Judging Freedom - Finger pointing in the Nashville killings _ IRS House Call on Matt Taibbi_

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, March 28, 2023. It's about 11.17 in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Here are your hot topics today, ranging from an absurd oral argument at the Supreme Court to the tragedy of what happened in Nashville yesterday. Yesterday, of course, a former student, a 20-year-old transgender person from male to female, though referring, choosing to be called they, arguing two people in the same body, constructed elaborate plans for attacking a fundamentalist Christian private grade school in an upscale neighborhood in Nashville and carried out with the attack. This killer, a 28-year-old person, male to female, as I said, slaughtered three innocent little kids,

nine years old. A school security guard, a substitute teacher, and the headmistress, the head of school, all were murdered. The police were called, the person entered the school at 9.56 in the morning with two rifles and a handgun. The police were called at 10.13. At 10.27, the police had killed the killer who was in the process of attempting to kill other people in the school. The police behaved, in my view, responsibly, professionally, courageously, and promptly. What causes something like this to happen? Some sort of a manifesto was left by this killer. The manifesto has not yet been published.

We don't know if it has to do with the school, with society, or with the deranged brain of the killer. We do know that the killer was a graduate of the school, so expect a lot of finger pointing. The left will be finger pointing at the school. So expect a lot of finger pointing. The left will be finger pointing at the school because it's a fundamentalist Christian school, which excludes from its curricula the nonsense that public schools are teaching today about how easy it is to change your gender and how you have all these choices of lifestyle, rather than teaching the basic

Judeo-Christian morality, which people my age were taught when we were in government schools. This private school opts for the basic Judeo-Christian morality, but expect the left to point fingers at the school for its deficient acceptance of those who are different. Guess what? It's a private school. They can teach what they want and they can accept whom they want. My hat is off to them for teaching basic Judeo-Christian values that there is right and there is wrong in the world. Secondly, expect finger pointing at those who legally own guns. The left will say, with Joe Biden as their cheerleader, we need to get rid of guns. We need to get rid of assault weapons. We need to get rid of high-powered rifles. Last

time I checked, these things didn't pull their own triggers. They didn't make their own way to the school. Any more than a steak knife, which kills more people than guns, made its own way to the victim of the person in whose hands it was criminally used. Any more than an automobile didn't make its own way to the crash site where it killed innocents. All of these are instruments that have a good purpose to them. A gun is used for self-defense. A steak knife is used to eat food. An automobile is used to get us from point A to point B. All are valuable pieces of equipment, but in the hands of monsters, they can be dangerous. Our job is to find the monsters among us, not to prevent people from using these pieces of equipment who would do so lawfully. So Joe Biden's saying we have to get rid of assault weapons.

What's an assault weapon, Mr. President? If you look at the federal definition of an assault weapon, it has a stock, a grip underneath that a right-handed person can use their left hand to hold with when the gun is in the left armpit or vice versa, a left-handed person can use when the gun is in the right armpit. That stock makes the gun more accurate, more precise for using for self-defense. Anybody who thinks that a killer is going to obey gun laws is crazy. A killer is intent on killing and only stops when the killer is disabled or terrified. Some killers have stopped when they're terrified. When they see massive firepower confronting them, they drop the gun. Some are crazy enough not to stop, in which case it is the duty of massive firepower

to use its massive firepower on that killer to stop him from killing others. Now, the third finger pointing is going to be at the LGBTQ community of which the killer was apparently a member. Well, we don't blame communities in America. We don't blame people who have immutable or brought upon themselves characteristics of sexual attraction and gender identification because of what one person did. There are deranged people in every community in the United States, in every community in the world. And as much as I argue against criticizing the Christian school for its teaching, criticizing those who lawfully own guns for their exercise of their Second Amendment right. I will criticize those on the right who will criticize the LGBTQ community because of what one member of the community did.

We're not Nazis. We don't criticize or punish a community because of what one person did. This was a deranged, sick individual. The police had no choice but to kill this individual, not knowledgeable of the individual's gender identity, which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this. Crazy killers come in every form and every stripe, in every gender, in every sexual orientation, and in every identity. Because they are killers, they will only stop when confronted with superior firepower. All right. About a month ago, when Elon Musk was revealing the emails, the internal emails about Twitter and revealing that Twitter during the 2020 presidential election campaign was using its platform to make things look good for Joe Biden and bad for Donald Trump. Absolutely lawful to do. It was a private bulletin board. They can do it. They can suppress my thoughts and they can advance the thoughts of AOC or anybody who is likely to disagree with me because it's a private bulletin board. They can do it.

They denied that they were doing it. That tells you something about their culture. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he revealed all this stuff. And it put Twitter in a very bad light. Two weeks ago, which is three months after he bought Twitter, he said it's now worth half of what he paid for it. He paid $44 billion, whether it be in cash. He now says it's worth between $20 and $22 billion. Did he make it worth less by revealing the truth? Who knows? But the truth hurt Twitter. How did he reveal this information? He revealed it through a courageous reporter that a lot of us in the business know and respect named Matt Taibbi.

Matt Taibbi, who has views that progressives like and views that libertarians like and views that coalesce between the two, is a very courageous guy and a gifted reporter. Elon Musk gave these tweets to Matt Taibbi, who revealed them, analyzed them, and quoted them. The tweets also revealed not only that Twitter was doing this, but that it was doing this at the behest of certain parts of the government. Now, Donald Trump was the president of the United States when this was happening. Donald Trump was the chief executive officer of the executive branch of the federal government. People who indirectly and theoretically worked for Donald Trump were undermining him. We know that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI was getting favors out of Twitter by getting Twitter to suppress ideas that DHS and FBI hated or feared and push ideas that DHS or FBI liked. But the unthinkable happened to Matt Taibbi. Matt, who says he files his taxes on time and files his taxes on the advice of an accountant, received an unannounced visit by an IRS agent asking about his taxes from 2018. Filed four years ago, accepted as far as he knew by the IRS.

The IRS owes Matt money from 2018. He doesn't owe the government any money. Why would the government be sending an IRS agent unannounced, which they never do. IRS agents always tell you they're going to visit you. Why would the government be sending an IRS agent unannounced to Matt Taibbi's home in the very days and weeks when he was testifying before Congress and revealing what Elon Musk had told him? You can form your own conclusions there. I mean, this goes all the way back to LBJ using, and Richard Nixon using the IRS, FDR used the IRS to taunt his political adversaries. Apparently, some political people in the IRS are doing that now. It's reprehensible. It shouldn't happen. It should be exposed. And I challenge the Republicans in Congress to find out who did this, who sent them

there, why they did it. The IRS does not come calling when the federal government owes you money. Why did the IRS come calling to Matt Taibbi's home? I hope we find out. So now we find out that the Department of State has what's called a dissent cable. This used to be cables, used to be old-fashioned telegrams, where if you worked for the Department of State anywhere in the world and you wanted to dissent from American foreign policy, you could send these cables to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State presumably would read them. These are cables from agents in the field, from employees at embassies, from ambassadors, and from high-ranking members of the Department of State.

I didn't know that this existed. Apparently, it's existed in the State Department since 1971. That's the Nixon presidency. That's the height of the Vietnam War, when apparently officials of the State Department were sending cables to the Secretary of State saying, this war is going badly. Don't believe the generals. This is wrong. We're losing. We're killing innocents. We ought to get the hell out. Basically what the Pentagon Papers revealed when Daniel Ellsberg stole them, God bless his courageous soul, and gave them to the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Supreme Court said you can publish them because the public has the right to know. Why am I bringing this up now? Because the House Foreign Affairs Committee

discovered cables sent to the Secretary of State warning that a summary departure from Afghanistan would be disaster. Summary meaning quick, fast, unannounced. Do you remember that disaster? Do you remember the lives that were lost? Do you remember the equipment that was left behind? Do you remember the humiliation visited upon the United States? Yes, you probably do. Now we know that the State Department and the Defense Department

were warned about this. So the Republicans in Congress want to know who did the warning, who was smart enough to know about this, and more importantly, who ignored the warning. Of course, the State Department is saying these are secret, confidential, classified materials, and we can't reveal them. Baloney. State Department doesn't want to be humiliated. It's more important that the public know what the government ignored than that the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense be insulated from embarrassment. We have a right to know who sent these cables and what they said. On and on and on, all of this goes. We left Afghanistan in six days.

When the Russians left Afghanistan, it took them eight months. They didn't leave anything behind. They didn't leave anyone behind. They didn't leave their integrity behind like we did. Finally, yesterday, there was an oral argument in the Supreme Court. It's times like this that I wish I were there, either on the court or participating in the oral argument. So here's what happened. You may be familiar with this very famous plaintiff's class action against Chevron in behalf of the landowners of the Amazon. No, not Amazon where we buy things from, the Amazon River in Brazil. Right. It's a $10 billion lawsuit that the plaintiffs won showing that Chevron polluted the earth in Amazon. Actually, the lawsuits against Texaco, which was bought by Chevron. Chevron paid the $10 billion and then came to the conclusion that the

lawsuit was obtained under fraudulent circumstances. So it filed a lawsuit against the lawyer who got the $10 billion. And a judge ordered that lawyer, ordered his bank accounts frozen, and ordered him to tell Chevron where the bank accounts are. In that order, he also ordered that lawyer to surrender his mobile devices. The lawyer declined to surrender his mobile devices, so the judge held the lawyer in contempt follow me federal judge holds lawyer in contempt and then orders the united states attorney for the southern district of new york that's manhattan where the judge sits to prosecute the lawyer for contempt the the government decides it's not worth prosecuting your honor we respectfully decline your offer to prosecute this lawyer. And then the judge does the unthinkable, but it follows a statute that

lets him do it. He appoints a private lawyer to prosecute this lawyer, and he presides at the trial. So he ordered the prosecution, he designated the prosecutor, and he's the judge at the trial. Can you guess what happened? The lawyer was convicted of contempt. He appealed that conviction to the Court of Appeals, which upheld it by a vote of two to one. He appealed that to the Supreme Court of the United States, which yesterday decided not to hear the case. However, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the member of the court most faithful to the Constitution and with strong libertarian values, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, no comment on his intellect, but he joined with Justice Gorsuch on this, who said, it is unheard of in America for a judge to order a person prosecuted and then to be the judge in the prosecution.

Judges can no more prosecute people than prosecutors can become judges in the cases of those they're prosecuting. But that's exactly what happened here. This judge, I know him. He's a friend. He's a highly regarded, well-respected judge. He's the judge in one of Trump's cases, in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, where she says he raped her and he says he didn't do it.

And then she says he defamed her and he said it wasn't defamation, it was the truth. Whatever that is, it's going to be tried in April before this judge who decided he was going to become judge, jury, and prosecutor, literally in this appellate case. And the Supreme Court decided 7-2, it's not going to hear the case. These are the cases the court should hear. The statute is unconstitutional. Judges need to stay in their lane. They can't be prosecutors as well as judges. The job of judges is to decide what the law means and what the Constitution means and to arbitrate these disputes to preside at trials between the government and a defendant, or between a plaintiff and a defendant, but not, not, never to take sides.

That's what happened here. More as we get it. No indictment of Donald Trump today, Tuesday, but probably before the week is out. Judge Napolitano, you like this? Like and subscribe. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.