I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. [00:00:19] And speaking up and expressing opinions isn't election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential? Vice president JD Vance received quite a bit of backlash for his allegations that [00:00:36] free speech is under threat in Europe. That was at the Munich Security Conference. But in reality, there is some truth to what he was saying. And he is right. There are many examples that we're about to get into. But what's ironic is that months after giving that very speech at the Munich [00:00:54] Security Conference, the Trump administration began engaging in arrests, attempted Deportations and sanctioning pro-Palestinian groups that are critical of Israel's genocidal acts and fight to ensure Palestinian civilians [00:01:09] get a modicum of justice. So we'll get to the latest examples of that in just a moment. But it is worth noting that some pretty wild things are going down in the United Kingdom. In fact, seven people have been charged with terrorism over zoom meetings. [00:01:28] More specifically, the alleged offenses relate to a group called Defend Our Juries, arranging public protests in support of Palestine action in London, Manchester and Cardiff, as well as a demonstration planned [00:01:43] for this Saturday in London. The charges also cover 13 zoom meetings allegedly held between July and August in support of the proscribed group. Oh my god, zoom meetings. Crazy. Now the seven people who were charged are all members of Defend Our Juries. [00:02:02] Defend Our Juries is a UK activist organization linked to Palestine Action. It criticized the arrests and said they would not deter people from taking part in this weekend's protest. So why are officials in the UK up in arms about Palestine action, and how [00:02:20] are they justifying the label of terrorist when it comes to peace activists? Well, the UK based Palestine Action, which aims to disrupt the operations of weapons manufacturers supplying the Israeli government, was proscribed in July, a month after two of its activists [00:02:38] broke into Britain's largest airbase and damaged two military aircraft. It's a ballsy thing to do, so the group's ban makes it illegal under UK law to be a member of, or even invite support for, Palestine action. The terrorist designation also puts them on par with organizations [00:02:57] such as Hamas, Al Qaeda and ISIS. I should note that the US armed al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria to topple Bashar al Assad. But anyway, let me move on. Six people aged between 26 and 62 were charged on Wednesday as part of an [00:03:13] investigation led by Counter-Terrorism Command of London's Metropolitan Police. A seventh person was charged on Tuesday in a connected investigation by police in Scotland. And just to see how ridiculous this all appears to be, take a look [00:03:29] at one of the people who got arrested. Take a look at what that scene looked like and just how scary and threatening this guy looks. What's your response? Yeah, this is what happens in Britain in 2025. All right, give me your hand. We're posing genocide. [00:03:45] I'm placing you under arrest. Okay. And I'm going to read out the reason for that. The time now is 7:10 in the morning. It's the 2nd of September. So, Patrick, you are under arrest on suspicion of committing the offense of section 12, subsection three of the Terrorism Act 2000. [00:04:04] You are alleged to have address an online zoom meeting between the 10th of July, 2025 and the 21st of August, 2025, for the purpose of encouraging support and furthering the activities of proscribed organization Palestine Action. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do [00:04:19] not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. So the arrest is necessary to prevent loss of evidence, prevent collusion with suspects, and to allow for searches under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and to facilitate his interview. [00:04:37] Hundreds of people have been arrested in the United Kingdom over their participation in pro-Palestine demonstrations. More than 700 people have been arrested and 114 charged by the Metropolitan Police in connection with this summer's demonstrations, with over 500 people arrested during a demonstration in August alone. [00:04:55] But things are getting pretty bad in the United States as well. Marco Rubio posted on X yesterday that this is the latest example. Today the Trump administration is sanctioning three NGOs Al Haq, Al Mezan, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights for assisting in the ICC's [00:05:15] illegitimate actions against Israel. The United States will continue to protect our own sovereignty and the sovereignty of our allies from the ICC's overreach. That's insane. So the overreach that he's referring to is the prosecution of Prime Minister [00:05:31] Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, of course, who is a war criminal that is guilty of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Last year, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of crimes against humanity [00:05:47] and other war crimes. So those warrants came as a result of the three groups now being sanctioned, asking the ICC to investigate Israel's airstrikes in Gaza in 2023. But the U.S. State Department made clear that they're in bed with Israel, regardless [00:06:04] of how loathsome their war crimes are. In a statement, the State Department claimed that the ICC has a politicized agenda and declared that the ongoing actions of the ICC set a dangerous precedent for all nations. [00:06:20] But that's not all. In February, the U.S. Moved to prohibit Karim Khan, the ICC's chief prosecutor, from entering the country or doing business with the U.S. And in June, it sanctioned four international Criminal Court judges involved in the probe. [00:06:37] The following month, the State Department announced sanctions against a top U.N. Human Rights Council official who has called on the ICC to prosecute companies and corporate executives tied to the Israeli government. Al-haq has responded by calling the sanctions a heinous and draconian measure [00:06:56] that constitute a cowardly, Immoral, illegal and undemocratic act. The group also wrote as the world moves to impose sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel, its ally, the United States is working to destroy Palestinian institutions, working [00:07:12] tirelessly for accountability for the victims of Israel's mass atrocity crimes. I'm just going to pause and note that reporting using internal IDF data indicates that at least this is the IDF's own data. [00:07:27] At least 83% of people killed in Gaza by IDF happen to be civilians. These are obviously war crimes. And just last week, the State Department also announced sanctions against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization ahead [00:07:44] of the UN General Assembly in New York, which could prevent PA leaders from traveling to America for the meeting. This is all happening with the backdrop of student visa or green card holders becoming targets for arrest and deportation if they participate in pro-peace protests [00:08:02] or write op eds for their school paper. By the way, critical of Israel's actual war crimes in, you know, war crimes in their student papers. So this is really concerning because I think that you're on to something, Dave, when you talk about how the paradigm shift is clear, corporate media has lost power. [00:08:23] Legacy media has lost power. There's this explosion of independent sources that are informing the American public about the reality of our foreign policy, and how detrimental it is to the American people and to others abroad. By the way, and so I'm worried that now our government might move to engage [00:08:41] in unconstitutional acts against our freedom of expression. - What do you think? - Yeah. Well, it's a you know, like when they say when when a woman leaves an abusive husband, that's the most dangerous time, right? That's when the guy might flip out and actually kill her. [00:08:58] And that doesn't mean it's like the correct move is still for her to leave that guy, but it's also the most dangerous time. And so there is a concern where as they're kind of ability to control the the narrative through their more traditional means, which they always had, [00:09:14] they didn't really need to resort to to these type of tactics for a while because they could say, just, get Donahue fired from MSNBC or get, you know what I mean? Like, they would just if somebody was against the war in Iraq or was was getting a little bit too close to it, they would just kind of get rid of that person. [00:09:31] And, you know, me and me and Scott's intellectual hero, Murray Rothbard, was really driven out of kind of polite society in his time and, and relegated to, to, you know, form his own institutions and stuff like that. But he was like a guy who was writing for National Review and then and was a founder [00:09:48] of the Cato Institute, and then they totally boxed him out. And that's the way the old system used to work for, for a long time. And that they don't really have that anymore. And so now they're trying to crack down in these other ways. I think the only answer to this is that we we got to overwhelm them with numbers. [00:10:04] And all of us just have to not budge on this to the point that it's like, well, there's no way they're going to shut this conversation down anyway. But it is disturbing, you know, with so many of the people who, like, defend Israel blindly, like the, the Bill Maher's of the world or whatever, you know, they always say it's a battle of civilizations, and Israel represents [00:10:25] liberalism and Western civilization and democracy and all these things. But then you'd be like, but what does that even mean? If the bedrock principle isn't that you're allowed to say what you want to say, you're allowed to criticize a government policy, especially when [00:10:40] that government policy is mass murder. And in in some sense, you know, the people who say that about Israel, like there is a kernel of truth to it. I mean, Israel in Israel proper, there is some degree of that [00:10:55] liberal tradition of freedom of speech. And that's why Israeli newspapers will tell you about the war crimes that Benjamin Netanyahu is committing every day. And they don't seem to get arrested for it. And even, I mean, they had just a couple of weeks ago, there were protests [00:11:11] in the hundreds of thousands people protesting the war in Tel Aviv there. And I don't think I heard about anyone there getting arrested or shut down for it. But, you see, because we have to support Israel and everything they they do, we have to give up our freedom of speech in the Western world, [00:11:28] which is just so totally outrageous. And but I should say there is a long tradition of this in the United States of America. I mean, it's not as if it's what a lot of, you know, in the mind, I think of a lot of young people. They'll be like, you know, cancel culture is this new phenomenon that just started. [00:11:44] But people can go read up on what Woodrow Wilson was doing to antiwar activists during World War One. And these type of tactics are, you know, this is this is, I think, probably one of maybe not the the number one reason, like the humanitarian reason might be number one, [00:11:59] but certainly one of the top reasons why guys like me and Scott are so anti-war is because, you know, war is the health of the state. And it's the biggest indicator of what the relationship between the citizen and the government is, and that it's always true in times of war that [00:12:14] governments crack down on civil liberties. And first amongst those is speech that's anti-war. In fact, I feel like the trend of labeling anything the federal government doesn't like, or anyone who pushes back against the federal government, [00:12:29] certainly when it comes to foreign policy as terrorists, like really like ramped up during the, you know, war on terror under the Bush administration. And I remember at that time, shows like The Young Turks [00:12:44] like warning against that, right. Warning against just labeling fellow Americans as terrorist supporters or terrorist sympathizers, if they were speaking out against U.S. Foreign policy, and it was difficult to do that, by the way, especially in the early [00:13:00] years of the Bush administration, because Americans were understandably terrified of what could happen if we didn't engage in this war against terrorism. You know, we had just been victimized in the largest terror attack [00:13:15] in American history. But I think that the politics of fear should be something that's top of mind for most Americans, because if the government is trying to scare you, it's usually because they want to engage in some pretty nefarious policies. [00:13:32] So I'm going to let you have the last word on this, Scott. You know, thoughts on all of this, what's happening in the UK, what's happening in the US and what the future might hold? As, you know, more and more people speak out against our unwavering commitment to Israel. [00:13:47] Yeah. I mean, it's another tragic piece of blowback, another side effect of American support for Israel. Another demonstration of our support for that country being against the interests of the American people, regardless of what the people in D.C. [00:14:03] Say. But, you know, as previously discussed here, there's a great crackup coming on the left. It's virtually the entire voting population of the Democratic Party versus its rulers. And more and more, it's becoming that way on the right. I saw your poll, but there was a different one recently that had it a 5050 split [00:14:22] as far as Republican sympathies with the Palestinians or the Israelis. So it depends on how you ask the question and all that. But it's really changing quite rapidly on the right. And as Colonel MacGregor says, time wins more arguments than reason. [00:14:38] And it just turns out there's we just have nothing to show for all of our, pro-Israel wars in the Middle East and the rest of these policies and more and more people are finally just turning against it, America first or Israel instead. You can't have it both ways. [00:14:54] So then this is what's really exciting is we're going to have a situation where, just like on the Democratic side, on the Republican side, you have the rulers of the party versus more or less the voting population. And in its majority on this issue. And it's not going to be as stark of a difference as it is on the left, [00:15:11] you know, quite soon enough for my taste. But it's coming. And then we'll have just like over there, it'll be apartheid, right, with the small minority ruling the rest, despite the overwhelming consensus of the American people. We don't want any part of this anymore. And then that's untenable for the long term. [00:15:29] So the crack up is coming. I encourage everybody to keep pushing. Well, I credit the two of you for, you know, focusing on foreign policy so heavily and informing people about things that we aren't going to get in corporate media or legacy media. So everyone, please support the work that Dave and Scott do. [00:15:46] As I mentioned earlier, Dave Smith is the host of part of the problem. Please subscribe to the show. Is there anything else you'd like to promote before we go, Dave? Oh, can I just say, you know what? Scott's got this sitting in back of him, but I'm I'm I'm out on the road doing comedy shows, and I'm in a hotel, which is I got little kids. [00:16:03] So this is the only time I get my reading done. But. So I've literally just been cracking into this. I'm like, halfway done. It is so good, dude. Creative Chaos by William Van Wagenen is just the story of the CIA's covert war in Syria, and how Barack Obama and John Brennan started that whole catastrophe. [00:16:21] And I've read like, I'm halfway through this thing in my first setting. It's so great. It was just published by the Libertarian Institute. So I don't I don't see any money from that, but I just wanted to plug it because it's a really good book. You're you're amazing, Dave. I love it so much. I love it so much. And by the way, thank you for doing your best to inform people [00:16:37] about how we were attacked by Al Qaeda. But are or did arm al Qaeda in Syria under the Obama administration? I don't think most people are aware of that. But Scott, it's okay. And you can be friends. You can be friends with them. Now. Hezbollah was always the enemy of the American people. - That's what you got to worry about. - Wild. [00:16:54] Wilde and Scott Horton again is the director of the Libertarian Institute. He's written many books. Scott, I want to kick it over to you to promote anything you'd like. So you can see all my books behind me. I wrote enough already. Oops. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism and and provoked about the Cold War [00:17:11] with Russia and the war in Ukraine. And I have a brand new project coming out. You can see on my mic flag here, it's the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, and we should be launching here, I don't know, within the month, I hope, at Scott Horton Academy. And this is, a major project like Tom [00:17:29] Woods Liberty Classroom, long form, seminars by myself and, other great experts on all different aspects of American foreign policy and freedom. And, so that should be kicking off soon. And people can watch a great promo video and sign up with their email address [00:17:46] there at Scott Horton academy.com. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true, but it does keep you updated on our live shows.