Watch the full episode here:
Good evening. It's Wednesday, January 31.
Tonight: the state of Texas has undertaken various measures to stop the flow of migrants illegally entering that state. One such measure was the 2021 construction of miles of barbed wire that was intended to—and by all accounts, succeeded in—significantly reducing the number of immigrants able to enter the state illegally. However, the Biden Department of Homeland Security ordered Texas to cease this construction and to remove that fence, and when Texas refused to engage as agents and Border Patrol officials began cutting down Texas's fence, the state sued DHS and various Biden agencies in federal court, and although a district court judge, the lowest level of the federal court system, found in favor of Texas on every single factual question, including the fact that, without the fence, huge numbers of immigrants were entering Texas illegally and in an unsustainable way, and that the barbed wire was very effective in reducing the number who were entering, the court nonetheless dismissed Texas's lawsuit on the technical finding that the U.S. government enjoys sovereign immunity and cannot be sued. Texas, however, won the case on appeal when the Fifth Circuit of Appeals ruled that the U.S. government could be sued in this case, and then after finding in favor of Texas on that technical ruling, it affirmed the lower court's factual findings in favor of Texas, again, including its finding that the federal government had been negligent in protecting Texas from waves of migrants it could not afford to accommodate, and that the barbed wire fence that Texas constructed and that the U.S. government was trying to destroy, was, in fact, highly effective toward that aim.
Last week, however, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively overturned that favorable decision for Texas, and the appellate court instead decided in favor of the Biden administration. The Supreme Court vacated the lower court's injunction that prevented Homeland Security from tearing down Texas's wired fence. In other words, it gave the go-ahead to the U.S. government to take down that fence and destroy it. Two conservative judges on the court, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the three liberal justices to form a 5 to 4 majority that ruled that Texas has no right to construct that impediment.
That order was not accompanied by any significant rationale. They may issue an actual explanation or a decision in the future but that left many people confused about what happened here and why. So, we will walk you through this legal controversy and explain both the political and the legal implications that arise from it.
Then: in April of last year, a 50-year-old left-wing political party called the African Peoples Socialist Party was criminally indicted by the Biden Justice Department, along with three of its members, including its 81-year-old American citizen and head of the party, Omali Yeshitela. Both the party and its members have been opponents of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. wars for decades and—consistent with that ideology—have been outspoken opponents of the U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine. Yet the Biden Justice Department pointed to their anti-war opposition regarding Ukraine and Russia when criminally indicting the party on the grounds that they are “Russian agents” and after making that allegation about this party, that they are Russian agents by virtue of their trips to Russia and their opposition to helping Ukraine. They then accused the party of failing to file the forms required when one is acting on behalf of, or at the behest of a foreign government. The party vehemently denies that it has ever taken any kind of instruction from anybody. It insists that it acts fully in its autonomy and that it is following the ideology that it has been advocating consistently since the early 1970s. And yet, despite the great free speech implications of this prosecution—and this is one of the worst and most blatant abuses I have ever seen that tries to use the criminal justice system to criminalize political dissent—virtually no corporate media outlets have covered, let alone denounced, this prosecution. One of the few people who did was Tucker Carlson while still at Fox News, who, despite obvious ideological differences with this Black Socialist Party, angrily condemned the prosecution as a direct attack on Americans' rights to free speech. Just two days ago, a magistrate judge rejected the party's motion to dismiss the indictment on First Amendment grounds. And that means amazingly these charges are actually now likely to go to trial, where Omali and his fellow defendants face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
That wouldn't likely be the actual prison term that they would get. But if they go to trial and contest the charges and are found guilty, and most defendants who do so end up being found guilty in the federal system, it is likely that they would actually spend real time in a federal penitentiary. We'll speak tonight to the chairman of the party, as well as to his very noble lawyer, Leonard Goodman. And I say noble because Goodman is representing this group and these individual members pro bono in order to defend all of our free speech rights. And we'll hear the latest on the case and try to understand why it is so dangerous now.
This is all part and parcel of the Democratic Party's broader, deranged insistence on casting all opponents of its foreign policy as Kremlin agents. Just this week, Nancy Pelosi accused pro-Palestinian protesters outside her house of being probed as being linked to the Kremlin and called on the FBI to investigate those protesters. But in this case, Democrats did not limit this fixation solely to reputational destruction, as they usually do, but are now trying to imprison people for expressing views that are fully consistent with their lifetime of political activism and ideological expression, and yet angers the government because they oppose U.S. foreign policy. This case really needs to be seen to be believed and so, we're going to show it to you.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
