Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Wednesday, February 15, 2023. Watch the full episode here.
Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman from Florida, finally has his name cleared as the result of an announcement from the Biden Justice Department that they do not have sufficient evidence to charge him with any crimes. Gaetz had his name and reputation dirtied and crippled and even destroyed by an anonymous leak published almost two full years ago by The New York Times under this headline, “Matt Gaetz is Set to Face Justice Department Inquiry Over Sex with an Underage Girl.” Despite having no opportunity to contest this innuendo – because he was never charged – Gaetz has been widely assumed to be guilty of one of the most horrendous crimes there is.
We had already booked Congressman Gaetz several days ago to appear on our show tonight to talk to him about his new bill to cut off all future U.S. funds to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine. And for our interview segment tonight, we did sit down with him just before the airing of our program to talk to him about that bill, and we'll show you that. But we also asked him about the vindication he received today and the lessons to draw from that.
Before we show you that interview, we will examine what happened here. I've been reporting on this story from the very beginning, and we want to highlight the crucial lessons about due process and presumption of innocence and media recklessness that were deliberately trampled on when it came to his rights and the goal and the instrument was the media malfeasance.
After that, we report on a major victory for free speech today. A federal judge in New York, an Obama appointee, ruled in favor of Rumble and one other online publisher by invalidating a 2022 New York state law designed to govern how social media companies must handle complaints about so-called “hate speech.” The court ruled that the law is a gross violation of the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. We’ll explain the ruling and its important implications.
As a reminder System Update, in addition to being available live on Rumble and then watchable forever on this platform, is also now available in podcast form. Each episode is posted to Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms the day after it airs live here. So those who wish to do so can follow us there as well.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Americans love to talk about all the rights we have. It's virtually a national pastime to do that, but we don't spend very much time discussing the reason why these rights exist, or why it is that they matter so much. That's definitely true of free speech, for sure, and it’s at least as true of due process.
Like free speech, due process is both a constitutional guarantee and a societal value. The constitutional right is straightforward. The Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution provide that neither the federal government nor the states may “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without the due process of law. That right did not materialize out of nowhere. For centuries, institutions of power had imprisoned people or seized their property, or even killed them based on highly dubious and unproven accusations.
Like all of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights, due process was designed to prevent abuses of power by the state that founders had seen being undertaken for centuries throughout history. It requires that the government must first charge you with a crime and then prove your guilt before treating you as a criminal. The right of due process protects you against arbitrary punishments or fraudulent accusations as long as you have a fair shot to defend yourself, and as long as the government is required to clear a very high hurdle to prove your guilt with things like requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, an impartial judge and jury, the right to cross-examine witnesses, prohibitions against forcing you to testify against yourself, bans on having the state try you more than once for the same crime. Only then are we largely protected, not entirely, but largely, from the state's abuse of its power to punish citizens, imprison us, take our property, and even kill us.
As is true of free speech, due process is not only a legal requirement, it's also a societal value. The constitutional right of free speech means the state is barred from enacting laws or taking other action to criminalize or outlaw the expression of particular political views. But free speech as a value extends far beyond that. It represents a consensus judgment that, in general, our society is healthier, our institutions more accountable, and our discourse more likely to foster truth if we maximize the values of free inquiry and free thought. In other words, we safeguard those values not just from incursions by the government, but by anyone and everything.
The concept of due process similarly extends beyond its legalistic doctrine. As a society, we believe it is wrong to assume someone's guilt based on mere accusations. Evidence and proof is required before a rational person believes that an accusation is true or regards a person as a criminal based on accusations that they've committed crimes. That is why the mantra ushered in by the #MeToo movement – “Believe Women” – was so offensive to our innate sense of justice.
No accusation is entitled to a presumption of truth, especially accusations that attempt to pin on someone the worst possible crimes that can be conjured. Even those who believe that the #MeToo movement shed light on genuine injustices such as the intrinsic difficulty many women face in proving that they were the victims of sexual assault or sexual harassment, given that such acts are often undertaken in private and with no witnesses and leave behind no physical evidence - even they are forced to admit that the “Believe Women” decree if taken literally, can usher and has ushered all kinds of grotesque successes and abuses.
The power to destroy someone's reputation based solely on one's say-so is a power far too potent for anyone to wield with no safeguards. All of us, all humans, regardless of our gender, are susceptible to abusing the power that is placed in our hands. All of us, at some point, have felt the temptation of vengeance, of jealousy, of having been betrayed or wronged, and the power to destroy the target of our rage simply by accusing them of heinous acts and then expecting our accusations to be instantly accepted is true without question, and having the accused be ostracized and destroyed with no proof, is a power far too dangerous for anyone to wield. Only the values of due process can provide the necessary safeguards. The societal value that holds that accusations will be believed will be presumed true if and only if they are accompanied by convincing evidence beyond the accusation itself, and only if the accused has a fair opportunity to defend themselves.
All of these crucial values were completely trampled on deliberately almost two years ago, when the nation's most influential newspaper, The New York Times, published a story that, by design, pinned onto the forehead of one of their ideological enemies, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, some of the worst and most destructive labels one can attach to a human being: pedophile, sex trafficker of minors, abuser of underage girls.
The passage of time has led many people to forget just how little care or caution The New York Times exercised when deliberately depicting Congressman Gaetz as a sexual predator of children. The paper of record had no evidence when they published this to enable it to conclude that the accusations were true. All they had were leaks from still anonymous sources that Gaetz was being investigated by the federal government for some of the worst crimes that a person can commit. The Times headline by itself was more than enough to destroy Matt Gaetz’s reputation and it read, “Matt Gaetz is Said to Face Justice Department Inquiry Over Sex With an Underage Girl.”
One who read the article beyond the headline would not even have known how little evidence existed to suggest this claim was true. To the contrary, the article was written to use the harshest and most blunt words possible to attach them on the most visceral and irreversible level to one's perceptions of Matt Gaetz. In case anyone had any doubts about the motives of the paper, they even somehow managed to mention former President Trump in the very first paragraph of this article, even though Trump had nothing to do even conceivably with any of these events. The article read,
Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel with him, according to three persons briefed on the matter. Investigators are examining whether Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, the people said. A variety of federal statutes make it illegal to induce someone under the age of 18 to travel over state lines to engage in sex in exchange for money or something of value. The Justice Department regularly prosecutes such cases and offenders often receive severe sentences.
It was not clear how Mr. Gaetz met the girl, believed to be 17 at the time of encounters about two years ago that investigators are scrutinizing, according to two of the people (The New York Times. March 30, 2021).
Ever since the publication of that New York Times article almost two full years ago, the mere mention of the name Matt Gaetz – one of the very few members of Congress steadfastly devoted to ending the U.S. posture of endless war in confronting and heavily scrutinizing the U.S. Security State – just the mere mention of his name prompted the media accusations that he's a pedophile, a sex trafficker of minors, a criminal, a pervert, someone who clearly belongs in federal prison and it's just a matter of time before he ends up in the cell.
Those accusations flowed and flowed, despite the fact that Gaetz had never even been charged, let alone convicted, of any crimes. In other words, this one leak successfully besmirch his name and reputation – it destroyed it in many circles – even though nobody bothered to present evidence he committed any crimes, it made it almost impossible for anyone to be associated with Matt Gaetz – lest there be guilt by association that if you're having anything to do with him, interacting with him in any way, it must mean that either you too are a pedophile or don't care about pedophilia. That is what it was designed to do to render him radioactive without the need for any trial or even having any evidence. Last September, about five months ago, The Washington Post reported under the headline “Career Prosecutors Recommend No Charges for Gaetz in Sex Trafficking Probe” that,
Career prosecutors have recommended against charging Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla), in a long-running sex-trafficking investigation – telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely in part because of credibility questions with the two central witnesses, according to people familiar with the matter (The Washington Post. Sept. 23, 2022).
Earlier today, the Justice Department made it official.
Here you see, from CNN, the headline that reads, “DOJ Officially Decides Not to Charge Matt Gaetz in a Sex-Trafficking Probe”. The article states,
The Justice Department has informed lawyers for at least one witness that it will not bring charges against Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz after a years-long federal sex-trafficking investigation. Senior officials reached out to lawyers for multiple witnesses on Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNN to inform them of the decision not to prosecute Gaetz.
Prosecutors working on the case recommended against charging Gaetz in September, in part, because of questions over whether central witnesses in the investigation would be perceived as credible before a jury, CNN reported at the time.
But the final decision not to move forward with charges came from senior department officials. The DOJ declined to comment (CNN. Feb 15, 2023).
This is not some technicality that happened here, as far as why it was that he wasn't charged. The fact that the two witnesses making accusations against him were judged – not just by career prosecutors, but by the political appointees of the Biden Department – to lack credibility, in other words, to have strong reason to believe they're not telling the truth, goes directly to the crux of whether the accusations are valid. But whatever else is true, this means that Matt Gaetz will never have been charged with any of these crimes that The New York Times caused to be attached to his reputation, let alone will he ever be convicted of them. In fact, because there will be no trial of any kind, Matt Gaetz has no ability – and has had no ability – to defend himself from any of this. All he knows is that The New York Times caused huge numbers of people, millions of people, to believe he was a pedophile and a sex trafficker of minors. He had no opportunity to confront the witnesses behind this, to examine the evidence presented – because none of it was presented. He just sat there having people call him a pedophile every single day for the last two years because of what The New York Times did – aired all kinds of grievous accusations against him, even though there was no evidence to believe that they were true.
Just to give you an indication of how so many liberals have treated these accusations, let's look at a tweet from September 2022, when The Washington Post announced – all they did was that career prosecutor concluded that they couldn't convict Matt Gaetz in a court of law because there was no credible evidence against him.
Here you see Ryan Cooper, who's a very standard liberal journalist who works with the American Prospect, over the article from The Washington Post reporting that career prosecutors did their duty in declining to prosecute because there was no credible evidence, he wrote: “chickenshit club.” He wanted Matt Gaetz prosecuted and convicted and imprisoned not because he cares at all about whether Matt Gaetz is guilty of sex trafficking of minors and pedophilia. He wants Matt Gaetz in prison because Matt Gaetz has a different ideological perspective of the world than Ryan Cooper does. Matt Gaetz, for instance, is against endless war, while Ryan Cooper being a good establishment liberal is for them. Matt Gaetz is opposed to the abuses of the U.S. Security State, while Ryan Cooper, being a good liberal, reveres the CIA and the FBI and the NSA. This is a sick and authoritarian mindset on display to condemn the Justice Department, career prosecutors and Democratic Party senior Justice Department officials for doing their duty and refusing to charge him with a crime, even though Ryan Cooper has absolutely no idea of what evidence is available, he just wants him in jail.
This is the mentality of American liberalism. They want their political opponents imprisoned. For years, before the 2016 election, Julian Assange was regarded universally as a hero, among the liberal left in the United States. I spent years defending Julian Assange. Ever since the major leaks in 2010 that revealed war crimes on the part of the Pentagon and all of America's closest allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then major corruption by U.S. partners throughout the Middle East and Saudi Arabia and Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that in many ways sparked protests throughout the Arab world – all kinds of benefits that were spread, that were brought about by WikiLeaks’ reporting.
I don't remember a single person ever objecting to my defense of WikiLeaks on the liberal left and the Democratic Party. In fact, the Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute Julian Assange because they realized and said there was no way to prosecute him without also prosecuting the newspapers that publish the same materials, namely, The Guardian and the New York Times and El País and major newspapers around the world. That was heralded as the right decision by the Obama Justice Department and by virtually every single Democrat and liberal that I know.
Now, though, it is almost required among American liberals to cheer Julian Assange’s imprisonment. Now they're happy that he's wasting away in the dungeon. And the only thing that changed was his behavior in the 2016 election, where he did reporting that revealed true documents that were incriminating of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party. Remember, that reporting led to the resignation of the top five officials of the Democratic Party based on proof that they cheated in the 2016 election by ensuring that Hillary Clinton won and Bernie Sanders lost. And because of that, because of their anger toward Assange, not for doing what he's indicted for doing – namely publishing top secret documents, something journalists do every day – but instead, because he reported in a way that undermined Hillary Clinton, they want him imprisoned. And they were able now to imprison him by the Justice Department for one reason and one reason alone: that they perceive Julian Assange to have the wrong politics. They constantly want their political enemies imprisoned, regardless of whether there's evidence that they committed crimes. This is the mentality of a fascist and an authoritarian. People who say “chickenshit club” when they learn there's no evidence to prosecute Matt Gaetz for sex trafficking, all because the only thing they know is Matt Gaetz is on the wrong side of political debates and therefore he belongs in jail. And that has been the reaction to that New York Times article from the beginning.
I don't remember having a single hearing, a single Democrat or member of the American left objecting when people treated that innuendo leaked by anonymous sources with no evidence as true. I have a very distinct memory, in fact, of how they reacted, because, from the beginning, I began writing, almost instantaneously, about the dangers of treating these accusations as true, despite the fact that there's no evidence presented other than the leak by anonymous sources.
Here, for example, you see an article that I wrote when I was on Substack, in April 2021, so, just a month or so, not even two weeks, after the New York Times story first emerged, urging caution in how these accusations were treated. The headline of my article was “Due Process, Adult Consensual Morality and the Case of Rep. Matt Gaetz.” The sub-headline reads “The Florida Congressman has not been charged with any crimes. But the reaction to this case raises important questions of political, legal and cultural judgments.”
I talked about several issues there, including the fact that American liberals overwhelmingly want to legalize what they call sex work, and the fact that in many states in the United States and for years it's been true, the age of consent is 16 and not 18 or 20 or 25, as many American leftists want it to be. But the real point of this article was, right in the first phrase, due process, that it was wildly inappropriate and incredibly dangerous to start assuming that people are guilty of the worst crimes because the New York Times decides to air innuendo that they're being investigated for it, even though no one has seen any evidence that it's true.
Now, in addition to that article – and I have to say that was an article that prompted among the most intense anger and most grotesque attacks on me as any as I've ever experienced. The argument was that because I was defending a pedophile, defending a sex-trafficker of children, I likely – myself – was a pedophile and a sex- trafficker as well. Why else would I be defending Matt Gaetz, a pedophile, unless I myself was either a pedophile or had empathy for pedophilia? That was the argument that was made – and that is what they do on purpose. If anybody stands up and says, wait a minute, this person deserves a presumption of innocence, not just in court, but in our society, until evidence is presented, the mere accusation is not enough, especially when it comes from anonymous sources, they purposely will demonize you, too. They'll put that pedophile label on your head using guilt by association and an impugning of motives. Why else would I want to invoke the core rights in the Constitution of due process to defend Matt Gaetz from pedophilia accusations unless I too was a pedophile? That was the tactic that was used over and over.
I have the fortune of not having any care about scammy and unfounded attacks of that kind. I feel an obligation, in fact, to use my platform to raise these kinds of issues that are very difficult for other people who are more vulnerable to raise. And so, I also went back and did an entire video on the dangers of prosecutorial leaks. We don't know where these leaks came from but the reason why it's illegal for prosecutors to leak information about investigations is precisely because investigations are not proof of guilt and that prosecutors can start leaking things to destroy your reputation. Prosecutors have unlimited amounts of power. They have the power to destroy your reputation by simply telling The New York Times that you're being investigated for some crime that then people assume that you're guilty of simply because The New York Times has said you're being investigated for it. That's exactly what happened in the case of Matt Gaetz. Here, I don't know if you can see that graphic that says the prosecutor’s duty of silence, from a law review article, explaining why it's illegal for prosecutors to leak anything about it.
Let me just show you a clip of this video where I was explaining why this issue was so important to me. Due process is, along with free speech, a major cause of mine for decades, going back to my work as a lawyer and then when I started writing about the War on Terror and its excesses. A major objection I had to the Bush-Cheney approach to the War on Terror was that they were imprisoning people with no due process, no trials of any kind, not just in Guantanamo and not just foreign nationals in Bagram and in Afghanistan but they even claimed the right to imprison American citizens by decreeing them to be enemy combatants and then putting them in military brigs with no obligation to charge them with the crime or even give them access to lawyers.
That actually happened in the case of Jose Padilla, to John Ashcroft, the then attorney general, when he was arrested in Chicago, at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. This is an American-born American citizen arrested on American soil. John Ashcroft accused him in a hastily arranged press conference of being the dirty bomber, and he was arrested, which is fine, but he wasn't put into the criminal justice system. He was taken to a military brig for three and a half years with no charges against him, without access to lawyers. He was held incommunicado until the Supreme Court basically forced the Bush administration to finally charge him. And then, when they did charge him, and they didn't charge him with being a dirty bomber, with trying to detonate a radiological weapon, they charged him with other crimes and he was convicted. So, due process has always animated my work as a lawyer and as a journalist. And I explain here why it's so important in the Matt Gaetz case, from December 2021.
(Video 33:50)
G. Greenwald: What has happened instead is that The New York Times created this narrative, and put this gray cloud over Matt Gaetz's head as a result of what is certainly unethical and probably illegal leaks by people who are working on the prosecution investigating it for the Justice Department. And he has absolutely no way to defend himself because he hasn't been charged with anything. There's just media innuendo circulating and attached to his name that the Justice Department purposely created by leaking this story. And yet, there's no way for him to defend himself. This is why […]
So, if you consider the context an article had emerged, from The New York Times again, that they had put additional prosecutors into this investigation and that Fuller, a liberal journalist with the Huffington Post, posted the New York Times article with no comment other than “Hoooooooooooo, boy.“ This is the intellectual and maturity level that they're at. “Hoooooooooooo, boy”? That was his reaction, this “journalist,” to hearing that a couple of more prosecutors were added to Matt Gaetz. His case obviously intended to imply strongly that that was proof somehow that Matt Gaetz is guilty.
In response to that, Elie Mystal, one of the most deranged left-liberal commentators in the country, who himself is a lawyer, he's frequently on MSNBC, he writes for the Nation; this is what he said in response to the story: “On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “everything is fine,” 10 being “I'm going to jail”, adding prosecutors is a solid 8.”
The entire left-liberal commentary united to continuously, not just once, but continuously, over two years, encourage everyone to believe that Matt Gaetz was all but convicted. And that was what I was reacting to. Here's the rest of it.
(Video 35:55)
G. Greenwald: It's illegal. It's unethical for prosecutors to leak the existence of a criminal investigation because you leak the existence of a criminal investigation, you put out there in the media that someone is being investigated for grave crimes, you've destroyed their reputation, but you have no obligation to present evidence that they're guilty of it, let alone afford them the opportunity to defend themselves.
So, I've been warning about the dangers of this from the very beginning and the amazing thing is I wish that I could say that I was confident that Matt Gaetz's exoneration – which is what it is when the government comes out and says, we have no credible evidence to present to a jury to convince them that he's guilty is an exoneration in every way. It means Matt Gaetz will never be charged with anyone convicted of all these crimes that liberals have spent two years accusing him of having committed. The reason why I know, though, that this won't resolve anything, that people go to their graves calling Matt Gaetz a pedophile is because, like free speech, American liberals do not believe any longer in due process. It really is an authoritarian movement. They don't believe in the basic rights of the Constitution. They only believe one thing. And by “they” I mean pretty much the entire swath of the Democratic Party, as well as those Republicans who have profited greatly by masquerading as Republicans to oppose Donald Trump and yet, even with Trump gone, they're still shilling for the Democratic Party because their only audience – the only people who buy their books and retweet their tweets and put them on TV – are liberals. And so they've turned into Democratic Party shills, the Rick Wilsons of the world. The reason I know that they will never stop with any of this, even though he just got vindicated, is because they don't care about due process.
So, let's remember that a special counsel was appointed early on in the Trump administration, Robert Mueller, the former FBI director for George Bush, to investigate one thing: whether the Trump campaign had criminally conspired with the Russian government to hack into the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, the Democratic National Committee. And just like as happened with Matt Gaetz, exactly the same, Robert Mueller spent 18 months investigating. He had full subpoena power, and unlimited resources, and all of that time, liberals were assuming that Trump was going to prison, that members of the Trump campaign clearly were going to be convicted of this crime that led to the enactment of a special counsel.
Weeks before the Mueller investigation closed, John Brennan promised MSNBC viewers, as we showed you many times, that it was just a matter of time before Robert Mueller went and arrested Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump himself, on charges that they criminally conspired with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election. Robert Mueller closed his investigation. The number of Americans indicted for that central crime, criminally conspiring with Russia, was zero. He did convict people. He did charge people on process crimes, crimes that happened only during the investigation – lying to the investigators of the FBI, those kinds of process crimes – but the number of people charged with the central conspiracy theory was zero. And in the report Robert Mueller issued, he made as clear as he could, just like the Biden Justice Department did today with respect to Matt Gaetz, that there was no evidence he could find that would establish the truth of this conspiracy theory.
Here, for those who need a reminder, here's what he said:
Although the investigation established the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government and its election interference activities.
That was the entire purpose of that investigation. That was the conspiracy theory and its products. Robert Mueller concluded there was no evidence to establish the existence of that conspiracy theory sufficient to indict anyone for it. And do you think then Democrats and liberals apologize for saying it over and over or abandon them? Of course not. This is due process. They don't believe in that. They believe that their political opponents are criminals by definition, and they continue to this day to assert these crimes were committed even though the person they turned into the icon of truth and America's savior found no evidence to demonstrate it. So that's the same thing that's going to happen with Matt Gaetz but it's nonetheless important to remember what happened here, what The New York Times did, but also to realize the reasons why due process is so crucial. Exactly to prevent abuses of power like this, where the government can destroy you and can destroy your reputation, even though it has no evidence to demonstrate that you were guilty of anything.
It was a coincidence that we have Matt Gaetz on our show today because we actually had invited him on a couple of days ago because he had introduced a very interesting new bill designed to cut off aid, any future aid, to fuel the war in Ukraine.
Here you see, from Rep. Gaetz's page, the announcement of his bill, on February 9, just a few days ago: “Matt Gaetz Leads 11 Lawmakers in Introduction of “Ukraine Fatigue” Resolution to Halt Aid to Ukraine”. His page and his explanation for the bill:
Since the onset of the war last February, the United States has been the top contributor of military equipment and aid to Ukraine, sending over $110 billion of taxpayer money to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including an additional $2 billion in aid announced on February 3rd. Congressman Gaetz was joined by the following original co-sponsors on the “Ukraine Fatigue” Resolution: [ Note they're all Republicans] Reps. Anthony Biggs (AZ-05), Lauren Boebert (CO-03), Paul Gosar (AZ-09), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), Ana Paulina Luna (FL-13), Thomas Massie (KY-04), Mary Miller (IL-15), Barry Moore (AL-02), Ralph Norman (SC-05) and Matt Rosendale (MT-02).
President Joe Biden must have forgotten his prediction from March 2022, suggesting that arming Ukraine with military equipment will escalate the conflict to World War III.
America is in a state of managed decline, and it will exacerbate if we continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars toward a foreign war. We must suspend all foreign aid for the war in Ukraine and demand that all combatants in this conflict reach a peace agreement immediately (M. Gaetz (FL-01). Feb. 9, 2023) .
So, we are thrilled to have had Congressman Gaetz here to talk about this bill, his reasons for it and the politics around it but we would have been remiss if we didn't ask him about today's vindication, and so, we started by asking him about that as well. We really enjoyed this interview and I am certain you will, too. It's up right now.
The Interview - Rep. Matt Gaetz
G. Greenwald: Congressman, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate it.
M. Gaetz: Oh, thanks for having me.
G. Greenwald: So, as you know, we originally invited you on to talk about the bill that you presented to cut off aid to the war in Ukraine and we want to spend most of the time talking about that but, as it turns out, there was an announcement today from the Biden DOJ that they will not be charging you for anything having to do with what The New York Times two years ago almost said that you were under investigation for it. Just as a reminder, the headline of The New York Times was “Matt Gaetz is Set to Face Justice Department Inquiry Over Sex With an Underage Girl”. You've had this accusatory cloud hanging over your head with no opportunity to defend yourself for almost two years now. And now comes the announcement, two years later, that you're not going to be charged at all, let alone convicted. What's your reaction to all of that?
M. Gaetz: Well, the announcement is not surprising, but it's certainly welcome. At times. I think the process is the punishment. People try to smear you, they say things about you that aren't true and then hope that it distracts from the mission. And while the last two years haven't been the most comfortable of my life, I've been very focused on my work here in Congress, representing my constituents and never really looking past the task at hand. And so, I'm pleased with the announcement, but I can't say it's a big surprise.
G. Greenwald: Just one last question about this, and then I want to move on. But what does it say about the climate that we're living in, in which people are willing to assume guilt with no due process, based on nothing but leaks? It's actually illegal for prosecutors to leak these sorts of things exactly for this reason, we don't know who leaked it. But clearly, you've got around now two years with people unjustly accusing you of this. What do you think? What lessons do you think we ought to learn from the fact that you won't end up ever being charged, let alone convicted?
M. Gaetz: Well, the lesson I learned is that God doesn't give us anything that we can't handle but it is troubling when powerful entities in the media and government try to take you off the chessboard with false accusations. And they hope the accusation is so searing that even though it's not supported by facts, it can still derail opportunities to serve and in my particular case, to oversee the precise activities of the Department of Justice, the FBI, that I'm on, the Judiciary Committee, that's part of my work here in Congress. It's one of the things I focus on. It's one of the things I focused on during my first term when they were working to impeach President Trump over the Russia hoax. And it was a little surreal today, Glenn, that as I got this news from my attorneys, I was literally sitting in a transcribed interview of an FBI whistleblower there complaining to the Judiciary Committee with allegations that the FBI had upscaled anything that could be categorized, domestic violence, extremism, allegations that the FBI was not following its own rules in practice when it came to January 6 defendants. And so, to be there in an oversight role and then getting this news, maybe it opened up a wormhole somewhere.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, there's a reason the due process is guaranteed in the Constitution and there's been a value since the Enlightenment, because people abuse their power to accuse others, to take out political enemies, and the like. And so, I think we see the reason why that right is so important.
So, let's move on to this bill you have pending, along with ten of your colleagues in the House, I believe, who have cosigned it, to essentially cut off further aid to the war in Ukraine. The United States has already allocated over $100 billion in various forms of aid for that war. What is the reason you introduced this bill? What's the rationale behind it?
G. Greenwald: M. Gaetz: Well, first, it's a lot of money: $100 billion would be enough to secure the entire United States from Chinese cyber attacks. But instead, we've chosen to play in this war in Europe to such an extreme degree. Secondly, I think it should be principally Europe's obligation and responsibility because it's Europe's interests that are most directly impacted. And you're just creating the conditions for yet another forever war. If the United States is pouring cash into a faraway land over a historically corrupt country, hoping that that's somehow going to lead to like the liberation of Jeffersonian democracy, while you've got Germany and others in Europe buying so much Russian energy, it seems a little bizarre that the United States would participate to such a level.
I also think that we are extending the violence. We are extending the carnage. No one wants to see this war go another day. And yet, when we continue to send these enhanced munitions and weapons systems, I think that we do make the likelihood of a longer war increase. Also, I'm not sure that we're following our own laws and our own regulations regarding the monitoring of material that is sent into an area of hostilities. In law, we have requirements for ensuring that U.S. equipment doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Each and every step has to be documented and reported. And I've become increasingly concerned that we're not even following those laws. And we just throw our hands up and say, well, we just have to do this for the sake of democracy.
And in my time here in government, I guess on the planet Earth, sometimes I get most worried about these explosions of unity because they always seem to lead to the worst things we do. Right? There was so much unity after 9/11 that we needed the Patriot Act, and then we quite literally saw it turned against patriots and turned inward against Americans for political purposes. And then there was all this unity over COVID, and it led to some of the most egregious lockdowns. And then there was unity after the George Floyd death, we all, everybody had to come together and embrace, you know, the BLM movement, and if you didn't, you were shouted down as a racist. And I saw that same dynamic play out around Ukraine where, like, you just had to be for sending anything that would shoot, in the words of Ben Sasse, and if you weren't for that, somehow you believed less in American democracy or American interests.
G. Greenwald: Yes. You know, the arguments – let me ask you about the two principal ones, wielded against people like you who say maybe the U.S. doesn't need to fund and fueled this proxy war into all of eternity. The first is that Russia is an enemy of the United States, and through this war, we're able to weaken an enemy of our country without having to send troops there or risk the lives of American citizens, we're just paying in order to weaken a major adversary. And that's a good deal. And the second one is if you cut off funding to the Ukrainians, as your bill suggests we should, then Russia will simply overrun the country, will conquer it, and will annex what they want. And I guess that's a bad thing for Ukraine. And the argument goes for the world as well. What are your responses to those two claims?
M. Gaetz: So, I reject the premise of the first claim that somehow this is something we do in the absence of risk to Americans. Our country just lost a 20-year war to goat herders with rifles in Afghanistan. And I'm supposed to believe that Americans aren't at risk when we go poke a nuclear power with a madman in charge? If you accept the premise of the neocons, Putin is this crazy madman, well, then why would we be in a situation where we would greater risk to our fellow Americans sending weapons systems into Ukraine and into disputed territories in Eastern Ukraine on the border of Russia, where they're launching deep into Russian territory to strike Russian assets in Russian supply chains. That is precisely the ecosystem that leads to escalation. That's a risk to our fellow Americans. And, you know, the second, the notion that, well, just like they're an enemy, so we want the enemy weaker is not like what got us into Vietnam.
America's very costly interventionism is usually driven by this debunked theory of geopolitics that if we play out a series of proxy wars by borrowing money from one country to send it to another, we somehow improve our global standing. It seems to do pretty well for the defense contractors and the elites. But I'm not sure that advances the interests of the people, like the farmers in my district, who rely on Russian satellite technology for seed planting, or they rely on fertilizer from Belarus. They're not doing better as a result of this. They're actually paying a price for it, a price that is far higher than just the cash that the U.S. government prints off but in terms of the inflationary impact on their lives and their energy, and their prospects. What was the second argument?
G. Greenwald: You addressed both. That Russia will take over and conquer Ukraine if we cut off aid and that we're getting too weak an adversary with no lives at risk? Do you have anything to add to those? I feel like you address those. But if you want…
M. Gaetz: I want Ukraine to prevail. But shouldn't Germany want that more than the United States? Shouldn't these European powers use their money to facilitate socialism and then want us to go and subsidize their defense, all the while they're critical of us? That makes us dead money on the world stage, not a meaningful impact player.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that these countries, so many of the ones to whom we give aid or to whom we provide protection, beginning with Germany, have given to their citizens a better standard of living than a huge number of American citizens are able to get. And we're spending our resources to further enrich those countries, to protect those countries, to relieve them of their obligations while our citizens suffer. So, you mentioned the people who are benefiting, which are not people in your district – I bet you could go around to a town hall in every district and not one person would say that the thing they worry about, when they wake up in the morning, is who is ruling the Donbas or eastern Ukrainian provinces – but you did mention people who are benefiting and those are arms dealers.
I remember in the House Armed Services Committee, where you served, the debate during the Trump administration, where you were arguing the best way to get out of Afghanistan was yesterday, and the next best day is today. You ended up losing that debate. The House Armed Services Committee blocked President Trump from withdrawing, but we did end up withdrawing, finally, during the Biden years, in the first year of the Biden administration. And then it's kind of amazing that six to eight months later, the arms industry gets this brand new war that is a brand new, very lucrative market for all of their weapons that they lost when we finally got out of Afghanistan.
Do you mark that up as a coincidence, or do you think that, at least, part of the reason we keep finding wars to fuel is that these arms manufacturers have so much power in Washington and benefit so much?
M. Gaetz: I'll say it explicitly, I do not believe we would have our level of involvement in Ukraine at where it currently stands if it were not for the drawdown in our activities in Afghanistan. These defense contractors need tens of millions of dollars in new programs every month just to justify their overhead. They're that big. And so, you've got a situation where the supply and demand economy really works against global peace and against the interests of Americans, because the demand is the demand to have somewhere to send these weapons and so, the supply… then, you get a circumstance where policymakers are trying to generate areas that justify it. And it's not only in areas of hostilities. Now you're seeing a lot of that same incentive structure play out where folks roll up to the Hill and give us briefings insisting, oh, all of our stockpiles have been depleted. We've said everything to Ukraine, and all of our stockpiles have been depleted. What does that do? That generates a whole new round of business on the initiative of refilling our stockpiles when the reality is we don't need to send a lot of the stuff over there anyway. And it's quite humorous, Glenn, if you don't mind me saying when I get on these phone calls, with a lot of these Ukrainian defense officials and they start reading off the list of shit that they want – they don't even know how to use a bunch of this stuff. I know that there's just somebody who went and bribed them to make those requests. And a lot of this stuff doesn't even get into the fight. And the defense contractors don't care. They just want to be able to make it, mark it up and sell it, and then they hire these third parties to go bribe Ukrainian officials to go there and make demands on U.S. policymakers. And it's debasing to watch a lot of my colleagues leap over one another, to be the first to insist that they be given everything on the list, regardless of the capabilities that exist to operate it effectively.
G. Greenwald: So, let me ask you about that, the kind of politics of your bill, the war. Back in May, the Biden administration asked for a huge amount to send to Ukraine, which was $33 billion. Your colleagues in both the House and Senate decided, seemingly arbitrarily, to just kind of boost it up by $7 billion. So why don't we make it $40 billion? – kind of rounded up from what the Biden administration asked. On that vote, every single Democrat in both the House and the Senate – from the most right-wing Democrats to the Squad and Bernie – voted yes. It was completely unanimous. There were at least 69 no votes in the House and Senate that came exclusively from your party. Now, I'm looking at the co-sponsors of your bill to cut off aid. I notice that they're all Republicans and not Democrats. Did you attempt to try and attract any Democratic Party cosigners to this bill? And what explains this kind of unanimity on behalf of the Democratic Party, where there was always at least some anti-war sentiment, to just keep sending more and more money to fuel this war?
M. Gaetz: Where did the anti war Democrats go? I remember when the Squad showed up in Washington, D.C., and they were saying the military is racist. Now, they're voting for NATO expansion, for goodness’ sake. So, it's been quite the reversal.
And I did solicit the support of some Democrats and you know what they said to me? They said, well, we can't look inconsistent and we voted to send these arms, and so, now, we have to vote to continue, to maintain that, and maintain the logistics kits and the supply chains and all the advisors that go along with having this equipment in a theater of hostilities. So, it's a fear of looking inconsistent rather than being in a principled position. But it sort of begs the question, why were they there in the first place? Where is the anti-war coalition in the Democratic Party? Because guess what? I'll work with them and I don't care who it is. I'll work with anyone and everyone, regardless of what they think about me or any other subject, to try to end our involvement in these wars. And in the end, the manner in which this Congress seems to be at the bended knee to defense contractors and lobbyists, and special interests, rather than serving the actual interests of our fellow Americans. And it's no joke when you're playing a game of nuclear chicken with a country like Russia.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, if you look at the left wing, almost every modern democracy in the world, in Germany, in Great Britain, here in Brazil, you find huge amounts of people on the left, including members of the parliament or major political figures, including the newly elected president of Brazil, who are saying it's madness to keep fueling this war. And yet, there is simply not a single Democratic member of Congress willing to say that. It's really bizarre.
Let me ask you this specific question, obviously, we've been talking about the financial motive in war, the kind of fear that people have of the U.S. Security State, of the armed industry. But it does seem like there is a very kind of obsessive interest when it comes to Ukraine in particular. We've been involved in the micromanaging of that government since at least 2013 when Victoria Nuland was changing the government and picking who should run the country – quite a weird thing for a democracy for that to happen. We know that Joe Biden was so heavily involved in running Ukraine that when Burisma got in trouble, the Ukrainian energy company didn't pay a Ukrainian politician’s son, they paid Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, $50,000 a month to sit on their board. President Obama was always saying when asked, why aren't you doing more to confront Russia over Ukraine? He would say, we have no vital interest in Ukraine. There's no oil there. There's no geostrategic importance to that country that we would risk going to war over Russia with. Why is there this obsession among this kind of permanent foreign policy cause in Washington, like Victoria Nuland and her crowd when it comes to Ukraine?
M. Gaetz: Well, Goldman Sachs observed that Ukraine is the third most corrupt country in the world and the most corrupt country in Europe at the time that they made that assessment. And it's a money laundering mecca. And so, you saw how the Afghanistan War and Afghanistan rebuild really plowed a lot of cash into offshore accounts in Switzerland and in Dubai. And one has to wonder, where will the bounty of the Ukrainian grift end up? Foreign financial centers will benefit from all of the arms deals and all of the reconstruction that is bound to follow this current kind of period of hostility.
And I think that motivates it. I think that when you have a place with a well-developed infrastructure around money laundering and corruption and kickbacks, it kind of greases the wheels for this type of delivery system. And the great horror is that the people end up getting killed in these terrible ways, in these extended conflicts.
If my resolution intends to do anything, it's to bring some peace to this country. I don't wish this war on the people of Ukraine. I think it's horrible what's happening to them but I do not believe that the United States government spending over $100 billion there is improving conditions or bringing this matter to any faster resolution. And by the way, when you propose peace, like when Elon Musk proposed a peace plan, you get shouted down like you're some sort of agent of the Russian government, just because you want the killing to stop. And I think we've got to be able to have that level of intelligent discourse to get past the rather dogmatic responses that we've seen thus far.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, but that tactic has been going on for decades, that if you question any U.S. war – in Iraq or anywhere else – you get accused of being a traitor on the side of the enemy. You're pro-Saddam, all of those things.
Well, let me ask you about this last question, which is what this money could be used for, instead, if your resolution is passed. I praised a tweet earlier today, by one of your Republican colleagues, Congressman Andy Biggs. He said: “The U.S. leads all nations in Ukraine aid – $200 billion sent in about a year. We could have used this money to address veterans’ healthcare, rising crime in major cities, crumbling infrastructure, declining test scores in K-12 and so much more. We're getting taken advantage of”.
Are those programs that he named that could be funded with that money, programs that you would support funding if your resolution succeeded?
M. Gaetz: Well, sure, There probably wouldn't be the top of my list. I would start with our own border with just a fraction of the amount of money that we have sent to Ukraine. We could totally secure the U.S.-Mexico border and do a lot of internal enforcement of our immigration laws to get people who have active deportation orders on them – and there are more than a million of them walking around our country freely now – to get them out of our country. And I think that would be a priority that would advance the interests of my fellow Americans. But I even asked the military that precise question, Glenn. I asked Admiral Harris, who's just, I say just retired from the military, was leading the entire Indo-Pak command. And I asked him, I said at war, Harris, if I gave you $100 billion to confront and deal with the Chinese threat, how would you use it? And he said with that amount of money, we could literally secure every inch of U.S. infrastructure, every American, and every business from Chinese cyber-attacks. We're going to have to deal with those cyber-attacks for now, and generations to come. We could have done a lot more protecting our homeland than protecting the sovereignty and borders of a country oceans away.
G. Greenwald: Congressman, congratulations on having your name cleared today from this unjust cloud that's been hanging over it for way too long. And good luck with your resolution. And we really appreciate the time that you took to talk to us. Thanks a lot.
M. Gaetz: All right. Thanks so much.
So, it's not every day that we get to bring you what is unqualified good news, but we're happy to report that we're able to close our show this evening by doing exactly that. There was a very favorable and, I think, an important ruling issued today by a judge in the Southern District of New York that struck down as unconstitutional, under the First Amendment free speech guarantee, a newly enacted law by the state of New York, enacted just last year, that purports to dictate to social media companies how they are required to treat complaints about, quote-unquote, “hate speech”.
The decision that struck down this law as unconstitutional, the judge who issued the ruling, the context for how the suit came about and the rationale for the ruling, I think, are all very important to examine, what we will do pretty quickly. But before we do, let me explain to you the context of how this lawsuit was brought about.
As I indicated last year, the state of New York is trying to find ways to deal with what they regard as the problem of too much free speech on the Internet. That is absolutely a major concern of power centers all through the West. How is it that we can permit people to speak freely on the Internet, given the dangers it poses to our powers? In the parts of the world that don't pretend to be democracies, like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates and Singapore and many other places, they just adopted laws years ago that said it was criminal and illegal to publish anything online that we regard as hateful or inciting of violence or that we think is fake news and we have the right to order that removed and the people who posted it, imprisoned. And those are the kinds of countries you would expect to see that sort of authoritarian power and those restrictions on free speech.
In the West, it's becoming an increasingly common belief that there's too much danger from allowing free speech on the Internet and something needs to be done. The problem for the United States, where that belief is growing rapidly and has taken hold of most of American liberalism, is they have this thing called the First Amendment that if they're in government, provides a pretty significant impediment to how they can go about doing that. And they become increasingly creative and inventive and try to find ways. So, the New York state legislature, at the behest of the attorney general, Letitia James, and the governor, Kathy Hochul, as a Democratic-run state, decided they would pass a law that wouldn't tell social media companies what they had to do with “hate speech” because they know that would violate the First Amendment. Instead, they purported to say, “You are required to tell your users you take hate speech complaints seriously. You're required to create a method and a system by which people can complain and to be transparent about how it is that you're going to handle this”.
And Rumble, recognizing that that is a threat to their main goal as a platform, which is to allow free speech to thrive on the Internet – the law was very clear that its real goal is to stop the publication of what the politicians in New York State regard to be hate speech – sued the state of New York, along with Eugene Volkov, who is a long time law professor and blogger in Locals, the platform, here on Rumble, that's for community building and the like. Their argument was that by forcing us what to say about hate speech and how we handle it, they violated our free speech rights.
I think it's very important to know – and I'm saying this as somebody who obviously is on Rumble and who believes in Rumble as a cause, but has no financial stake in Rumble, I'm not a shareholder in Rumble, I don't have any stock options in Rumble, I have no interest financially in promoting their company or in saying anything good about them, in fact, I'm totally free to report negatively on them if I want but, as I've explained before, I'm here because I believe they really are devoted to these causes – they have been bringing lawsuits, that they're paying for, to vindicate the causes they say they believe in.
Just last July, I reported on a major win that they had in their lawsuit against Google. They're suing Google because Google is clearly manipulating their search engines to bury Rumble’s content or any other content that competes with their other companies, including YouTube. I've explained before, I've had the experience when I go to look for my own Rumble videos, unless I know the exact title, it's almost impossible to find it using Google. Almost always, the YouTube version of that video comes up way before the Rumble one does, even if it has far fewer views. There's no question they're doing that. And Rumble won a big victory when a judge in the federal court refused to dismiss Google's lawsuit, ordered it to go to discovery and now Rumble is getting a lot of information that was previously unknown about how Google manipulates search algorithms and search engines to bury information that doesn't want seen and promote the information it does.
In addition to that, as I've talked about before, in the EU, it is now illegal – illegal – for any platform to host and to be heard by Russian state media like R.T. and Sputnik and the like. And even though YouTube is not a European company, out of fear, they obeyed and kicked those Russian media outlets off of YouTube. Rumble said “We are not going to do that. We are not going to decide for adults what they can and can't see. If you don't want to listen to R.T. don't go and listen. But if you do want, we're going to keep them on our platform”. The French government said to Rumble: If you don't immediately take off these websites and make them unavailable in France, that we don't want our citizens to hear, you will no longer be allowed access to the French market. And Rumble said, we'd rather lose access to the French market than obey your censorship demands because once we start having foreign governments tell us what we can and can't platform, the entire purpose of our website, which is to foster free speech and free discourse and free inquiry on the Internet, which was its original purpose, will be destroyed.
So, they made the choice to lose France rather than succumb to these orders. Another thing that Rumble did is, even though they have an outlet for fewer resources than Facebook and Google and Twitter and TikTok, Instagram, and the like, they sued the state of New York.
And here you see the Reason Magazine article, from June of last year, announcing the new New York law. The headline was “New New York Law Aimed at Getting Social Media Platforms to Restrict Hateful Speech.” As soon as that law was enacted, Rumble sued, along with Eugene Bullock, and, today or yesterday, rather, a ruling was issued. And it's really interesting. They sued in the federal district of the Southern District of New York, which is where Manhattan is. They sued the attorney general, Letitia James, in our official capacity as New York attorney general. And this ruling was issued by an Obama-appointed federal judge, Andrew Carter, that agreed with Rumble's argument that the law is unconstitutional under the First Amendment and therefore issued a preliminary injunction enjoining the law, meaning the law cannot be enforced.
What's really interesting about Andrew Carter is that he wasn't just appointed by Obama, but he is really clearly a man of the left, a lawyer of the left. Obama appointed a lot of prosecutors to the federal bench. He appointed a lot of corporate lawyers. This is one of the rare examples where Obama appointed somebody who was actually a legal aid lawyer, somebody who works for both the state and the federal agency that provides free legal counsel to people who can't afford legal counsel when they're charged with crimes. That's almost always people who have a left-wing ideology doing that. Not always, but mostly. He clearly has a lot playing background jurors potentially. And that's what makes this ruling, that the First Amendment does not permit laws like this, so much more valuable. That's not from a Trump judge or a George Bush judge or a Reagan judge that could be easily dismissed as some kind of fascist ideology or whatever.
Free speech is something that all federal judges should be protecting and not only did he rule that they were in favor of Rumble against New York. Listen to the first, very first paragraph of his ruling. This is the core idea he's endorsing in this decision. That absolutely is the animating idea of the First Amendment,
Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate”. Matal v. Tan, 137S CT 1744-1764 (2017). (Ruling from U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. Feb 14, 2023).
And he's quoting a 2017 Supreme Court case.
He begins his decision by saying, of course, hate speech by definition is hateful, especially, if you define it in this narrow way as demeaning people based on their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or other similar grounds. But it doesn't matter if you like ideas or if you think they're hateful. The whole point of free speech is that it bars the government from restricting, even speech and thoughts that we hate. That's the whole point of it. If all that happened under the First Amendment is that speech that the majority likes was protected, it wouldn't be necessary. Nobody ever seeks to censor ideas held by the majority, ideas held by the powerful. The \ targets of censorship are always marginalized people, dissidents, people who hold views that only a minority support. And he began this decision by reminding everybody, and in a very emphatic way, at the point of the free speech clauses, not to protect popular speech, but unpopular speech, including hate speech.
The decision itself is pretty technical, but I'm just going to explain to you nonetheless what it was. The law that New York passed is called the Hateful Conduct Law and it essentially went out of its way, as I said, to avoid requiring social media platforms to delete anything that the state regards as hate speech because they knew no law like that would survive constitutional scrutiny. What they did instead was try to do an end run around the Constitution by saying all we're doing is requiring you to create rules for how people can complain about hate speech and to express your condemnation of hate speech and to make clear that you will have an open process.
And the reason Rumble and Eugene Volokh knew that this was unconstitutional, and the judge eventually ruled it was too, was because the real purpose of it is evident. It's even explicit. It's to eventually force these companies and pressure these companies to ban speech which the state regards as hateful. That's the problem with hate speech. It means different things to different people. If a diversity counselor comes into a corporation and tells people that white people are inherently more violent or more imperialistic or more prone to colonize, is that hate speech based on race? If someone says that men are more likely to resolve conflict through aggression and war, or more likely to use their force to impose their will on women and force them to engage in sexual acts, is that hate speech based on gender? If someone says that conservatives are all fascists, is that hate speech based on ideology? It's all vague and ambiguous and amorphous by design. That's what makes it so powerful to put censorship authorities in the hands of the state.
And so, the court went through and I won't I look at every one of these clauses, but essentially broke down the law and said why it is that this law cannot be tolerated. And then, in the end, it said this,
In the face of our national commitment to the free expression of speech, Listen to that. In the face of our national commitment to the free exercised expression of speech, even where that speech is offensive or repugnant, the Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement of this law is granted (Ruling from U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. Feb 14, 2023).
It concludes by saying that the law cannot be enforced because the law is clearly designed to eliminate speech that, no matter what you think of it, is within the bounds of the First Amendment.
It's a very important ruling because the states around the country are absolutely looking for ways to prohibit the expression of speech they just like while trying to avoid the First Amendment's prohibition. The fact that this comes from a left-wing judge, a judge in the very influential Southern District of New York, that it's done in Rumble’s favor, against the state of New York, is a very important precedent. It's a very positive development, no matter how you look at it.
I think we owe a lot of gratitude to both Eugene Volokh, the longtime law professor who brought this lawsuit, in addition to Rumble – they paid out of their own money to vindicate the free speech rights for all of us. And this is why my show is here. And my journalism goes on places only like Substack and now Locals. Because the internet is not valuable – to the contrary, the internet is harmful – if it becomes a venue of espionage, by the state against us – track ways to track what we're doing – or if it becomes a weapon to disseminate propaganda by banning dissent. The cause of creating a space on the Internet where free inquiry and free speech can continue to thrive, to me is one of the most important causes, if not the most important. When we think about things like independent media, the ability to challenge establishment orthodoxy to compete with the media corporations that have propagandized the country, that could only be possible if free speech constitutionally is protected. If lawmakers and politicians are forced to keep their hands off the Internet and if companies are genuinely committed, even at the cost of their own self-interest, to devoting themselves to creating places on the Internet, not just any places, but places with a large reach where free speech and free expression are protected.
I'm really proud of the fact that the platform where I have my show is a company that continues to do this. This is not a victory only for Rumble: it is a victory for the entire country, for all citizens that believe in free speech.
Obviously, we will continue to follow this. There's a likelihood that the state of New York will appeal it. There will likely be other laws like this, that are designed to work around this court ruling but this court ruling is going to make much more difficult future attempts to impose censorship over the Internet. And for that reason, we think it's a cause for celebration but also, given how the corporate media has almost entirely ignored this ruling, even while they reported extensively on the law itself, we thought it was important to report to you on exactly what this ruling is and what its implications are.
That is a happy way to end the show. It's, as I said, not often that we get to deliver to you unqualified good news, but this certainly is that.
