this once in response to this question about this category, so somebody could have interpreted it to mean it meant this as to that, as to the other group, as to here.
That's not how defamation law works.
And a lot of people believe that he's done all these things that he never did.
Go back and watch Alex Jones' original Sandy Hook after the day the Sandy Hook happened.
He doesn't challenge Sandy Hook happening at all.
The media has made a myth that he was the one out there initiating and instigating the claim that Sandy Hook didn't happen.
That's patently false.
He raised questions about what happened at Sandy Hook.
Two years after Sandy Hook happened, in response to a few questions, over 7 million words that he said or InfoWars published, they took 7 minutes of it out of context and said that was all he ever said, when it's just not true.
Paul Joseph Watson, the editor of the InfoWars site, always said Sandy Hook happened.
So from the beginning, he was saying, Alex Jones was saying Sandy Hook happened.
Other people took the lead claiming Sandy Hook didn't happen, including a media professor, a philosophy professor, a school safety expert.
Those were the people taking the lead on it.
And if you studied the psychology of why they thought that, denial is a natural response to people who have young children going, who could have experienced the same horrible tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook.
And the other factor here is what really happened at Sandy Hook is the politicians pocketed the cash rather than putting in basic school safety metrics that had been required for two decades.
And Robert, while you were talking, I'm listening, but I was also just trying to find the actual quotes.
And people in there, go Google or go search on the interwebs for the actual quote.
What you will find is article after article after article that only has...
Two words in quotes that they say Alex Jones said.
It says crisis actors in quotes, and it says that Alex Jones said that they were, quote, crisis actors.
Every article, try to find the original quote, because I...
I think at one point he entertained the notion of crisis actors and said that it had occurred in the past as it has occurred in the past.
And then the media takes it.
And there was reference to specific things that happened.
In other words, there were people who were using it for politicized purposes.
There was whether Anderson Cooper used a green screen.
You dig into the actual factual allegations and they've just misapplied it because they wanted to create a mythology.
Alex Jones was the guy who created this fake narrative that Sandy Hook didn't happen.
He was the only one behind it, and he lined his pockets for it.
It's all false.
He raised questions at certain junctures, but it was only a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of everything that was covered.
I mean, Owen Shroyer's being sued.
Why is he being sued?
He, too, was denied a chance to defend himself by motions to dismiss.
I mean, these are court proceedings that want the mythology to live.
The problem is mythology is a lie.
And in order to propagate the lie, they have to deny him.
If they were right, why are they scared of a jury trial on the merits in a place like liberal Austin, Texas?
I know we've talked about it before, but just refresh everybody's memory.
I was involved in a case in Canada, which had come up from the States, where the defendant allegedly had behaved so improperly in the context of the proceedings.
The defendant was foreclosed from presenting a defense.
It went to jury, and the defendant could not speak.
In their own defense, sentenced to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, which they then brought cross-border to execute against assets in Canada.
But on what basis was Jones denied the ability, precluded from presenting a defense and precluded from testifying and defending himself?
What did he do that was so egregious?
Well, first, he was denied a right to bring a motion to dismiss.
He was denied his procedural remedy based on his out-of-court speech.
That was it.
Based on his out-of-court speech, they denied him his right to bring a motion to dismiss or bring an anti-slap motion or bring a motion for summary judgment.
I mean, all of it.
They stripped him of basic procedural remedies that every party's supposed to have based solely on his out-of-courtroom speech.
The second thing they did was deny him any jury trial on the merits.
They issued a default judgment.
A default judgment is supposed to be very rare, very limited.
They're strongly disfavored.
And what was the grounds?
That he hadn't participated in discovery.
But he had participated in days and days and days of depositions.
On average, a party gets one deposition for one day.
He managed to be deposed day after day after day.
His father was deposed.
Other people were deposed.
Other representatives of the companies were deposed.
One of the reasons they multiplied the suit.
Is they wanted a separate day of deposition for each representative of an entity.
So what you do is you sue nine entities, and it allows you to get nine days of depositions that you shouldn't be entitled to.
That would never happen in another corporate case.
If you sued a bunch of corporate affiliates, the judge would say, no, no, no, you get one day of what's called the person most knowledgeable PMK for everybody.
You don't get to multiply suits by suing every affiliate name.
But the rules change when it's Alex Jones.
And even though he produced more than a million pages, documents, and information.
Including information that plaintiffs were flat out not legally entitled to.
Just compare this case to Project Veritas versus the New York Times.
They sat for very few depositions and got discovery completely stayed while they appealed their anti-slap denial.
Alex Jones is sitting for days and days and weeks and weeks of depositions.
Millions of information.
I mean, he had to turn over his entire spam file.
All the people that had spammed him over the years.
Then they lied when people had spammed InfoWars and sent illicit materials to him.
Of young people.
Exactly.
He didn't even know it existed because of someone who had tried to...
Send it to him by mail.
He's ordered to turn over his spam mail file.
Again, ridiculous.
Turns it over, and what does the media say?
Alex Jones deliberately sends illicit materials to the Sandy Hook families.
Another lie!
The media's been lying about this case from day one, and the courts have facilitated, entertained, and justified and rationalized the lies.
And that's why they're so scared to have an open jury trial.
I mean, here...
They're scared to have a jury trial in either very liberal Austin, Texas, or the place where Sandy Hook happened.
Why are they scared of those jury pools?
Why?
Because they know the facts will show that most of the mythology and the lies in this case have come from the media misrepresenting the case.
And I'll tell you one thing.
This is another subject that I always avoided because, again, I don't like it.
I don't like what it brings out in people because some people...
I don't agree with some people's positions on it.
I happen to be sufficiently close at one degree of separation from people who were directly impacted.
But the second you say that, people call you a liar and whatever.
Not interested in having those discussions.
And I've heard all the theories.
Why did they tear down the school so quickly?
Some people think it was to hide the fact that it was an outright whatever.
Robert, when you said this last week with Salty Cracker, I immediately thought, now, they did tear down the entire building.
The excuse they gave, you know, it's...
You want to destroy any memory of this awful tragedy.
When you mentioned that the school had failed to do certain things to protect the school, I started questioning, is there any legitimacy to the idea that the reason for which they tore down the school was specifically to hide the fact that doors didn't have locks on the inside to destroy the evidence of potential negligence from the school to protect their own children?
Is that at all a theory?
Absolutely.
I mean, not only that, they hid foil.
The reason why these conspiracy theories took off about Sandy Hook was because they were hiding information.
And they were refusing to disclose information under the Connecticut's version of their Sunshine Laws, Freedom of Information Act laws.
For years, they were hiding information.
And so people thought they must be hiding it because of these other conspiracy theories.
No, they were hiding it for the basic reasons that they usually do, which was politicians pocketed the cash rather than put in basic school safety measurements that had been international public policy ever since Columbine, which is make sure that teachers have a means to lock the doors in case of any kind of incident.
And have other safe spaces where you can lock.
They couldn't even lock the bathroom doors inside the classrooms.
I mean, that's why I won't get into detail.
They found horrible, horrifying things there.
And what it was is, if you understood, okay, why are bodies stacked in this way?
Oh, it's because they had no place to go because they couldn't lock a single door inside the room, to the room, or anywhere else.
Now, imagine if that had come out.
If that had come out, one, every school in the country, you can bet, would have suddenly got on board with their safety policies, and anybody who was lackadaisical on their safety policies suddenly would have been imposing it.
But what would have also not happened?
You wouldn't have been able to use it for gun control.
You couldn't blame the gun.
So that's why everybody was complicit with protecting the local politicians who had failed here.
Because Obama wanted to use it.
Various people, like Piers Morgan, who was busy lying last week about his interview with Donald Trump, explicitly said, I'm going to stand on the graves of these dead kids.
And by the way, for folks out there, most of the people who suffered tragedies from this case have not been involved in any of these suits.
A majority have not sued.
So that should tell you something, too.
But putting that aside, Piers Morgan and, frankly, Barack Obama decided he was going to stand on the graves of these dead kids for a political purpose and blame the gun.
And it also distracted...
You listen to Alex Jones that night, he's talking about, he didn't know about the school safety issue, but he was talking about if you dig in, you're probably going to find a problem with Big Pharma.
You're probably going to find a problem with the way this kid was psychologically handled.
You're probably going to find issues with the security at the school system.
You're probably going to find the kid glamorized violence because of the way Hollywood and the gaming culture did so.
He lays out an indictment as to who is most culpable and what is most culpable for this kid's insane actions.
With the kid being the most responsible, the shooter being the most responsible.
He doesn't say it didn't happen.
But all of those other targets aren't the gun.
And so everything had to be suppressed.
Everything about school safety had to be suppressed.
Everything about this kid, the shooter, had to be suppressed.
His diary destroyed.
I mean, his home destroyed.
Everything that could say, you know what?
Maybe Big Pharma has a role here.
Maybe the way we're psychologically treating our kids has a role here.
Maybe school safety and politicians has a role here.
That couldn't be talked about.
Maybe Hollywood has a role here.
No, no, no, no.
Just the gun, just the gun, just the gun, just the gun, just the gun.
And that's why the media has been complicit in this fake narrative about Alex Jones.
Yeah, look, that'll be eye-opening for some because it's always like the reality is the most disturbing part, not the exaggerations, not the actual unsubstantiated theories, but rather just the actual reality that it's more...
You can still blame the guns.
I mean, I'll still understand everybody who says schools shouldn't have to have locks on the doors because people should not have access to these automatic or high-capacity weapons.
I understand that.
Schools shouldn't have to have locks.
Fine.
Doors shouldn't have to have locks.
Banks shouldn't have to have security.
But there are bad people out there, so they do.
I understand.
Still blame the guns.
But the idea that...
Call it not a cover-up, but rather the controversy under this would have been there was money to implement certain safety protocol that was not implemented.
We saw it in Michigan as well with the shooting there.
Blaming Hollywood?
That might be a little bit more of a tenuous blame than, say...
Mental medication, which is being over-prescribed to kids.
Yeah.
It might be all a bunch of factors.
It is true, though, to oversimplify and just pick on the two demons, Alex Jones and guns, without looking at why there weren't proper safety precautions made in order to cover that up, destroy the building quickly, which is going to fuel other people's more unsubstantiated and out-there theories.
It's interesting, and it's not to justify.
There's no justifying certain untenable beliefs, but you know if you do certain things, you're going to exacerbate them.
And that seems to be what's been happening.
What are Alex Jones' remedies right now?
He's been precluded from presenting a defense, found guilty, and the only hearing now is on the quantum.
Does he have any remedy against the fact that he was deprived of his right to a trial?
What's supposed to happen now is a trial solely on damages.
Like I said, I haven't seen any evidence under the Texas Supreme Court decision where basically a doctor sued for defamation.
He got $2 million in damages.
The Texas Supreme Court unanimously said he's entitled to nothing.
And why?
Because he has to prove it, and he didn't prove it.
And you have to prove strict causation.
And in particular, they mentioned if there were other sources of your harm, then you can't blame that defamation for your harm.
As an example, like what happens, this particular doctor had been subject to a nasty rumor campaign by his prior employer.
Somebody repeated that, and he wanted to say that repetition of that was grounds for his suit.
And they said, really, that person was just repeating what everyone else had already heard anyway, so it's not, you didn't prove damages.
Very interesting ruling for a range of reasons.
And so it explains why, well, I'll tell that story another day.
So it should limit.
To my knowledge, nobody can show.
One thing that people don't know is that almost everybody suing him never once complained to Alex Jones until right before the lawsuit.
You're being so emotionally stalked and negatively hurt by Alex Jones that you didn't know to send him a letter for six years.
I mean, this is a bogus suit.
That's what this is.
And I don't represent him anymore, so I can say this publicly.
When I represented him, I had to be limited.
The plaintiff's lawyers were such scuzzbags that they were constantly subjecting me to personal threats and professional threats on a routine and repeated basis.
So these are not the heroes the media has made them out to be.
These are some of the worst lawyers, ambulance chasing lawyers that you could imagine, except they're politically motivated, who that want to silence and suppress the voice.
I won't get into how I know, but I know that if we were able to present a trial on the merits, the plaintiffs were more likely to lose than win, even in liberal Austin and liberal Connecticut.
The courts obviously figured that out at some point, and that's why when they realized the evidence refutes the theories of the case, the media's theories of the case in particular.
Then they gutted his ability to defend himself.
Not only that, they were saying in the damages stage, he can't reference the First Amendment.
Those words can't come out of his mouth in front of the jury.
I mean, things like that.
So in my view, they don't have evidence of it.
Maybe they do.
I mean, I haven't been party to the case in a little while.
But right now, it's all in bankruptcy court, and bankruptcy stays everything.
So no case will go forward until the bankruptcy court says it can go forward.
And the bankruptcy court is a federal court, not a state court.
You get a more diverse range of judges for that reason.
In Austin, all the judges are a waste of space.
They're so political, you cannot get anything vaguely resembling justice in Austin, Texas.
I've told, well, heck, I've told Alex this publicly.
I wouldn't still be in Austin, Texas if I was Alex Jones.
Well, I'm trying to explain a concern.
You cannot stay in liberal jurisdictions and expect anything vaguely resembling the justice.
They are weaponizing the justice system everywhere they can, weaponizing the legal system everywhere they can, weaponizing government everywhere they can.
And they're doing it to such a degree.
That you can't expect justice if you live in these places, unfortunately.
So right now it will stay in bankruptcy court until the bankruptcy court.
The bankruptcy court can transfer the trial to itself.
The bankruptcy court can say, and then the bankruptcy court could reverse prior decisions of the state trial court.
The bankruptcy court could say, you know what, I think you should get a trial on the merits.
This default judgment is ludicrous.
You won't find a single case with a similar fact pattern where default judgment has ever been affirmed in the history of this country.
But the bankruptcy court could only say that for the bankrupt entity and not for Alex Jones himself, correct?
Yes, that's correct.
And if the plaintiffs are strategically savvy, they'll just drop those bankrupt defendants from the suit.
They still have got Alex Jones and the main business.
They'll drop those so they can proceed for a quicker trial without having to wait a year.
They won't do that because the media is going to spin this as a tactic by the defendants to delay justice for the plaintiffs so they're going to win even with a delay.
And like the Connecticut lawyers are very political lawyers.
They have family members that are connected to the sitting senators.
I mean, it's that bad.
Connecticut's always been a corrupt state.
People don't understand that.
Same with Rhode Island.
A lot of these old Yankee states that they imagine are pristine, pure.
No, they're some of the most corrupt states in the union.
And Connecticut's no exception.
So they probably think that they can work.
Now, the other thing is the bankruptcy is all in Texas.
So it stays the Connecticut case, but it's Texas.
Bankruptcy court that decides everything.
There's a reason why the Perdue's and other people over the years have gone to bankruptcy court.
Bankruptcy court shifts the venue, both for the judge and the jury pool.
But we'll see.
It will be up to the bankruptcy court what it does.
You're right.
Smart plaintiffs.
Would have never sued these entities in the first place.
At a minimum, once they knew, the entities not only had nothing to do with it, they don't identify a single statement by any of these entities that's actionable.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Alex Jones is the principal of these entities, and so therefore, by extension, one step removed, he made the statements.
We don't know on behalf of which entity he made it.
We didn't even allege he did it as an agent of Infowars life.
And that's the problem.
They should have been dismissed, but because the courts didn't care.
The egregiousness of it is shown by Owen Troyer.
Why is Owen Troyer still a defendant in any of these cases?
Why is he being denied himself a merits defense?
You won't find any of the media talking about this because it exposes how bad the courts are.
Because it makes a joke out of the court's ruling.
Even assuming what Alex Jones did was so egregious that it should warrant...
You know, a preclusion of him presenting a defense.
That now applies for Owen Troyer.
So Owen Troyer, another co-defendant, prejudiced by the acts of one of the co-defendants.
Yeah, Robert, you don't have to have a law degree to know that that doesn't make sense.
I want to bring this one up because it's not funny.
It reminds me of when Jim Jeffries was actually mildly insightful.
He had a bit on, you know, guns in America.
And he says, he's Australian.
He's like, you want to give teachers fire?
Have you ever seen what these teachers have to...
That's a bad accent.
Bottom line, have you seen the teachers of libs of TikTok?
These people don't need guns.
There's truth to that, but that's not what it is.
People are just talking about security at schools.
A good political transition is that when the right responds to using its political power in a way that is perceived as punishing woke corporations for trying to interfere in political...
Affairs.
Then all of a sudden, there's a bunch of people on what I call the corporate right that suddenly complains, and this goes to the DeSantis versus Disney case that's coming.
We'll get there actually right now.
One last question.
DTQC agreed on the rationale in theory behind this law, but I think we can agree on where this law is going to go regardless.
Was there one more question on Alex Jones?
Cripe, there wasn't.
Okay, Alex Jones, anybody who wants to timestamp these subjects, I'll pin the comment.
Okay, this is a good one.
The Disney.
Jenna Ellis has taken some flack on Twitter because she has the audacity to come out and defend, you know, she's not defending Disney.
I think she genuinely believes and I think she is defending what she understands the Constitution to be.
Cernovich had a tweet.
And I don't want anyone...
I was going to respond to the tweet, but I don't know anyone thinking I'm trying to dunk on Cernovich or trying to score points.
Twitter reads sass.
Cernovich said, you know, Disney's a big company.
It's got politicians.
It's got a multi-billion dollar company.
It's got lawyers.
They don't need...
What did they say?
Conservative influencers defending them.
And I was going to respond, but it can't be done eloquently on Twitter.
I don't think Jenna Ellis is defending Disney.
She's defending what she thinks the Constitution represents.
And that is...
You know, preventing reprisals, preventing legislation, preventing Congress from enacting law to punish for the exercise of First Amendment rights.
Robert, this is the question now.
So, I mean, there's a thorny question.
Disney comes out and says, we disagree with DeSantis, we disagree with the don't say gay bill, even though they're misrepresenting what it means, yada yada.
DeSantis and the Florida State Legislature comes and passes a piece of legislation, but it's not that it deprives...
Disney of some tax benefits and self-governance privileges that they had.
It's that it will not renew it as of 2023.
So Disney has one year left of their tax benefits.
They effectively have been given or granted government powers over Disney, the municipal corporate village that is Disney.
They could have their own fire department.
They could levy taxes to pay for roads, whatever.
They were given government powers as a privilege.
That is now not going to be renewed as of June or July 2023.
It passed the democratic process in Florida.
And some people are saying, Scott Adams, Jenna Ellis, that this is effectively congressional reprisals for the exercise of free speech.
And I'm torn.
I say, like, not renewing privileges.
I know that there's going to be the argument that it is a reprisal or it could be a reprisal and therefore it is the government sanctioning free speech.
What is your take?
First of all, if I mis-explained the actual tax benefit that Disney benefits from, correct me or specify, but what's your take on this?
Yeah, so I think from a legal perspective, Disney's got no case.
So people who think Disney's got a case have not done enough actual First Amendment law.
So even The Intercept interviewed some liberal First Amendment lawyers that actually practiced First Amendment law said, no, Disney wouldn't win in a challenge.
Because in order to show retaliatory prosecution, you have to show that every member of the state legislature that voted for this, or at least a majority, They voted for it in order to specifically punish Disney and had no other policy purpose behind it.
And that was the same when the governor signed it.
That hurdle, to my knowledge, that hurdle has never been met, evidentiary-wise, in a case.
And the reason is, one, judges hate to inquire into motivations of legislation.
This has come up in cases where people allege legislation was passed by bribery.
The court said, can't get involved.
Nope, doesn't matter.
So as long as it passed the legislature, even there, often whether a bill passed, the courts have said whatever Congress or whatever the legislative branch says determines it.
To give an example, there's the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution, the one authorizing the income tax.
If you dig in...
You find lots of problems with how that was purportedly added to the Constitution.
What do you think the U.S. Supreme Court said?
You think they were going to dig into that mess?
Not a chance.
They said if the archivist said it passed as part of the Constitution, final word, it's unreviewable.
So it's because they are not going to get into the motivations of these legislators.
That's never going to happen.
I mean, just look at the Trump cases.
Where Trump is being targeted by the executive branch overtly, people who ran for office saying, I'm going to go and investigate him, elect me, then went and investigated him.
Courts have said even that wasn't violated, the First Amendment.
And that's specific in particular, that that's real evidence, not trying to guess what 60-plus House members and 20-plus senators and the governor was attempting to do.
So what you end up doing is you've got to look at the law itself.
Does the law itself on the face violate First Amendment rights?
Well, the law itself doesn't even reference Disney.
So it's hard for Disney to claim this law on its face is meant to retaliate against us when they're not even mentioned in it.
That's problem one.
Problem two is they also took out all of the special districts before 1968.
So they took out a half dozen other ones.
And people and districts have nothing to do with Disney.
So in reality, they would never be able to prove, and a court wouldn't even allow them to kind of try to produce the evidence to prove a First Amendment violation.
So it's going nowhere in the courts.
Instead, Disney's looking at whether they can make a technical argument about whether it was in a special session versus a general session, whether it has to go to referendum, etc.
So on the legal side, it won't work.
But let's talk about the broader political side of it.
Hold on.
One question first.
It might also be relevant that, from what I understand, Robert, unless I'm wrong, it was a few years ago where it was sort of a bipartisan move to actually do this three years before this incident, or where Democrat politicians also wanted to strip Disney of their special privileges, unless I'm mistaken?
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
I mean, the other fact that's relevant, even if they were willing to look at motivation, even if they were...
Ignored that there's no facial violation here.
This is clearly facially neutral.
Even if they ignored the fact that five other special districts were also stripped of it.
Even if they ignored their independent public policy reasons for this to be passed.
The other aspect of this is, as you noted at the beginning, this is a privilege.
This is not a situation like, okay, Disney lobbied against us.
Let's impose a special tax on Disney.
Disney now has to pay a 5% surtax on all their future profits, right?
That would be a better, stronger argument, because they're right on the face of it.
Somebody's getting treated.
This is Disney no longer gets the special benefit of a special district that they lobbied for on false premises about 50 years ago.
And when I say lobbied for on false premises, they were promising a bunch of things they never delivered on.
And the other problem with this was Disney's policing.
The reason why also it's relevant, like this is where you could have had a political motivation, you could say Disney is supporting groomer activities in schools.
So is this chat here, is there any truth to this?
Yeah, that's what I'm about to get to.
Disney was self-policing.
So Disney got to have all the legal authority of a small town.
This wasn't just about taxes.
One critical thing is they could issue bonds, tax-free bonds, as if they were a municipality.
So they got tax-free debt that they got to issue.
Which had a whole range of benefits for Disney.
That's the more consequential financial one over time.
And there'll be some complexity about transferring that debt to the local counties that they're a part of.
But that can be done without too much hurdle.
They have more than a year now to fix it.
But the Disney got...
Peter Schweitzer raised this problem back in the late 1990s.
For example, people didn't know Disney was a key secret partner in one of the biggest pay-per-view porn sites that was out there in the 90s.
I mean, Peter Schweitzer, the great investigative reporter, he wasn't well-known back then.
He's much more well-known now.
You know, Clinton-Cash, the secret alliances of China, and so forth.
But back then, he was...
In fact, the book is only available in hardcover.
But he goes into how Disney had abused its special relationship power to cover up for a disproportionate child abuse problem on Disney.
And if you think about it...
I mean, even if Disney had no complicity or culpability whatsoever, Disney is going to be the kind of place where you're going to have, because where do you have access, broad access to children?
If you're an abuser, you look for where you have opportunity.
It's like, this is crime in nature.
It's like the first time I was moving off campus at Yale, the cop said, here's what to look for.
And he explained, crime is a crime of opportunity.
So don't pick an apartment in a neighborhood that doesn't have good lighting.
You know, live in a residential place.
Don't live in an apartment complex that you have to walk upstairs for.
Things of this nature.
And it was great advice.
I mean, I lived right across from the Y. It turned out great, but that's another story for another day.
But the same dynamic.
Crimes are crimes of opportunities, and particularly pedophiles and child abusers.
Are really the ones aggressive.
That's why they show up in foster homes.
That's why they show up in, frankly, the priesthood.
That's why they show up in a range of places.
They have disparate access.
And that's why they were going to show up in Disney.
And the key was, what did Disney do about it?
Did Disney expose it?
Did Disney prosecute it?
No.
Disney was covering it up.
Because look at it from Disney's perspective.
Who's going to bring their little six-year-old to Disney World if it's, hey, let's meet the local pedo?
So, you know, it's not going to work well for Disney's marketing.
So the reality is Disney's support of grooming in schools correlates to Disney's history of problems of protecting child abusers that is directly relevant to this law.
So independent of all of the other grounds, the legislature in Florida and the governor of Florida, the good governor of Florida, had an absolute legal right, and I would say duty.
To strip Disney of this special protection because it correlates to problematic criminal behavior taking place at Disney.
And if you're Disney, do you think you're going to bring a suit and allow DeSantis to document and detail these issues?
No.
Disney will never sue on these grounds, is my early prediction.
They'll figure out some other way to deal with it while they're dealing with their stock going...
Because it turns out grooming isn't popular with parents.
Robert, I never...
This is why sometimes I think I'm smart and then other times I realize I'm totally ignorant.
Never even thought about having your own private security, your own private police, your own private...
When I read about their own fire department, their own roads, I was like, okay, this sounds like a...
What do they call it?
A corporate city or an incorporated city?
It's a company town.
It's an old school company town.
And have your own police and the issues...
Yeah, I'm putting a lot of twos and twos together, and I don't like the number that it's adding up to.
It's two plus two plus two is six.
South Park portrayed Mickey Mouse the way it did because it had a lot of truth in it.
Mickey Mouse is a criminal gangster in the South Park world that's randomly banging every animal that exists and is probably responsible for the pandemic.
In the South Park world, right?
But that's because there was deep truth.
They often hint at real truth with some of these people.
Even where I don't agree with their criticism, there's usually a truth to that criticism.
I just brought up a chat that said, Viva, are you a right-wing extremist?
Well, I guess it depends if you ask Wikipedia.
Yeah, I'm the most Canadian leftist, you know, forget the identity side.
No, I'm not.
I'm not.
What I am, I believe, is a rational human being.
If that makes me a right-wing extremist, okay.
But Robert, Okay, so...
Well, speaking of the political weaponization of the court process, what Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and Madison Cawthorn are having to go through is just insane.
Okay, before we even get there, I want to say one thing in defense of Jenna Ellis.
I said it on Twitter.
If you only respect someone because they agree with you or reaffirm what you believe, you never actually respected that person.
You just respected your own opinion.
I believe Jenna Ellis is sincere.
Until she proves herself to be insincere or dishonest, I believe she's sincere.
She might be mistaken.
But to rail on someone to go look for all sorts of ulterior motives why she's defending Disney, take for granted, you all liked her.
Before she took a position that you disagree with, don't start looking to demonize the individual just because they part ways with you on one thing that you believe firmly in.
I like Jenna.
I think she's honest.
I think she's smart.
I think she might be wrong.
But then again, I don't really think I have my own opinion.
I've heard Robert's argument and I'm influenced by it.
But I don't think ill of Jenna for being courageous enough to take the position she's taking knowing.
What people are going to say about it.
She has a strong independent position.
Now, a lot of your National Review types I don't take seriously because a lot of them are just, they come from the corporate whore side of conservative lawyers.
And so some of those I don't take seriously at all.
What is baseball crank, that loser?
Those kind of people I have no respect for.
Your National Review writers, none.
Because many of these same people are cheering.
The individual sanctions being issued on people based on whether it's a country, whether it's a company from a country, or the individual has that ancestry.
It's like, hold on a second.
It's wrong to use someone's political actions as a grounds to deprive them of property, unless they're Russian.
Then it's okay.
I mean, that's the same.
So these people are hypocrites.
They're frauds.
They're phonies.
Some of them are war whores.
Some of them are corporate whores.
There are other people, Jenna Ellis, Scott Adams, others, have their sincere beliefs.
I disagree with how they apply it in this context, but I don't doubt the sincerity of their beliefs.
I just saw a shirt, war whores, Robert.
I don't think we can do it, but we'll see.
Okay, Robert, let's get to the next one, but hold on, I saw flattery.
Flattery, a lot of taking the high road.
Disney defenders seem like they are very unlikely.
Okay, and David, you're the best person.
If everyone were like you, the world would be utopia.
No, the world would be...
Hyperactive and very annoying.
I can appreciate it.
Too much Viva would be very annoying for everyone around you.
And I have my foibles as well.
But Robert, okay, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I know what I initially thought of her.
I'm human.
All I hear is that she's extremist.
She says terribly stupid things.
She retweets violent messages.
I've seen some of her tweets.
Not tweets I would ever make myself, but do I think that they are evil incarnate?
I'm not so sure.
I know what I thought of her to begin with.
I saw her testify on Friday.
I now know what I think of her after having gotten to know her legally.
But I don't know what the heck is going on here.
This is a very complicated thing.
The proceedings that she's facing, the administrative proceedings to try to prevent her from being able to run again, she filed a civil temporary restraining order to basically suspend the proceedings, the administrative proceedings against her.
Matt Gaetz got, what's the word, dismissed from these proceedings on an 1872 exemption amnesty.
Robert, I know enough to know.
I know nothing of what the heck is going on.
I just know the questions to ask.
What proceedings were filed against Marjorie Taylor Greene to have her booted from the ballot or precluded from running for office again?
Yeah, well, it's all Mark Elias' strategy to use the old Confederacy ban from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to go after their strongest critics.
And their critics are, you know, Senator Johnson in Wisconsin, Congressman Cawthorn in North Carolina, Congressman Gates in Florida, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, and Paul Gosar and a few others in Arizona.
So it went to court in North Carolina with Madison Cawthorn, and the federal judge said that it didn't apply and it could not be used as grounds to remove him from the ballot.
It being Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and now I had Nate on Friday with Eric Huntley.
They had a disagreement on the essence or application of that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
I think Nate is less right than Eric.
In the interpretation, but what was the intended application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment in terms of barring people from running for office again?
The real answer is radical Republicans wanted to keep Southern Democrats out of Congress after the Civil War.
That's the real answer.
And there's serious questions about the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment because the states that passed them We're states that most people weren't allowed to vote in them.
So it's like, hmm, did that really?
That's why the U.S. Supreme Court, when it came time to visit the 16th Amendment, was like, ah, we're not getting near this, because then the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th would have some serious issues.
That's why I said the greatest power is who gets to determine what's in the Constitution.
And one of the great loopholes of the Constitution is the archivist of the United States could declare himself king legally.
And disband everybody and put the army under his complete control and end all elections.
Because he could just say the Constitution's been amended to so declare.
And according to the U.S. Supreme Court, nobody's allowed to challenge the Archivist.
I find that a little insane, but that is literally, it's one of those abstract loopholes that we don't think would ever happen in real life, but actually could happen legally.
So the same dynamic, what the 14th Amendment Section 3 said was that if someone, while under oath to either state or federal office, Congress could, by two-thirds vote, overrule that.
And the 14th Amendment said Congress could pass legislation to interpret and enforce this.
Which also relates to another constitutional provision that says, when it comes to members of Congress, only Congress itself can determine whether they're qualified to be there.
So these are the overlapping provisions.
In 1872, we got passed, the radical Republicans kind of lost power as part of what happened.
And so they passed an amnesty act that said, really the only implementing legislation ever passed by Congress on this, that said, okay, Everybody that was disqualified by that's now qualified.
And then there was a second Amity Act passed in 1898.
They reinvigorated this in 1918 to go after the socialist congressman Victor Berger from Milwaukee, who was against World War I. And on the grounds that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, they could only do that because there had been a declaration of war, and thus certain nations had been listed as an enemy, and he had said we shouldn't go to war, in that case with Germany and World War I. Big German population, of course, in Milwaukee.
German socialists dominated Milwaukee for a good period of time after the beginning of the 1900s.
And they reinstate, and Congress said, yeah, we can reinvigorate this, and the Amnesty Act doesn't apply because that's only retrospective, not prospect.
It goes to the First Court system in North Carolina.
Cawthorn says, no, the 1872 Act, because he's recognizing the real history.
This was meant to deal with Confederates.
We decided not to do it anymore in 1872.
The law requires Congress's implementation for its interpretation and enforcement by the 14th Amendment's own explicit terms.
And it explicitly gives Congress the right to change the rules, which it has done, by its own explicit terms.
And the Constitution says only members of Congress can determine the qualifications of the members of Congress.
So that's Cawthorn's judgment.
It goes to Totenberg in Georgia with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Well, I'll skip her.
It goes to Arizona next.
Arizona, they challenge Gosar and two other Arizona congressmen.
Same grounds.
They say, these are insurrectionists.
They are not constitutionally qualified to vote.
The Arizona State Court does a very deliberate decision, goes through this whole history and says, no, this provision does not apply.
And at a minimum, there's no private right cause of action.
That Congress has to pass laws defining this and interpreting this, and Congress alone can enforce it unless it says otherwise, based on the constitutional structure for congressional membership.
Then it goes to, so that court dismisses it, says all these congressmen can run.
Then it goes, I'm not sure what happened with Gates.
My understanding is, I don't know if it's reached the court process.
I thought Gates was dismissed as well under the 1872.
It probably was.
Then under, for then Marjorie Taylor Greene, they have a different process.
You don't initiate the process in the courts.
It's kind of like North Carolina.
You initiate it through an administrative proceeding.
Any Joe Schmo.
Can file a challenge to whether somebody's qualified and get themselves discovery in a hearing in Georgia?
I need to stop you.
One thing that goes back all the way, and by the way, whoever just said the chat of what the disagreement was, you're right.
It was on the right to secede.
We'll get to that after.
But Robert, the 14th Amendment section, paragraph three, it says, anyone who participated in an insurrection or rebellion, question number one.
Who defines, who determines whether or not there was an insurrection or rebellion?
Does it have to be an actual declaration of insurrection or rebellion?
I mean, that's why the Arizona court said, if you look at the entire 14th Amendment, and you look at Article 1, Section 5, and you look at the various provisions of the Constitution in terms of application and interpretation and enforcement, particularly as congressional membership, that this is something Congress has to define.
Congress probably has to enforce unless it chooses to allow private causes of action.
There's legislation pending to try to do this.
It will never get through the Senate, so it probably won't go anywhere.
But they never have.
And in fact, again, this was really a historical relic that was meant to screw over the ex-Confederates and really all Southern Democrats so that the radical Republicans could have carte blanche control, more than two-thirds control.
Once they no longer had that control, the 1872 Amnesty Act was meant to put an end to it.
We sadly reinvigorated it when we don't like war protests, which is ugly history, but that's the nature of it.
Briefly in 1918, we had a lot of bad ideas rolling around in 1918.
Ultimately, the protest against the war vindicated and validated Victor Berger and others, and so we never reinvigorated it again.
And this is the first time we leave it to Mark Elias to make up an interpretation and suddenly say, this should somehow stop my opponents from being allowed on the ballot.
Mark Elias, who if John Durham had any ethics, would have already criminally prosecuted for his role in Spygate and Russiagate, is being detailed in the Sussman case that's about to go to trial in more briefings this week.
But watch, he won't, because he's there to cover up for the system, not really expose it.
Pick a few fall guys and then move on to make it look like you did something, but don't actually do anything.
That's what Durham's really good at.
But maybe I'll be proven wrong, but that's really what it is.
And so because there is, so you could look at, there are criminal statutes that define insurrection and sedition and rebellion, but they were never meant to, and they're not explicitly interpreting this statute, I mean, this constitutional provision.
And really, the 1872 Amnesty Act was meant to put an end to it.
And we've only occasionally reinvigorated it for bad purposes when we want to target political dissidents.
And it's not a coincidence they're targeting Cawthorn, one of the most effective populists in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most effective populists in the House, Matt Gaetz, one of the most effective populists in the House, Paul Gosar, one of the most effective populists in the House.
All four, by the way, voting against sanctions on Russia, along with Thomas Massey.
And they're using statements about January 6th because they need to redefine the election fortification that took place as illicit insurrection and fraud claims, that it was inherently bad to second-guess that election, like it's inherently bad to second-guess our current war efforts.
These people sit at the nexus of both, and they're just using this bogus proceeding, in my view.
But the bad luck for Marjorie Taylor Greene is she drew Judge Totenberg, and that meant zero chance she was going to win in court.
The Judge Totenberg, that's in the court case, not on the administrative hearing case, correct?
Right.
So what happened is they initiate, in Georgia, anybody can initiate a cause challenge for qualifications in the administrative process.
She sued in federal court, Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Cawthorn had in North Carolina.
And said, look, this process violates my First Amendment rights, also it violates the Constitution's explicit and exclusive delegation to Congress for enforcement on constitutional qualification questions.
It says that only Congress can determine whether its members qualify under the Constitution.
For some time, and one of the cases she cited, she only cited two, one of them was mine, which I'm still ticked about.
So, I brought a suit on behalf of this little young socialist in California.
And she had been denied the ballot summarily by Kamala Harris as Attorney General.
And because they didn't like her.
They didn't like this little lefty being on the ballot.
She was sort of young, charismatic, etc.
So, I filed suit on the grounds that whether or not she's constitutionally qualified under the 25th Amendment is a presidential question.
And then, in fact, you can argue the 25th Amendment anticipates someone being elected to the presidency who doesn't meet the qualifications yet.
The vice president would then hold the office until the president was qualified, and it'd be up to Congress to make a determination on that issue.
There's been a lot of bad rulings from the federal courts for the last 60 years on ballot access issues.
They basically will want the state to monopolize the ballot, control the ballot.
And all of it was, it was done for your, you know, the secret ballot, all of that was done for your benefit.
No, it wasn't.
It was done to screw over populist and labor movements in the United States because a lot of their populations couldn't read in English.
And so what happens when you require they read in English in order to vote effectively?
What happened is people used to be given ballots as they went in from people they trusted in their local neighborhood and community.
And then they put that ballot in.
The secret ballot said, well, we can't allow that.
We need the state to monopolize the ballot.
Now, we would never use it to disqualify people we don't like, right?
But that's all they've done for over a century, is use it to try to keep people off the ballot that are popular.
You don't need to keep them.
It's all done by the lie.
then Judge Gorsuch helped perpetuate this lie when he was on the 10th Circuit because he allowed states to say a presidential candidate could be struck by the state government and you, the voter, couldn't even have the option of voting for them based on the state's determination as to their presidential constitution.
My case went up to the Ninth Circuit.
Ninth Circuit followed Gorsuch and said that, in fact, one of the judges said, well, what if the people put Bugs Bunny on the ballot?
And my response was a lot of people would prefer Bugs Bunny to a lot of the people we've been electing lately.
So the, you know, I went back and forth at it with that judge.
But they like the state having this power to keep out the rabble because it's noteworthy.
There has been a context where presidential cause challenges were brought and the court said, no, no, that's not the business of the state.
The state government has no right to do that.
No court has a right to do that.
That was when people challenged whether John McCain...
Born in Panama, Barack Obama allegedly born outside of the United States, whether they met the definition of a natural-born citizen to meet the ballot.
All of a sudden, then the court said, oh, no, no, we can't get into that.
No, no, they have to be allowed on the ballot.
Yes, indeed.
It shows you how corrupt and political and partisan these courts are.
But as to Congress, as the Arizona court pointed out, I had my 25th Amendment interpretation, which was novel at the time, still is.
They didn't even address it, that lazy, partisan Ninth Circuit decision.
But there's no question that Congress, congressional qualifications are determined by Congress explicitly by the Constitution.
So that's why, and Totenberg just ignores this, pretends these two decisions about the presidential candidate governing.
They don't.
Total difference between those two because of the issue related to Congress having exclusive control over qualifications written right in the Constitution.
Totenberg ignores it and says the Georgia administrative process can go forward.
Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene will ultimately win that because the ALGA has signed the case.
What happens is they have a hearing.
Anybody watch that hearing can see what an embarrassment it was.
Apparently, 1776 is now insurrection.
You can't use the reference 17th century.
You're an insurrectionist.
Everything is code, except when Maxine Waters says to get in the faces of politicians and harass them.
But Robert, hold on a second.
Just make sure I understand.
Marjorie Taylor Greene failed on her 1872 amnesty, despite the fact that Matt Gaetz succeeded on it.
Or Madison Cawthorn did.
Madison Cawthorn, sorry.
If you can, one sentence, remind me how that happened again.
So, I mean, what happened is, In 1872, Congress finally enacts the power they had under the 14th Amendment and says the disqualification provisions will no longer apply.
Period.
That was explicit power.
The Totenberg decides to pretend that was an amendment of the Constitution.
She has one line that says, the argument is that this is simply enforcing a provision that Congress has, but that's just rhetorical.
No, it's a totally different legal argument.
It's like, you know, when language is different and the structure of an argument is different, it's a different argument.
And she pretends that argument doesn't exist.
And again, why?
I have no doubt that if this was Senator Ralph Warnock, Totenberg would have found that this was being applied illicitly.
Totenberg, if people recognize the name related to the NPR, Totenberg, I mean, one of the most activist liberal judges in the country.
The problem in Atlanta is, if you're in Georgia, it's a problem that needs to be systematically solved.
It's like the District of Columbia.
You have to go to the political capital, and the political capital is filled with your adversaries.
And this is true even in the federal court process, but definitely true in the state court process.
So she says the 1872 amnesty doesn't apply.
She says that the Congress doesn't get to exclusively define qualifications.
Says there's basically only, she applies all of the ballot access rules to, she waters that down to its lowest possible standard to say if there's almost any rational basis for the rule, it can be done.
So she greenlights the continuation of this harassment of Marjorie Taylor Greene in this cause challenge.
However, it's likely to all be mooted because the administrative law judge, he doesn't make the final ruling, he just makes recommendations.
But he's likely to say that he doesn't meet the legal definition.
The decision has to be made by the Secretary of State, Raffensperger.
Who you have called...
By the way, if I'm tearing, I have a tickle in my throat.
I can't stop it.
I inhaled something that I shouldn't have.
And my nose is red because I got some sun.
So the administrative judge, they call him the A...
whatever.
He's an administrative judge.
He renders a recommendation that he submits to Raffensperger, who makes the final determination.
Yeah, his real name is Raffensperger.
I call him Ratburger for short because that's what he is.
But I don't think he would be dumb enough to exclude Marjorie Taylor Greene from the ballot.
I think he's running for re-election.
I haven't double-checked that.
He should lose anyway.
And then that decision can be challenged in a state court in Atlanta.
She is, of course, I believe she's appealing the denial of the temporary injunctive relief to the 11th Circuit.
Ultimately, there's no grounds for her to be disqualified from the ballot, period.
I assume the ALJ will say so.
I assume the Secretary of State will determine it so, and that should end it.
But the fact she has to go through any of this is nuts, and it's because of a misapplication and misinterpretation and political weaponization of the law in a way that's ahistorical or counter-historical and not consistent to, but contrary to, the explicit and expressed language of the Constitution.
Well, some people said there might be a net positive for Marjorie Taylor Greene because, I'll tell you this, I'm pretty open-minded.
I didn't watch the Tim Pool episode, not just because I had never seen it.
She came off much more reasonable in her examination than the media portrays her, and I think that's going to be a net positive for Marjorie Taylor Greene.
A lot of people are going to say also the system is almost irreparably screwed.
If this is what they're trying to do to get people off the ballot from the democratic process.
But it was a good hearing to watch.
I don't know if it's going to continue next week, but bottom line, that judge, the administrative judge, does not render any decision.
He just issues a recommendation to Raffensperger, who's going to issue the final order, which itself can be challenged.
Yes.
I mean, and it's...
I mean, what the administrative law judge should say is that he doesn't have the authority or power, nor does the state of Georgia have the authority or power to do this, and he should follow the rulings in both the federal court in North Carolina and the state court in Arizona.
That's what he should say.
We'll see if a lot of your ALJs are not the most inspiring people in the world.
Yeah, but you know, this guy looks like he's getting it.
You know, I was looking at his face when the Marjorie Taylor Greene's attorney was making closing arguments.
The judge gets it.
I mean, the judge obviously gets it.
To anybody with half a brain, and I say this totally politically unbiased, it's bullshit.
I mean, it's actual straight-up bullshit.
You don't need to fortify elections when you can just keep people off the ballot.
To say that she should be kept off the ballot for aiding or providing comfort to rebellion, no one was charged with insurrection, Robert.
No one was charged with rebellion.
And they're going to say that what she said, which was, we want to do it peacefully.
But bear in mind, it was from two years earlier.
The reality is we've only had one legal insurrection, legally defined insurrection in American history, and it was the Civil War.
And that's what that meant.
If you took an oath to the Confederacy after you had taken an oath to the United States Constitution, that's who this was meant to apply to, not to anybody else.
And then 1872, we gave a grant full amnesty to say we're no longer even going to apply it to them.
So that should have been the end of it.
It's ludicrous.
It was misapplied in the case of Congressman Berger.
I mean, Eugene V. Debs went to prison for his dissident beliefs.
People forget this kind of thing because we whitewash it in our classrooms.
You know, when you're doing your history class, you either get the crazy, woke, leftist nonsense, America's an evil empire, killed all the Indians, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or you get sort of a mythical, in some of the mythical conservative ones, they leave out.
You know, the things like, oh, we lock people up for their war protests, and we used to forcibly sterilize people and treat them like human guinea pigs, as Barack Hussein Obama was bragging about this past week.
He goes, we got to experiment on a billion people!
Wasn't that great?
I don't want to have any problems on this stream.
People, you'll notice I won't be posting clips on Viva Clips for a little while until I have an issue resolved with YouTube, which is...
Can I say bullshit again?
Bullshit.
I mean, it just shows you there's problems with automated flagging.
But, yeah, we heard what Obama said, and we know what people have done in the past.
But, Robert, before we get into this chat, which I think is going to bring you back into some picks that you made, because I think you made some good predictions, the dispute between Nate Brody and Eric Hundley was whether or not states had a legal right to secede.
I thought it was a clear-cut answer, but then I think maybe I'm totally ignorant and ignorantly thought it was a clear-cut answer.
Is there legitimate bona fide debate as to whether or not states have the right to secede?
And if there is, what's your opinion on whether or not a state has the right to secede from the Union?
Well, this goes back to the Constitution was unconstitutional in its first formation.
Because the Articles of Confederation said any amendment would have to have unanimous consent.
And the Constitution came along and said, you know what?
We're going to change the rules by which our Constitution is adopted.
Imagine if you proposed a constitutional amendment that said all you need is a majority of Congress.
And they said that that was constitutionally changed the Constitution.
That's basically how our Constitution was formed.
And so my forebears in Rhode Island were still trying to issue our own currency, still trying to fight the National Army.
And then they sent in the National Army, and we decided we were going to drop that protest for the time being.
So yes, conceptually, there are a wide range of arguments about whether or not there's a right of secession under the Constitution.
And there's good arguments on both sides, is the short answer.
As a practical matter, the Civil War kind of solved that.
Again, you have the law.
As they say in Mexico, Constitution made of paper, blade made of steel.
Blade made of steel is what ultimately governed you.
Okay, that's very good.
By the way, one of the chats...
Hold on, Robert.
Robert, I thought it was on my computer screen, so I wasn't going to say anything about it.
Hold on, hold on.
Where is the chat?
I'll buy that thread on Robert's mic for $20.
Robert, go around to the front side of your mic.
There's a little white thread on the front of your mic.
There you go.
Keep it.
Keep it, Robert.
No, keep it!
I thought it was on my computer.
Oh, it's over there.
I can still sell it for $20.
Oh my goodness, that's funny.
Okay.
I hope that wasn't...
Oh, whatever.
Okay, that's funny stuff in real time.
Okay, Robert.
So...
I don't know then who's right between Nate and Eric.
Now I'm thinking I was...
Oh, there's good arguments both ways, I think.
John Calhoun was the great legal advocate for the legal constitutional right of slavery.
There are a range of good ones arguing otherwise.
I think it's more interesting that slavery itself was on secession.
I think there's good arguments.
I like Lysander Spooner's 1840 argument that he co-authored with Frederick Douglass that slavery itself was actually unconstitutional.
And I agree with him.
And so I find that argument more intriguing than secession in the sense that there's some people that argue that today Texas could declare it to dependents.
Good luck with that.
That's all I got to say.
Like I said, civil war kind of put an end to that practically.
Okay, fascinating.
Robert, okay, we had some other...
Oh, yes.
Let's do it.
Dominion.
Patrick Byrne.
So Byrne sued by defamation.
I guess he's feeling the Byrne, but it's not really feeling a Byrne.
He made a motion to dismiss Dominion's defamation lawsuit against him.
He raised every argument under the sun.
Some of them were good.
Some of them were bad.
Some of them were better.
Some of them were novel.
But Byrne filed a motion to dismiss.
argued section 230 immunity, which I didn't really understand that argument as to how he raised it, but there's some interesting things that come out of it.
Double-edged sword.
He alleged the actual malice argument, which is going to be postponed for a little while later.
Bottom line, the motion to dismiss Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Byrne was itself dismissed.
I guess, in my view, the most impactful or the most relevant thing was that Byrne had retweeted an article linking Dominion to foreign interests, China, etc.
It wasn't just a retweet of an article.
It was a retweet with a comment saying, I can vouch for this.
It's true.
What's your take on the dismissal of the motion to dismiss?
One part I disagree with in the court's logic is the court said that if something is inherently implausible, that that means you meet the actual merit standard.
The problem I have is, if it's inherently implausible, then that means it can't be considered a statement of fact because no one would believe it's true.
So this is a contradiction inside the logic.
They're trying to go to this inherent implausibility argument because they don't like the way a particular statement.
It was implausible to them.
It wasn't inherently implausible.
Whether there was a smartmatic-dominion relationship, foreign governments, that's not inherently implausible.
That's a statement that requires evidentiary research and whatnot, but nothing about that statement on its face is inherently implausible.
So I thought that logic of the court and implying actual malice was wrong, and I thought simply adapting inherent implausibility makes no sense in a defamation context, because if something's inherently implausible, then it's a statement of opinion that no one could consider defamatory.
And they've said this in other contexts.
I disagree with that aspect of the court's ruling.
Otherwise, what Patrick Byrne did is he just stepped in it.
He made specific factual statements about Dominion that I was out screaming and we were talking about on the show were patently false and they should quit doing it because they were walking into a trap that was going to discredit the election fortification challenges.
I'm not patting myself on the back, Robert.
I'm patting you.
Digitally on the back.
Certain statements were demonstrably false.
The corporate history of the company.
It's corporate ties to other entities.
Two minutes of research to prove we're false.
In that specific decision, which statements were inherently implausible?
I don't think any statements that anyone made about Dominion were inherently implausible.
They were highly unlikely.
There are things that five minutes of research would have disproven.
Right?
You know, that Dominion didn't come from Smartmatic, that Dominion isn't part of Smartmatic, that Dominion wasn't involved in Venezuela, all the China, Iran, all of the stuff that was obvious gibberish that all of them took the bait on and, you know, helped discredit.
And now, you know, the narrative they're trying to write is a combination of January 6th being insurrection based on these lies that these defamation cases prove are lies.
Ignoring...
The fact that, again, there were problems with this election.
Part one of the problem was that there were constitutionally unqualified voters who voted.
Problem two was that the method of voting was many people voted by a method that was not constitutionally qualified.
And third, the counting and canvassing of the ballots was not constitutionally qualified.
And what I mean by constitutionally qualified is as these other January 6th cases reference, the state legislators have exclusive control over what the rules are for presidential electoral elections.
And those were routine.
But nobody paid attention to that because it got sucked up in.
China and our secret servers in Germany and the CIA and really working with us and the generals in QAnon are really on our side.
All gibberish that led people down the primrose path that precipitated some of the people's dumb actions on January 6th and precipitated dumb actions by Patrick Byrne.
I thought the biggest problem for Patrick Byrne was not only he made very specific factual statements that two minutes of research would have proven were false, but that he refused to retract.
I mean, that looked really bad to the court's perspective.
But to this day, he's refused to correct.
And people tell me he's a straightforward actor.
I'm sorry.
He's either a complete idiot or he's a fraud because he's refused to retract patently false statements that were distracting to the actual election challenge that created a red herring that has allowed the media and the political class to ignore the egregious things that actually happened in the 2020 election.
It's like you had somebody...
Steal something from a bank and you blame the wrong person and in the process they pretend nothing got stolen from the bank.
Just because you blame the wrong person doesn't mean the bank didn't get stolen.
Or if I pull up the Philip DeFranco accusing Nicholas Sandman of hate and then saying, okay, he was innocent but I still stand by my condemnation of hate.
You bum.
Yeah, just apologize.
Isn't he busy whoring for war as we speak?
I choose.
What did he put out the other day?
Oh, I have to go to my Twitter feed to remember this one, but it's not worth remembering at this point in time.
But Robert, on the issue of election fortification and election challenges, this is not, and we will highlight and specify, this is not a challenge to 2020.
And I love the fact that the lawsuit specifically says this is not a challenge to 2020.
This is perspective, not...
What is it?
This is prospective, not retroactive.
Whatever.
It's a lawsuit challenging.
Let me pull it up so I can refresh my memory.
The District of Arizona, Carrie Lake and Mark Fincham versus a number of people.
The only big name that stuck out to me was Bill Gates in terms of ensuring transparency, legitimacy of digital.
Voting.
And again, just so that nobody misinterprets anything, this is not about undoing 2020.
This is just about ensuring 2024.
I mean, the lawsuit basically says we want to ensure voting integrity via digital machines.
And it goes through a lot of the concerns that prior to 2020 had been noted by CNN, New York Times, the inherent weaknesses of digital as a...
And especially digital, where some of these highly sensitive components are manufactured in foreign countries, hostile foreign countries, which they've highlighted in that lawsuit.
First question first, I mean, I guess summarize the lawsuit, but then also just explain how Bill Gates, is it the Bill Gates who's on the Maricopa County Board of whatever that's also involved in this?
I don't know.
I don't know.
So that part I don't know.
I know that they're bringing suit because they want in advance to make sure they don't have to audit the election results again in Arizona after the election because of concerns they have about the efficacy and integrity of the machines and the software being operated on those machines and the companies running those machines.
So I think it's an issue ongoing in the Senate race as well, because Blake Masters has made election reform one of his top issues.
I think it's politically savvy.
I'm not sure where it gets legally.
But I think politically it's smart for them to highlight their concerns with electronic voting machines in Arizona.
Legally, I'm not sure how there's, whether the courts will think that they are entitled to remedy at this stage.
And I've highlighted the Bill Gates who's on, you know, they go through the parties, but just essence of the lawsuit, it's a civil rights action for declaratory and injunctive relief to prohibit the use of electronic voting machines in the state of Arizona in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.
Okay.
And then if we just go to Gates, where they describe who the parties are, not finding it.
Oh, there we go.
No, keep going.
Defendant Gates, whoever, as members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
So it might be another Bill Gates.
Yeah, it's definitely a different Bill Gates.
Okay.
He's busy trying to short Tesla stock.
And led to him and Elon Musk engaging in a bit of...
Well, he didn't do it.
Elon Musk engaged in a little bit of a Twitter war.
He was showing some of the unflattering photos of Bill Gates and other things.
Okay, so it's a different person.
I'm sorry, when I see Bill Gates on an election, call me a conspiracy theorist, I connect Bill Gates with Bill Gates.
So, correction, if it's not the same Bill Gates, we'll find out.
We'll find out, people.
Bill Gates, I apologize.
No defamation.
I don't want to...
Retraction and put it on the alpaca wall.
Okay, Robert, what do we have next?
So there's a lot of cases at the Supreme Court.
There was the trial that everybody was talking about this week on the LawTube, which was the Johnny Depp case versus Amber Heard.
But the Supreme Court was busy because they had Nazi cases.
They had the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
They had a couple of tax cases.
They had a habeas petition case.
They had some constitutional cases.
So they were busy this week.
Well, which one do you want to start with?
This is where I stopped with my homework.
Johnny Depp, I don't think we need to go into it, except to say one thing, Robert.
The strategy of reading a text message and then saying, did I read that correctly, Mr. Depp?
It's objectively idiotic, correct?
Well, we're seeing a lot of mediocre lawyer.
So for people who are watching the case, not because they care about the celebrity drama, but we're looking at it to be...
Sort of informative about the legal process.
Ignore the lawyers because they're both mostly mediocre.
I would say the only educational aspect of the case has really been Johnny Depp as a witness.
He's managed to keep his cool, perform very well.
We'll see how Amber Heard does.
But what more and more people are discovering is that Amber Heard is batshit insane.
What I've been saying for years now.
She's insane.
Johnny Depp was the victim.
She was the abuser.
That hasn't changed at all.
Amber Heard is still batshit insane.
The evidence is continuing to accumulate from third-party witnesses, text documents.
The worst thing that Johnny has is some unfortunate text when he was in a state of agitation with some friends.
Where he talked about drowning and burning and necromancy.
Inherently implausible?
He didn't do any violent.
He just said some unfortunate...
Unfortunate things.
I think the lawyer was trying to elevate the sexting text in order to make it sound like he's otherwise violent, but that really didn't fly.
I thought Depp handled himself very effectively on the stand, took responsibility where it was needed, expressed emotion where it was effective, didn't play it over the top.
If you want to see how to handle yourself as a witness.
Johnny Depp's testimony has been a good example.
Don't look at it for anything.
The lawyers are very mediocre.
Very mediocre.
I'm just going to read two Rumble rants that I just screenshotted from the Rumbles.
We got Great Sidebar Thursday with Salty Cracker.
Salty is a legion.
Mr. Barnes, grateful for Art of the Day.
That's on vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
That was from SY110GISM.
I can spell that fast enough.
And we got Hamartix says, if you have a tickle in your throat, would the behavior panel detect vocal fry?
I inhaled some fluid.
Johnny Depp, reading the text messages.
Darn it, I had another question, which I'll get to.
As a tactical device, you have the person read those, by the way.
You don't read them yourself as a lawyer, because then you're associating those words with your voice.
You don't do that.
You have the witness do that.
Always have the witness do that.
Um, so I think that, uh, that, that was a just tactical error, but yeah, but the big cases of the week, the cases of consequence, uh, though, you know, it's always interesting.
People tell me, Oh, I'm not interested in the Johnny Depp case.
And then everybody on law tube is covering it to lots of views.
So it's like, there's a whole bunch of people out there that pretend I'm not interested in the Johnny Depp case, but they're, you know, they're tuning in, you know, that kind of thing.
But I'm not generally that interested.
It was obvious from day one.
She's batshit insane.
If you want to see what, if you want to, there was a good, uh, Description comparing the movie Gone Girl and the book Gone Girl to Amber Heard because it matches up.
As other people, in my experience in domestic abuse cases, women are just as likely to engage in abusive behavior as men.
The only disparity is that men are physically superior to women.
And so consequently, their male's use of the violence and abusive behavior can create more fear in women than vice versa.
But in fact, as a historical and sociological phenomenon, investigators have confirmed the same thing.
This isn't a male...
Me too has been wrong about that.
Men and women are just as equally capable of gaslighting, just as equally capable of being physically violent, just as equally capable of emotional abuse.
All of those things.
And Johnny Depp just gave a crash course in what that looks like.
But there were some...
Warning signs, you know.
And what was Elon Musk doing around with him?
Well, you know, Elon Musk should thank God that she chose Johnny because, you know, where he would be, who knows.
But the bigger cases of the week were the Supreme Court.
Okay, so now, I mean, walk us through it because this is where my homework came to an end, Robert.
What was the, well, I guess we're going to get to the vax mandates afterwards or the mask mandates.
What came out of SCOTUS?
Because I'm in the dark.
So, well, yeah, the SCOTUS will probably rule the mask mandates.
So there are a couple of vaccine mandate emergency injunction cases that went up, and because of Barrett and Roberts and Kavanaugh refusal to overturn or refusal to get involved, and when they have got involved, they've ruled in favor of the military.
Consequently, there's been limits to those injunctions.
So those courts that have not granted injunctions, the U.S. Supreme Court has not got involved.
Where the court has granted injunctions, they've limited the scale and scope of those injunctions.
So once again, we just see that Barrett and Kavanaugh are unreliable votes, though that's specific to the military context.
I think on the mask mandate that a federal judge, who was a former Justice Thomas clerk, Wrote a very disciplined, well-thought-out decision, 59-page decision, explaining why the mask mandate by the CDC was,
as we described at the very beginning of the issuance of this mandate, was unconstitutional and was illegal and violated the Administrative Procedures Act, violated constitutional delegation doctrines, violated a range of provisions.
Because, put simply, the CDC does not have the power to impose medical Sharia law on the entire country.
Never did.
And the fact that it's a plane or a train or an automobile didn't magically give them such jurisdiction any more than they had such authority to issue landlord relief and tenant relief by preventing evictions across the nation.
So I think this decision, the government chose to appeal it, but the airlines very quickly loved the injunction.
Because they've been begging for this for a while.
There was good lawsuits brought by stewardesses challenging this mask mandate that we discussed a week or two ago.
So they were thrilled.
So the masks are gone.
I do not anticipate the 11th Circuit overturning this decision.
And if it goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court, I believe the U.S. Supreme Court will affirm the decision because this is another case where the CDC just did not have this power, period.
And it establishes a great precedent.
The reason why it's getting appealed is the Biden administration is...
And as Fauci admitted, he goes, what are these courts doing telling the CDC what to do?
That tells you who Fauci is, this little Napoleon dictator wannabe.
You know, there's a great meme that shrunk him and put him on a ladder that I loved.
Well, you want to talk about conspiracy theories?
People are going to Wikipedia saying he's 5 '7", the woman interviewing him was 5 '8", and look at that.
It was a wide-angle lens.
It distorts on one end, distorts on the other.
But all that to say...
He had a bobblehead of himself on his desk behind him.
That's pathological-level self-idolizing that should scare everybody.
Just read Bobby Kennedy's The Real Anthony Fauci, and that tells you who Anthony Fauci really is.
And the prophets, by the way, go to help fund these cases and suits.
To Bobby Kennedy's credit.
But the Supreme Court was otherwise busy, though they haven't yet had the opportunity to rule the mask mandate, are still not helping out on the military vaccine mandate.
They issued a range of rulings, some of which were really good.
A couple of unanimous decisions were really good.
A couple of other decisions I disagreed with, and in particular, I disagreed, frankly, with the conservatives in a couple of cases, because I think they fictionalize original jurisdiction in certain areas by fictionalizing the history that relates to it.
But, yeah, they were busy.
I mean, my favorite decision was that the Nazis lost.
The Nazis lost at the Supreme Court.
In a case we previously talked about, that's the painting case, the Pissarro, which was seized by...
Well, what happened was, in order to get an exit visa, a Jewish family had to use her Pissarro painting as the price for an exit visa.
And, I mean, that Pissarro was already very well valued.
I think it was Rue Saint-Honoré.
How do you say that in French?
Hold on, I'm going to pull it up.
It's the Rue Saint-Honoré in rain in like afternoon or morning, afternoon, and evening.
Something like that.
Oh, gosh darn it.
Well, not...
Hold on, say it again.
Rue Saint-Honoré.
And it's H-O-N-O-R-E is the name of the street.
Okay, so hold on.
Portrait of Pablo Capasso.
Pablo Picasso.
Rue Saint-Honoré.
Well, I guess it would be like the small people.
Yeah, see, I just can't do that.
I can't do that N in the R in French.
And you know what?
I can't find an article fast enough that I'm not going to look like an idiot for trying to look for it.
So what was the bottom line outcome of the lawsuit?
The key was under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, which limits when you can sue foreign governments.
I've never been in favor of any such limitations existing, but it is what it is.
Because there's an art foundation that is a division of the Kingdom of Spain, That's what created this act.
So the family who should have inherited that painting sued to get it back once they found it.
They'd been searching for it for half a century, and they found it in this Spanish museum.
And the question was, what's called choice of law?
So because it involved expropriated property...
That's the grounds by which you can sue under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
You can sue a foreign government or foreign sovereign.
But then the question was, did California law apply or did Spanish law apply?
Because under Spanish law, you have to prove that they knew it was stolen property.
Under California law, all you got to prove is that it's stolen property.
I favor California law, by the way.
You can imagine why the Spanish and Europeans prefer that they know, right?
There's a lot of stolen loot running around Europe from all, you know, going back centuries, right?
They don't want that original ownership being the basis.
California and America, mostly we favor original ownership.
And the lower courts were saying Spanish law applied.
And so under Spanish law, they couldn't prove it and they were never going to get the painting back.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously...
Said that's not the choice of law.
The choice of law is that because the whole point of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act was to say that when an exception applies that allows them to be sued in the first instance, then they must be treated exactly like a private party would be treated.
And the point the Supreme Court made was if this was a private museum, California law applies under choice of law principles.
So that's what has to apply even when it's a foreign sovereign.
And that means...
They're finally going to get that painting back and the Nazis lost and the Nazi beneficiaries lost because that's the effect of the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling.
And that was one of the good decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here's the skill of the producers of the Viva and Barnes Sunday Night Law Hour.
I found the art.
This is a two-year-old article when things were not going quite so well for the family, but it says, So this says, a work of art.
I guess stolen or misappropriated of Pissarro will not be given back to the family, but this is 2020.
And this is...
French even sounds better because he uses words like restitution and spoil.
I like how they use that.
And I'll say, une spoliation sans retour.
That is a theft without return.
And then we'll go to the article.
Whoever wants to go bone up on your French.
So, bottom line...
It's been resolved, and it goes back to the family.
And someone said it wasn't stolen, it was bartered.
When you don't have enlightened consent, I guess extortion is a form of bartering, just an unlawful one.
Okay, very cool.
There are a couple of tax cases.
One of them was unanimous, which was that a lot of what happens in taxes is they use these tricks to deprive you of your access to remedy.
And one of them is you have to respond within a certain time frame or you're out of luck.
And so this law firm got hit with a big penalty.
They were denied their collection due process hearing request for remedy.
And under the rules, they had 30 days to file in tax court.
They missed it by one day.
The lower court said, too bad, that's jurisdictional, which is always bogus in my opinion, but they love to say things are jurisdictional.
The state, the governments do especially, say the courts just don't have any power in this instance.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed.
Because it established that unless Congress explicitly says this is a jurisdictional requirement, it is not a jurisdictional requirement, which is what the law should always be.
And you have what's called equitable tolling, which is if there's an equitable grounds you were late, you should be allowed in.
And so that's good for all the taxpayers across the country in a wide range of contests where they're going to be in battle with the IRS, tax authorities.
So that was a good tax decision.
Then they had another tax-related case that was about benefits, was about Puerto Rico.
And I recommend Justice Gorsuch's concurrence in the case because he points out that we have this whole mythology called insular cases where we pretend...
What happened was, as our political class decided to make America an empire, starting with the Spanish-American War, deciding to grab property for the business class, lied to the American public, hence, remember the Maine, to hell with Spain.
That was our pretext to go grab the Philippines and grab Puerto Rico and grab Cuba and grab these other places.
It was a lie, of course.
Shock, shock.
You can see those at the hush-hushes at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
Harvard came up with an excuse for how are we going to govern these countries, these new territories?
Because traditionally, all territories are still covered by the Constitution.
But they didn't want these to be covered by the Constitution because they wanted to strip it of its land and labor of its value without abiding by constitutional limits.
So a couple of Harvard lawyers came up with this cooked up an idea that said, you know what?
They used racial eugenics, shock, shock, social Darwinism, to say these people are so foreign and barbarian that we're going to have to utilize...
We're not going to be able to apply the Constitution, unfortunately.
That nonsense.
They got the U.S. Supreme Court during its social Darwinism eugenics era, which led to Jacobson and led to Korematsu and led to Buck, led to the Trilogy of Infamy of Decisions, now being cited by so-called liberals across the country to justify everything from vaccine mandates to mask mandates, to say that these are insular territories and the Constitution doesn't apply.
And then over time they said, well, you know, this doesn't look good in the 50s and 60s during our Cold War.
So we said maybe some of the Constitution applies.
So a case goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it's about whether or not Puerto Ricans are entitled to supplemental Social Security when they used to be a U.S. citizen and then moved to Puerto Rico, or used to be in New York and then moved to Puerto Rico, because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.
And the U.S. Supreme Court said, well, the Puerto Rican said, no, we don't extend that.
Puerto Rico is uniquely taxed in that you don't have to pay a lot of taxes if you live in Puerto Rico, even U.S. taxes.
Though it's not quite as easy as people think it is, but that's another story.
But they also don't have certain benefits.
The U.S. Supreme Court comes in and says, the person sues, says, that's a denial of my equal protection rights.
Goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court says, There's a rational basis for this rule, which is we're going to extend special benefits to Puerto Rico.
And just as we extend them special tax benefits, it means there's a rational basis in not extending them certain benefits that would flow from taxes we would otherwise gather.
That's probably fine.
Only Sotomayor descends from that part of the decision.
The concurrence by Gorsuch, though, is robust.
Because his point is, we should be making clear that the U.S. Constitution applies together, quit having these dumb insular case logic still around, but the rest of the court was unwilling to get involved in it, despite its ugly history and completely unconstitutional origin.
But that was the net effect.
The Equal Protection Clause, and then Thomas wrote separately to say, by the way, I don't think the Fifth Amendment Equal Protection Clause...
The Due Process Clause has an equal protection component.
That should be applied under the 14th Amendment.
He, Thomas, writes this long thing about it.
So for people with certain interests in certain areas of law, it has specific application.
But I think they came to the right conclusion, but the way they got there could have been a lot better legally and constitutionally.
But for people interested in certain intellectual topics, that case has some interesting concurrences with Thomas and Gorsuch that are worthy to read.
Now, I'm not going to say that I'm not particularly interested in that topic.
I was just trying to look up your picks for the elections in France, Robert.
Is it on Locals at sportpicks.locals.com?
Yeah, sportpicks.locals.com.
I think she's going to come up a little short of where I needed her.
She was a little more than 2-1 to get over 45%.
And I think she's going to fall a little short of the 45%.
Because I think Paris' votes are the votes left to be counted.
Maybe they've counted them now.
And the bottom line now is France just had their presidential...
Yeah, presidential election.
Because they don't have a parliamentary...
In a parliamentary system, Macron would already be gone.
He's only because he has a negative rating of about 65%.
And so the net effect was that because Le Pen has high negativity is how he got re-elected president to France.
Now the parliamentary elections are coming up.
They separate him in France.
It's kind of interesting.
They re-elect the president first and then they do the parliamentary elections later.
And so I think he'll do poorly.
His party will do poorly in the parliamentary elections is how the French electorate is probably splitting it.
It's still, I will say, shocking in the institutional sense that far right.
I mean, they still call her far right.
Speaking of which, I've never seen anything Le Pen has said that I would qualify as far right.
Got 40, 42% support.
It's still being called...
Oh yeah, she lost, I mean, last time 66 to 33. And when her father ran, it was like 80 to 20. So it's the highest vote for Le Pen in French history.
And she probably won the blue collar vote.
She probably won the working white-collar vote.
She probably got crushed again amongst students, retirees, and amongst the professional class, managerial class vote.
Particularly in the cities, probably places like Paris, places like Marseille, places like Bordeaux.
It appears she won a lot more.
Interestingly, I think she won in Martinique, which was like a 40-point reversal.
So it shows that there was some movement of left, young, working-class populist towards the right populist candidate.
Low turnout in some other areas, but it's the nature of the French elections.
But it will probably discipline Macron a little bit, especially with the parliamentary elections coming up.
Because again, last time he won by 2-1, before they beat a Le Pen by 4-1.
So now it's getting into 13, 14 points.
I think she needed to take more gambles than she did.
And I think that proved out.
But a lot closer than it was last time.
But not as close as it could have been.
Macron and the European Union reversed its position on sanctioning Russia with an oil embargo.
They announced it yesterday, I'm sure, to influence the election results in France because that was one of the things that could have helped sink him.
But I don't think he'll have a bad parliamentary outcome.
And so his power will be very nominal, will be very limited over his second term, and I think it will be his last term.
And I'm going to share this because I noticed it early on.
People were saying that there were riots and police opening fire.
I'm just going to pull up an article from This Is Real Time Stuff, and I don't like commenting on real time.
Police opened fire on vehicle in Paris, killing two people and injuring third local media.
It's believed that the vehicle's driver and a passenger sitting in the front seat were those who died.
I don't know if it's a police opening fire on rioters.
I'll clip it.
People can read the news.
Not going to get into fog of war real-time making any determinations, but articles in the pinned comment.
One of the other Supreme Court cases was, this is where I disagree with the conservatives on the court, and this is about habeas petitions.
So the right, the writ of habeas is an ancient writ that pre-exists in the United States that goes to the deepest parts of our legal tradition in history and ancestry.
But it has often been misapplied by the courts.
And in particular, when they really reinvigorated habeas petitions in the 1960s and thereafter, there was a flood of habeas petitions that filed the court.
In federal courts.
And courts hated it.
And for those that don't know, basically, habeas corpus says, my body is wrongfully detained where I'm at.
And in my view, it completely empowers the court to look at any basis by which you are being held in physical custody, period.
Or your liberty or property is being stripped in some meaningful manner that could be applicable or analogous in the criminal context.
And that's what the ancient writ is supposed to mean.
The courts have always found an excuse to try to water it down, create procedural hurdles, administrative hurdles, technical hurdles, everything to make it as difficult as possible.
Defer to Congress as if Congress could limit this.
I've never agreed with that principle.
I don't think the writ of habeas corpus is something Congress has the constitutional authority to suspend.
Lincoln tried to suspend it during the Civil War, one of his most horrendous actions that he did.
How that's done.
And the conservatives on the court have the big issue.
I agree with the originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, which is that our ancestors bound us to a set of principles and what they intended at the time is what bounds us in terms of principle.
Not a living constitution that the courts can just reinterpret anytime they want.
The devil, though, is in the details.
How do you define what that original intent was?
There's a lot of selective history that goes into it on both sides.
But frankly, conservatives have been more culpable because they believe more in original jurisdiction in the first place.
But what happens when it has a political outcome you don't like, like a very criminal defendant-friendly outcome?
Well, all of a sudden, these same conservatives reinterpret history very selectively to somehow exclude a lot of it, such that they can claim the original interpretation of something like the writ of habeas, but doesn't mean what...
It plainly means.
And so my view is you use the common principle of what's there in the language of it.
You start going down historical paths, you should be careful because it's very easy to get selective in sources.
And often you simply don't know because you have limitations on what people thought and said at the time.
And that too should cabin the degree to which you just delegate to the field of history our interpretation of the Constitution.
Look at its plain language, and you can usually kind of figure it out nine times out of ten.
It wasn't like they were using arcane academic language.
But the conservatives basically put more restrictions on habeas petitions on the grounds that really the writ of habeas was never meant to be much of anything at all with this fake history that Gorsuch wrote.
And it's a fake history created by a bunch of conservative legal scholars, in quotes, because they deliberately, artificially It selectively created a history that isn't the real legal history of that principle.
And the liberals were right who dissented and said, no, the writ of habeas actually has always had broad understanding if you look at certain cases and issues over time.
The liberals were right, the conservatives were wrong.
It's probably not very consequential because the procedural hurdle they imposed just means if you're a federal judge, you have to write a 50-page opinion rather than a 30-page opinion because legally, consequentially, it flows the same way.
But it is an example of a...
A key problem with the conservative legal academy, which is very selective history on First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, Eighth Amendment issues, where they don't like the policy outcome or don't like the constituency of benefits.
It's an area where they continue to come up short, unfortunately.
Okay, fascinating.
Now, I'm going to bring this up because I've seen the individual seems to want this question addressed.
Viva and Robert, thoughts on Tennessee GOP keeping Robbie Starbuck off ballot?
They kept several off.
Parties generally have pretty broad discretion at what their qualifications are for being able to be a candidate.
Like sometimes they require conventions instead of primaries and things of this nature.
It's usually very hard to win those cases.
So my understanding is Harmeet Dillon is representing him.
So we'll see.
We'll see what the courts say.
I haven't looked into the issue into detail, even though it's in Tennessee.
I just know that in general, those are tougher cases to win.
A good case that won was a hate speech loss got struck down out of the University of Central Florida by a unanimous 11th Circuit.
The problem wasn't the idea of going after discriminatory harassment, which is what it was named after.
The problem was they were so vague, so obscure.
It was clearly deliberately going to target people politically, and consequently it was overbroad and under-inclusive, and under-inclusive in the sense that it doesn't get the targeted group overbroad, and then it gets people that aren't the targeted group.
And so the 11th Circuit determined that the University of Central Florida's hate speech laws are unconstitutional and violate the First Amendment, and that was a good ruling that hopefully will start to spread throughout the country.
There was another professor who won a $400,000 verdict related to being fired because of his speech.
So we're seeing, and there was some great language.
There was a judge who concurred in the 11th Circuit decision.
He talked about universities are supposed to be asylums for speech and freedom of thought.
If they're no longer asylums for freedom of speech or freedom of thought, they're just an asylum.
And what useful is that?
So he has some nice language to that effect.
I'll post that decision at Viva Barnes Law.
Locals.com.
But that was another good case, good decision of the week.
I was going to say, Harmeet Dillon, and people will love her until they hate her because she takes a position they don't like.
Great attorney.
So, in good hands.
There was one rumble rant which said, Plan Act 77, can you explain how government...
Oh, some of these things.
How government bureaucrats make their own money off of new medications.
I can't...
I mean, other than what I've read in...
The real Anthony Fauci.
That's about, you know, who has...
Yeah.
Read the real Anthony Fauci and that will give you some information on that.
Who do we have for Wednesday's sidebar, Robert?
Don't know yet.
So, you know, Darren Beatty has said that he's game, but not sure if he...
I haven't heard back whether this Wednesday works for him.
So, we'll see.
So, tentatively, it's going to be Darren Beatty of the Revolver if we get confirmation that timing works.
Otherwise, we'll see who else is available if he's not available on Wednesday.
And now I have been in discussion with Ariadne Jacob.
Ariadne Jacob, who is suing the New York Times, had a run-in with not Jennifer Lawrence.
Who's in the news there?
It is Jennifer Lawrence, right?
Or Lawrence?
Oh, the woman who doxed the libs of TikTok.
I forget.
Anyhow.
Oh, Taylor.
Taylor Lawrence, right?
Taylor Lawrence, not Jennifer Lawrence.
I'm thinking of Jennifer Taylor.
Taylor Lawrence.
So Ariadne Jacob might be on at some point this week.
I don't know if it's going to be the sidebar Wednesday if possible, but otherwise...
I see some comments about Bill 15 and the system being deficient to protecting children in abusive homes.
I would argue the system is deficient, but not because of absence of laws, but because of...
Poor application of existing laws.
That would be my position.
And it's always dangerous once you give the state the control over children.
They're always going to do it in the name of protecting children.
How often does that work?
Empowering the state over kids.
Not in my experience.
Especially when the state is going to determine the best interests of the child.
Above and beyond.
Guess what?
Turns out you're a girl and didn't know it, even though you're six years old.
And it will be abuse if the parents don't consent to what the child...
Number one source is state orphanages and foster homes are the number one source of abuse.
So the idea that they're going to improve on the situation?
I don't think so.
I'll talk about it tomorrow.
It was Philip DeFranco put out a tweet yesterday saying, my son asked me if he could be a fruit bat when he grows up, and he was disappointed when I said no.
And I said, ironic that this should be a tweet that can get you canceled.
And it led to some interesting discussion to be addressed tomorrow because we've two and a quarter hours in, 13,500 people watching here, and I hear a dog barking upstairs.
Hold on.
Anything more on Rumble before we go?
I don't see anything on Rumble.
So, Robert, what do you have coming up this week?
Are you going to be on other channels at some point this week?
Yeah, Eric Hundley, 2.30 California time, 5.30 New York time, I believe.
So, yeah, we'll be there Tuesday.
And then at some point...
Maybe on Infowars with Alex Jones, he wants me to talk about the January 6th cases.
I missed a date last week.
I ended up appearing on a Friday.
I was supposed to be there on a Thursday and I got the time wrong.
And Jones got agitated and was like, that's Barnes.
He sees a squirrel and he's gone.
Which is kind of funny.
But I just got the time wrong.
So I might do something on that.
But otherwise, it's a busy legal week.
So I think that'll be about it.
Okay.
And then before we forget.
Don Lemon, trial is coming in June, or do we not know yet for sure?
No changes?
I don't know yet for sure.
Okay.
So, Robert, leave us with some words of wisdom, words of inspiration before we say adieu to the crowd tonight.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, some really good rulings came out of it.
I mean, I think the Arizona ruling was a good ruling for Congressman Gosar and others.
A couple of the unanimous Supreme Court decisions were the right decision.
And any week that Nazis lose is a good week.
And so Nazis lost in the Supreme Court, and that by itself is a sign of encouragement and reason to be happy on this Orthodox Easter, because he is prison.
Set the standards low, people.
When Nazis lose, it's good news.
And that rhymes.
Happy Orthodox Easter to everybody.
Robert, stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes.
Everyone in the chat, thank you as always.
Stick around.
Tomorrow I'm going to go live, talk about the Canadian stuff.
Tuesday, it's a busy week.
Follow us, Twitter, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
You know where.
Everyone, enjoy what's the rest of the night and the weekend.
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