Your News Talk America with Jake Smith – 9/12/2024 – No Video
Your News Talk America with Jake Smith. Welcome to the digital and interactive program.
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10:10 AM ET
Panelist:
Judge Andrew Napolitano
At 10:10 – its Jake and the Judge. This week, Judge Napolitano takes issue with Merrick Garland’s DOJ charging Russian agents with election tampering. Judge nap compares it to Soviet style prosecution.
Free Speech and the Department of Political Justice:
In 1966, two famous Russian literary dissidents, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sin-yav-sky, were tried and convicted on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet state. The two were authors and humorists who published satire abroad that mocked Soviet leaders for failure to comply with the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which guaranteed the freedom of speech.
Their convictions sparked international outrage. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and then America’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg called the charges and the trial "an outrageous attempt to give the form of legality to the suppression of a basic human right." When a secret transcript of the trial was circulated in the West, it became clear that Daniel and Sinyavsky were convicted of using words and expressing ideas contrary to what Soviet leaders wanted. They were sentenced to five and seven years, respectively, of hard labor in Soviet prison camps.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Political Justice took a page from the Soviets and charged Americans and Russians with disseminating anti-Biden administration propaganda in Russia and here in the U.S. What ever happened to the freedom of speech?
Here is the backstory.
The Framers who crafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, both under the leadership and the pen of James Madison, were the same generation that revolted violently against King George III and Parliament and won the American Revolution. The revolution was more than just six years of war in the colonies. It was a radical change in the minds of men -- elites like Thomas Jefferson and Madison, as well as farmers and laborers generally untutored in political philosophy.
Untutored they may have been, but they knew they wanted to be able to speak their minds, associate and worship as they pleased, defend themselves, and be left alone by the government. The key to all this was the freedom of speech. Speech was then, as it is today, the most essential freedom. The late Harvard Professor Bernard Bailyn read and analyzed all the extant speeches, sermons, lectures, editorials and pamphlets that he could find from the revolutionary period and concluded that in 1776 only about one-third of the colonists favored a violent separation from England. By the war’s end in 1781, around two-thirds welcomed independence.
But independence was bilateral. It meant not just independence from England but independence from the new government here as well. In order to assure independence from the federal government, the colonies ratified the Constitution. Its purpose was to establish a limited central government. After the Constitution was ratified and the federal government was established, five colonies threatened to secede from it unless the Constitution was amended to include absolute prohibitions on the government from interfering with natural individual rights.
During the drafting of the Bill of Rights, Madison, who chaired the House of Representatives committee that did the drafting, insisted that the word “the” precede the phrase “freedom of speech, or of the press” in order to manifest to the ratifiers and to posterity the Framers’ collective understanding of the origin of these rights. That understanding was the belief that expressive rights are natural to all persons, no matter where they were born, and natural rights are, as Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence, inalienable.
Stated differently, Madison and his colleagues gave us a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that on their face recognized the pre-political existence of the freedom of speech and of the press in all persons and guaranteed that the Congress -- by which they meant the government -- could not and would not abridge them.
Until now.
In the past two weeks, the feds have secured indictments against two Americans living in Russia who are also Russian citizens working for a Russian television network that expressed political views -- the feds call this propaganda -- contrary to the views of the Biden administration.
The same feds secured an indictment against Americans and Canadians for funneling pro-Russian ideas to the American public through social media influencers. The feds, who call the words being used by their targets “disinformation,” apparently believe that the First Amendment has some holes in it for the speech that the government hates and fears.
That belief is profoundly erroneous.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of evaluating the content of speech. The strength of an idea is its acceptance in the public marketplace of ideas not in the minds of government. This is political speech that is critical of government policies -- that would be the very speech in which you and I and millions of Americans engage every day.
The speech we love to hear needs no protection because we welcome it. But the speech that challenges; irritates; expresses alternative views; exposes the government’s lies, cheats and killings -- even harsh, caustic, hateful speech -- is the very speech that the First Amendment was written to protect.
The United States has not declared war on Russia. Under international law, there is no legal basis for such a declaration. The U.S., however, which supplies weapons for its proxy Ukraine to attack Russia, is far more a threat to Russia than Russia is to the U.S. But you’d never know that by listening to the government. Now the government doesn’t even want you to hear speech that contradicts its narrative.
In reading about the Soviet show trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky and the recent indictments of Americans and others for expressing so-called Russian propaganda, my stomach turned. The federal government has become what it once condemned. Just like the Soviets in 1966, it mocks free speech, it assaults basic human rights, it evades the Constitution it is commanded to uphold and now it punishes those who dare to disagree. This may bring it to the same untimely end as the Soviet Union it now emulates.
Sample Questions:
- Judge, why and has the Department of Justice been politicized to the extent that it is trying to divert attention to what is another manufactured Russia Hoax?
- The FARA act is a paper tiger, so why has the government sought to weaponize it at this point in our history?
- RFK Jr. issued a warning saying if Kamala Harris wins, we will be living in a totalitarian state; if Donald Trump returns to the White House, would you be supportive of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as AG? If not, how can Trump repurpose the DOJ as it was intended or is that task insurmountable?
10:35 AM ET
Segment Topic:
Liberalism or Communism? Will the United States be split into separate provinces?
Panelist:
H.R. Buckley
His latest book, F. H. Buckley, author of The Roots of Liberalism: What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us about Civil Virtue.
Professor Buckley is a Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law.
He is a senior editor at the American Spectator and a columnist for the New York Post, and he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post among others.
His most recent books are The Republican Workers Party (2018); The Republic of Virtue (2017); The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (2016); The Once and Future King (2015); and American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup (2020).
Professor, as a conservative talk show host, the concept of an American breakup – your book in 2020 is the future that most conservatives fear.
Play Rush cut from 2020 – your book American secession was generating that possibility back then:
Is that possible, future secession, rooted in Liberalism? Your latest book: The Roots of Liberalism: What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us about Civil Virtue warns us that: Liberalism is not an ideology that stands above our practices and judges them, but a practice itself, an inheritance of virtues, institutions, customs, and longings embedded in our culture and passed on through our memories and stories of moral heroes.
Sample Questions:
- HR, todays liberals appear to be nothing like social libs of the 1960’s. These so-called 21st-Century liberals support communism, socialism, Marxism. Are we misleading the nation by referring them as liberals? They are not your daddy’s social liberals.
- In your book, American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup (2020), my listeners and callers are still talking about a possible secession. What was it about this book that has captured the attention of this nation?
11:10 AM ET
Segment Topic:
NY Congresswoman, Stefanik files complaint against judge in Trump (hush-money) trial saying his daughter has a "newly active financial relationship" with the Harris campaign.
Panelist:
John D. O’Connor, Author of, Postgate and the Mysteries of Watergate: https://www.postgatebook.com/
John O’Connor is an experienced trial lawyer, practicing law in San Francisco since 1972. He has tried cases in state and federal court throughout the country.
He served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Northern California, representing the United States in both criminal and civil cases. Among his interesting assignments have been representation of the government during the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s; writing Fifth Amendment and “state of mind” briefs for the prosecution in United States v. Patricia Hearst; representing the FDIC, FSLC and RTC during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s; representing California Attorney General Dan Lungren in campaign-related litigation; defending R.J. Reynolds Tobacco in significant smoking and health litigation; representing Coach Don Nelson in litigation with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban; and representing W. Mark Felt regarding the revelation of his identity as Deep Throat.
Sample Questions:
- John, is this ethics complain have any teeth or is it political posturing by Stefanik?
- John, what did you think of Jack Smith’s new indictment of Trump and how will Judge Chakan (an Obama Judge) do with this new indictment, new grand jury and new evidence?
- What do you make of Jack Smith’s appointment? Was it lawful?
- Do any of these cases now threaten Donald Trump’s candidacy? If so, how?
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Credits
Host
Jake Smith
Director
Walt Palmer
Technical Director
Julia Hardy
Real News Talk Logo Graphics LED Pixels Light Effect
Storyblocks Asset ID: SBV-302248713
Music Track: About The Lion and The Cuckoo
Artist: Radioactive Pokemon
Written by: Alexander, Denis
Album: Through the thorns of a dead forest
Visuaizer: About The Lion and The Cuckoo –
Radio… (First release on YouTube) Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/1UW8aa…