The House votes on a bill that would extend U.S. authority to spy on foreigners who are located abroad without a warrant. Iran threatens to attack Israel, O.J. Simpson dies, and a bill fails to pass the House.
00:00:50.920I've freed millions of Americans from this crushing debt of student debt.
00:00:54.020It means they can finally get on with their lives instead of being put, their lives being put on hold.
00:00:58.840Today, I'm proud to announce five major actions to continue to relieve student debt for more than 30 million Americans.
00:01:06.240Israel reportedly bracing for an attack by Iran in the next 48 hours.
00:01:11.780The Wall Street Journal citing a source who says a direct attack on Israel could be launched today or tomorrow.
00:01:17.760While plans for an attack are still under discussion, no final decision has been made yet by Iran.
00:01:22.820The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem has been restricted, has restricted travel for staff members and their families.
00:01:28.900Iran has publicly threatened to retaliate against Israel for that airstrike last week on a diplomatic building in Syria.
00:01:35.220O.J. Simpson, the former football star who was accused of killing his ex-wife and her boyfriend, has died.
00:01:41.560The House is expected to vote today on a bill that would extend U.S. authority to spy on foreigners who are located abroad without a search warrant.
00:01:49.700A national security official says the program is essential for gathering intelligence and fighting terrorism.
00:01:55.620The House will also vote on an amendment that would require a warrant if the government wants to review information on U.S. citizens gathered during foreign investigations.
00:02:04.460We've seen a rogues gallery of foreign terrorist organizations calling for attacks on us.
00:02:11.140Now is not the time to take away tools that we need to punch back.
00:02:15.000The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board created by the 9-11 Commission Act of 2007 says that our amendment is consistent with what should happen.
00:02:25.700Our amendment is consistent with the majority recommendation of that board.
00:02:29.340This was a board specifically created to protect Americans' liberties looking at how the intelligence community operates by the 9-11 Commission Act of 2007.
00:02:37.000And they say this amendment, the majority of that board said this amendment is what needs to happen.
00:02:42.840Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board today's edition of Human Events Daily, live from Washington, D.C.
00:02:47.600Today is April 12, 2024, Anno, Domini.
00:02:51.100The FISA bill is going through, folks.
00:03:07.380Well, I'm in a unique position to talk about this because as a prior Navy intelligence officer, someone who had FISA access, someone who understood very clearly how these programs work, not just the abuses that we saw from President Trump.
00:03:23.980In FISA collection, if you're read into FISA, you've got access to communications from U.S. persons.
00:03:31.080There is no check on it whatsoever, which means that if that's collected, boom, you've got a copy of it sitting right there anytime you want to make a query.
00:03:41.380Then, this amendment came up for people to say, and particularly the Freedom Caucus, but also Jayapal and others came in for it, and they said, look, if we are going to put forward this amendment, we want FISA.
00:03:54.880We want the ability, and when they say that, they mean they want the ability for the government, for the feds, to go after bad guys, okay?
00:04:03.760But what 702 allows is for the queries of that database for U.S. persons that are collected through what's called the two-hop maneuver and also incidental collection.
00:04:13.700That means, most famously, and we talked about the other day with Senator Johnson, General Flynn, when he was on the phone with the Russian ambassador.
00:04:51.640He was making phone calls to the House from the head of the Biden DOJ.
00:04:56.360The head of the regime DOJ was making phone calls, and people know when you get a phone call like that, when Merrick Garland calls and says, we're going to make you an offer.
00:05:06.420The same Merrick Garland that's sending patriots to the gulags of D.C.
00:05:10.580He says, excuse me, Congressman, the call's for you.
00:05:26.740Vote this way on the Biggs Amendment or else.
00:05:30.360Remember those pictures from a couple of years back?
00:05:33.540Remember that party you were at a couple years ago?
00:05:36.100It would be a real shame if those photos got leaked to your wife's divorce lawyer or, I don't know, maybe the pages of the Washington Post.
00:05:44.800Or you simply say, look, you saw what happened to General Flynn.
00:05:49.000You wouldn't want to be the next one now, would you?
00:05:51.420And then, boom, right like that, the government right in front of our eyes will continue to be able to listen to Americans' conversations without even a warning.
00:06:10.360Ladies and gentlemen, one of the best ways that you can support us here at Human Events and the work that we do is subscribing to us on our Rumble channel.
00:13:09.260What have we seen the Department of Justice doing from time and time again?
00:13:13.100And these are the guys that we're supposed to trust.
00:13:15.440These are the guys who have the keys to these tools.
00:13:18.800These are the guys we're handing the weapons to.
00:13:20.860That's what I'd go to any of the Republicans, not just Speaker Johnson, but every single one of them who voted against the Biggs Amendment and said,
00:13:29.080how can you say that you are critical of Merrick Garland?
00:13:32.760How can you say that you're critical of the conduct of this Department of Justice and this FBI at the highest levels?
00:13:39.740And then turn around and keep giving them the keys to these weapons, keep giving them the launch codes, keep putting them in power.
00:14:38.080And then they get that call when they're in a position of power.
00:14:40.740And that call is, here's how you're going to vote.
00:14:43.940And if you don't vote this way, here's what's going to happen.
00:14:46.780And then all of a sudden, that same person who maybe for years had had one position steps up to those microphones in the house rotunda and says, you know, that program is actually a lot more important than I realized.
00:15:03.880And now that I've got access to more intelligence, I've decided that this is what we've got to go.
00:15:11.360And by the way, I'd love, I would absolutely love to hear anybody question me when it comes to this.
00:15:18.960I said, guys, you know, you congressmen, I was one of the guys that worked at the agencies that was putting together the briefings that you guys even read.
00:15:29.280Okay, I saw this way upstream of whatever you guys get read out.
00:15:34.560Congressmen aren't getting raw intelligence.
00:17:46.500What do you think they're doing with those phones over there?
00:17:50.080And the same surveillance that used to be done with the guy who was your political commissar is now being done with the click of a button on those thousands and thousands of Chinese intelligence screens monitoring internally their own populace.
00:18:51.860And the next thing you know, you're getting ads for products that match whatever it exactly was that you were just talking about.
00:18:57.900Well, between the government, big tech, corporate America, and criminals, your privacy is compromised 24-7.
00:19:02.760And that's on top of the side effects from radiation that cell phone corporations swear is safe.
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00:19:53.420Darren Beattie of Revolver News joins us now.
00:19:56.820And, Darren, you know, for folks out there who are surprised that the Biggs Amendment to FISA went down today, even though it was a nail-biter, a real nail-biter right at the end there, 212 to 212.
00:20:17.580It's interesting to me because you and I have talked about the fact that we've been living through an era of regime politics, and we've been speaking about this for years now.
00:20:26.040And the fact that Merrick Garland was making personal phone calls to members of Congress, to me, it's really just the cherry on top.
00:20:35.920I've got to get your reaction to this.
00:21:02.620And he goes all the way back to the Clinton years, when he held the domestic terror portfolio and helped to massage the narrative, as it were, when it comes to Oklahoma City and a bunch of other things that served as the pretext to clamp down on the right then.
00:21:18.500And so he's been at this game for a very long time, and he's one of the trusted officials.
00:21:48.300Speaker Johnson, back when he was in the Freedom Caucus, had actually voted for a very similar amendment to this.
00:21:55.300He had also voted for some other controls on FISA back in 2018, when all of this with the Carter Page and General Flynn and all of this came out.
00:22:05.740Though, perhaps just handicapping it a little bit, perhaps the fact that they had to go all the way to the Merrick Garland level, actually having the AG making these phone calls,
00:22:16.660perhaps that might also show that they were just a little bit worried about what that vote count was going to be.
00:23:35.740Everyone should go to revolver.news and read it.
00:23:37.980But basically, there's been a major push against universities in the aftermath of October 7th, the tragic attack in Israel, and the domestic response to it.
00:23:49.460It's awakened a lot of people who are kind of slumbering in their delusions on the center-left.
00:23:55.320There's been a lot of kind of center-left Jewish people like Ackman are kind of getting involved more in politics as it becomes clear just how rabid and destructive left-wing movements and left-wing activism can really be.
00:24:10.280And make no mistake, I know there's interesting conversation online and such, but underneath it all, the energies associated with the Palestine movement, and it could be objectively analyzed in a different way with more nuance, as they like to say.
00:24:29.280But the realities are the energies really draw upon this pre-existing left-wing ideology and the mobilization efforts and tactics and behavior behind it.
00:24:41.480And so, you see a lot of the same kinds of obnoxious displays with these Palestine protests, as we saw with BLM and just about any other left-wing protests.
00:24:53.480And so, that's what you see on campuses.
00:24:55.240And this has led to an, in part, very justified and welcome backlash against universities.
00:25:03.480But there's an important caveat to this.
00:25:06.800We want to be careful about this going too far.
00:25:09.680And you see various spokespeople come out of the woodwork who, you know, never really cared about conservative or right-wing issues before, people like Talia Khan.
00:25:19.900But there are others coming out and basically calling for their own set of speech codes to slap on to the woke speech codes in order to appease all of the various groups on the university.
00:25:32.860And I think that's very dangerous and inadvisable.
00:25:36.500This is a great opportunity not to push for more speech codes against people we don't like, but to make a critical distinction.
00:25:45.020We want to maximally accommodate all speech that's peacefully performed.
00:25:52.280And we want a zero-tolerance clampdown policy on anything that is truly threatening or disruptive.
00:26:00.840This is a golden opportunity to act on that distinction because, frankly, we don't want, you know, the disruptive behavior isn't just from the pro-Palestine groups.
00:26:12.220We've seen disruptions for people like Charles Murray, Charlie Kirk.
00:26:16.280Anyone on the right who goes to university faces these kinds of demonstrations.
00:26:22.100We can get very violent and just shut down conversation.
00:26:26.140That's the kind of thing that we can clamp down 100%.
00:26:30.420And that all of these people like Ackman, conservative influencers, to be using all of the leverage here to demand zero tolerance for actual disruptive and threatening behavior.
00:26:43.420Rather than saying, oh, we think we should censor this speech because it's Palestine speech or whatever, and simply end up reinforcing the legitimacy of these speech codes, which will be embraced, will be intensified, and will be used against what minimal amount of conservative speech exists on campus in this critical election year.
00:27:05.740So twofold, maximize peaceful speech, absolute zero tolerance policy for disruptive behavior.
00:27:16.000If you see people trying to shut down a speech, give threatening speech and so forth, they should be expelled on the spot.
00:27:23.840Well, and this is so obvious because, look, how many times have we had to deal with this, even over a turning point, Riley Gaines is the most recent one that comes to mind, where people were screaming for her to be killed.
00:27:41.920They essentially performed a false arrest and kidnapping of her at one point where they had locked her in this room and were not letting her out.
00:27:50.900You know, this wasn't, you know, say what people want about, about, I know there's been some questions about Ronald Reagan, but this guy had no tolerance when it came for campus agitation whatsoever at Berkeley back in the 1960s.
00:28:03.940He would send, Governor Reagan is an interesting and missing.
00:28:33.520And I remember there's the, there's not even if you're breaking the law, I would say there should be tremendous pressure because there's leverage.
00:28:38.640Now, if people are disrupting a speech that should be automatic expulsion, but no matter who's invited to speech, no matter to speak, no matter how controversial they should be allowed.
00:28:50.900If they're just doing their own thing and acting peacefully in accordance with the first amendment, that's such a critical.
00:28:56.460And as you put it, simple distinction, but it's a distinction that's seems to be lost because I'm seeing a lot of people like this on individual, but also I think misguided proposal by, um, Abbott in Texas.
00:29:09.840We don't need to slap on more speech codes to these universities on our institutions.
00:29:15.560We need to use this opportunity and this leverage to demand maximal accommodation for first amendment protected speech and maximum pressure to borrow a phrase against people who disrupt peaceful speech.
00:29:34.120It's very simple and it's very easily implemented if we embrace this distinction and act accordingly.
00:29:41.620And I think that's something where, of course, you know, it's, it's, look at these, um, you know, we, we look at our, our newfound friends, uh, coming to us from the sort of center left world.
00:29:53.260And of course their first response is, well, just ban it, just get rid of it.
00:30:04.560We're talking about these issues, freedom of speech on campus and whether or not giving these powers to administrators, to the new leaders of these, uh, elite institutions would then be used against us the same way that FISA and everything else that Republicans are giving to the government is being used against us.
00:30:47.020Jack was back live wanted to bring up and kind of switch topics here a little bit with Darren Beattie of revolver news, because this news about the OJ Simpson, um, the OJ Simpson passing away has sort of reignited a lot of the social debate regarding the OJ trial.
00:31:08.660And in fact, I believe we have a clip from CNN, um, in terms of their reporting on it.
00:31:16.560It's not like OJ Simpson was the leader of the civil rights movement and his era.
00:31:21.820You know, he wasn't a social justice leader, but he represented something for the black community in that moment, in that trial, particularly because there were two white people who had been killed and the history around how black people have been persecuted, um, during slavery.
00:31:37.540There were, there were just so many layers.
00:31:39.240And I guess I would just close with this is that there was racial tension.
00:31:46.000Now it might not be the backdrop of the Trump campaign, but until this country is ready to actually have an honest conversation about the racial dynamics from our origin story till today, we will always have moments like OJ Simpson that manifest and our country will always be divided if we don't actually deal with the issue of race.
00:32:07.540The issue of race as pertains to OJ Simpson and saying that the black community can relate to OJ Simpson because he killed two white people at CNN.
00:32:25.340You know, I always love these things with Ashley Allison.
00:32:29.760I'd never heard of her before, but, you know, she's, she's interchangeable with a whole industry of people just like this who are given the same talking points and spout the same platitudes.
00:32:41.800And one of those platitudes is, oh, if it's, it's time that we need an honest conversation about race.
00:32:49.140It's time, if we only had an honest conversation about race, first of all, if our country was allowed to have an honest conversation about race, she wouldn't have a job.
00:32:59.240Probably if we were allowed to have an honest conversation about race, the whole edifice of the post-World War II order in the United States would completely collapse.
00:33:12.020So I just find it rich because it's one of these semi-frequent talking points of these people like this.
00:33:17.580The people who are only elevated to the prominent positions they're in because the United States is like the chief actuating goal of America in the past 50 years has been to prevent an honest conversation about race and destroy anyone who attempts to begin one to say, oh, now we need an honest conversation about race.
00:33:42.400So that was the first thing that struck me. But the O.J. thing really was an interesting inflection point in our culture.
00:33:48.700I'm old enough. I remember actually watching the trial live. I was I was young, but I did watch it live.
00:33:54.740I remember it as well. Yeah, I lived at the time. I lived in some pure Pacific island called Palau, but we did get live CNN.
00:34:02.840Then that was the Ted Turner days. And yeah, I was watching it and everyone was watching it.
00:34:08.060So it was all these kinds of interesting nostalgic elements of there being enough of a monoculture that it was really the thing that everyone was watching.
00:34:17.360That was an interesting meta component to it. But there was also a cultural component in the verdict.
00:34:25.120And, you know, a lot of a lot of a lot of white people watching this who thought, OK, he's definitely guilty, he's definitely guilty.
00:34:32.420The justice system will deliver was kind of a rude awakening.
00:34:35.940And so far as these comfortable delusions and pretty lies that have sustained a lot of people to look and to hear that verdict and have those lies just.
00:34:46.340Smashed to the ground in such a dramatic way was a kind of rude awakening that maybe lasted for a day for people and then they went back to their delusions.
00:34:58.400But for those who were able to stick with the revelation there, it was really one of the initial throws of a transformation that has been in the works for a long time and that's really kind of culminating right now has reached a new point of intensity.
00:35:16.080And that is that the rule of law, as we understand it, the rule of law going back to its traditions in the common law.
00:35:26.600Now, we did a major, really interesting piece at Revolver a while back about the jury system and what it means to have a jury of one's peers, which is actually there's a whole fascinating history to that going back to medieval times and Magna Carta and so forth.
00:35:41.620But the long story short is the legal system as the founders envisaged it, as it is rooted in the common law history and in England, is really incompatible with the racial spoils system and patronage dynamics that animate the kind of multicultural empire that we've built.
00:36:11.620And Darren, it's interesting you mentioned the jury system because we've actually pulled an interview with someone who was one of the jurors on the trial.
00:37:03.440And so for people who don't know the history here of the 1990s, in Rodney King's, the Rodney King case was a case where this guy had been sort of the George Floyd of the 1990s in many ways.
00:37:16.620And the police officers who attacked Rodney King, he was not killed, he was beaten, and there's a tape of it.
00:37:25.380And police officers were later acquitted, not to go down the rabbit hole of that entire case.
00:37:30.580But the city of Los Angeles erupted in massive riots that led to extreme violence.
00:37:39.300The actual U.S. military was deployed to Los Angeles to quell the uprising.
00:37:46.900That's how bad the L.A. riots were 32 years ago.
00:37:50.020And a couple of years later, there's this sort of other case that comes up with O.J. Simpson.
00:37:57.820And what O.J.'s lawyers successfully did was to make the case not about O.J. and Nicole.
00:38:04.220They made it about the black community and the L.A.P.D.
00:38:09.120And of course, for folks who know even a little bit more, is that the case was moved from Brentwood, an elite area, very wealthy area, to the Simi Valley, where it would all but certainly guarantee either a majority or a completely black jury.
00:38:29.900The jury then only deliberated for four hours.
00:38:32.040So, Darren, when you talk about this idea of a multi-ethnic empire that's ruled by political correctness, how is it that that does not comport with the rule of law and the trial by jury?
00:38:45.120Well, we see the example here because then it becomes about race.
00:38:48.480It becomes not what the actual outcome should be in terms of evaluating the evidence according to the standards of evidence.
00:38:55.640And they're very clear standards of evidence, standards of evidence, standards of judgment, reasonable doubt.
00:39:04.680All of these things are fairly clearly defined, but those become irrelevant because what matters is where the verdict fits within the larger racial dynamics of the country.
00:39:15.520You see the same thing in the acquittal of O.J. and the conviction, dare I say it, of Derek Chauvin.
00:39:22.760Very similar kind of dynamics, sort of mirror images of one another, that in both cases, the racial dynamics supersede any kind of independent judgment according to the standards that would be given to jurors to evaluate the case properly.
00:39:41.620One thing that we saw yesterday as well is that Mark Lamont Hill, who actually was a professor when I went to Temple University 20 years ago and is now at the City University of New York, came out and kind of said the quiet part out loud on this one and basically tweeted yesterday,
00:39:58.740Well, I agree that O.J. murdered those people in cold blood, but we need a racial reckoning in this country, and that's why the jury did what they did.
00:40:09.680So basically just telling us directly that social justice is meant to supersede legal justice.
00:40:19.660And for folks out there, we've got a quick break coming up who don't understand the direct line that you can draw from that day in 1995 all the way to the situation we find ourselves in now that you have not been paying attention yet.
00:41:04.580We're talking about how the O.J. Simpson trial was essentially an inflection point, an inflection point for our country going back to 1995.
00:41:14.760And Darren, in our last segment, short segment here, I think that's what I want to ask about.
00:41:19.360Was that case the inflection point where America kind of said, you know what, let's not care about all these laws anymore.
00:41:28.900If there's something that's politically correct, let's choose that thing, let's choose that option over whatever the real, you know, legal matter is.
00:41:38.680Because, of course, then you have just a couple years later, Bill Clinton committing obvious perjury in a legal setting and getting off scot-free from it.
00:41:48.700And then we sort of have this slide of American culture from then to now where we basically say, and this finds its way, you know, you were talking about the universities earlier.
00:42:00.400This idea that standards don't really matter anymore because there could be extenuating circumstances to the point where even, you know, O.J. Simpson somehow is a victim of society where, like, I'm sorry, did poverty cause O.J. Simpson to chop his wife's head off?
00:42:20.260Was it socioeconomic factors that caused O.J. Simpson to do that?
00:42:25.300I mean, this guy was unbelievably wealthy.
00:42:34.640I mean, you could not be a bigger celebrity than O.J. Simpson at the time of this.
00:42:39.620Fabulously wealthy, married to a supermodel, and then still goes and does it anyway.
00:42:44.780It really kind of flies in the face of a lot of liberal shibboleths.
00:42:48.420But at the same time, it's something where we as a country in a very big way sort of decided that, you know, we're just going to look the other way.
00:42:59.960I mean, they got away with it, but it was the patronage dynamics that really governed that.
00:43:06.500And it was an inflection point because it was the first time that it really became clear that this racial patronage ideology that, you know, been in development for a while, but kind of intensified in the 90s, was incompatible with the legal system and the rule of law as, you know, traditionally understood.
00:43:31.440So it's a very, you know, interesting case from that perspective.
00:43:37.220And, you know, people want to say, oh, well, it's because he's a celebrity.
00:44:43.560And this is, this is, like, it's, it's, it's sort of the, I said on Twitter yesterday that this was, this, the OJ case is kind of the womb of new America.
00:44:53.280Because we get, what do we get out of it?
00:46:14.640Um, and it was, I mean, obviously it was impossible to understand the significance of it at the time, but it really was an inflection point in the culture and in the law in terms of how our legal system functions.
00:46:30.480And we see, you know, we see the, the echoes of that now in 2024 with cases against Trump with the, uh, you know, interesting enough, you know, because people don't like to think it's about race, but look at the Chauvin case as opposed to the Rittenhouse case.
00:46:47.060I'm convinced, you know, the only reason Rittenhouse is free today is, you know, thank God the people that he shot were white.
00:46:57.320I mean, they were Antifa scum, you shot them and they're white.
00:47:00.980If, if, if the racial dynamics had been in there, the outcome could have been very different.
00:47:06.220There'd be very different dynamic at play.
00:47:08.480The same dynamic that you saw with Chauvin.
00:47:10.520So, and, and speaking of which, here we go, just about a minute left.
00:47:15.480And as you say, juries, trials, dynamics, Alvin Bragg takes Donald Trump to trial on Monday morning here today, which is just, I mean, everyone needs to go and pull out Tom Wolfe and Bonfire of the Vanities and page through that.
00:47:31.720Because just called every single second of what we're living through right now.
00:48:05.520Folks, understand, there is a direct line through the situation we are living now to the OJ trial and then back to many things that happened in the 1960s when the Libs say the 1960s were a new founding of America.