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Good evening. It's Friday, March 1.
Tonight: one of the most important and sacrosanct rights is the right to protest peacefully. There have been few threats to this right over the last decade as serious and dangerous as many of the prosecutions of the nonviolent January 6 defendants. From the start, prosecutors were faced with a genuine legal dilemma how could they convert January 6 from what it really was—a three-hour protest turned riot in which the vast majority of the people were nonviolent—into not only a crime but major felonies for which lengthy prison terms could be imposed, even in the absence of allegations of the use of violence. The answer they came up with was to take long-standing laws and bestow upon them radical and exotic interpretations that those who wrote those laws could never have possibly envisioned. That is how the January 6 defendants the vast majority of whom are nonviolent by the government's own admissions, were turned into felons and given lengthy jail times. Finally, those radical prosecution theories which endangered the right to protest for all Americans, suffered a serious blow in the federal judiciary today, as a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, composed of two Obama-appointed judges and one Clinton-appointed judges—so, all three Democratic-appointed judges—struck down one of the major theories used by the prosecution to impose lengthy prison terms. We report on this ruling and its significant implications for the January 6 defendants and also for Americans everywhere.
Then: we've been reporting for several years now on the growing repression and censorship and authoritarianism in Brazil, the world's sixth most populous country and one of the world's largest democracies. When doing so, we have repeatedly emphasized that this matters to Americans, not only because Brazil is a highly influential country in our hemisphere, filled with oil and environmental reserves and iron and other commodities, but also because Brazil is being treated by the U.S. and the EU as a laboratory of sorts, where the same theories to justify harsh systemic censorship are being embraced across the right of dissent in all sorts of ways. Last night, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released a video that he conducted with two prominent conservative Brazilians, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is the son of former President Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and the person who received the highest ever vote total for a congressional candidate in Congress, and the journalist Paulo Figueiredo Filho, who was one of Brazil's most watched TV journalist who is now in exile in South Florida with a genuine and undoubtedly well-grounded fear of arrest. If he returns to Brazil. The Brazilian Supreme Court has banned virtually every social media account he has, as it has done to so many other dissidents of the Brazilian establishment. We're very happy that Tucker did this interview and brought attention to this repression and hope it brings a lot more international attention to the various dangerous developments in Brazil now. I do not agree with all of Tucker's framing and disagree with several of his observations, and I will explain what I mean by that but the repression he attempted to highlight is very real and very serious and has a lot more effects on Americans than I think most Americans understand. We will review the critical issues tonight.
Then: Congressional Republicans today held a hearing where they invited Jewish American college students from some of the country's most elite universities, including Harvard, Penn, Columbia, MIT and more, and for hours these students and their Republican representatives in Congress claimed that they were endangered, even though not a single one of them has been physically attacked or even threatened with physical assault. Words, I suppose, are once again to be treated as violence. As many liberal political aides have been doing for years, Republican lawmakers and the students attempt to depict themselves as marginalized and unsafe on college campuses, and then to demand that administrators do more to create safe spaces for them. Last night, we examined at length this deeply sinister attempt to concoct a narrative that suggests that Jewish Americans, of all people, are uniquely vulnerable and persecuted victims in the United States. It's offensive, while, as well, being obviously untrue.
Mostly this is done to render off limits and the opposition to Biden's policy of financing Israel's military and wars by implying that any dissent to that policy is bigoted and driven by racism against Jews but much of it is being done for the same reasons. Such victimhood narratives are often embraced in the United States for the multiple benefits such narratives confer on the victim group being defended.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
