Judging Freedom - Big Tech - No Holds Barred_

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

#bigtech #Elon #twitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, November 21st, 2022. It's a little after three o'clock in the afternoon here in the East Coast of the United States. My guest today is no stranger to the great libertarian audience.

Tom Woods is not only the host of the wildly popular Tom Woods Show, he's not only a lifelong friend of your humble host of Judging Freedom, he's also one of the smartest people I know. Tom, it's always a pleasure. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Thank you, Judge. You and I have talked many times about many things recently about the dangers of the relationship between government agents and big tech, so that when big tech is censoring somebody as a favor to the government, it appears as though this is big tech, private bulletin boards controlling their own property. We all know that the First Amendment only restrains the government. It doesn't restrain private property owners. So if Twitter kicks off Donald

Trump or Alex Jones or Tom Woods or Andrew Napolitano, it will say we can kick off whoever we want. We're not the government. But of course, when you dig deeper, as you have done, you find the sinister hand of the government and its left-wing billionaire allies behind this. Explain what you and I have ranted about publicly and to each other. Well, as you say, everybody would understand if the federal government said we are going to silence such and such person, or we're going to prevent such and such perspectives from being heard, that that would be a First Amendment violation. Everybody would see that. But we're now learning, as I suppose should have been obvious by now, but thanks to some

investigative reporting by The Intercept, we're now learning that the federal government, in fact, went to big tech repeatedly and said, we don't like this, we don't like that, we don't like this person having his voice able to be heard. And so then Twitter would remove such and such person. And so it seems as if it should be pretty much equivalent if the federal government does that completely on its own, or if it in effect coerces or strongly urges, let's say, a private actor to do the same, well, it seems like tomato, tomato. It seems like the same kind of thing. If it's using a private agency to do what if it itself did would be a violation of the First Amendment, that seems pretty darn close to a violation of the First Amendment. And we do know that it was

naming specific names. For example, Alex Berenson, who was very well known for being skeptical of the lockdowns and the various COVID restrictions, he was mentioned by name as somebody they wanted out of there, and they got him out of there. Now, he was reinstated because he sued. But this all revolves around a case being brought by the state attorney general of Missouri. And I think the state attorney general of Louisiana may also have joined in. Where apparently they've been told that they may, in fact, depose Dr. Fauci and anybody in the public health establishment they choose on these topics. So this doctrine, which is an old doctrine of when a private actor is doing the government's dirty work or the government's handiwork, as the case may be, is called state action. And it allows someone aggrieved by this to ask the court to impose the First Amendment restrictions that are imposed on the government on the private actor.

So if Twitter blocks Alex Berenson or Donald Trump because some federal bureaucrat asked Twitter or threatened Twitter to do it, I'm just picking Twitter as an example here, then Twitter is engaged in state action. It's an agent of the state, here the federal government, and therefore the First Amendment would apply to it. This is extremely dangerous for Twitter or for any big tech entity that is complying with these threats. And I got to tell you, I have been very critical of state attorneys general ganging up on private business. I thought they just held up the tobacco industry, which paid billions in ransom for them to go away. But this is a legitimate lawsuit intended to vindicate the First Amendment rights of people who have

surreptitiously been harmed by the government coercing and promising big tech to do its bidding. And we wouldn't have known about this, but for a courageous federal judge, excuse my froggy voice, but for a courageous federal judge who's permitting these state attorneys general to take the depositions that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. So it's going to be very interesting to see how it unfolds. I'm surprised that we have people in public life with the guts to go forward with something like this. But, and of course, it's the worst possible combination, the federal government and a private entity, because the federal government

is good at being oppressive and the private entity is efficient at doing things, you know, at least if it's just the federal government, they're clumsy. And if they had to divide some big database to pick out the offensive statements, it would take them 20 years.

But I'm sure Twitter's really good at it, you know, so I don't want them partnering with Twitter against me. And especially when the claim is that the people being targeted in many cases are supposed to be spreading quote unquote disinformation. So we'll leave aside the hate speech stuff and all that's another conversation. But disinformation, well, disinformation according to whom? Do I want the Democratic Party in effect in charge of telling me what's true and what's not, especially in a very fluid situation like COVID where yesterday's misinformation is today's orthodoxy. So today, Elon Musk announced that he's bringing back Donald Trump on Twitter, but not Alex Jones. And when challenged by this from some lefties said, well, Alex Jones used the death of children to enhance his wealth. And that's just a no brainer for me. I don't know if you saw the piece that our wonderful, delightful, irrepressible friend Walter Block wrote on lewrockwell.com last week called

Alex Jones's right to express his mind. So suppose I want to claim that George Washington is still the president of the United States. That's my cockamamie opinion. Is Elon Musk going to kick me off air because he doesn't like that? Or suppose I want to express an opinion that the little sisters of the poor should be subject to the Affordable Care Act. I'm picking on little nuns. Is he going to kick me off of Twitter because of that? Where will this stop, Elon Musk? Yeah, it's interesting that he's willing to take the slings and arrows when it comes to Trump. Although I think he handled that brilliantly by having a poll and just saying, look, I'll leave it up to you people. And then he can say, well, hey, I'm washing my hands of this. This is what the people called for. But with Alex Jones and this claim, look, I don't know exactly what he said, but my understanding is that he cast doubt on those events.

He did. He did. And then he recanted. He lost. And the media rejected his recantation. Yeah. So, like, there's nothing, what was it that he was supposed to do?

I did a pretty good episode of the Tom Wood Show with Robert Barnes going through the ins and outs of that particular case. And then since then, we've heard people saying, well, it's possible he could actually wind up having to pay. And it was some crazy figure like $2.75 trillion, which is like more than many, many countries of the world produce in a year of course you know so i mean so at that point

even if i could accept that some people were behaving from a position of goodwill and they just thought that he had gone beyond what was decent and they just didn't like him you know i i fair enough maybe we can accept that some people feel that way but to be holding over his head that kind of punishment when he's already you know had to pay like a billion dollars which is way more than anybody else involved in any of this has had has had to pay and and when something like 80 million of those dollars is going or 90 million million is going to one of the FBI agents who worked the case, who didn't know anybody involved, knew none of the children or the parents or whatever,

then I think we're going beyond just a matter of we have to punish Alex Jones. I think it's more we have to punish Alex Jones and simultaneously broadcast to the world that if we consider you to be sufficiently, you know, unrespectable then the this can happen to you basically i i think it's meant to have a chilling effect i don't think that's an unfortunate side effect i don't know if you saw the uh connecticut supreme court opinion affirming the trial court, but the trial court really did George Orwell one better. She simply said, because what you said is so outrageous, it's not an opinion, it's a non-opinion,

and therefore it's not protected by the First Amendment. So Connecticut is the only state in the union that has an Alex Jones rule. If the court calls your opinion a non-opinion, it's no longer protected. And now Elon Musk is going along with that. And again, it goes right back to that same problem of who gets to decide what's misinformation. Obviously, it's whatever's politically convenient for them. Right. It should be the listener gets to decide. The listener decides what to listen to, what to accept, what to reject, and what to challenge. I wonder if big tech is not only being rewarded by the feds, but being threatened by the feds. If you don't do our bidding, we'll introduce legislation which will remove your immunity from litigation,

from liability for what you post. I don't consider that to be out of bounds as a speculation at all. I was very surprised when Zuckerberg, I guess on Joe Rogan, if I'm remembering the clip right, just openly said, yeah, the FBI came to us and said we're going to need you to put a lid on x and y and so we do various things like we we lower things in the news feed and whatever but he just openly talked about it i would have thought he'd keep quiet about that but so we we know now that these things are going on and for some of us who actually have principles this is a problem. Like we want to be against it.

And I would be saying this if it were, you know, somebody who had some other opinion that the federal government was, uh, was targeting and targeting individuals by names. This is not the country we're supposed to be living in. So I usually don't read what, um, my reader, um, my viewers say in their emails, but you'll get a chuckle out of this one. Someone said, is the judge interviewing Bob Murphy? Because of all the time you spend

with him, Tom. No, this is Tom Woods, Bob Murphy. It's the great economist who is a mutual friend of ours. This is very dangerous. This is fascism. This is private ownership and government control. And you know from your study of history, your PhD is in history, Tom,

the insidious nature of the government's tentacles in a private entity. They don't stop. No, they don't. And I guess for some reason, it's particularly hard for me to get over the specific application of this power during the COVID years. Because of course, in the abstract, I'm against the government exercising this power. But at that particular moment, people might say, well, it was all very uncertain. That's exactly why you need to have open discussion was because things were very uncertain and different countries were having different experiences and different countries

were trying different things. And sometimes different countries had different definitions of what it meant to, to constitute a COVID death. So sometimes we're comparing apples and oranges, where we're looking at statistics from one country to another. We needed to have a robust conversation. And when you look at some of the people who were censored, these are not like nobodies with a half a degree from Podunk University. I mean, the kinds of people who found themselves throttled in what they wanted to say were people with elite credentials, who had sometimes been friends with Fauci, in some cases, or Francis Collins. And the fact that it was used in this way, this was the worst possible time for there to be a lid put on open discussion, the worst.

So this litigation in New Orleans, which is just at the very beginning of the litigation, Tom, who knows where it will end? It could end up with a tremendous expose of the Biden Department of Homeland Security, which has become the most totalitarian version of that department since it was begun in the George W. Bush years, being held accountable financially for the harm caused to people who were silenced, and Twitter and the other big tech people being held financially accountable as well. And the expose of this fascist relationship between the private entity, uh, and the government, I'll give you the last word because my voice is about to go. Okay. Well, several months ago, uh, Rand Paul had, uh, I love watching Rand Paul grill government officials.

And he had the secretary of the department of Homeland security and he grilled him. He said, all right, you want to have a disinformation governance board, which they've ostensibly abandoned since, since then. He says, tell me, do you think the Steele dossier was misinformation? Do you, you know, tell me what would be considered misinformation? And then he went down and said, he's trying to say, under what circumstances would I have my speech restricted? Or do you think I should beels that are spreading the idea that at some of our vaccination sites, you shouldn't go there because there's fentanyl in the vaccines. And Rand said, how many Americans are stupid enough to believe cartels telling them there's fentanyl in the vaccine? Yeah, then go ahead. Put a notice on the Department of Homeland Security website.

Right, right, right. But I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about you preventing us from having conversations that adults need to have. The government always expands and the government hates liberty. And this is the tip of an ugly spear. And I'm deeply gratified that these two state attorneys general and this courageous federal judge are about to expose it all. Tom Woods, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Judge. My pleasure. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.