RFK Jr. The Defender - Jailing Dissonance with Willem Engel

In this episode of Freedom Again, I speak with William Engel, who has been released from prison twice in the Netherlands. He is one of the most prominent anti-police activists in the country and has been in prison twice before. He has a degree in biopharmacy and analytical chemistry, and is on a number of the calls that I am on regularly with European activists and lawyers. His advocacy has been extraordinary, and he has been a frequent guest on calls I also make regularly with other European activists. In this episode, we talk about how he was arrested at the voting booth, and how he fought for the right to freedom of speech. He talks about the Dutch government's censorship of free speech, and the court case against him. He also talks about his experience in prison and the challenges he has faced in the past, and what he is doing to fight for the future of Dutch activists and human rights activists everywhere. I hope that you enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to do what you can to speak out in support of human rights and human dignity and freedom. Thank you so much to William for his courage and courage in fighting for the fight for human dignity, freedom, and for standing up for what matters. I am so grateful for your support and fighting for human rights everywhere. Thank you for being a voice for the voiceless and for fighting for justice and freedom for all of us. - freedom is possible, not only for you, but also for everyone who is fighting for us all! - thank you for listening and supporting us, and I hope you continue to do so much more of what matters to us in the coming days and weeks and months and years and years, and years to come! - we will see you in the next few years. . Peace, love, and keep up the fight, and thank you, and God bless you all, bye - Your continued support, bye, bye bye! - Alyssa, - P.S. - Pravin, P.A. P.E. - EJ, JUICY, SONGS, EJ & P.M. - A.O. (and P.B. - D.V. (A. ( ) ( ) - JUY ( ) and P. (S. (JUY) ( ) ( ) . , EJ ( ) ? ( ) ( )

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, my guest today is William Engel, who has just been released from prison.

00:00:05.000 Welcome to freedom again, William.

00:00:07.000 William is one of the most high-profile European activists.

00:00:12.000 He's been in prison twice in the Netherlands.

00:00:15.000 He has a degree in biopharmacy and analytical chemistry.

00:00:21.000 His advocacy has been extraordinary and he You're on a number of the calls that I also am on regularly with European activists and lawyers.

00:00:34.000 You know, I'm really grateful for your leadership.

00:00:36.000 Tell us about how you got arrested when you were at the voting booth, right?

00:00:42.000 Exactly.

00:00:42.000 So it was quite an event.

00:00:46.000 A few weeks ago, after casting my vote, a few, what I thought was thugs, So I was very surprised because there is a case, but that's from 2020.

00:01:05.000 And they would bring it in front of court on the 30th of March.

00:01:10.000 And this first arrest was on the 16th of March.

00:01:14.000 So I was surprised.

00:01:15.000 I thought, well, the court case is still coming up.

00:01:17.000 But this was a new case.

00:01:18.000 And they brought me in.

00:01:20.000 There was no real reason to.

00:01:22.000 They could have called me.

00:01:23.000 I could have gone to the police station.

00:01:25.000 But I think they wanted to give a message to other activists and other public journalists that if you keep speaking out, then we will silence you.

00:01:36.000 So I was in prison for two weeks.

00:01:39.000 They released me on the special condition of That I could not post anything on social media.

00:01:48.000 Now, I got out.

00:01:49.000 I didn't do anything on social media, but I gave a few interviews.

00:01:53.000 And because of those interviews, on my next trip to a demonstration, I was arrested again, full of the highway, because I was visible on social media.

00:02:04.000 This swayed the public opinion so much that even the mainstream media cried out about this suppression of the freedom of speech.

00:02:13.000 A few days later, I was released and those restrictions were lifted.

00:02:17.000 So that was a huge win in the public debate for free speech.

00:02:22.000 In our country, we have the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech to American citizens.

00:02:28.000 We don't really have it anymore in our country, but at least we have it on paper.

00:02:33.000 What is the guarantee in the Netherlands?

00:02:37.000 Does it come to the European community or is there a constitution?

00:02:41.000 Of course, there is a constitution in Holland as well, but there is also something as the European Treaty of Human Rights, and that actually supersedes the Dutch constitution.

00:02:52.000 To be technical, Article 93 and 94, which say that all these human rights that are in the European Union are above any Dutch law.

00:03:03.000 And then, specifically, Article 10 is the article for the freedom of speech, and that was the article that was invoked in the case with the judges when I was released again.

00:03:16.000 In our country, the freedom of speech and the enforcement of the Constitution is pretty much absolute.

00:03:23.000 There's no exceptions, but the courts have created exceptions.

00:03:28.000 You can't shout and fire In a crowded theatre, you can't incite violence or riot.

00:03:35.000 You can't advocate for pedophilia.

00:03:38.000 So there are some narrow exceptions.

00:03:40.000 Do they have the same thing in the Netherlands?

00:03:42.000 Yes, that's basically in Article 10.2.

00:03:46.000 So that is the restrictions.

00:03:47.000 The first part is about the liberty.

00:03:49.000 So I think it's for public health, for the order, for public safety.

00:03:54.000 These grounds can be a ground to limit the freedom of speech.

00:04:00.000 And that is, of course, the whole idea behind a charge of sedition, that you have called for violence or for people to systematically break the law.

00:04:10.000 But they try to redefine what is incitement.

00:04:15.000 So if I say, let's demonstrate, and then other people, and normally this is the agent provocateurs that start some violence in the demonstration, then they turn it around and they say, well, you organized the demonstration and it got out of hand.

00:04:32.000 So you incited violence.

00:04:35.000 And that is very reminiscent of what Hitler did in his Nazi era when they really changed or reinterpreted the law to do what they wanted. 0.88

00:04:45.000 Did they tell you exactly what the statements that you made were that were actionable?

00:04:53.000 Yes.

00:04:54.000 So there was calling for demonstration after a judge had ruled that it could not carry on because of these COVID restrictions.

00:05:04.000 And we also fought that in court and the judge blatantly lied.

00:05:09.000 So I filed charges against judges quite regularly and I understand that it's Doesn't influence the judges in a positive way.

00:05:19.000 But for me, right is right.

00:05:21.000 So if they break the law, they should be brought for justice as well.

00:05:25.000 So what is the disposition of your case now?

00:05:28.000 You now have two cases against you.

00:05:30.000 That means you have two.

00:05:31.000 Are they criminal trials?

00:05:33.000 Yes, they're criminal trials.

00:05:35.000 And I think the maximum penalty would be five years, but...

00:05:38.000 It's a show trial.

00:05:40.000 It reminds me of the book from Kafka, the trial, or the Dreyfus trials in France.

00:05:47.000 It's a completely constructed case, and when you read through it, you quite easily disseminate and take it apart.

00:05:56.000 So the battle is not whether I have committed a crime, but whether the public prosecutor can fool the judge in that there is evidence of a crime.

00:06:07.000 Whose choice was it to arrest you?

00:06:09.000 Is it the prosecutor?

00:06:11.000 Is it the police?

00:06:12.000 Is it a government official who tells the prosecutor this guy's a prosecutor?

00:06:18.000 So officially it's the public prosecutor which orders the police for an arrest and then has to ask within three days To a judge whether that arrest was lawful and whether the detainee can be detained for a longer period.

00:06:33.000 So in my case it was first two days.

00:06:36.000 Then the judge ruled that I had to be held for 14 more days.

00:06:40.000 Then I was released and they said I broke the conditions.

00:06:44.000 So after four days I was arrested again.

00:06:47.000 I've been in jail for three days and then finally the third judge ruled like this is completely unconstitutional.

00:06:54.000 He has to be released immediately.

00:06:55.000 However, there is still these two court cases.

00:06:59.000 But now I have a few months to prepare and gather all the evidence and show that all these arguments they have cooked up are completely false.

00:07:09.000 So it's mainly about seven tweets and four of the tweets they say they had real life damage in a sense that people were harassed or that there was violence at demonstrations.

00:07:21.000 So do you know which tweets specifically they're going after you for?

00:07:27.000 Yes.

00:07:27.000 So I got the file once I was imprisoned and I went through the file.

00:07:32.000 Of course, my lawyers went through the file as well.

00:07:35.000 And there was a lot of information missing.

00:07:38.000 So the detectives should have picked it up.

00:07:40.000 And we don't know whether they did that intentionally or unintentionally.

00:07:44.000 But it was also some information that was not in the research.

00:07:48.000 But it wasn't a charge.

00:07:50.000 So what we found out is that the district attorney or the public prosecutor actually fabricated evidence, because this is a social media trial.

00:08:00.000 It's only about what I post on social media.

00:08:03.000 Now, they have tried to construct a false narrative and a false context to certain tweets, taking them out of the discussion or just taking a few sentences out of a tweet.

00:08:14.000 So completely distorting the message that it was.

00:08:17.000 But the fabrication of inciting arsony, that was the most egregious one.

00:08:23.000 And it's also very easily debunkable.

00:08:27.000 So what happened, I think three days after my arrest, the public prosecutor was taken off the case already.

00:08:34.000 Now, the Ministry of Justice is still pursuing the case, but they have changed the one who is prosecuting.

00:08:41.000 And it shows to us that now they feel that they have overreached, overstepped, and that the case is very weak and they have to solve it.

00:08:49.000 But once it is before the judge, they cannot pull it back anymore.

00:08:54.000 And is the judge that's going to hear the first of these cases, is he the same judge that you have accused of lying?

00:09:02.000 I don't think so.

00:09:03.000 But, like, they will run out of judges very soon, I would say.

00:09:08.000 Because all these judges and I can understand their difficult position because they are political tools.

00:09:14.000 They're under a lot of pressure.

00:09:16.000 We won two court cases in the last two years.

00:09:20.000 What happened is that our government changed the law within one or two days.

00:09:24.000 Or they filed an appeal case within four hours.

00:09:28.000 These things that really show the complete corruption of the system.

00:09:32.000 That if a citizen asks for a speedy appeal, you get four months.

00:09:37.000 But when the government asks, they get four hours.

00:09:40.000 So we have to be back in court in four hours.

00:09:42.000 And that shows that this system is broken.

00:09:46.000 Sometimes there are judges, but if they rule in favor of us, then they're taken off the case and we'll never see them again.

00:09:53.000 In your interview on The Defender, I read kind of an ambiguous comment that there were 10,000 people who signed a petition against you as a...

00:10:05.000 That seemed very strange.

00:10:06.000 Yeah, so what happened, and that's another charge that we're making against the Ministry of Justice.

00:10:14.000 So what happened is that there was a counter-activist, you could say.

00:10:17.000 He started the petition, and I think in the end he got 22,500 people signing on to the charge that he was making against me for sedition and inciting and misinformation.

00:10:29.000 It was a very crazy charge, actually.

00:10:32.000 But he got so much media attention.

00:10:35.000 He was on every major network and every major newspaper.

00:10:38.000 So they really wanted to get a lot of numbers.

00:10:40.000 And taking that into account, it's actually not that much.

00:10:44.000 What happened is that the Ministry of Justice actually used him as a pawn.

00:10:50.000 He's a stalker of me.

00:10:52.000 I have already filed a few charges against him.

00:10:55.000 If you look at his social media, it's quite obsessed.

00:10:58.000 Three, four tweets a day, just about me.

00:11:01.000 Anything that he tweets is about me.

00:11:04.000 It's very obsessive.

00:11:05.000 But what happened is that the Ministry of Justice shared a lot of research information from my case, As a victim of stalking to the stalker.

00:11:17.000 And that to me is like they have blown their whole case completely.

00:11:22.000 This is probably the reason why they took off the public prosecutor.

00:11:26.000 Tell us the background in the Netherlands.

00:11:29.000 How did the Netherlands handle the pandemic and where are they now?

00:11:33.000 Yeah, so Holland is really following the German course or the German policy, but we're less restrictive.

00:11:41.000 And I think that is mainly due to the difference in culture, but also because I think we pushed back quite effectively.

00:11:48.000 So we stopped the mask mandate outside and we stopped the QR code outside.

00:11:54.000 With only 2G, it's that you have to have either a recovery proof or a vaccination proof.

00:12:00.000 And in Holland, it stayed also the testing.

00:12:03.000 That system has been abolished, not entirely.

00:12:07.000 So there is a relative freedom again.

00:12:10.000 But you see that they want to turn up the restrictions already.

00:12:14.000 And in September, I expect lockdown mentality again.

00:12:19.000 And I understand that there are other leaders in France and other countries that are also being arrested.

00:12:28.000 Yes, and that is a very good point to bring up.

00:12:32.000 This is not a single case, not in my country.

00:12:35.000 I think I'm one of the 20 people that normally go to demonstrations or organize demonstrations and do a video or vlogging event.

00:12:43.000 Specifically, those kind of people are targeted.

00:12:46.000 I've spoken to people from Belgium, from France, from Germany, from the United States, from Canada, from the UK. It is happening all over the world at the same time with the same kind of charges.

00:12:59.000 So this is a protocol run through.

00:13:02.000 This is not coming from a national level, but from an international level.

00:13:05.000 I've been arrested a number of times during civil disobedience protests.

00:13:10.000 In the summer of 2001, I was involved in a lawsuit against the United States Navy for bombing the island of Vieques, and I won the lawsuit.

00:13:23.000 But a local judge who was corrupt refused to enforce my injunction.

00:13:29.000 And I ended up at the request of the mayor of Villegas and a couple of other people doing a civil disobedience.

00:13:36.000 And they put me in jail for 34 days during the summer of 2001 in a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico.

00:13:44.000 People asked me how it was.

00:13:47.000 And I say, honestly, it was one of the better occasions in my life because There was no cell phone.

00:13:54.000 I didn't have to make decisions.

00:13:56.000 I had a lot of books that I had access to.

00:13:59.000 And I got to read books that I hadn't read before.

00:14:03.000 And I've been sitting on my shelf for years.

00:14:05.000 I got to play basketball every day.

00:14:07.000 The food was pretty bad, but I don't mind bad food.

00:14:10.000 It wasn't that bad.

00:14:12.000 I did four days in solitary confinement, which was awful.

00:14:17.000 But the rest of it was, you know, actually pretty tolerable.

00:14:21.000 How was the jail in the Netherlands?

00:14:24.000 Yeah, it's, I think, pretty similar because I can really confirm what you are saying.

00:14:31.000 If you're in a jail, the personnel is very friendly.

00:14:35.000 The detainees are very friendly.

00:14:37.000 I was treated very well.

00:14:39.000 I had a lot of books.

00:14:40.000 I was writing a lot, making charges against all kinds of other violations.

00:14:46.000 I was also put in isolation for, I think, almost seven days.

00:14:50.000 Five of those were so-called quarantine rules.

00:14:54.000 This is just a few weeks ago.

00:14:56.000 They have not lifted those restrictions in jail.

00:15:00.000 People in jail are the weakest group in society from a legal standpoint.

00:15:06.000 So even those rights were abused on my door because I asked for a test that could show that I'm infected, but I am asymptomatic.

00:15:16.000 Well, those tests don't exist, we all know.

00:15:18.000 So they couldn't supply the sufficient test and they put on the form, he refused the test.

00:15:26.000 I have not refused the test.

00:15:27.000 And then they started to treat me as if I was a COVID patient and they printed COVID-19 on my cell door.

00:15:35.000 So I filed actually three new court cases while I was in jail.

00:15:40.000 Did they try to vaccinate you in the jail?

00:15:42.000 No, they did not try to vaccinate me.

00:15:45.000 But they tried to force me to wear a face mask, although I have a medical exemption.

00:15:51.000 And what was really strange and a bit frightening there is that they also restricted the communication with my lawyer.

00:15:58.000 They said, well, if you don't wear a face mask, you cannot talk to your lawyer.

00:16:02.000 And of course, that is also a huge violation of the rights of a detainee.

00:16:07.000 So it was a very interesting period.

00:16:10.000 I don't think the face masks work, even if they work normally, I don't think they work at all if you have facial hair.

00:16:17.000 Probably not.

00:16:18.000 Do you have any good news?

00:16:20.000 Do you see the orthodoxy crumbling, the fortress kind of getting cracks in it?

00:16:25.000 Do you see any in the press or in the institutions?

00:16:30.000 Absolutely.

00:16:31.000 And that's why I'm so skeptical about the war in Ukraine.

00:16:34.000 It came at a moment when the COVID narrative crumbled.

00:16:38.000 People started falling out of the belief, out of the hypnosis, out of the mass formation.

00:16:43.000 And it needed a new direction.

00:16:46.000 And it got a new direction with blaming everything on the war in Ukraine.

00:16:51.000 So now energy prices are going up.

00:16:52.000 There is a huge hyperinflation.

00:16:55.000 The food prices and the food scarcity is there.

00:16:59.000 And then in the autumn, we switch back to the narrative of COVID. That's my expectation.

00:17:04.000 And what's going to happen to you?

00:17:06.000 Well, because we got so much public support, I received 10,000 physical letters in prison.

00:17:14.000 The mail division of the prison couldn't cope.

00:17:17.000 They had four people working around the clock to go through the mail because it has to be searched, all the mail you receive in prison.

00:17:24.000 And I think that actually surprised them.

00:17:27.000 There was so much attention in the media and so much outcry, public outcry, is that they had to release me.

00:17:34.000 And that shows also the way forward.

00:17:37.000 If we think about defense, we have to think about each other to form huge groups that can support each other when something goes wrong.

00:17:45.000 Is there anything else we should talk about?

00:17:47.000 We made a really huge win with that principled decision of the judge throwing the restrictions out just on the principle of freedom of speech.

00:17:56.000 William, how can people support and follow you?

00:18:00.000 Well, we have a media website.

00:18:02.000 It's called viruswarheid.nl.

00:18:04.000 It means virus truth.

00:18:05.000 And there we have our news articles.

00:18:07.000 We have the links to all the legal cases, to all the freedom of information requests, to all the guerrilla marketing poster actions, the demonstrations, etc.

00:18:18.000 And of course, there's also a button where you can donate for the causes, because we believe in four pillars.

00:18:25.000 The four pillars being filing court cases, informing the public, organizing demonstrations.

00:18:31.000 And the last one that's not talked about enough is It's trying to get people to autonomy.

00:18:37.000 Once they start caring for themselves, that's where we can start the resistance.

00:18:42.000 William Engel, thank you so much for your leadership, for your courage and for joining us on the podcast.

RFK Jr. The Defender - April 14, 2022

Jailing Dissonance with Willem Engel

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