Judging Freedom - 2022 = 1984

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Exposing this Disinformation Governance Board. #Disinformation #1984See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, April 29, 2022. It's about 10 minutes of 2 in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. very much appreciate it. And I welcome and encourage you to do that concerning this insane, immoral, unconstitutional, and probably criminal idea of the Biden administration about a ministry of truth. They're not calling it that, but that's effectually what it is, a misinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security. And a lot of you have asked some very interesting and outrageous questions. I mean, you know my opinion of this. The whole Department of Homeland Security is unconstitutional because the Federal Police Department and the Constitution doesn't authorize the federal government to own a police department. That includes the FBI as well. DHS was the brainchild of the Bush administration. Many of us argued against it at the time.

I'm getting emails this morning from friends and colleagues, a lot of them former colleagues of mine at Fox, saying, hey, Judge, you were right. This is just outrageous. And the powers that the Republican Congress gave to the Republican president, George W. Bush, are now in the hands of a bunch of crazy lefties that are tugging Joe Biden to the left and running the Biden administration. So a lot of you ask questions like, can't the Supreme Court simply invalidate this? No, the Supreme Court can't. The Supreme Court is an appellate court. It only hears appeals from other courts, meaning someone would have to challenge the existence of this Ministry of Truth and would have to get a decision from a federal district court, that's the trial level, and then whoever loses there would have to appeal that to a federal appellate court,

and then whoever loses there would have to appeal that to the U.S. Supreme Court. There are emergency provisions whereby those appeals can happen in a couple of weeks or months. They usually take a couple of years. Can you just sue the government to invalidate this ministry of truth? No, you can't, because the Constitution requires cases and controversies, meaning real adversity between the person suing and the entity being sued. Stated differently, you'd have to have a legal dispute with the Ministry of Truth. They would have to seek to harm you, fine you, or silence you before you'd be in a position to challenge them. Now, that rule is not unique to this craziness that the Biden administration has visited upon us. That's a rule put in the Constitution to restrain judges, to prevent judges from saying,

that's unconstitutional, that's okay, that's no good. Get rid of that. You don't want the judiciary to do that. The judiciary exists to tell us what the law means and what the Constitution means within the confines of a real case or controversy under the Constitution or the federal laws. So, I mean, we're going to have to wait before a case comes down. Somebody asked who defines what disinformation means. Look, the whole concept here is Orwellian and profoundly unconstitutional. The government will call you have heard me say this. I once had a semi-public, because it was in a restaurant and people were listening, dispute with my dear late friend Justice Antonin Scalia about whether the government has the freedom of speech. He argued that because the government has to say things like the speed limit is 25 miles an hour, the library closes at nine o'clock, the draft board is located on Main Street, that it has the freedom of speech. I argue that those

are ministerial things that the government is telling us. The government has no freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is a personal individual human right that comes from our humanity. The government has no business expressing an opinion to counter the opinions expressed by individual persons. The government has no right to enter the marketplace of ideas. The government does not have the ability to regulate free speech, to reward speech, to punish speech. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech. Well, suppose the government didn't punish a reward. Suppose the government just punished lists that said, you know, Ron Paul is crazy. Alex Jones is nuts.

AOC is wonderful. Just giving you some examples that are likely to come out of this ministry of truth, this bizarre constitutional monstrosity. Can the government do that? No, the government can't do it. It can't do it for two reasons. One, the government doesn't have the freedom of speech. Only individual human beings do. And two, when the government uses its bully pulpit to counter speech, that will make you think twice or three times before you counter the government. That's called chilling, when government behavior gives you pause before you speak truthfully. And the Supreme Court has ruled that chilling is unconstitutional because it's prohibited by the First Amendment because it's a form of infringing speech. How can we stop this? Well, unfortunately, the Congress has given too much authority to the President of the United States, not to Joe Biden, but to all of his predecessors. And each Congress, when the Congress and the President are of the same party, enhances the President's powers.

Goes back to the Democrats doing it for FDR, and then they did it for Truman. And just for two of the eight years Eisenhower was president, Republicans controlled the Congress. And then the Democrats did it for JFK and LBJ. And then the Republicans did it for Reagan and for George W. and for George H.W. And the Democrats did it for Reagan and for George W. and for George H.W. and the Democrats did it for Barack Obama. The Republicans did it for Donald Trump. And now Joe Biden has inherited all that power. And that power gives him a lot of leeway to set up these monstrous boards like the Board of Disinformation. I don't even know if I have the name right. I prefer to call it the Ministry of Truth. And it gives him money to spend on it so he can hire this crackpot whose professional life has

been spent trying to suppress opinions that she disagrees with and put her the head of the Ministry of Truth. Now, before you lose sleep over this, this entity, this Ministry of Truth, because it's not established in law, it's just some gaggle of people in the Department of Homeland Security. They can do no more than express their opinion. They can't write rules. They can't prosecute people. You can challenge them. You can disagree with them.

You can say whatever the hell you want about them. This is just some left-wing, bizarre, grotesque hit job intended to diminish the influence of Elon Musk as he opens up Twitter to a real bulletin board of free speech. What can we do about it? It would take a vote of Congress to shut this thing down, and that's not going to happen because old Joe would veto that. And then you'd need two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate to overrule the veto. Freedom of Information Act lawsuits so I know exactly what they have in their minutes of their meetings and their emails and their texts and every nickel they've spent. The other thing we can do is ignore them because they don't have any power at all. They're aggravating me, they're aggravating you, and they will continue to aggravate, but that's about all they can do to us. All innocuous speech is absolutely protected.

And all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge it. That's not me. That's the Supreme Court of the United States in a case called Brandenburg v. Ohio. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of evaluating speech. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to encourage open, wide, robust, even caustic speech about the policies and the personnel of the government. That's not me. That's the Supreme Court of the United States in a famous case called New York Times against Sullivan look in the long run freedom prevails

I just don't want that run to be too long Judge Napolitano, judging freedom