RFK Jr. The Defender - Censorship Forum with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi

00:00:00.000 Welcome, everybody, to our virtual roundtable on censorship, arguably one of the top news stories of our time.

00:00:07.000 I think we all agree.

00:00:08.000 Panelists tonight are staunch advocates for the First Amendment who have each experienced the heavy hand of censorship and insidious manipulation of our information.

00:00:17.000 My name is Cheryl Atkinson.

00:00:19.000 I'm a practicing investigative reporter, formerly CBS, CNN, PBS. I'm going to give a brief introduction of tonight's panelists before each has a chance to make opening remarks.

00:00:42.000 We'll go one by one, but first with our host, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democrat and candidate for president who recently, by the way, testified at a congressional hearing on censorship and the government's role.

00:00:54.000 Kennedy has said that reinvigorating the First Amendment is at the heart of his presidential campaign.

00:00:59.000 He has been widely censored, misrepresented, and smeared.

00:01:04.000 A starting point to consider in the opening remarks, all of you if you choose.

00:01:09.000 Those who wish to censor claim to do this to protect us.

00:01:13.000 They can have all the information they want, but they say that you can't have it and that's for your own good.

00:01:18.000 In reality, the heart of censorship is control.

00:01:22.000 So we're going to start, I think, by asking what is it today that they are so desperate to control and who are they?

00:01:30.000 First, Bobby Kennedy.

00:01:32.000 Well, are you asking me to answer that question?

00:01:35.000 If you choose, you can comment however you wish, but I think in the overarching picture, we know something's going on, and it kind of begs the question, who are the people that are able to exert this kind of control, and what are they so afraid of?

00:01:48.000 Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, to me, is very opaque.

00:01:53.000 Six lawsuits going on, and they're against different entities.

00:01:57.000 So we have lawsuits against Google and YouTube that we filed last week.

00:02:03.000 We were scheduled for an expedited hearing this week.

00:02:07.000 And in that, we're bringing in 1983 action, which are usually reserved for government agencies.

00:02:14.000 But in this case, what we're alleging is that Google is actually acting at Google and YouTube are acting as proxies for the government.

00:02:24.000 So this is the state actor theory.

00:02:26.000 But it goes to your point that there's been this bizarre cooperation between the big social media titans and the government.

00:02:36.000 And it's hard to, Actually, we have the FBI and the CIA and a whole army of different government agencies, including the Census Bureau and the IRS. I don't know what the Census Bureau has to do with censorship or controlling information, but they were given portals into Twitter, And to Facebook to literally censor people from speaking.

00:03:02.000 We also have a successful suit in the state of Washington against a medical board that was silencing doctors, and particularly Dr.

00:03:11.000 Eggleston, who published something in the newspaper critical of the COVID countermeasures, and his license was pulled by the medical board.

00:03:20.000 In the state of Maine, across the country, CHD is representing Meryl Nass, a highly respected local physician who also is one of the world's leading experts on bioweapons and on anthrax.

00:03:34.000 The anthrax vaccine, she's testified six times before Congress.

00:03:38.000 She's been quoted in the Washington Post, the New York Times, many, many other papers.

00:03:43.000 She's highly revered, both locally and internationally.

00:03:47.000 And she published on her substack articles that were critical of the COVID response, and the local medical board in Maine Yanked her license and suspended her license for the last 19 months and is slow walking her hearing.

00:04:02.000 You know, we also have litigation against Twitter and against Facebook.

00:04:08.000 Our Facebook case is in the Ninth Circuit.

00:04:10.000 I argued that case almost a year ago, and we're awaiting a decision on that based upon that case, the state actor theory, which is that, you know, as we know, a news organization that chooses, that makes a decision to censor people has no obligation to do otherwise.

00:04:29.000 They can provide space to people that they want to provide space to, and it's their editorial decision.

00:04:36.000 But when the government is asking them to do that or requiring them to do that or threatening them if they don't do it, and they become a government proxy, then the First Amendment is implicated.

00:04:47.000 So we brought the Facebook case under that theory, Missouri versus Missouri.

00:04:51.000 Biden was brought by two attorney generals based upon our Facebook case.

00:04:55.000 We also simultaneously filed a suit against President Biden.

00:05:00.000 Under the same theory, I was the first person that President Biden began censoring 37 hours after he took the oath of office.

00:05:09.000 People from the White House were calling Facebook and Twitter and threatening And that if they did not remove me, that they would, that the White House would work to remove their Section 230 immunity.

00:05:23.000 That is an existential threat to those organizations.

00:05:27.000 So we filed a case that those cases, our case, has now been consolidated with the two attorney general's case.

00:05:35.000 We had an argument this week in front of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that went very, very well.

00:05:41.000 They were from the judges in that case, in that argument.

00:05:44.000 We're comparing the White House to the Mafia.

00:05:47.000 So I'm very confident that we will win the Fifth Circuit.

00:05:50.000 This will then go to the Supreme Court.

00:05:53.000 There's a long answer to your question of who's doing this.

00:05:56.000 Clearly, the government is involved, but there's involvement in other people.

00:06:00.000 I want to mention one of the laws, and I don't know if I've exceeded my time, but this is actually one of the most important ones to consider.

00:06:07.000 There's an organization that we're suing called the Trusted News Initiative.

00:06:11.000 The Trusted News Initiative was a secret collaboration that was organized by the BBC at the very, very beginning of the pandemic.

00:06:19.000 In fact, there's evidence that they started organizing it in late 2019.

00:06:24.000 The members of the Trusted News Initiative are the Washington Post, Reuters, The AP, all of the social media sites, and several other big news organizations from around the world.

00:06:35.000 And they all agreed to play by a certain playbook, only to censor any information that departed from government orthodoxies.

00:06:45.000 Their motivation, and we have this from their discovery, communications with each other, was venal, really.

00:06:52.000 It was that They see a lot of alternative news sites popping up all over the world, and they believe Those news sites are responsible for taking their business, for eroding their business model, and also eroding public trust in the mainstream media.

00:07:09.000 So they decided to start an organization where they would crush alternative news sites who departed from official proclamations.

00:07:17.000 And the way they did that is they had a branding system where any of them could report to the TNI, to the Trusted News Initiative, noncompliant organizations like my organization, CHD, Green Med Info, Dr. Mercola, many, many others.

00:07:34.000 And that then those groups would be banned by the social media sites.

00:07:39.000 The social media sites all signed on to this.

00:07:41.000 And that would destroy their businesses.

00:07:43.000 So they literally put out of business many, many, many small organizations using that methodology.

00:07:49.000 And so, you know, going back to your original question, who's doing it?

00:07:54.000 It is a collaboration.

00:07:55.000 And there are, I think one of the most disturbing involvements is the consistent involvement of the intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies, both in the United Kingdom and in our country in the censorship.

00:08:10.000 A lot to add to that as well.

00:08:13.000 You've touched on many Really good, relevant topics, and I'm sure Glenn Greenwald has something to say about some of that.

00:08:19.000 In 2013, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote the story of the revelations of what's a lower Edward Snowden.

00:08:26.000 Not only was that one of the biggest stories of our time, it was paradoxically difficult to get published and subjected to all kinds of propaganda efforts in an attempt to control the message.

00:08:36.000 Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2014.

00:08:39.000 The same year, by the way, that I left CBS News over increasing efforts to improperly shape and censor stories.

00:08:45.000 Then in October 2020, Glenn resigned abruptly from his own new news organization after editors sought to censor an article.

00:08:53.000 I believe he said if he didn't remove material that was critical of then presidential nominee Joe Biden.

00:08:59.000 Is it possible, Glenn, or you can branch off in a different part of the discussion, but is it possible to identify with any specificity who these big authorities are who are able to orchestrate these campaigns to pull strings and get everybody to agree to censor?

00:09:14.000 I think it is.

00:09:15.000 I think what Bobby was just saying about the involvement of the government is fundamental to the discussion.

00:09:21.000 And I think that in order to understand a little bit more specifically what that involvement is, I've been writing about this for years now.

00:09:32.000 Obviously, everybody understands that the First Amendment imposes meaningful impediments on the U.S. government's ability to directly censor, meaning Congress can't adopt laws forcing social media companies to ban certain political viewpoints, nor can the government institute meaning Congress can't adopt laws forcing social media companies to ban certain political viewpoints, nor can Either the censorship is more circuitous and for that reason, more insidious and therefore more dangerous.

00:10:00.000 What they essentially do is apply the kind of pressure that governments can apply threatening legal and retaliatory, irregulatory reprisals in the event of failure to censor, which is exactly what primarily the Democratic Party was without trying to make this a partisan discussion, has been doing since they took control of the House and the Senate.

00:10:23.000 Where they were openly summoning the CEOs of big tech companies one after the next and very explicitly saying to them, not just Section 230 as Bobby alluded to, but other kinds of regulatory reprisals, clamping down on all sorts of contracts that they get that are lucrative in nature, that if you don't start censoring more, The way you continuously promise you will, when you appear before us, you will pay a price.

00:10:48.000 We will start legislating against you.

00:10:50.000 We will start applying all sorts of other political pressures against you.

00:10:54.000 And there is Supreme Court law from the 20th century that makes very clear that the First Amendment doesn't only prohibit the government from directly censoring in the ways that we're all, of course, conditioned to expect it won't do, but also to indirectly censor by pressuring private actors to Censor for them.

00:11:12.000 The kind of seminal case was a case where this Rhode Island Commission kept pressuring a bookstore to remove books from the display window, and there was no law passed, there was no explicit threat made, but the pressure rose to the level where the Supreme Court said the First Amendment was violated because the pressure was sufficiently coercive that it violated the First Amendment, meaning that it doesn't just prevent the government from directly censoring, but also getting private actors to censor for them.

00:11:38.000 I think, though, there are other actors that are important to mention as well when we understand who is doing this censorship.

00:11:45.000 And I always go back to the fact that if you go and read the literature in the mid-1990s when the internet first emerged, the reason it was so triumphalist was because...

00:11:56.000 This idea was that this innovation was uniquely liberatory, that it was going to allow human beings to communicate with one another and to organize without relying on this mediation from centralized state and corporate power.

00:12:10.000 And I'm old enough to remember, unfortunately, that the internet was like that.

00:12:15.000 It was kind of this incredibly free, like, Wild West ethos where everything that you did wasn't traceable to you.

00:12:21.000 It wasn't something that could be controlled because there was no mediation.

00:12:25.000 And that simply became too threatening to establishment powers.

00:12:29.000 They cannot have some kind of weapon that is that powerful that is outside of their control.

00:12:33.000 No establishment will refrain from trying to commandeer that.

00:12:38.000 And one of the ways the censorship regime started was that corporate media, media corporations, the largest media corporations in the country, in part because they like to maintain their hegemony over the flow of information, in part because of ideological reasons, namely they were horrified by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and believed that namely they were horrified by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and believed that proved people can't be trusted to communicate freely, started agitating for censorship by running one story after the next, essentially accusing CEOs of Facebook and Google and Twitter

00:13:06.000 essentially accusing CEOs of Facebook and Google And they then just started routinely creating this kind of journalistic beat, as they call it, that they continues to this day, where they find content they think ought to be censored.

00:13:25.000 And if it isn't, they call these companies under the guise of reporting, oh, we're working on a story about how you're allowing this speech to remain uncensored or unmoderated, when in reality, it's basically an extortion threat.

00:13:37.000 It's saying, if you don't remove this content, we're going to publicize the fact that you're associated with these things that we think are harmful.

00:13:45.000 And that has placed a lot of pressure on these big tech companies, including ones who don't want to do it, to censor systematically.

00:13:52.000 And I think we have to pause and realize what a surreal thing Circumstance it is that the leading censorship advocates in the United States are people who have, as their label with human resources and gigantic media corporations, the job title, journalist.

00:14:13.000 I mean, for me, for a journalist to advocate for censorship is like hearing a cardiologist encourage people to smoke more cigarettes.

00:14:20.000 It is so anathema to the core values and functions of what journalism is supposed to be, but they have absolutely played a crucial role in that.

00:14:28.000 And now, most disturbingly at all, it's not just the political wings of the government, but the U.S. security state.

00:14:34.000 We know from the Twitter file reporting, we know from a lot of other reporting, independent of that as well, that it is a frequent We're good to go.

00:15:00.000 If the FBI or the CIA comes knocking at your door as a private corporation and threatens you or tells you that content that you're not censoring is a threat to the national security or in some other way dangerous, you're going to take that very, very seriously.

00:15:14.000 And so you have this confluence of forces operating in conjunction with one another.

00:15:19.000 They're not operating independently.

00:15:20.000 They're very much unified toward the same goal of not just imposing a censorship regime, but one that is designed to silence dissidents to establishment orthodoxies.

00:15:31.000 It's often understood as being directed at the right.

00:15:34.000 I don't think that's the right way to understand it.

00:15:36.000 It does fall heavily on the right a lot of times, but lots of left-wing or just independent voices who question establishment orthodoxies on the war in Ukraine or COVID or January 6 or the 2020 election.

00:15:49.000 Basically, every important debate that we have are systematically censored in a way that has become completely normalized.

00:15:55.000 To me, I think that that is, if not the gravest menace to our core liberties, certainly one of them, them because the internet is this incredibly powerful tool that will either be the liberatory technology that it was promised to be, or it will be the greatest tool of propaganda and coercion ever invented in history.

00:16:15.000 And it is increasingly becoming that latter framework.

00:16:18.000 Well, I agree wholeheartedly as a fellow journalist.

00:16:21.000 And I think one of the biggest, most successful propaganda feats of our time is the fact that 10 short years ago, people were not asking or accepting of the notion that third parties should come in and curate their information.

00:16:35.000 This was largely started, if you want to trace it, to about September of 2016.

00:16:40.000 At least this is where I traced it.

00:16:42.000 When President Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon, where he insisted that someone needed to step in and begin curating information in the Wild Wild West media environment.

00:16:52.000 And people may not remember because this has been so pervasive since then.

00:16:57.000 That was really the first time I remember hearing somebody suggest that someone else ought to come in and tell us what we can and can't see and read and think and hear.

00:17:05.000 And it took off from that point.

00:17:07.000 It was headlines on a daily basis as an organized campaign talking about how information should be censored and shaped.

00:17:15.000 Former New Jersey Assemblyman Democrat Jemele Hawley lobbied against a bill in New Jersey and the legislature that proposed to eliminate an existing religious exemption for school vaccinations.

00:17:27.000 I'm not sure how many states have that, but states do offer an exemption for vaccine on religious grounds.

00:17:34.000 He was acting basically in the defense of free exercise of religion, but found himself on the wrong side of powerful forces inside his own political party.

00:17:43.000 So...

00:17:44.000 Jamel Hawley, in your case, what do you think or who do you think were the enemies of constitutional rights in your battle?

00:17:51.000 Well, thank you, Cheryl.

00:17:52.000 And before I answer the question, I just want to thank Mr.

00:17:55.000 Kennedy for inviting me to join all of you on this important topic.

00:18:00.000 But a lot of those states that you referred to in that question actually started to happen after Bobby actually reached out to me when we saw that New Jersey and New York and a couple other states had, Big Pharma had targeted They're lobbyists into Democratic-controlled states to remove that religious exemption.

00:18:23.000 The unique part where we were able to be very successful was that they were short some votes.

00:18:30.000 And because of those short votes, what they did was go even deeper, not only removing religious exemption, but also segregating our children in our public school system versus our private school system.

00:18:45.000 And when Bobby, Mr.

00:18:47.000 Kennedy, reached out to me, what we found unique was that shortly thereafter, there was Virginia, there was Connecticut, there was Illinois.

00:18:56.000 Mr.

00:18:56.000 Kennedy had me really in a bunch of other states throughout the United States talking to legislative caucuses on the target that particularly Big Farmer had on these Democratic states.

00:19:10.000 And so the enemy here is actually Big Pharma because there was a unique, targeted, focused group that Pharma had on these Democratic-controlled states, not only removing religious exemption, but when they couldn't get the fight and approve off the religious exemption, they actually started to segregate in the 2000s, 2019 and 2020.

00:19:39.000 It started to go even deeper where they segregated the kids.

00:19:43.000 So for me and for Mr.

00:19:45.000 Kennedy, it went beyond just the targeting of removing a religious exemption, but it was about going even deeper when they started to target our public school kids based upon where they went to school and their zip codes.

00:19:58.000 And it was there that Mr.

00:20:01.000 Kennedy really advised me on, you know, once you stepped out on this issue...

00:20:05.000 And once we were very successful, that my party in particular, Democratic, I've been in the Democratic Party all my life, as well as Mr.

00:20:15.000 Kennedy.

00:20:15.000 What they did was begin that pathway of censoring me in the press, censoring me in the party, not allowing a lot of my bills to move forward.

00:20:27.000 And he was right.

00:20:28.000 I mean, he was, you know, on target when we took that particular stance.

00:20:33.000 He advised me very early on.

00:20:35.000 On that.

00:20:36.000 And it actually happened.

00:20:38.000 And we saw it go from state to state to state.

00:20:41.000 And we had legislators that just wouldn't want to take that risk and step out of the box to defend those particular bills to protect freedom of religion and protect our school kids.

00:20:55.000 So that's where it started for me.

00:20:56.000 Mel, how did it turn out?

00:20:58.000 You won in New Jersey.

00:21:00.000 That bill didn't pass, you said, right?

00:21:01.000 The one that would have removed the exemption.

00:21:04.000 Right.

00:21:05.000 Nationwide, is there a brief way to summarize where things stand in other states?

00:21:10.000 Yeah, I mean, as surely thereafter that, as I mentioned to you, we travel from state to state, and we've made some headway in some of those states thereafter.

00:21:19.000 We maybe paused the bill for a while, but surely after that, it was just like a tsunami.

00:21:24.000 It just went through.

00:21:25.000 I mean, we're talking about Virginia, we're talking about Connecticut, and we're talking about, you know, Illinois and Colorado as well.

00:21:33.000 That removed the exemptions or agreed to preserve them?

00:21:36.000 They removed it.

00:21:37.000 Wow.

00:21:37.000 Janine Yonis is litigation counsel at the new Civil Liberties Alliance representing individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit that Mr. Kennedy referred to Missouri versus Biden.

00:21:48.000 That lawsuit is unearthing some fantastically important revelations as a challenge of the government's involvement in social media censorship.

00:21:57.000 By the way, I'm going to be reporting on that case on an upcoming episode of Full Measure, my TV show.

00:22:03.000 Janine also recently served on the House Judiciary Committee's Weaponization of Government Subcommittee investigating this very issue.

00:22:11.000 Now, your lawsuit has unearthed some of the answers to the question of who is the they when it comes to social media censorship.

00:22:18.000 What's the latest on your efforts?

00:22:21.000 Because this suit's been going on a while.

00:22:22.000 It's not going to end soon, it doesn't sound like.

00:22:24.000 No, it's not.

00:22:25.000 Although it might make its way to the Supreme Court on the emergency motion relatively soon.

00:22:31.000 So what we've uncovered is quite a bit of evidence of the government's orchestration of this censorship on social media.

00:22:38.000 So we knew that the social media companies were censoring people for saying things about, for instance, the COVID vaccines, lockdowns, masks, and other subjects, including the 2020 election, that didn't align with the Biden administration's preferred message.

00:22:52.000 And I want to emphasize, this should not be a partisan issue.

00:22:55.000 I myself was a Democrat, voted Democrat entirely up until 2020.

00:22:59.000 I found myself in a different company due to not agreeing with how the Democratic Party has approached these issues.

00:23:06.000 So what we've seen is especially people within the Biden White House calling these companies, threatening them, as Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Greenwald discussed earlier, and the companies then complying.

00:23:18.000 And some of the most important recent evidence that actually came out as a result of my subcommittee's investigation showed that the companies were giving in to the government's coercion.

00:23:29.000 So initially, the government was arguing, well, yes, we were telling them what we wanted them to do, but that doesn't prove that the companies were actually doing this.

00:23:38.000 So that doesn't prove that the censorship was occurring because of us.

00:23:41.000 Well, the emails that were unearthed and other internal documents that were unearthed as a result of the Missouri litigation and also as a result of the Facebook files show the companies saying things like, While we're under pressure from the White House, we better do this.

00:23:54.000 One of the most stark examples was with the lab leak theory, where you have Nick Clegg emailing somebody else at Facebook.

00:24:02.000 Nick Clegg was with the White House?

00:24:04.000 No, no, sorry.

00:24:05.000 Nick Clegg is at Facebook.

00:24:07.000 He's a senior executive there, head of global affairs.

00:24:10.000 So he emails a colleague and said, can you remind us why we censored the lab leak theory?

00:24:14.000 And the colleague said, well, we were under pressure from the White House.

00:24:17.000 We shouldn't have done it.

00:24:18.000 So this is just one of a number of emails saying the same thing.

00:24:23.000 And the Biden administration took a very hard line when it came to COVID. And one of the things that I really want to emphasize here is this case sort of shows why we have a First Amendment.

00:24:32.000 Two of the clients I'm representing are Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Fuldorf, who are top epidemiologists at Harvard and Stanford.

00:24:39.000 They co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which eschewed lockdown, said that it would cause more harm to society than good.

00:24:45.000 And they were censored on the topics of their expertise.

00:24:48.000 So natural immunity...

00:24:49.000 vaccine-induced immunity, the efficacy of lockdowns.

00:24:54.000 And that skewed the debate so that the public didn't, the public was given the false impression that there was a consensus when there wasn't one.

00:25:01.000 And that led to the adoption of policies that were very harmful for this country and actually worldwide.

00:25:07.000 Congratulations on the suit because you really are turning up a lot of important information, which kind of raises the next topic I wanted to brush on, which is how are these things remedied?

00:25:18.000 If the government itself is guilty of constitutional violations, but the government exonerates itself or refuses to, let's say, prosecute itself or stop itself, How can anything be done?

00:25:31.000 Does anyone have a thought about the fact that we all now recognize this is going on, but short of lawsuits fought individually by people, which is very time consuming and is expensive with who knows what the outcome will be.

00:25:45.000 What are people to do when it's the government committing the violations and it's the government that decides what to do about that?

00:25:52.000 I mean, I think you do exactly what Mr.

00:25:54.000 Kennedy and others are doing is stepping up.

00:25:56.000 And fighting and continuing that change and bringing to the forefront of the American people.

00:26:02.000 Government has long had a history of targeting, you know, individuals, residents, and people's rights.

00:26:09.000 And the only thing that changes is when people power steps up.

00:26:12.000 And I think that part of why we're having this discussion is because many of you, myself, and I've never seen at a higher level as a presidential candidate, Such as Bobby Kennedy, having to deal with this particular issue in our modern time.

00:26:28.000 And so I think that the only thing that we continue to do is to step up and step out and continue to bring this forth in front of the American people.

00:26:37.000 And I think that is resonating very well.

00:26:39.000 I mean, just in particular, this roundtable that we're having now, there's so much engagement.

00:26:43.000 There's so many people who are interested in wanting to, you know, the engagement of people is what is happening.

00:26:51.000 And I think that you continue to step up and step out and challenge the government on multiple levels.

00:26:56.000 And I think that what we're doing here is one of the best things that we can do at this present time.

00:27:03.000 I think that right now the only principal institution we have for addressing this at the courts, I would say this, I'm very worried because what we're doing here in the United States, what our government, I think we're going to probably be able to hold some of the line against our government.

00:27:22.000 What's happening in Europe, what's happening in China, what's happening in Canada?

00:27:27.000 And Australia and other parts of the world really, I think, threatens the business model of these social media companies as well, because they're going to have to censor, you know, these governments are like the European Union is demanding really extraordinary, I would say, draconian censorship.

00:27:46.000 With enormous fines if you depart from government orthodoxies.

00:27:50.000 And so we have the courts in our country and we're having now for the first time, thanks to Janine and a bunch of other attorneys, we're having success in the courts.

00:28:00.000 As Glenn pointed out, journalism, you know, there's a couple of institutions that are supposed to protect our democracy.

00:28:06.000 And journalists have always prided themselves on being the gatekeepers and the guardians of free speech and fierce defenders of free expression.

00:28:15.000 And it is, it's absolutely breathtakingly shocking to me.

00:28:21.000 I mean, I grew up in a home surrounded by people like Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and, you know, in a whole, you know, Anthony Lewis and Ben Bradley and, you know, these, Mary McGrory and these extraordinary generation of journalists who I can't Mary McGrory and these extraordinary generation of journalists who I can't imagine what they would be doing But we're finding, you know, people like Glenn, the only journalists left, you know, have been relegated to Substack.

00:28:50.000 And it's people like Glenn, it's people like Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker, and there's a lot of really good CJ Hopkins and a lot of other great journalists, but none of them are being carried in the mainstream media now.

00:29:04.000 And I think Substack is a start.

00:29:07.000 We need to start developing Our own institutions where, you know, real journalists can actually come and make a living and be able to flourish because that is an institution that's absolutely critical to our democracy.

00:29:20.000 And we've lost it.

00:29:22.000 We've lost it here.

00:29:23.000 We've lost it all over the world.

00:29:25.000 And it really is shocking about how, you know, how it's been completely normalized.

00:29:31.000 You know, because I'm running in this presidential campaign, I talk to journalists all the time.

00:29:37.000 I always raise with them, you know, are you behind the censorship?

00:29:41.000 How can you, you know, how can you be going along with this?

00:29:44.000 And it's like talking to a brick wall.

00:29:46.000 They don't even understand.

00:29:48.000 They seem to not even comprehend.

00:29:51.000 How bizarre it is.

00:29:52.000 We all grew up reading, you know, we read Robert Heinlein and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and Arthur Kessler and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and all of these classic authors who were writing about the dystopian future.

00:30:08.000 And in every case, it always begins with censorship.

00:30:11.000 And that was just a lesson that, you know, the number one lesson in democracy was You never censor people.

00:30:18.000 There's no time in history when we can look back and say it was the good guys who were censoring speech.

00:30:25.000 They're always the bad guys, but they see themselves as the good guys today.

00:30:30.000 Throughout the mainstream media, it's filled with people who are no longer journalists.

00:30:35.000 Simply propagandists and stenographers for official orthodoxies and guardians of it.

00:30:41.000 They're not speaking truth to power.

00:30:43.000 They're silencing dissent on behalf of the powerful.

00:30:48.000 Well, this has been a process as to how that's come about that has had to do with several factors.

00:30:54.000 One of them, these influences that wish to control the message are not just doing so from the outside, which they used to do, but they're now so intertwined and integrated into America's newsrooms.

00:31:06.000 And into the journalism schools with what they teach and what kids are learning today, and with what is promoted and accepted inside newsrooms, that it is one and the same, that the interests of the propagandists and the interests of those in some of these media outlets are one and the same.

00:31:20.000 And that's why, really, the only thing I'd like to hear what Glenn thinks about this, the only thing that explains when top news organizations and the reporters are so consistently wrong about so many things and yet continue to promote those same reporters and Who go to the same sources who are incorrect and nothing seems to happen to them.

00:31:40.000 You have to understand, as I think I do, their goal is not accurate information.

00:31:45.000 Their goal is entirely different when they've been co-opted by the propagandists.

00:31:50.000 Their goal is to get out a message or a narrative and they consider themselves successful if they've gotten that message out, even if later it's revealed that that was inaccurate or wrong.

00:31:59.000 They don't care because the mission was not to get out the accurate information.

00:32:04.000 Glenn, what do you think about that?

00:32:07.000 I agree with Jamel entirely that the primary goal is to bring better public attention to the fact that the censorship regime is very real and that it's very pervasive.

00:32:24.000 I think Americans are inculcated from birth with the idea that free speech is an important value and censorship is intrinsically the tool of tyrants and despots.

00:32:35.000 And that's one of the reasons why euphemisms are so important, like content moderation or other sorts of phrases designed to obfuscate what's happening.

00:32:42.000 And so I've always thought it was really important that Bobby's campaign, like a centerpiece of it, is denouncing the censorship regime because up until now, it has taken on this partisan framework that I think is very misleading.

00:32:56.000 You have some Republican politicians complaining about it, but only to the extent they kind of depict it as being an anti-conservative campaign.

00:33:04.000 I don't think that's the proper way to understand it.

00:33:06.000 And so the fact that you have a Democratic Party candidate now talking not as an ancillary issue, but as a centerpiece, I think is crucial.

00:33:13.000 And then I also think that the lawsuit that Janine is involved with is, you know, if you stop and think about it, the fact that a federal court has looked at the Ample record and concluded as a factual matter that the Biden administration is engaged in what the court called a grave assault on the First Amendment,

00:33:36.000 not in isolated cases of censorship, but as a systematic campaign to control the flow of information on the Internet and to suppress dissent.

00:33:44.000 When you look at the magnitude of that ruling and the importance of it and set it Aside to the virtually non-existent coverage of it by the corporate media, I think you really see what you were just saying, Cheryl, which is that the media is so siloed that it is true that if you tell them there's a censorship regime, they don't even see it, in part because it benefits them.

00:34:07.000 It benefits their political ideology, but it also is aimed at silencing the competitors to them, the people that are taking away their audience, the people that are ensuring that their narratives don't go unchallenged.

00:34:21.000 And so for me, when it comes to the question of what is the most important thing that can be done, in addition to all of those things that everybody else has said that I agree with completely, I think constructing alternative ecosystems of independent media where dissent can thrive Like, for example, the platform that we're currently speaking on, which is Rumble, that has a much bigger audience than a lot of people realize.

00:34:44.000 There are now often many hours during the day when the top three or four or five streaming shows on the entire internet are on Rumble, where you have audience sizes comparable to the most-watched cable shows.

00:34:58.000 The numbers that our show does, for example, in the 24 hours after we air are growing and are in that same league.

00:35:06.000 And the fact that there are a couple of platforms like Rumble, like Substack, hopefully we'll see where Twitter is.

00:35:12.000 And as Twitter undergoes more and more commercial pressures, how much they're able to maintain these vows that Elon Musk has made.

00:35:20.000 I think that's in question.

00:35:21.000 But certainly Rumble and Substack are two examples where Rumble is so devoted to ensuring that there's a major space on the Internet that can both reach a mass audience and guarantee resistance to the censorship pressures that the government of France ordered Rumble to remove RT and other Russian state media as part of a law that the EU enacted at the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

00:35:45.000 which is really extraordinary if you think about it.

00:35:47.000 That makes it a crime for social media platforms to carry Russian state media so the citizens of the EU, the adults in the EU, even if they want to hear from the Russian government, just to hear the other side are prohibited from doing so because the EU has made it illegal to platform RT. The French government reached out to Rumble,

00:36:06.000 even though Rumble's not in France, not in the EU, and said to them, if you don't remove RT and the other Russian state media that you're platforming, We will ban you at the IP level from existing in France.

00:36:19.000 That's how extreme this is.

00:36:21.000 And to their great credit, Rumble said we would rather not be in France than take a foreign government's orders about who we can and cannot allow to be heard on our platform.

00:36:31.000 And as a result, Rumble's now challenging in the courts and Is not available in France.

00:36:36.000 So fortifying the platforms where free speech is a genuine priority, not just a branding mark of a company, but a genuine priority of the people running the companies, and then ensuring that as many people as possible are migrating to those platforms,

00:36:53.000 I do think there's a lot of pervasive sense that big tech tyranny and despotism removing congressional hearings from YouTube the way Google did when it came time for Rand Paul to have witnesses to talk about the efficacy of ivermectin or the fallacies of a lot of the advocates for vaccines.

00:37:11.000 They just removed congressional hearings from Rand Paul's channel, even though he's an elected senator.

00:37:15.000 People are understanding just how tight those screws are not again, not just for conservatives, but for any dissonance to establishment authority.

00:37:24.000 The more people realize that the more they're going to migrate to free speech platforms, the more those are going to grow.

00:37:29.000 Now, as they grow, I do think there's going to be a lot of concerted effort to try and silence them technologically, removing them from their Internet hosting services, pressuring companies to take them out the airway.

00:37:43.000 When Parler, for example, was the number one most downloaded, most popular app in the United States, political officials started pressuring Google and Apple to ban them from their stores, and Google and Apple succumbed to that, and Parler was destroyed overnight, even though a lot more planning for January 6th was done on YouTube and Facebook.

00:38:00.000 That was a really alarming show of force.

00:38:03.000 But a lot of these platforms like Rumble and Substack are building their own kind of invulnerable, independent networks where they have their own cloud, their own hosting services that can't be subject to those kind of pressure campaigns.

00:38:17.000 And it is really an information war.

00:38:19.000 And I think the ability to have these platforms grow and to ensure a space like the one we're currently using Where free speech and dissent can flourish without the threat of being censored and controlled is one of the most important priorities for people who want to preserve free speech on the internet.

00:38:36.000 You have a sub stack.

00:38:37.000 Where can people find your TV show?

00:38:39.000 I recently moved from Substack to Rumble because I have a nightly show called System Update at 7pm Eastern.

00:38:46.000 I interviewed Bobby Kennedy and we have a really growing audience.

00:38:51.000 So that is on Rumble.

00:38:52.000 And then the written journalism I do is now on Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform and operates very similar to Substack.

00:38:57.000 So yeah, people can find it there.

00:38:59.000 Okay, Janine, I'm wondering, you know, in the big picture, it's great that you're fighting the suit, that somebody's fighting these battles, but why, I wonder, is it taking individual people to spend their money or states to spend money and do stuff that is so blatantly on its surface, I think, in the opinion of most fair-minded people, unconstitutional, meaning the government's actions.

00:39:24.000 Why does that even exist?

00:39:26.000 Why does there have to be a fight over all these little technical issues in court?

00:39:29.000 Why isn't there some upswell among all the people that could make a difference?

00:39:35.000 And then saying this is obviously something that was never meant to be in this country.

00:39:39.000 It's a huge affront to everything that we thought the country was founded on.

00:39:43.000 Why does it take people like you and a court to do something?

00:39:47.000 And what ultimately could come of your lawsuit if you were successful?

00:39:51.000 What is your best case scenario outcome in terms of impact?

00:39:54.000 Those are good questions.

00:39:56.000 So as far as the first part, I have a little less faith in people or the population maybe than you.

00:40:05.000 I'm not certain that the American population really appreciates the value of free speech.

00:40:09.000 When I talk to people about Missouri or, you know, what's happened to my clients or other people, they sort of say, well, what about misinformation?

00:40:16.000 You know, it's killing people.

00:40:17.000 You can't have people going around saying that COVID vaccines don't work or that sort of thing.

00:40:21.000 And they don't seem to understand that the way to counter untruths or things that might be harmful is through true speech or, you know, the other side.

00:40:32.000 And we debate things out in this country or that's how it was supposed to be.

00:40:35.000 But I think that's been lost and a lot of that might have to do with partisanship.

00:40:38.000 The country has become so deeply divided that whatever the Trump people say is terrible and wrong and has to be silenced and...

00:40:45.000 Vice versa.

00:40:46.000 So I think that there needs to be a renewed appreciation for free speech in the country before we can really move forward.

00:40:52.000 As far as what the case could accomplish, I guess those questions are intertwined.

00:40:56.000 I expect the case to go to the Supreme Court pretty quickly, and I expect the Supreme Court to rule in our favor, although I don't...

00:41:02.000 I worry about being overly optimistic, but I think the Fifth Circuit indicated that it was very sympathetic to our clients, and I would expect the Supreme Court to have a similar opinion of the case.

00:41:14.000 That said, I mean, all the court can do is tell the government what you're doing is unconstitutional.

00:41:19.000 Stop doing it.

00:41:20.000 They can't do a whole lot more than that.

00:41:23.000 And if these government actors want to try to, in secret, as they were doing before, behind closed doors, go around and bully these companies, I don't know.

00:41:31.000 It takes something more to stop them.

00:41:33.000 So there are other ideas.

00:41:35.000 I mean, the idea of legislation has been floated requiring the government to reveal any sorts of communications it has with tech companies so that these conversations aren't taking place in secret.

00:41:45.000 We know what's going on.

00:41:46.000 But sort of fundamentally, I think that the public has to care about this, and they have to understand that silencing your political opponents is not a way to win or to have a free society.

00:41:59.000 Jamal and Bobby, and everybody watch the clock, so we have a couple minutes to close out.

00:42:05.000 But for Jamal and Bobby Kennedy, what is it about politics, particularly the Democrat Party, censorship, the pharmaceutical industry, how do those things connect in such a way that have created these firestorms?

00:42:21.000 And these battles that you have been caught in and that Americans are becoming familiar with, what is it that the Democrats care so much about the pharmaceutical industry to want to silence and take rights away and so on under the constitutional rights that are afforded to us?

00:42:36.000 What do you think is happening?

00:42:37.000 Is that simply a money tie?

00:42:40.000 We know the political parties get donations, both of them, huge donations from the pharmaceutical industry, but is that driving all of this and why so much among Democrats?

00:42:50.000 I would say that it's more, I mean, partially it's money, and the pharmaceutical industry is now the biggest industry in the world.

00:42:56.000 It's bigger than oil, it's bigger even in the military-industrial complex, but it's part of the military-industrial complex, and that's what people need to understand.

00:43:06.000 And in fact, when Eisenhower made his famous speech in January of 1961, warning about the rise of a military-industrial complex that would overwhelm and devour American democracy, And turn us into an imperium abroad and a surveillance state at home.

00:43:23.000 He also specifically devoted several paragraphs of that speech to talking about the medical cartel, the federal scientific bureaucratic apparatus that was part of the medical military industrial complex.

00:43:40.000 And that became much more More manifest.

00:43:45.000 After 2001, if you remember after 2001, we had 9-11, which, you know, we were supposed to get the peace dividend right after The collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no enemy anymore and there was no justification for us to be a kind of a colonial power abroad and an imperium abroad.

00:44:02.000 And then the next year in 92, 92 was the year the walls came down.

00:44:06.000 In 93, we had the first attack on the World Trade Center and the beast even and the brakes were put on that and it started adding.

00:44:14.000 We started building this terrorist defense system and then 9-11 happened.

00:44:19.000 And a week after 9-11, you had an anthrax attacks on the U.S. government.

00:44:26.000 And at that point, the neocons in the White House and that That anthrax, it turned out, you know, it was used as a justification to go to war against Saddam Hussein, but because we said the government initially pretended it was from him,

00:44:41.000 we later found out a year later, the FBI investigation disclosed that the anthrax was Ames anthrax, and the only source for that was Fort Detrick, which was the CIA slash DOD bioweapons labs in Frederick, Maryland.

00:44:58.000 But the neocons had redirected U.S. foreign policy toward what they call the biosecurity agenda.

00:45:07.000 And so biosecurity became the spear tip of U.S. foreign policy, and the pharmaceutical companies were part of that pivot.

00:45:15.000 So they were, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are not only on, you know, the advertising on the, 75% of the advertising on the evening news, which allows them to dictate content.

00:45:26.000 And they, they're the biggest lobbyists in Congress, but they also have these, this seamless relationship with the military and the intelligence agencies.

00:45:36.000 And all of those agencies are now, it's not an accident that the first public demand for censorship came from Adam Schiff.

00:45:45.000 In March of 2019, when he demanded, it first came from WHO. WHO, in January of 2019, announced that vaccine hesitancy, this was in the 90s, so this is one year exactly before COVID, that vaccine hesitancy is the principle as one of the 10 greatest threats to public health.

00:46:07.000 There was no data to show that.

00:46:09.000 There was no, you know, there's no information, no scientific citations.

00:46:14.000 They just said it's up there with AIDS, with HIV, with malaria, vaccine hesitancy.

00:46:20.000 And then three months later, you have Adam Schiff, who's the chair of the Intelligence Committee, sending a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and to Google, Sergey Brin, and to Jack Dorsey and all of the heads of the social media company,

00:46:37.000 threatening them that if they do not censor Vaccine misinformation, which is of course a euphemism for anything that departs from government proclamations, that they would face retribution from Congress.

00:46:52.000 So that's one year before 9-11, before COVID. So the ground was already being prepared and the relationship, you can no longer distinguish where the intelligence agencies end and where the pharmaceutical industry begins.

00:47:08.000 It's an entanglement that, you know, every time you look at it at the It gets worse and worse.

00:47:13.000 Jamal, did you figure out what the tie was between the Democrat Party that you came up against in New Jersey when you were trying to fight the removal of religious exemption?

00:47:25.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's just the Democratic Party.

00:47:28.000 I think that it's all parties.

00:47:30.000 I mean, all roads lead to money.

00:47:34.000 And Bobby just outlined his experience and what he's researched and his history in terms of vaccines.

00:47:41.000 But I think that it just goes beyond just vaccines.

00:47:44.000 I think that it's news in itself.

00:47:47.000 And I just want to take a moment out to say that there are some very good journalists out there.

00:47:52.000 I think there are some very credible journalists out there.

00:47:56.000 I think there's some actually very good journalists out there that actually want to do the right thing.

00:48:01.000 But I think there's just been this cultural war that we've experienced.

00:48:05.000 And Bobby touched on one particular issue that he's had to deal with.

00:48:09.000 But there's been a myriad of issues over the years that has come down to culture wars.

00:48:15.000 And I think that it has a lot to do with money.

00:48:17.000 And I don't just think that it's the Democratic Party.

00:48:19.000 I mean, pharmaceutical companies, as Bobby mentioned, are one of the leading advertisers in our news space.

00:48:25.000 And I think that it's taken control over a lot of where these journalists direct their particular objectives of two.

00:48:34.000 And I'll just take case in point in New Jersey and New York and in the metropolitan area in itself.

00:48:41.000 But it's just been this cultural war that we've lived in, I would say.

00:48:46.000 And I'm a lot younger than many of you on this call.

00:48:50.000 But in just my modern time, it's just been this cultural war that I've been able to experience from the time that I started politics.

00:48:57.000 So now that we've had some very good journalists, and I still think that they do exist, but I think that because of the money and because of the cultural wars, that they've been, you know, marginalized, in a sense, to where they really can't focus their direct stories or the real truth that is out there on multiple instances.

00:49:19.000 And towards your point, I have covered in the past, there are good members of Congress in both parties who have tried to tackle these issues.

00:49:27.000 They have said in stories that I've done with them, both Democrats and Republicans have been halted by their party leaders from holding certain types of hearings, from calling certain types of witnesses.

00:49:39.000 At the highest level of both political parties, as far as they report to me in Washington, D.C., they are conflicted by this pharmaceutical industry.

00:49:47.000 I mentioned Democrats because I think traditionally it was thought that Republicans kind of were more on the tape for the pharmaceutical industry historically, but there seems to have been a shift where I would say Democrats now equal in terms of them getting out there and on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, I think trying to make certain things happen.

00:50:07.000 I think that it seems to have evened out a bit to me.

00:50:11.000 Any final word on that, Jamel?

00:50:13.000 Yeah, because of the shift.

00:50:14.000 I mean, because of the shift in the political structure that has taken place, when you look at the Democratic-controlled legislatures, when you look at the Democratic-controlled states of governors, when you look at the Democratic-controlled states of our United States, of last few presidents that have been Democrats, it's all about the shift of the political infrastructure.

00:50:33.000 And so when Democrats are majoritally in control of Republican legislatures across the The country or they have the majority of Republican governors.

00:50:43.000 It's about the political shift.

00:50:44.000 And Farmer is going to go and reality is going to go with certain journalists of that political shift.

00:50:51.000 But I think that we have a unique opportunity at this point in time where we could elect someone who is actually going to speak truth to power.

00:50:59.000 And I think that's what we're experiencing.

00:51:01.000 They don't have to like Bobby Kennedy.

00:51:03.000 They don't have to want to support him.

00:51:05.000 The truth of the matter is everything that he's put out, everything that he's said has been backed up by facts.

00:51:11.000 And because of the political shift that has taken place in this country, he's going to get a raw deal.

00:51:18.000 And until we continue to chip away and do the things that we're doing now and the things that you all are doing across your respective careers and all of what you're all doing, we're going to have to deal with this for some time until we break the ice on this particular issue of censorship.

00:51:35.000 But it's going to continue along with the political shift that's in power.

00:51:39.000 Well, there have been some...

00:51:40.000 Go ahead.

00:51:42.000 Cheryl, let me just say one thing to shed a little light on that, because I watched it happen.

00:51:46.000 It used to be that Democrats would not, generally speaking, some would, like if they were from a big farm estate like New Jersey, Democrats would accept pharmaceutical money, but generally speaking, the money was going to the Republican Party.

00:52:00.000 That changed when Obama was pushing through Obamacare.

00:52:04.000 My uncle was part of that.

00:52:05.000 He was still chair of the Senate Committee.

00:52:08.000 They needed to get the pharmaceutical companies on board, and so they made this deal with them that the government wouldn't bargain for pharmaceutical products.

00:52:18.000 So they basically were allowed to charge anything they want.

00:52:21.000 That brought the pharmaceutical companies...

00:52:23.000 On board, they could not pass Obamacare without the pharmaceutical companies.

00:52:28.000 That brought the pharmaceutical companies in on the side of the Democrat, and it suddenly became, this was around 2014, 2015, it suddenly became permissible for Democrats to accept pharmaceutical money.

00:52:40.000 And before that, You know, Democrats generally always had a really hard time raising money because the only people that they could take money from were unions and trial lawyers.

00:52:49.000 They couldn't take it from the NRA. They couldn't take it from the oil industry.

00:52:53.000 They couldn't take it from the chemical industry or the big food processors or anything else.

00:52:58.000 And they couldn't take it from pharma.

00:53:00.000 And yet now they suddenly could take it.

00:53:02.000 And the pharmaceutical company began flooding money into the Democrats.

00:53:06.000 Within a year, the Democrats were taking more money than Republicans from pharma.

00:53:11.000 Then during the 2016 election, Donald Trump said on three occasions that he believed that he knew people, women whose children had gotten autism from vaccines.

00:53:23.000 He said that publicly.

00:53:24.000 And that led Democrats to put that vaccine issue into the same anti-science dumpster as President Trump's climate denial.

00:53:35.000 And so it became suddenly a tribal issue.

00:53:38.000 And part of it was Farmer Mayan, part of it was Donald Trump.

00:53:42.000 And the allergy that Democrats have to Donald Trump that ironically has put the Democratic Party in a position where all of its policies are actually being dictated by Donald Trump.

00:53:54.000 Fascinating.

00:53:55.000 Well, when it comes to what we have focused on tonight, the censorship and so on, I think a few things are more important than that topic.

00:54:02.000 But it's not being treated, as you pointed out, with the urgency that it deserves.

00:54:06.000 And we're going down this...

00:54:07.000 Rapid path at a slippery slope.

00:54:09.000 We can only hope that we are in a transition to a new kind of paradigm where there are ways to get information out that is unfettered and more like the internet.

00:54:20.000 We hoped it would be and more like it was at first.

00:54:23.000 Thanks to all for making this dialogue a priority.

00:54:25.000 Let me touch on that before we go, because I think that it's happening.

00:54:29.000 I think that when you have Fox News and I think that when you have CNN and you have MSNBC, individuals who normally will watch that and they do watch that, they're actually fact-checking those stations themselves.

00:54:43.000 Individuals now that I'm amongst and people that I talk to, even young people, they go beyond the news that they see to just say, well, there's a spin to this. 0.90

00:54:51.000 Like, folks are not stupid, right? 0.85

00:54:53.000 Folks are very intelligent. 0.97

00:54:55.000 They are beginning, and I've seen a trend where when there's a newscast or when there's a news reported, they just don't look at the news that they're watching or they're reading.

00:55:07.000 They actually go more in-depth and try to find the facts themselves.

00:55:11.000 So I think that it is a transitioning, and I want to leave it on that note.

00:55:14.000 Thank you for the opportunity to just chime in on that last question.

00:55:18.000 Absolutely.

00:55:19.000 And thanks to everybody.

00:55:19.000 And thanks to Bobby Kennedy for hosting this important dialogue.

RFK Jr. The Defender - August 31, 2023

Censorship Forum with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi

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