Judging Freedom - LIVE: Milan, Italy - Taking Rights Seriously- Judge Napolitano for the Bruno Leoni Institute

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

LIVE: Milan, Italy - Taking Rights Seriously- Judge Napolitano for the Bruno Leoni InstituteSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Andrea Napolitano, il cognome che tradisce l'ascendenza brandeburghese, ha studiato a Princeton e alla University of Notre Dame Law School. Quella vaga relazione di carattere territoriale che si respira appunto dal suo cognome. In questa veste è stato negli anni, ed è una delle voci più ascoltate degli Stati Uniti e dunque del mondo, che abbia scelto di portare la stessa croce che portiamo noi all'Istituto Bruno Leoni, cioè quella di idee liberali che fanno perno sulla rigida e rigorosa limitazione dei poteri pubblici. Napolitano è oggi quello che si definisce in altre sfere e per altro genere di contenuti un creator,

cioè ha un canale YouTube, un podcast di grandissimo successo, Judging Freedom, con milioni di visualizzazioni a settimana. Ma è anche un giurista raffinato, un pensatore originale, ha scritto libri sia di grande successo, rivolti a una audience più popolare, che anche di recente un trattato, un trattato vero e proprio che ha per tema gli echi di lungo periodo del giusnaturalismo nella giurisprudenza statunitense. Questo trattato si intitola Freedoms Anchor, l'ancora della libertà. Anche il titolo è significativo.

Nelle scorse settimane è stato ripubblicato in una nuova edizione italiana, in una nuova traduzione italiana, una semi nuova traduzione italiana, il libro principale, quello più noto di Bruno Leoni, cioè Freedom and Law, in italiano prima la libertà e la legge e ora la libertà e il diritto. Nelle primissime pagine di quel libro, nella premessa, Leoni dice qualcosa che per le persone in questa sala è chiaro ma non è detto che lo sia per molte altre cioè la libertà è un concetto giuridico ora io non voglio avventurarmi su sentieri impervi e che vanno affrontati con l'adeguata strazione, ma è difficilmente discutibile l'idea che un diritto che è qualcosa di diverso e qualcosa di più del diritto che è scritto, che è forgiato dai parlamenti, sia una delle ancore che hanno consentito l'emergere della libertà nella storia e non a caso forse è un ancora che è stata

particolarmente salda in quei contesti in quei mari nei quali questa libertà forse è stata un po più solida nel corso del tempo ora di come sia invece purtroppo in anni recenti un po' dappertutto scarrocciata la nave della libertà, parlerà Andrew che ha sc che ascrivibile alla tradizione libertaria e che però in quel libro, che parte di una fase molto feconda di riflessione negli Stati Uniti sui fondamenti dell'ordine politico e dell'ordine giuridico, in quel libro comunque Dworkin ragiona sui diritti come vincoli al potere pubblico e specialmente come vincoli al potere delle maggioranze. Ora per me è un grande piacere dare il benvenuto questa sera al giudice napolitano ed è particolarmente un piacere dargli il benvenuto per tenere l'edizione di quest'anno di questa serie di conferenze che si chiama Discorso Bruno Leoni e che ha avuto un po' come quasi tutto nella nostra vita una lunga interruzione pandemica e post pandemica, ma che in passato è stato già tenuto da alcuni insigni giuristi statunitensi, quali Frank Easterbrook e l'indimenticabile Nino Scalia. I would be lying if I told you I understood what he said. I recognized my name and I recognized freedom a few times and I recognized Scalia at the end. But thank you for that introduction. Whatever it is you said about me, how can you live up to an introduction when you couldn't understand it?

Once I was giving some stand-up comedy in new york city and as i walked into the theater a lady stopped me in the street she said judge napolitano judge napolitano i heard you were dead how do you answer that i said madam i'm sorry to disappoint you i hope i don't disappoint you tonight and and I'm very happy to be here. I'm also happy for all of my friends at Judging Freedom that are watching this live stream on that YouTube channel that I'm fortunate enough and happy enough to operate. I'm deeply grateful for Professor Mangiardi. I'm grateful for Professor Dan Klein of the Scalia Law School of George Mason University who introduced Professor Mangiardi and me.

I'm grateful to be in the presence of the great Professor Luigi Marco Bassani. Don't let that Italian name fool you. He's from Chicago. He's as American as apple pie, but a brilliant Jeffersonian scholar whose works I was pleased to read and with which I can happily resonate. So the purpose of my talk tonight is to demonstrate to you the existence of natural human rights, irrespective of the government and irrespective of the geography. I will argue that our rights come from our humanity, whether you believe that we are creatures of God the Father, as I do.

I'm an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Latin mass attending Francis skeptic Roman Catholic, or whether you believe we are the highest rational beings on the planet who developed by natural selection. Either way, you can understand that by the exercise of human reason, we can discover what our rights are. And by the exercise of those rights and by reason, we can achieve the truth. We can discover the truth in spite of the government, which often has its own version of the truth. In America, it doesn't matter which political party controls the government. Its impulses to aggrandize power and to suppress liberty are the same. What is this liberty? Well, the world is filled with truisms, statements of fact that need not be proven. Two plus two equals four. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If this was an issue in a courtroom, you wouldn't have to bring

in the mathematician to prove that 2 plus 2 equals 4, or an astronomer to demonstrate that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, because we all know these things. They are not true because we believe them. They are true essentially in themselves. Well, if there is a truth essential to itself outside of our beliefs, there is a law that dictates these truths outside of our beliefs. Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas called this the natural law. It is the order of things in nature, and from the natural law we can derive the concept of natural rights,

hence the title of my lecture, Taking Rights Seriously. These examples of truisms are many, but the universal truth is that these truths are knowable by the exercise of reason. One of the dark lessons of history is that when a government wants to kill people, it first dehumanizes them because it is necessary for the government to justify its killing by taking away their rights. Oh they're not humans, they're slaves, they're subhumans. Oh that's just a blob in the womb that's not a person. If you can demonize the individual or if you can take away the person's rights, at least in the public mind, it's easier to get rid of the person or the group to which the person belongs.

That's essentially why natural rights are so important. A right is a claim, an indefeasible, inassailable, undefeatable claim against the whole world that you always have with you by virtue of your humanity. Your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to travel as you wish, to read what you want, to publish what you say, to associate with whomever you choose. These are natural rights that come from our humanity. They don't come from the government. The great proponent of natural rights in American history, of which Professor Bassani is one of the foremost students

in the world, is Thomas Jefferson, who articulated this in the Declaration of Independence. If you'll put up slide number one, please. The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence should come up here in a second. Slide number one. Here we go. Now, the opening lines were written intentionally in order to grab the attention of the listener. The listener were average folks, many of whom were not even literate, in town squares and in pubs in the 13 colonies in America in 1776, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which, read this with me silently, the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them. Jefferson did not appeal to the British Parliament. He did not appeal to the British king. He did not appeal to the British tradition.

He didn't even appeal to his own previous writings about the rights of man. He appealed to nature and nature's God. And in the second paragraph, the most famous of them, we hold these truths to be self-evident, a truism, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator. And the original, the letter C in creator is in the uppercase, it's capitalized, with certain unalienable rights, inseparable from humanity. And among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This is the sheet anchor of American liberty, and it is, in my view, and I know Professor Bassani, the cap is on the water so I didn't make a mess, and I know Professor Bassani agrees with me, arguably the greatest and most succinct expression of the concept of natural rights written in the English language. It's very important to know that this was adopted unanimously by the Congress such as it was at the time, the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia. It's also important to know that though Jefferson wrote the original draft of this, his ego was bruised because there was a committee of five that revised it. And then the Continental Congress got in a room and they closed the shades or the shutters on the window and they locked the

doors and they revised it in a group and they had arguments and they shouted to each other, what about this? What about that? And Jefferson's ears were just singed as this was going on. But the essence of the work is his, and we know from Professor Pauline Mayer, who's the leading scholar on this, even though she profoundly misunderstood Jefferson, what she called him overrated. How can you call somebody overrated who wrote something like this? We know that this line, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We know that that line is pure Jefferson. uh jefferson if this is true then the rights that eventually would be articulated in the bill of rights of the constitution don't come from the government they come from our humanity i ticked

off the basic ones a few seconds ago your right to live your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say. Your right to ingest any information that you choose from whatever source you choose. And the government can't make those sources, TikTok, illegal. Even, and I mentioned TikTok, I don't even know how to use it, but I know that there's 150 million people in America under the age, I'm looking at this young man, under the age of 17 who use this TikTok thing all the time, even though the Congress doesn't want them to use it. Who the hell is the Congress to tell you what you can read? You have the right to read and acquire information from whatever source you want. Where does that right come from? Your humanity.

Somebody asked me the other day what I thought of taxation. Well, here's what I think of taxation. You're at home one night, and there's a knock on the door, and you open the door, and there's a a guy and he points a gun at you and he says give me your money i plan to give it away in your name what is this guy crazy i'm going to call the police don't bother we are the police we came to collect the taxes taxation is theft unless you consent to giving the money, in which case just give the government all the money you want. But we have a government, at least in America, and I know you do in Italy as well,

where the government takes what it wants, takes from the haves and gives to the have-nots. And then when it gives this money away, it has the temerity to call it a right. Well, if rights come from our humanity and if our humanity comes from the creator, how can the government create a right? It can't. The government creates privileges on which people rely, but it can't create rights because they come from our humanity. But the government, which always wants to confuse rights and privileges, claims that what it gives away as privileges truly are rights.

Can the government exist in the absence of consent? Can it morally, licitly exist in the absence of consent? Jefferson said no, not here, but in another portion of the Declaration of Independence, he argued that the only moral government is one to which the people have consented. Is anybody here consented to the government that regulates them? The answer is always no whenever I ask that. All right, you walk on a government street. Well, that's not consent to the government. You voted against the people that are in power.

You didn't consent to the ones that are there. Is there any government that is moral in the absence of consent? I would argue that the only government that is moral in the absence of consent is a government that enforces and protects natural rights. Because just as you can protect your natural right on your own, you can hire somebody to protect the natural rights for you. But government, unlike we in this room, does not take rights seriously. It doesn't take them seriously because of this confusing juxtaposition between privileges and rights. The government would like you to believe

that it can control the spigot of rights like a water faucet, and it can open it up in good times and close it down in bad. If you think I'm making this up, you can go to the speeches of President George W. Bush. It would take a lot of patience to read them because they're not grammatically accurate, but whatever.

In one of them, he makes that very analogy. And he, of course, was speaking right after 9-11. The government can close down rights when it deems it appropriate. Well, if our rights come from our humanity, if a right is an indefeasible claim against the whole world, then the government can only interfere with those rights when you waive them, when you give them up. So a bank robber obviously gives up his right to freedom when he steals the deposits in the bank.

But short of that, assuming he's been prosecuted under due process, a fair prosecution, you only lose your rights when you affirmatively give them up. What is government? Government is an artificial monopoly of force in a geographic area. This is where I had many disagreements with my late friend after who's named the law school where Professor Klein teaches, Antonin Scalia, who believed that government had moral legitimacy.

Government has no legitimacy. It's just force monopolized in a geographic area. Takes from the haves, gives to the have-nots, suppresses the speech that it hates and fears. perpetual war. The Americans always have to have a demon. They always have to have somebody they hate, whether it's Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, it's whoever the government tells you to hate, the Republicans and the Democrats will gang up together and wage war on that hated individual. Please put up slide number two.

So this is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. When the Constitution was formed, the 13 colonies, five of them said, we're leaving unless there are some restraints in this document that prevent this new government that we just created from taking rights from us. And those restraints are called the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights are negative rights. They don't grant liberty. They restrain the government from interfering with us.

Congress shall make no law. It doesn't say Congress shall grant the freedom of speech. It says Congress shall make no law, go down two lines, abridging the freedom of speech. So two questions that I would put to law students when discussing the Bill of Rights, where I won't call on you, and that is, if the states enacted an amendment repealing the First Amendment, if none of this was the law, would we still have the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press and the freedom of assembly? Most law students would raise their hands and say, no, if there's no First Amendment, there would be no freedom. But if freedom comes from our humanity, if freedom comes from within us, then we have these rights, whether they are enumerated in the Constitution or not. The purpose of the enumeration

is to make certain that people that do what I used to do, judges, are compelled to enforce these rights. Second question I would ask, this is a trick question, which is the most important word from among the following? Congress shall make no law, put down two lines, abridging the freedom of speech. The most important word is the word the in front of freedom. They argued over whether or not that should be in there. And Madison, James Madison, Jefferson's neighbor, the third president of the United States, the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention, and the drafter of the Bill of Rights, argued that the word the is absolutely vital to be in there, because if we call it the freedom of speech, we know it pre-existed the government. And if it pre-existed the government, where did it come from?

So because the United States, which was once an openly Christian nation, no longer is, these phrases, the freedom of speech, are not referred to by the natural law, because that's too Catholic-sounding a phrase. Who said that? The most Catholic member of the Supreme Court ever, Antonin Scalia. So the phrase today is called pre-political, pre-existing the politics, pre-existing the government. But this phrase pre-political is a code word for natural rights. So each of these rights, worship as you wish, say what you want, publish what you say, peaceably assemble, like on the lawn of Columbia University, even if the university doesn't want to hear what you have to say. Columbia is privately owned, but one of the attacks on private property in America is if you have a university in a state like New York or New Jersey, the public areas are dedicated to the public use.

So any member of the public can come on to the public areas of Columbia or Princeton or Rutgers wouldn't be a good example because that's owned by the state. And they have to respect the freedom of speech, even if they disagree with what you're saying. In one respect, it enhances freedom of speech. In another respect, it attacks property rights because Columbia is owned by a board of trustees. They may not want certain speech there, but they have no choice because they're in a state that says the public parts of Columbia University

are open to the public. So back to the public. So back to the first question asking law students. If you believe that law is only what is written down and ratified by the law giver called positivism, if you believe that law is only that which is written down and this were repealed, then there would be no freedom of speech. But if you believe that law comes from within us,

irrespective of what's written down, irrespective of where you are, irrespective of where your mother was when she gave birth to you, then these rights are human, individual, and universal. The third slide, please. This was Madison's favorite, the Ninth Amendment, because they debated loud and long.

And there's a famous debate that Madison had with Alexander Hamilton. If you're a small government person like everybody in this room, and you know American history like most of you in this room, you hate Alexander Hamilton. He is the father, the author, the creator of big government, the predecessor to the Federal Reserve. You hate Alexander Hamilton. But he has this argument with James Madison. How can we possibly list all the rights that the government can't interfere with? You name 10, I'll name another 10. You name another 10, I'll name another 10. This is what Madison came up with. This is the most important line in the Bill of Rights. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, speech, press, assembly, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

What are those others retained by the people? Your natural rights. Jimmy Madison, as they called him, was four foot eight. Now I'm kind of short myself, but I hope that when I go to heaven, if I go, I get to stand next to little Jimmy because I'll look like Shaquille O'Neal, one of these professional basketball players next to little Jimmy. And he was no saint. I mean, at the end of his second term, what did he sign into office? The second National Bank of the United States. And what did that become? The dreaded, hated monster today called the Federal

Reserve. Brow beat him to death and he finally gave in. In fact, when the first National Bank of the United States was proposed, little Jimmy was a congressman. And he gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives about why it's unconstitutional. The man who wrote the Constitution three years later is telling you why the first national bank of the United States is unconstitutional. This is the most famous speech in American history given on the floor of Congress, and it's called the Bank Speech. In those days, these things weren't taken down verbatim, but in phrases and in summary form by the stenographers using writing very quickly. But if you want to read what the Constitution truly meant by the guy who wrote the Constitution. It's little Jimmy in the bank speech. So I want to leave some time for Q&A.

Where does all of this leave us? Well, we know that the government doesn't take rights seriously because it confiscates property from us, whether by taxation or regulation. We know the government doesn't take rights seriously because it confuses, intentionally confuses, privileges with rights. Because if it can call a privilege a right, and if it can turn off that privilege, then it can turn off the other rights that come from within us.

Everybody that works for the government in America, whether you're a janitor in a school board or whether you're the president of the United States, whether you're the governor of New Jersey or whether you're in the United States military, takes the same oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, which includes the First Amendment,

which includes the Nin First Amendment, which includes the Ninth Amendment, which requires that everybody, including members of the judiciary, respect these rights. Unfortunately, in America, the book to which Professor Mangardi referred, I mean, it's a doorstop. It's 500 pages long. It's got 2,000 footnotes. The footnotes are the universe, if I may say so myself, the universe of everything written in English on natural rights, going back to Aristotle, obviously wrote in Greek, but translated into English. And my team and I examined every American Supreme Court opinion that expressly accepted or expressly rejected or impliedly rejected

the concept of natural rights. It's a very slow, sad story because it starts out with natural rights triumphant and with the Supreme Court of the United States restraining the Congress and restraining the states because they were interfering with natural rights, whether they were expressive rights, speech, whether they were commercial rights, your right to engage in commercial intercourse. With the passage of time, with the continuation ofcourse. With the passage of time, with the continuation of war, with the advance of science, with the increase in taxes, with the increase of the size of the government, with the government putting its nose in everybody's business, with positivism, whatever is written down becoming law triumphant, the natural law waned down to the point where it exists in very,

very few areas in American law today. In all my years on the bench, I think only twice, because they knew how I felt about this, did a lawyer make a natural law argument to you. These are just unheard of in American law today. Maybe'll be uh triumphant again one day but the government hates the concept of natural rights because the government likes not only wealth not only power the government likes to kill and if you have natural rights and the chief among them is the right to live then the only way the government can kill you, this is bringing us back to where we started, is by demonizing you and taking away your rights.

Because the public would not long accept the killing of people just by taking their rights away. Or would it, Joe Biden? Can the government slaughter people because of where they are or who they are because they happen to be inconvenient to the government? Is all of this just a wild, harebrained theory started by Jefferson, articulated by Bassani, pointed out by me and many, many others throughout the ages, or does it really make sense?

I'll give you an example. The Nuremberg trials, the trials of the German high command after World War II in Nuremberg. What law did they violate? They didn't violate German law as horrific as their behavior was. It was lawful. And then in a conference amongst the prosecutors, of all people to suggest this, the Soviet prosecutor who was the former head of the KGB comes up with the

idea. who was the former head of the KGB comes up with the idea, why don't we charge them with violating natural, universal human rights? And the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, who had been FDR's attorney general and then was on the Supreme Court of the United States and took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court to become America's chief prosecutor. By the way, here's a fun fact for you. The last member of the United States Supreme Court who did not graduate from law school, Attorney General of the United States, Supreme Court Justice, Chief Prosecutor Nuremberg, back to the Supreme Court. Jackson says, that's a great idea. And he and his Russian colleague and the British fellow and the French fellow wrote up the indictment and charged the German soldiers, the German officers with violating something called the natural law. right from wrong. So Bram Stoker, Bram Stoker who wrote Dracula,

poor guy, he died penniless. After he died, do you know how many copies of Dracula sold? 250 million. It's the largest best-selling book after the Bible in the English language.

Bram Stoker is walking through a park in London in 1872 and he sees three nuns taking about a dozen orphans on a walk through the park. They pass a dog attacking a one-winged, this is a famous story he recounts. They pass a dog attacking a one-winged bird. The bird's got one wing, helpless in front of the dog. One of the orphans runs from the nuns to chase the dog and save the bird. The nuns don't think anything of it. Stoker analyzed this over and over again.

Whence came the impulse in this homeless seven-year-old boy to save the bird? Do we all have a concept of right and wrong within us? Do we all have the ability to exercise our human reason, unimpeded by the government, and learn and know what is right and wrong? I would argue the answers to those questions is yes. These are not easy times in which we live. These are difficult times.

Government is too big, too fat, takes too much money, suppresses too much liberty. It lies, it cheats. It steals. It kills. It gets away with it. I am next month going to turn 74. I know I don't look at a rack there, but I'm going to turn 74. When I die, I expect to die faithful to first principles in my bed, in my house, surrounded by those who love me.

But not all of you, particularly the young people here, will have that luxury. Some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government prison. And some of you will die, faithful to first principles, in a public square to the sound of the government's trumpets blaring. When the time comes to make those awful decisions, you will know what to do, because freedom lies in the human heart.

And while it is there, no army, no dictator, no judge, no president, no prime minister can take it away. But the heart is a muscle and you must exercise it because freedom must do more than just lie there. Thank you very much. In English, please, Professor. In English. So we have some time. For those of us uneducated. We do have some time to entertain some questions in English. In the case you may have problems in articulating your question in English, we'd be happy to

translate it for you. Stefano, prego. Aspetta che devo fare il valletto. Judge Napolitano, thank you for being here. One question. What do you think about lockdowns and vaccine mandates? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. What do you think about vaccine mandates and lockdowns?

Oh, you can imagine what I think about vaccine mandates. They are the tools of tyrants. I mean, you own your own body. The government doesn't own it, and you have the right to travel whether the government says so or not. So I would profoundly and without exception condemn them. That's an easy question. Good evening, Judge. Thank you for being here. Thank you, sir. I hope I'm not going out of the teams that you are, but I was wondering, the term freedom in economic freedoms is, in my opinion, not exactly enacted in the sense that, for example, the presence of another,

what I would call monopolistic entity like BlackRock has a stronghold on the economy and on the government that is quite monopolistic, I think. And I was wondering what your opinion about this thought is. So in America, with all of these rights and the Bill of Rights, and I only put up the first and the ninth, there are no protections for economic freedom. And the Supreme Court has stated that. The right to engage in a commercial transaction, in the opinion of the United States Supreme Court and the United States Congress, is not a natural right.

I would argue that it is a natural right, and I would argue that free market forces will always be for the good. I know there are barriers to entry. I know there are huge corporations out there that would like to control the government. There are unseen forces that control the government as we speak. But just as I have the right to trade the sweat of my brow for whatever you're going to pay me for and we agree to, you have the right to sell me widgets

at whatever we agree to, and it doesn't require the government's permission. If you let the camel's nose under the tent, if you give the government an inch, there will be no stopping to it. So as painful as it is in this scenario you've created with multinational corporations having a stranglehold on governments, these corporations are richer than the governments, it would be far worse if the governments were in control. Why? Because the government will only make rules that it thinks will keep it in power. Hi, Dan Klein here. Great talk. I loved it. Thank you, Professor. Thank you for introducing me to that wonderful man next to you and to that wonderful lady on the other side of you. That wonderful lady is my wife, and she can testify as to how much time I spend watching your channel and admiring all that incredible lineup of guests that you have. I really loved your talk. I, of course, agree with

it fully in spirit. There are certain individual things like that government is monopoly of force, the idea of pre-political law and rights, I entirely buy. I think that you're bringing in the Nuremberg case and the story about the Soviet guy is brilliant. I think it's a great way to show the contradictions that you hear from folks who, you know, aren't so sympathetic to our call for freedom and liberty. I do think there are some things, though, you said that I would actually tweak or take issue with. One of them would be, first of all, I'm not actually a huge fan of consent theory of government. We maybe go there sometime, but a right is indefeasible. So... Wavable. Sorry? Wavable,

like the bank robber, but indefeasible. Okay. I'm concerned that by making a strong claim like that, you make it easier for people to kind of explode our attachment to these rights. You talked about the founding, the American founding. The army, George Washington's army, certainly violated natural rights to wage its war, to push off the British. So-

According to Murray Rothbard, the last moral war America fought, the revolution. So can rights be, are they defeasible in that instance of Americans being conscripted? Let me restate the question in a way that's easier for you and more challenging for me. Was it a just war? Was it just for the Congress to remember there were no individual taxes? So the Congress assessed that the colonies and the colonies had their own ways of raising taxation. Was it just to use the involuntary taxes to wage that war? I'm willing to accept the idea that it was. I mean, I don't know the history

well enough to certainly judge that, but I'm happy to go along with that in that I would like go for that. I would also agree to that. I would approve of that. Well, Professor Bernard Balin of Harvard, who wrote a masterpiece called The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. It's only about 130 pages. It's easy to read. It's absolutely brilliant. It argued that in 1776, only about 30 percent of the public was in favor of the war. About 30 percent were profoundly against it and wanted to stay under the wings of the king. And if you can imagine, 30% had no opinion. How can you have no opinion on that? And of course, they didn't have polls then.

But what he did was to examine the literature, the sermons, the editorials, the pamphlets, the posters to those conclusions. But using the freedom of speech, the radicals like Sam Adams, after whom the famous American beer is named, whipped up the brush fires of freedom. And by 1781, the numbers had switched radically, and it was now about 75% in favor of freedom. Were rights violated in order to achieve that goal? The answer is yes. Of course, rights were violated. Were they justly violated?

No. I have to be consistent. As morally just as the war was, it was not just to take people's property away from them in order to fight the war, which the government did. In fact, if you were a Tory during the war, once the war was over, your life was hell. You lost freedom and you lost property and governments looked the other way. Don't expect a court to return your farm in northern New Jersey to you when you allowed the Hessians to live on that farm. This is a true example, not far from where I live. Not my farm, but not far from where I live.

But I appreciate that challenge. I know Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but I'm going to be consistent. Where's Professor Mangardi? Okay. Don't let Bassani ask me any questions because he knows this stuff better than I do. Judge, you are one of my heroes. I always listen to you judging freedom. Thank you, sir.

I'm very happy to see you here, Milan. Well, my question is very simple we agree that liberty is a natural right but we live in italy and italy in the past four years has appeared as it is a colony of the United States. Our foreign policy is dictated by the Straussians in the Department of State. What do you think about that? Well, in America, foreign policy is dictated by what we call the military-industrial complex, the people that make the instruments of war. An example of that is this most recent debate, you can call it a debate, they debated for an hour. In the British Parliament, they would have

debated for a week. In the House of Representatives, they debated for one hour over the 61 billion to Ukraine. 40 billion of that stays right in the U.S. to reimburse the military-industrial complex to make more instruments of war. The military-industrial complex, those who make the instruments of war, is strategically spread out throughout the United States. So you'd be hard-pressed to find a member of Congress who does not represent a geographical area in which this military industrial complex exists. So there's that subliminal and real pressure on the member of Congress to continue to vote

to support the military industrial complex on the theory that it provides jobs for her or his constituents. It's reprehensible in my view, and it's why the American government fights so many wars. Take a guess as to how many foreign military facilities the American government has. You'll never guess in your wildest dreams. Well, the short answer is nobody knows. The long answer is it's more than a thousand. If you were to ask the Secretary of Defense to name these or even provide

a list of them, no matter when he prepared the list, it would be inaccurate because the time between the preparation of the list and the delivery to you, they would have built another one. So the military is very, very, we like to say it has civilian control, but it really has a control by the people that make the armaments. They control the government. Sir. Judge, it's for me an honor to be here in your presence.

Thank you. It's an honor for me that all of you are here. And thank you very much for everything that you are doing to enlighten people, with you and your friends and every effort that you're making. My question is this. Right now we are seeing the greatest attack on civil liberties since the McCarthy era. And basically the Congress in the United States, the Senate, you know, with the threats that they are making towards international criminal courts,

the way they treat students, calling them terrorists. By organizations like ACLU, by the Bar Association, to protect and help the U.S., against this assault on our rights. I think you will soon see that nearly everyone arrested on the college campuses in America will have the charges against them dismissed. Because most judges understand that all they were doing was exercising freedom of speech and the violence didn't come until the police arrived at the University of Texas, which is owned by the state of Texas. So it's government land. There's no dispute, but that it's a place for free speech. The president didn't ask for any help. The president of the university, the governor of Texas sent in a hundred state troopers on horseback, Texas on horseback in order to rough up the students. That's when the violence came and they arrested these kids. For what? For standing in the way of the horses, for expressing opinions that the government didn't want to hear. It's simply, as you say, a horrific assault on free

speech because the government fears this speech and fears that if this speech spreads, there will be pressure on the government not to wage these wars, whether we're funding genocide in Gaza or suicide for the Ukrainian people in Ukraine. If these anti-war messages spread, there'll be too much pressure on the government to change its policy. And this once happened in 1968. We had a crazy president who thought he could fight a war in North Vietnam. And the student demonstrations, Lyndon Johnson, chased him from office. He had the right to run for another term and he decided not to and eventually caused Nixon to pull the United States out of Vietnam, not before millions were killed, 500,000 American boys rotated through, 52,000 came home in body bags. For what? For one man's war because he thought he could become another FDR and get re-elected

by leading the country in wartime, this Lyndon Johnson. So that's why freedom of speech is so important, because it exposes the government. There's a case I'll tell you about. You can sit down, sir, called Terminello, a Roman Catholic priest, gave a speech in 1946 attacking President Harry Truman. He said that the use of the atomic bomb was a war crime. I happen to agree with him. I wasn't around in 1946. And he said it in such an incendiary way, I hope this doesn't happen tonight, that the audience stormed the stage, chased the priest out of the building, and trashed the building. What did the police do? Arrested the

priest. All he did was speak. The crowd destroyed the building. They arrested the priest. Convicted of inciting a mob in a Chicago city court. Upheld in an Illinois appellate court upheld in the Illinois Supreme Court reversed in the United States Supreme Court, which said. Freedom of speech is so integral to human happiness. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So essential for transparency and democracy, shaking your fist in the tyrant's face and challenging the government. It will tolerate violence. And the conviction of Father Terminello was reversed.

Another case is called Brandenburg versus Ohio. This guy was really nuts. He was a Ku Klux Klan leader who spoke at a rally and said, let's take back the government from the blacks and the Jews. Let's get rid of them. Prosecuted for incendiary speech. They called it criminal hooliganism. Convicted in Ohio trial court, upheld in the appellate court,

upheld in the Ohio Supreme Court, reversed unanimously by the United States Supreme Court, which said all innocuous speech is absolutely protected and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge it. That's how valuable the freedom of speech is. And today in America, at least now, it's being trashed. But these government officials will be coming up with all kinds of excuses when the courts start throwing these cases out. I don't want to go too long, Professor, but I am at your disposal. I suppose you always have some good reason to limit freedom of speech, don't you?

That's the key point. Wait a minute. My American rights travel with me, don't they? Well, in a sense, it was a joke, but up to a point, because the difficult thing with freedom of speech, of course, is that freedom of speech forces you to listen to things that you don't like. Correct. And I suppose one of the biggest problems behind any theory of government is that people want to associate their own likings to the foundations, legitimacy, to use the strange word you mentioned before,

and so on and so forth. It's very difficult for humans to get a dispassionate view by which, you know, rights are something that belong also to people I don't like. So I think, you know, if we stay in the arena of public opinion before entering the juridical playground, how can we convince people to be a little bit more tolerant of people. This is a question not for an aging judge,

but for a young psychologist. How do we convince people? Well, I suppose that's part of the job, isn't it? Yes, but I will ask you this. The other day, the President of the United States, with all of his personal baggage, commenting on these students who are preaching and demonstrating for peace, found what they did offensive.

Is there a right not to be offended? Of course not. What is the value of speech if it doesn't challenge and offend and cause discomfort? The speech we love doesn't need protection. It's the speech that offends that needs protection. Sir. Your Honor, I'm literally shaking talking to you because it's, I'm so, all right. I do have a question. You said before that you believe that all of us have a sense of natural rights within us, all right? Yes. young students all over the world are expressing themselves against academic freedom, especially in Italy, and like Professor Bassani has been a victim of this kind of...

That's the Chicago in him. So what is going on according to you? Are young people losing this sense of natural rights? And why do you think this is happening, if this is happening for you? You know, you ask me if young people are losing a sense of natural rights. When I taught jurisprudence at Brooklyn Law School, one of the students came up to me and said, Judge, I am sick of this.

I said, what do you mean you're sick of it? He said, I went to a Catholic grammar school, a Catholic high school, a Catholic college. Now I'm at a law school that's predominantly Jewish, and I have a Catholic professor that wants to talk to me about Catholicism. This is not about Catholicism. Don't have to believe the teachings of the Catholic Church

to embrace the concept that our rights come from within us but when I made this argument in the classroom by the end of the semester they understood the argument and we we examined ten different theories of jurisprudence natural rights is just one of them the first time they heard it it it was alien to them. So to get back to your question, this may not be taught in government schools because the government is not interested in telling you you have all this freedom because the government wants you to follow what it says is so. So in an ideal world, we wouldn't have government schools. We would have schools that are in every street corner,

just like McDonald's. You want to learn how to repair air conditioners, you go to that school. You want to go to Yale University, you go to that school. You want to go to the University of Milan, you go to that school. You want Mingardi to teach you,

you go to five different schools at the same time. As a university professor that knows university professors, I find the idea of schools proliferating like McDonald's absolutely horrific. That's a very good argument for monopoly.

Keep them just in one place. This lady came all the way from Bologna by train. I don't know how far that is, but God bless you, Natasha. It's only one hour on the train, so no problem. But I follow you all the time. I'm addicted to your podcasts. And this evening, I was extremely moved, particularly the end of your speech, where you talk about freedom what is right and what is wrong. I think this is a natural thing. We like to, as you said, the example of the little boy who wanted to save the bird from being caught by the dog. And we always side with the oppressed. This is natural in human beings. We always side with the oppressed. We always want to help. The problem is that with mainstream media that we have, we are confused of who is the oppressed. And so often we're in a

situation where we genuinely think we are good people and we're siding with the oppressed and we're doing the right thing. But actually, the information we receive, even though we claim we want to have freedom of speech and we want to have free information, is not there. I often find myself in a situation where I'm talking to people, whether they be Jewish or Catholic or Christian or Arab or whatever, and their position is right from their point of view. And they are behaving with integrity towards their beliefs, which is the belief of siding with the oppressed. Do you see any of the people on judging freedom in the mainstream media? That's an easy question to answer. No. No. Now, I was once a part of the mainstream media for 24 years

at Fox News, but the wonderful people that are on this program, which is running now, would never be permitted there because, and I don't want to pick on Fox, I'm never saying anything negative about Fox because I have wonderful years there and I still have wonderful friends there. But the mainstream media is on the side of the government and is complicit in suppressing the speech that the government doesn't want to hear. That's a head scratcher. The mainstream media is on the side of the, the fox is on the side of the Biden administration. Well, on Israel and Gaza and on Ukraine and Russia, yes. On the continuing increase in the size of the Defense Department and the wealth

of the military industrial complex, yes. Which is why the freedom of speech and the right to offend, where's my law school school friend is so important. All right, I guess that's it. Can you tell us what you make of Murphy versus Missouri and what you think will happen? All right, so this is a case in which the Trump and Biden administrations have been exposed for offering carrots and sticks to the large social media platforms. Suppress the speech we don't want. Enhance the speech we do want using your algorithms.

If you go along with what we want, we'll make life easy for you. If you don't go along with what we want, we will make life difficult for you. This was argued before the Supreme Court. I am not optimistic after hearing the oral argument. Sam Alito is my boyhood friend. We're classmates at Princeton. In fact, I introduced him to the now Mrs. Alito 52 years ago. But he's a big government guy, and I think he's going to lead the pack against the challenge. So the challenge is, can the government do indirectly getting Facebook and YouTube and Google to suppress speech? What it can't do directly. In my opinion, the answer to that is no, the government cannot do that. But I think the government's going to get away with it. The Solicitor General actually said during the oral argument, we need to control the message. What? The whole purpose. Can you put slide one up? Can you put slide one back up there? The whole purpose of the First put slide one up? Can you put slide one back up there?

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government, I'm sorry, slide two, my apology, is to keep the government, there it is, out of the business of speech. Under no circumstance, what does this mean? The underlying value of this, under no circumstances can the government evaluate the content of speech. But if you listen to the Solicitor General, that's the lawyer that represents the federal government before the Supreme Court. During that oral argument, she said we have to control the message. The government has no business attempting to control the message. The free market and ideas, according to that, must be unbridled and without limit, and the government must stay the hell out.

I think we'll call it on that. Thank you. God love you. Thank you for coming. Thank you.