Judging Freedom - NYC DAs take swipe at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's 'soft on crime' approach

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

Several of New York City’s borough district attorneys took aim at the soft-on-crime policies laid out this week by newly-elected Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I want to talk to you today about an announcement made yesterday afternoon by the Department of Justice that it is establishing a new unit focusing on domestic terrorism. What does that mean? Well, that means that whenever there's a political gathering anywhere in the United States of America, you can expect some FBI agents to be among the gathered there. You won't know who they are and you won't know what they're doing. They will look and sound just like everybody else, but they will be there. Do we really want the FBI next to us when we attend political rallies? And how will the Department of Justice decide which political rallies to cover and which political rallies to leave alone? Well, we all know that we have the

natural right to speak freely. It doesn't come from the Constitution. It comes from our humanity, and our humanity is a gift from God. As God is perfectly free, we are perfectly free. Excuse me, if you don't believe in God, you can still accept this idea of the origins of our humanity, since we are the highest rational beings on the planet. And in order to be rational, in order to think, we need freedom. And among those freedoms is the freedom of speech. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that the freedom of speech needs breathing room. That means the right to make mistakes. That means the right to shout. That means the right to respond immediately to what someone says to you.

So freedom of speech is not a scholar reading an essay. Freedom of speech can be you or me on a street corner haranguing a crowd. It could be you or me in the crowd responding to the person doing the haranguing. But when the crowd is populated by FBI agents who are there to write down who's there or take pictures of who's there or record who's there or even to goad the crowd on to doing more of what the speaker wants, that's very dangerous in American society. I'll tell you why. Because that's called chilling. Chilling is government behavior that doesn't silence you, but it makes you think twice before you speak for fear that the person next to you is going to record it and report it to his bosses in the Department of Justice.

Stated differently, we have the right to associate, we have the right to speak, we have the right to remain silent, and we have the right to be free from FBI agents surveilling what we're doing. The other potential danger to this new unit in the Department of Justice, sometimes, as we know, crowds can get out of control. We know what happened in Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2020. The crowd attempted to trash a federal courthouse. The local, state, and feds arrested 200 people. Overnight, 100 of those 200 were let go and were not charged. Well, who are they? They were the FBI agents who were in the crowd goading it on. They were the undercover

agents in the crowd working for the FBI goading it on. How does the FBI decide which crowd to join and goad on? These are all problems that come about when the government gets in the business of surveilling us, whether it's surveilling us in private on our iPhones or whether it's surveilling us in public at a rally. The government should stay out of the business of surveillance. I know this sounds harsh. It is not the job of the Department of Justice to prevent crime. It's the job of the Department of Justice to prosecute it after it occurs. And it is certainly not the job of the Department of Justice to cause crime, which we know more likely than not happened in the Portland, Oregon example and in countless others. Judge Napolitano on judging freedom.