Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims.
Equating Rhetoric With Violence to Blame Political Opponents for Mass Murder SpreesVIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Plus, Bernie's pathetic capitulation on Yemen, and more
Note from Glenn Greenwald: Our new live nightly program on Rumble, "SYSTEM UPDATE,” debuted last Monday. We broadcast five shows last week beginning, as always, at 7:00 pm ET, and another last night. We also followed it with a live inter-active after-show on Locals, exclusively for our subscribers here on Substack and on Locals. That after-show is designed for us to take questions, respond to feedback, and address anything else on the mind of our viewers. You can watch every episode live, or on tape after broadcasting, by clicking on this page. We are incredibly excited by this new program. Even with our decision to launch in the second week of December, while holding our major advertising campaign until January, our audience size has been far larger than expected. We have interviewed great guests with many more booked. And it provides a way to cover news and politics without being attached to or imprisoned by the news cycle or the suffocating constraints of cable news. We are, however, aware that many subscribers here prefer to read the journalism I produce rather than watch it. For that reason, we have contracted a service that will produce well-edited transcripts of every show that airs within twenty-four hours after the show airs. Anyone who is a paid subscriber to our Substack page here will receive each transcript to all the shows. The first such transcript — for our show that aired last Wednesday, covering the tawdry tactic of trying to equate words with violence so as to blame one's political opponents for mass shooting sprees (such as the most recent one in a gay club in Colorado Springs), as well as Bernie Sanders’ cowardly capitulation on his War Powers Resolution that had bipartisan support and could have stopped the ongoing U.S. participation in Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen — is below. Because the SYSTEM UPDATE shows, especially my opening monologue, are written and heavily researched, the transcripts are very similar to the articles I have been publishing here. That said, once the show is stabilized after a few weeks — meaning we have our rhythm and work flow down — I absolutely will begin returning to my written journalism as well. That said, at some point in the near future, we will migrate everything to the Locals platform. Anyone who is a subscriber to Substack will receive automatic full membership to our Locals page — at no further cost. You simply go to my Locals page — by clicking this link — click “reset password”, enter whatever email address you used to sign up to Substack, and you will have your password sent to you to enter Locals as a fully paid member, with access to everything, including the after-show and all written journalism and transcripts. Like everyone, you can watch our program nightly on Rumble at 7:00 pm ET, then use Locals for our after-show and to read all our written journalism as well. But beyond the written journalism, we will always provide full transcripts for each program to our subscribers here as well. We already have transcripts for each show through last Wednesday. Starting next week, we will have full transcripts the day following the show's airing. The first such transcript — from last Wednesday night's program — is below. Good evening. It's Wednesday, December 14, 2022. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new live nightly show to air every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. Tonight, we will begin with an examination of a sleazy, sociopathic but increasingly common tactic trying to blame mass shootings on one's political opponents by claiming, usually without evidence, that the shooter was, quote, “motivated by those opponents’ ideology”. It's a tactic as journalistically reckless as it is morally bankrupt, and, for reasons we'll explain, increasingly dangerous. And then we'll look at how Bernie Sanders right on the verge of victory in denying the Biden administration authorization to continue to help Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen, backed down as usual and capitulated because Joe Biden told him to. We'll speak to one of the most astute left-wing critics of Democratic Party politics and the Squad about this latest humiliation. As always, we'll follow our one-hour live program here on Rumble with our interactive afters-how on Locals, exclusively for our Substack and Locals subscribers. We’ll take your questions, respond to your critiques and feedback and hear what's on your mind. To have access to that afters-how, just click JOIN in the upper right-hand corner of this page to become a member of our Locals community. For now, enjoy the third episode in our debut week for System Update starting now. Monologue: Blood on their hands? Remember that shooting spree that killed five people in a gay bar in Colorado Springs just a little over three weeks ago? You'll be forgiven if you don't remember. That's because, after days of intense media scrutiny, that shooting spree has all but disappeared from our discourse. The reason? It appears, sadly, that this horrific episode cannot be blamed on the corporate media's political enemies. The reason we heard so much at first about these Colorado Springs murders, as opposed to the countless other mass murder sprees happening in the U.S. every week that are apolitical in nature is that the media were sure they instantly knew the motive of the killer. He was, of course, a gay-hating, right-wing, Fox News-watching fanatic motivated by a deep contempt for LGBTs to the point that he wanted to murder them. Almost nothing was known about the killer. Even less was known about his motive. But that made no difference. We were instantly subjected to a gleeful orgy from left-liberal political and media precincts, insisting that the real killers, the ones who had blood on their hands, were not so much the killer himself, but conservatives who express criticism of the LGBT dogma -- usually the T part of that equation. Tucker Carlson; Chris Rufo; The Libs of TikTok Twitter accounts, various from Republican politicians: the usual list of enemies of the media. These people, the media's ideological enemies, were blamed for this shooting in Colorado Springs, even though the media had no idea whether the killer had any opinion about those people they had blamed or whether he had even heard of all of them or any of them. They just asserted, with absolutely no evidence, that the killer was motivated by anti-LGBT antipathy, that he was taught by Fox News and whatever other individual politicians or activists most hated by whichever media figure was assigning the blame. Less than 24 hours after those murders, Pete Buttigieg who was apparently still the secretary of transportation, even though he seemed to talk about everything except transportation, wasted no time in penning the blame on his ideological enemies. Quote: “If you're a politician or media figure who sets up the LGBT community to be hated and feared -- not because any of us ever harmed you, but because you find it useful -- then don't you dare act surprised when this kind of violence follows. Don't you dare act surprised” Bernie Sanders did not even wait until the next day. On the very day of the shooting, he apparently knew everything about the motive of the killer and who was to blame. Quote: "Let's be clear, the terrible shooting in Colorado Springs this weekend is a direct result of the hateful and violent rhetoric that has been allowed to grow in this country. We must stand united with the LGBTQ+ community and speak out against bigotry everywhere we find it”. That social conservatives, especially those who descend from some planks of this very new gender ideology dogma, were the real killers, was instantly consecrated as truth, even though it never had and still does not have a shred of evidence. In fact, lawyers for the suspect, Anderson Lee Aldridge, said in the very first court filings that Aldridge identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. News reports then discovered that Aldridge had sought a name change at the age of 15 and then suffered online bullying, centered on mocking him as a homosexual. From the start, the police have said and continue to say they do not know his motive. And while some online extremism experts began doubting the authenticity of Aldridge's self-identification as non-binary, suggesting that perhaps he's just trolling -- who knew that such doubts were allowed now over someone's expressed sexual orientation? Perhaps that's only confined to these “online extremism experts” -- the picture that began emerging was very unclear at best and bereft of evidence to support the preferred narrative. That's why this media spree completely disappeared from sight. Without the ability to blame it on one's political adversaries, all the fun is gone. It has no utility and thus is of no interest in the media any longer. Nobody ever cared about those victims. The victims are only of interest if they can be exploited for political gain. All of this reflects one of the most demented and soulless new political tactics to eagerly blame every mass shooting attack on one's political enemies, regardless of whether there is evidence to support that accusation. Now, just imagine. Seriously, just imagine how so sociopathic you have to be to hear about a mass shooting spree with multiple innocent victims and eagerly wait for the green light to blame your political opponents for the dead people. And if that doesn't come about because the motive isn't what you hoped for or you can't determine it, you just lose interest in the entire crime, or you just fall back onto the standard tactic of blaming your enemies anyway, because they're the reasons that guns were available in the first place. All of this, in turn, is based on an even more insidious premise that words do not merely express ideas but are themselves violence. This is the rotted premise, the principle one that is causing more and more people to embrace the virtues of censorship. The idea that having centralized state and corporate authorities ban certain ideas is necessary to keep us safe because those ideas themselves are violent. For people who think this way, there is no difference between expressing an idea and pulling the trigger of a gun because in their worldview, as they themselves say, words are literal violence. Literal violence. Now, there are many points to make about this morally bankrupt eagerness to exploit dead bodies as a tool to bash your opponents over the head with. And I'm going to make many of those points in just a minute because the practice is becoming more common, more reckless, and increasingly disgusting. But just to start with, it's a journalistic atrocity, in general, to assert claims about major news events without having the slightest evidence to substantiate them is journalistically indefensible. If the claims that you make about news events are completely untethered to any evidence, such as claiming that a mass killer was motivated by political beliefs, you have no idea that even harbored, let alone that caused him to act. It cannot be journalism. It's anti-journalism. It's highly likely to mislead the public, not inform them. And what is particularly striking to have watched them do this so brazenly in the Colorado Springs case is that they did exactly the same thing in a similar case, a much more consequential one, where they ended up radically misleading the public about what happened, a deceit that persists to this very day. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen walked into an LGBT club in Orlando, the Pulse nightclub, and indiscriminately shot and murdered 49 innocent people and wounded 53 others. The same narrative that was spun last month in Colorado instantly emerged from the media. The motive of the shooter, Omar Mateen, was that he hated gay men, hated LGBTs, in large part because he was an Islamic radical and adhering to ISIS, and in part because he was perhaps himself a closeted gay man lashing out with internalized anti-gay hatred. And I know that to this very day, millions of Americans believe this is true. They believe that this is what happened. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of you watching this show still believe that's what happened. I don't blame those who believe this. That's because it was virtually the unanimous claim of the political and media class from the start. The Huffington Post's Melissa Jeltsen collected just some of the headlines. Quote: “Let's say it plainly: this was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people”, Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast. The massacre was, ‘undeniably a homophobic hate crime’, Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic. Some speculated that Mateen was a closeted gay man. He was likely, ‘trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture’, James Robbins wrote in USA Today.” And on and on and on. The Pulse massacre happened in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, and everyone from Hillary Clinton to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch made a pilgrimage to Orlando and definitively proclaimed, while the bodies were basically still warm in the morgue, that this was a hate crime against LGBTs. LGBT groups, such as the Human Rights Campaign, immediately began fundraising off this crime by using it to prove that LGBTs are still deeply vulnerable and hated -- And they still fundraise off this narrative to this very day. Most media outlets that identified anti-LGBT hatred as the motive in the Colorado Springs shooting compared it to the Pulse massacre, which they casually asserted was also caused by anti-LGBT hatred. But this is not true. None of this is true. Omar Mateen was an Islamic radical and did proclaim his allegiance to ISIS. But not only is there no evidence that he acted with malice toward LGBTs, but there is a mountain of evidence proving that was not the motive. Omar Mateen himself was not ever put on trial because he was killed by law enforcement that evening. But the Obama Justice Department wanted to appease the gay community in Orlando, who had been demanding a head on a pike, and they thus charged Mateen's wife, Noor Suleman, on numerous felony charges, alleging her complicity in her husband's attack. She was eventually acquitted on all charges, and justifiably so. Now, before that trial began, I myself had blithely assumed, without really ever thinking much about it, that the story we were told that Mateen’s killing was motivated by his hatred of gay people, rooted in his religion, was true. But then I followed the trial of his wife intensely. I reported on it almost daily, and like every reporter who did so -- there weren't that many of us -- but like every reporter who followed that trial, I walked away not with the belief, but the absolute certainty, that Mateen had no idea that Pulse was even a gay club and that anti-gay motives had no role, zero, in that shooting spree. Reviewing all of the evidence would require its own show and perhaps I’ll devote one soon to this because it needs to be finally debunked for one good reason: it's false. And that's all that should matter. But for now, I'll quickly note just some of the dispositive evidence that emerged at his wife's trial that leaves no doubt that the common narrative was false, just to illustrate to you that blaming one's political opponents for shooting sprees when you don't know the motive can really radically mislead the public aside from being morally bankrupt. Mateen lived more than 90 minutes away from Pulse, and he had spent the week prior scoping out numerous sites, particularly Disney targets, that had nothing at all to do with gay life. That was his first priority: to attack a Disney target as a soft target. But ultimately, he rejected those because they had way too much security. The FBI admitted at trial that none of the rumors about Mateen using gay dating sites or having visited Pulse previously were true. In fact, he had a string of extramarital affairs with women, and the only porn found on his devices was straight porn. On the night of the massacre, he found Pulse by going to Google and entering, quote, ‘Orlando nightclubs’ -- not ‘Orlando gay clubs’ or ‘gay nightclubs’, just ‘Orlando nightclubs’ -- and Pulse, because it was just a popular club, a very popular one, was the first result that was returned by Google. And so, he chose it to attack. The night of the massacre, Mateen spent hours inside Pulse terrorizing the patrons and speaking to hostage negotiators and the police. And that was because he was a terrorist. He wanted his motive known about why he had decided to do this. And not once, at any point during that evening, whether he was talking to the police or the patrons, did he utter an anti-gay slur or even a comment expressing hostility toward gay people. When speaking to the police, he repeatedly explained what his motive was. Namely, he wanted vengeance against the United States for bombing and killing innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drones and for bombing ISIS, to which he had pledged allegiance, in Syria and Iraq. But he never once mentioned during all of those hours that he was motivated by hatred of homosexuality or any notions about Western moral norms, something that terrorists do. The reason terrorists commit acts of violence is to publicize their cause. His cause was not anti-gay hatred but anger at the U.S. bombing campaigns. Now, I don't blame you if you're skeptical of what I'm saying. The narrative that was presented was virtually unanimously accepted because it resonated with the right, which liked hearing that Islamic radicalism resulted in intolerance for gay life, and with the left that benefited from believing that this is a hate crime against a marginalized group. But it just wasn't true. He chose Pulse by happenstance. All the evidence about motive pointed to his anger at the U.S. for bombing campaigns in the Middle East. Like me, the journalist Melissa Jeltsen also covered that trial. She did so for the Huffington Post and thus had no motive to challenge the narrative, popular enough, playing circles, that the Pulse massacre was a hate crime against gay people. But to her great credit, she followed the facts like a journalist should, instead of appeasing the ideological preferences of her readers, and she reported: “Mateen may very well have been homophobic. He supported ISIS after all, and his father, an FBI informant currently under criminal investigation, told NBC that his son once got angry after seeing two men kissing. But whatever his personal feelings, the overwhelming evidence suggests the attack was not motivated by it. As far as investigators can tell, Mateen had never been to Pulse before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub. Even prosecutors acknowledged in their closing statement that Pulse was not his original target: It was the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex. They presented evidence demonstrating that Mateen chose Pulse randomly less than an hour before the attack. It is not even clear he knew it was a gay bar. A security guard recalled Mateen asking ‘Where all the women?’, apparently in earnest, in the minutes before he began his slaughter. Now, the reason why these two spent so much time reviewing that is because I want to be clear that this tactic of trying to identify a motive with no evidence is clearly immoral. And I'll get to that in a minute. But it also is journalistically reckless. It really does end up gravely deceiving the public about major news events -- what ought to be the very first sin of journalism. But there's something worse going on here, which is that very few people can survive if we have a framework that says that if you express political opinions in a strong or a vehement way, and if somebody then goes and commits murder or other violence in the name of the ideology that you defend, you are somehow responsible for those acts. Nobody can survive that because every political opinion has the potential to inspire or motivate someone else to go commit violence in that name. The fact that Bernie Sanders, of all people, was one of the first to ascribe motives to the Colorado Springs shooting and to blame his political adversaries is particularly ironic, since somebody who is very close to the Bernie Sanders movement, who believed in it fervently, who looked at Bernie Sanders as his greatest political influence, along with Rachel Maddow, actually did go and commit serious violence in the name of that ideology. It happened in 2017, and that was when someone showed up at a softball field where Republican House leaders often played softball. On the weekend, he opened fire, shot three people, and almost murdered Rep. Steve Scalise, who was in the GOP House leadership. Here's the 2017 CNBC account of that – and, ironically, it's from Ron DeSantis, who at the time was a House member who was at the softball field: “A GOP lawmaker said Wednesday that the alleged gunman in the shooting at a congressional baseball practice that wounded five asked whether “Republicans or Democrats” were on the field shortly before the attack in Virginia” […] “Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Republican of Florida, told CNBC that a man came up to him and Rep. Jeff Duncan at the practice and asked if the players on the field were Republican or Democrat”. So, this is a person on the hunt for Republicans and Republican officeholders. The CNBC article from June 2017 provides more details on the attempted killer, James Hodgkinson. Quote: “When James Hodgkinson got into trouble, it was often with a gun, and when he got angry about politics, it was often directed against Republicans”. […] Hodgkinson was a frequent writer to his local newspaper, where he railed against incoming inequality, linking it to the tax policies of the GOP, the newspaper reported.” “I have never said ‘Life sucks, only the policies of the Republicans’, he wrote in one letter.” Does this mean that people who critique the Republican Party's tax policies for favoring the rich and exacerbating income inequality have Steve Scalise’s blood on their hands because the killer went and acted in the name of their ideology? The article went on: “In another, Hodgkinson said that his favorite TV program was the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Here you see it, right here. The Rachel Maddow Show was his favorite television show. Hodgkinson’s Facebook postings portray him as stridently anti-Republican and anti-Trump”. So, he evidently got radicalized by Bernie Sanders and by Rachel Maddow. The article goes on: “I hate Republicans and everything they stand for”, he wrote in December 2015. On June 3rd, he shared a caricature of the president as a ‘Maximus imbecilus’. He was a member of several political Facebook groups, including one called ‘Terminate the Republican Party’”. “He also used a cartoon of Bernie Sanders as Uncle Sam as his profile picture…”. Here are some more details from CNN: “The suspect in the congressional shooting was a Bernie Sanders supporter and was strongly anti-Trump”. CNN reported: “Hodgkinson, the man identified as shooting a Republican member of Congress, was a small business owner, [who defined himself as] very supportive of Bernie Sanders’ [progressive politics] and his hatred of conservatives and Donald Trump” […] “This is based on CNN's review of Hodgkinson's Facebook profiles, public records, and three years of impassioned letters to his local newspaper”. “Trump is a traitor. Trump has destroyed our Democracy. It's time to destroy Trump and company, he posted on his personal Facebook page on March 22nd...”, in language that you would get from the Rachel Maddow Show every single night. In fact, The Intercept once published an article saying Donald Trump is a traitor and the writer of that article, James Risen, went on Chris Hayes's show that night, on MSNBC. And the chyron that appeared was: Is Donald Trump a traitor? The exact words that the would-be killer of Republican politicians used, clearly inspired and motivated by what he was feeding on in liberal left political circles and media circles. The article went on: “Republicans are the Taliban of the United States, he posted in February”. Now, this theme that the Republicans are the Taliban of the United States was one that an entire book was based on. It was by the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas. The title was American Taliban: how war, sex, sin, and power bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. Is it reasonable to blame Markos Moulitsas and say he has blood on his hands for the killing of Steve Scalise since his would-be killer was someone who took exactly these words from this very book as his motivation? The article from CNN goes on. Let's take a look at some more about this would-be killer. In one public post on March 24th, he signed a petition to ‘Stop the Nexus pipeline in Michigan and Ohio. After Hodgkinson's Facebook profiles were discovered by news reports, they were updated to prevent public access”. […] Senator Sanders publicly acknowledged that Hodgkinson had volunteered for his presidential campaign, but he nonetheless went on to denounce him”. […] His own descriptions on social media portray him as an avid consumer of political shows. His favorite television shows were listed as Real Time with Bill Maher, The Rachel Maddow Show, Democracy Now!, and other left-leaning programs. His favorite movie? The documentary Inequality for All features progressive economist Robert Reich”. […] He had also joined several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including Terminate the Republican Party, The Road to Hell is paved with Republicans, and Join the Resistance Worldwide Now. How is it that you can set up a framework, as the media has done, that blames a pundit, a journalist, or a political activist for having the blood on their hands of somebody who goes and commits murders in the name of that ideology and not do the same here for Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow, whose ideas clearly contaminated the mind of this would-be murderer by convincing him that Donald Trump was a grave threat to the country, that he was a traitor to the United States, and that he was somebody who had inspired a Republican Party to become a grave menace as well? There are many other examples of left-wing political ideologies spurring violence. In 2002, one of the worst cases was a Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn. You may remember him. He started off as a Marxist. He was openly gay. He became deeply opposed to Muslim radical Islam because of its hostility to gay life and sexual freedom in the West. He also became vehemently anti-immigrant and as a result, he was viciously attacked as a grave danger to Dutch values by the Dutch left. And in 2002, nine days before a parliamentary election that was expected to lift him and his party to power, potentially on the road to be the prime minister of The Netherlands, he was gunned down in the streets by a vegan animal rights activist who was from the left, who ultimately confessed to the crime and acknowledged that his motive for shooting this politician was his belief that his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim beliefs made him a threat to The Netherlands and needed to be eliminated. Is it then fair to blame that murder on anybody who has talked about this politician or anybody who opposes immigration as being a fascist as being a grave threat on the grounds that they went and inspired this murderer to go and undertake those violent acts? That is the framework that is being implanted by our media, but in a very one-sided way. One of the worst and most reckless instances of this was back in June, when a self-identified white nationalist drove to Buffalo, purposely chose a supermarket in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood, walked in, and murdered ten black people on purpose because he wanted to eliminate black people from the United States. He left a manifesto identifying the people who inspired him: a long list of people who advocated violence against non-whites in the name of cleansing our country and Western countries of nonwhite people and restoring them to their white nationalist state. In the long list of people that he identified as his inspiration, one of the people that did not appear was Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In fact, there was no indication that this murderer even knew who Tucker Carlson was. There was no indication whether he had an opinion of him that was favorable, had been inspired by him in any way, and yet – and unlike, in the case of Bernie Sanders, when we know that James Hodgkinson was very inspired by Bernie Sanders --, there was no connection at all between Tucker Carlson and the killer in Buffalo, and yet the media narrative instantly arose that the real person who has blood on their hands of ten black people in Buffalo was not the killer, but Tucker Carlson himself. Let's watch this video from MSNBC, The Lawrence O'Donnell Show, where you'll see Chuck Schumer and Lawrence O'Donnell craft this narrative in the most reckless and morally bankrupt manner possible.
Now, everything you just heard, literally everything is an absolute lie. There is absolutely no truth to the claim that the ideology in whose name, which that murderer went and murdered those people, those black people in Buffalo is an ideology that Tucker Carlson espouses. The exact opposite is true. Tucker Carlson has never once suggested that people should go murder nonwhite people, that it's important to cleanse the American citizens of nonwhite people. The only thing he has ever talked about with regard to replacement is the view of Democratic Party strategists that the political benefit for Democrats of immigration is that by importing huge numbers of people into the United States will change the demographics of the United States from making it a less conservative country into a more liberal country, one that will be favorable to the Democratic Party by increasing the numbers of Democratic Party voters. That is a theory espoused by Democratic Party strategists. They write books and articles about it. And Tucker Carlson points that out, never once has he come close to espousing a racialized view that motivated this cohort, which is exactly why this killer and his long list of people who inspired him and opened up his eyes, in his words, it did not include Tucker Carlson. But even if that were true, the idea that if you espouse a particular view that someone then goes and commits violence in the name of you, you become responsible for that murderer leaves all of us exposed, as I just demonstrated from the left to the center to the right to these kinds of accusations. But it didn't stop. This was not just on MSNBC. This was a very common theme, including here on NPR. What this shooting in Buffalo has to do with Fox News host Tucker Carlson? Quote: “The man accused of murdering ten people in Buffalo said he'd been radicalized by a racist conspiracy theory. No one in a position of prominence has done more to promote that theory than Tucker Carlson”. Now, they went on to admit that the killer never once even indicated that he knew who Tucker Carlson was, let alone had a favorable opinion of him. And yet they nonetheless went on to place the blood of these innocent victims in the most cynical and exploitative way possible at the doorstep of the Fox News host, simply because they dislike his politics. (Audio: NPR )
Did you hear that? They acknowledge that they have no proof that the killer ever once listened to Tucker Carlson's program, that he was influenced by him in any way. And yet they decided that they were nonetheless going to blame him for it. Just like they jump out the minute there's a shooting spree in Colorado Springs and blame all their political enemies for it yet, nonetheless, never take responsibility when killers go and murder in the name of their own ideology. Not only is it a journalistically reckless and morally bankrupt practice, it's one that is completely cynical and one-sided. And I want to share with you an exchange that happened just yesterday in Congress that illustrates how cynical this is. There is a person who is a clinical teacher at Harvard Law School who is friends with a handful of left-liberal journalists like Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, at NBC News; and Taylor Lorenz, at Washington Post, that same klatch of people who have become self-styled reporters about online extremists. They're the ones constantly agitating for censorship by pointing out that words are actually dangerous. And for whatever reason, they've baptized this completely fake expertise called online safety experts. And there's like three or four of them who, by virtue of being friends with these reporters, get now cited by every media outlet as having this expertise. Taylor Lorenz often lies about this person, her name is Alejandra Caraballo, claiming she's a Harvard Law professor when she's nothing of the sort. She's nowhere near the Harvard Law faculty. She just teaches a clinic at the Harvard Law School. But yesterday she went and she testified before a committee about online extremism, along with three or four other like-minded people like her. And she was brilliantly and adeptly questioned by congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who is one of my favorite members of Congress, despite ideologically disagreeing with her, because I love the fact that she comes from a very unusual background. She raised her kids as a single mother by working as a waitress at the Waffle House. We need a lot more of that. And I want to show you what Nancy Mace did. She first ask them questions that she knew they would say yes to, questions like, do you agree that people who go online with violent rhetoric are risking violence in the real world? And of course, they all said, yes, yes, we absolutely agree with that. Do you agree that people who urge others to confront political figures are risking the lives or are subjecting them to danger? Yes, we all agree with that. She then zeroed in on Alejandra Caraballo because, despite the fact that she constantly insists that hateful rhetoric is a major problem and needs to be censored, there are few people as hateful as Alejandra Caraballo. She does nothing but spread hateful rhetoric constantly against all of her political enemies. And I want you to watch how Nancy Mace illustrated how one-sided this framework constantly is in trying to blame people for crimes. Watch what Nancy Mace did here: (Video)
Now, as Congresswoman Mace pointed out, shortly after she tweeted that everyone should go and accost court justices wherever they find them, they should never enjoy a moment of peace. A man was actually arrested outside of Brett Kavanaugh's house, a Supreme Court justice in the majority overturning Roe v. Wade and in his backpack had a firearm, all sorts of rope and tape, and the kinds of things that you would have if you intend to murder someone and ultimately confessed that he intended to do so. So, using the framework that that person creates every day, violent rhetoric or aggressive rhetoric can inspire violence. You would think she would blame herself and say if Brett Kavanaugh had been murdered, I would have the blood on my hands. But the reality is, it's not just a broken framework. It's incredibly one-sided. I just want to conclude this discussion by pointing out that a lot of these issues are not, in fact, new. On one of our shows that we did prior to the debut of our show when when we were test running the show on Locals, we've now put this segment on Rumble -- I examine the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the unanimous case decision of the Supreme Court, in 1969, that had said that if someone stands up as a KKK leader in Ohio and says it is time to start using violence against the government, the First Amendment does not allow the state to prosecute them, as Ohio tried to do to that KKK leader. Because the First Amendment even allows you to justify or defend the desire or moral necessity of using violence. The only thing you can't do is urge a crowd to go imminently, and engage in violence, like telling a mob gathered outside someone's house, ‘go burn that house down’. But as long as you're not doing that, as long as you're even saying, ‘I believe it's time to use violence against the US government’, the way the country was founded, the Brandenburg ruling unanimously was that you are protected by the Supreme Court. And I did that in the context of Elon Musk banning of Kanye West, because Elon Musk had previously said he believed in free speech absolutism, which he defined as anything the law allows should be allowed on Twitter. But obviously, when he said, I'm banning Kanye West because Kanye West was inciting violence, there's no conceivable argument that anything Kanye West said could be prosecuted or could be illegal because of the Brandenburg ruling. There's another really important ruling that I want to show you. It came in 1982. It's the case of the NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware. And even though it was issued in 1982, it rose out of events, really interesting events in the 1960s in which the NAACP and the state of Mississippi, the local or state affiliate, the NAACP, had imposed a boycott of white-owned stores. And leaders of the NAACP gave very fiery, passionate, often angry speeches about the need for this boycott and about the immorality of those who were violating the boycott. And some of the people who listened to those speeches got very riled up, as good speakers will typically do to a crowd, and those individuals, not because they were told to, but because they were inspired by what they were hearing, were engaged in violence against property. They threw rocks at stores, they burned down stores, they attacked people who are violating that boycott… And the state of Mississippi had a theory that not just the people who engage in the violence, but the NAACP leaders whose speech aroused these crowds and inspired this violence should also be held liable. And they sued these NAACP leaders on the grounds that their speech led predictably to this violence. And three levels of a Mississippi state court upheld the liability that these leaders, because of their fiery, inflammatory speeches, on the grounds that speech can be violent, should be held liable. The Supreme Court, it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned that ruling and said that it is inconsistent with the First Amendment to try and hold people responsible for the consequences of their political opinions, even if it's predictable that people would get angry. So, if I go on TV and I rail against the evils of factory farms and I tell you that it's a threat to the public health and it's a moral atrocity. And someone hears me because I give a fiery speech and they go out and they burn down a factory farm and they kill a factory farm executive at Smithfield. I can't be held liable, even though I very well might have inspired that person. And I think the reasoning of the court is really important as we think about this attempt to equate words with violence and to say that people whose ideology inspires others to go engage in violence as long as they're on one side of the political spectrum, should be held liable. Here's what the Claiborne Court said in rejecting liability for these NAACP leaders: “While the State legitimately may impose damages for the consequences of violent conduct, it may not award compensation for the consequences of nonviolent protected activity” -- such as free speech. “While States have broad power to regulate economic activity, we do not find a comparable right to prohibit peaceful political activity such as that found in the boycott in this case. This Court has recognized that expression on public issues has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values”, and then went on citing other cases. Quote: “Speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression. It is the essence of self-government”. […] “There is a ‘profound national commitment’ to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open”. And they concluded that these principles announced in those cases are relevant to this case. Civil liability “may not be imposed merely because an individual belonged to a group, some members of which committed acts of violence. For liability to be imposed by reason of association alone, it is necessary to establish that the group itself possessed unlawful goals and that the individual held a specific intent to further those illegal aims”. This is the Supreme Court in 1982, unanimously protecting and enshrining the right to express political opinions, even if those political opinions and the expression of them produce harm because all political freedoms have costs. We banned the police from entering our homes without a search warrant. There's a cost to that: it makes it harder for the police to catch violent criminals. We require that the state convict you beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of your peers before they can imprison you, that lets violent criminals like O.J. Simpson walk free. There's a cost to freedom of the press that it makes it harder to hold media outlets responsible for reckless behavior. And there is a cost to freedom of speech. It is possible that some particularly good speakers might inspire others with their ideology to go and commit violence. But the reason these freedoms are nonetheless so crucial is because the cost of being without them is far greater than the cost of these freedoms. And that, at its core, is what these left-liberal censors refuse and are incapable of acknowledging. But I think the most corrupted aspect of all of this is that they want to impose these standards on their political enemies while reserving for themselves the right to be as hateful and as inflammatory as possible without ever being held accountable. Third Segment: Since 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been waging a brutal and bloody war on Yemen, which, according to U.N. estimates, has directly killed 150,000 people in Yemen, with hundreds of thousands more dead due to famine and lack of healthcare facilities caused by the war. The U.S.'s response to that war was to get involved on the side of the Saudis. In 2015, President Obama announced support for Saudi Arabia's deadly strikes and began providing a full array of military support, including weapons, intelligence, crucial and air refueling, and surveillance tech to support the ongoing bombing of Yemenis. Since then, the U.S. has provided unceasing support, despite a humanitarian outcry both within the U.S. and around the world, and while a U.N. brokered a truce in April put a pause on Saudi strikes, that truce expired two months ago and many fear a return to more bombing and more bloodshed. Within the U.S., opposition to that war and America’s involvement in it had come from largely anti-war activists and the left but, recently, there has been increasing support from it on the right as well. Right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Work have begun urging support for a resolution by Senator Bernie Sanders to withdraw authorization from the Biden administration to continue to be involved in this war, and it's not hard to see why the right is now starting too as well. If you listen to what Donald Trump described as American First foreign policy principles in 2016, it was the idea that we should not be involved in wars unless our national security was directly at stake. And it's very hard to make that case when it comes to sending billions of dollars to the Saudis to bomb Yemen, even though they're it's part of their proxy war with Iran, in Yemen. So, now what we have is not only people on the left, but largely people on the right, including numerous Republican right-wing senators like Rand Paul and Mike Lee, stepping up and saying they were ready to support Bernie Sanders’s authorization to withdraw support and authorization for the Biden administration to continue to involve himself in this war. And it looked as though there was going to be a vote this week where Bernie Sanders’s resolution to withdraw this authorization could actually pass, in large part because the American right was now joining with the left to say there's no reason we should be involved in this war. And yet, for some reason, at the very last minute, Bernie Sanders decided painfully and with deep regret to withdraw his own resolution that was about to pass simply because Joe Biden told him to. Here's what Bernie Sanders said when he announced on Twitter what it was that he was doing. He said: “Today, I withdraw from consideration by the U.S. Senate, my War Powers Resolution after the Biden administration agreed to continue working with my office on ending the war in Yemen”. But don't be too disappointed, because Bernie then pledged to hold the Biden administration's feet to the fire, adding, quote: “Let me be clear. If we do not reach an agreement, I will, along with my colleagues, bring this resolution back for a vote in the near future and do everything possible to end this horrific conflict”. But it's so obvious that what Bernie said is a fraud. And that was quickly pointed out by an actually principled antiwar right-wing libertarian, Justin Amash, who had been a member of the Republican Party and became an independent, who explained in response to Sanders what was really going on and how cynical Bernie Sanders’s claims were. Justin Amash wrote: “At which time under GOP control will back your efforts. But you know that already, as does the Biden administration, which is why they don't want you to pass this joint resolution now when all the pressure is on the president because his party currently controls”. In other words, the only chance that Bernie actually has to get this resolution passed is right now in the lame duck before the Republicans take over the House. The Biden administration knows that. Bernie knows that. And that's why he withdrew it, because Joe Biden told him to. Knowing that this is the only chance it could actually pass. And instead of just admitting that Sanders essentially defrauded his own followers by saying, I'm going to hold them accountable if they don't really get this done, I'm going to bring this back knowing it never has a chance to pass again. And this is always what Bernie Sanders does. And the American left, such that it exists does is they pretend antagonism with the Democratic Party all while in fact being constantly subservient to the Democratic Party and doing what they're told. To help me analyze this further, I'm going to be speaking right now to someone who's actually a man of the left, but who, unlike Bernie Sanders and the Squad, is guided by his principles, not subservience to any party, someone who's become one of the most honest and incisive critics of the left wing of the Democratic Party, such as it is, the writer and analyst Nick Cruse of the Revolutionary Blackout Network. The Interview: Nick Cruse
So that concludes our show for tonight. As always, we are now going to move to Locals for our aftershow, where we're going to take your questions, hear your feedback, and interact in all sorts of ways. For those of you who want to participate and are not yet members, you can sign up for our Locals membership very easily and you'll have full access not just to the aftershow at all times, but also to all the writing, the journalism we're going to be doing on the local platforms. For those of you who continue to watch, we really appreciate it. We will be back tomorrow night and every night from now on, Monday through Friday, right here on Rumble, 7:00 p.m. Eastern. We hope to see you then. Source: Glenn Greenwald |
No comments:
Post a Comment