Chauvin Trial Day 18, SCOTUS Orders & Justice Thomas, 60-Minutes’ Ron Desantis Fake News

The government continues presenting its case against Derek Chauvin with a doctor and Chief of Police. Justice Thomas pens an interesting concurring opinion regarding Big Tech that raises eyebrows. Ron Desantis is the subject of a CBS 60 Minutes hit piece that takes him out of context. And more! Join criminal defense lawyer Robert F. Gruler in a discussion on the latest legal, criminal and political news, including:​

 • Judge Cahill conducts a “Schwartz Hearing” to question jurors about potential misconduct.​

• Dr. Langenfeld testifies today he believed that asphyxia could have been the cause of death based on the information that he had the time.​

• Minneapolis Chief of Police Medaria Arradondo testifies today and says that Chauvin should have “in no way” kept Floyd pinned down.​

• United States Supreme Court issues new orders and grants Petition for Writ of Certiorari in Biden vs. Knight First Amendment Institute over big tech censorship.​

• Justice Thomas drafts concurring opinion, analogizing big tech platforms to common carriers.​

• The Supreme Court will hear the case, but Judge Thomas expresses concern that the case does not address the real issues.​

• CBS 60-Minutes’ Sharyn Alfonsi selectively edits interview with Governor Ron Desantis to make it look like he is inappropriate accepting campaign contributes.​

• Transcript of the interview show major portions of text selectively deleted by Sharyn Alfonsi.​

• Publix and Democrat state official blasé CBS 60-Minutes smear as “absolutely false.”​

• As always, your questions and live Locals.com chat after the news!​

LIVECHAT QUESTIONS: ​

• https://watchingthewatchers.locals.com/​

CLUBHOUSE AFTER PARTY DISCUSSION:​

• https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/MR00rXK6​

• Join the Club: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/watching-the-watcher​

Connect with us:​

• Locals! https://watchingthewatchers.locals.com​

• Podcast (audio): https://watchingthewatchers.buzzsprout.com/​

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robertgruleresq​

• Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/RobertGrulerEsq​

• Robert Gruler Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/RobertGrulerEsq/​

• Miss Faith Instagram https://www.instagram.com/faithie_joy/​

• Clubhouse: @RobertGrulerEsq @faith_joy​

• Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/robertgruleresq​

• Homepage with transcripts (under construction): https://www.watchingthewatchers.tv​

Don't forget to join us on Locals! https://watchingthewatchers.locals.com​

Why Locals? We head over to Locals to continue the conversation before, during and after the show. You can also grab the slides (and other stuff) from the show as well as a free PDF copy of Robert’s book which is also available to buy on Amazon here: https://rcl.ink/hHB​

Other tips? Send to tips@rrlawaz.com or tag @RobertGrulerEsq on twitter.​

#WatchingtheWatchers #DerekChauvin #ChauvinTrial #GeorgeFloyd #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt #Certiorari #JusticeThomas #RonDesantis #60minutes #FakeNews

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, my friends. And welcome back to yet. Another episode of watching the Watchers live. My name is Robert Mueller. I am a criminal defense attorney here at the RNR law group and the always beautiful and sunny Scottsdale Arizona, where my team and I over the course of many years have represented thousands of good people facing criminal charges. And throughout our time in practice, we have seen a lot of problems with our justice system. I'm talking about misconduct involving the police. We have prosecutors behaving poorly. We have judges not particularly interested in a little thing called justice, and it all starts with the politicians, the people at the top, the ones who write the rules and pass the laws that they expect you and I to follow, but sometimes have a little bit of difficulty doing so themselves. And so that's why we started this show called watching the Watchers so that together with your help, we can shine that big, beautiful spotlight of accountability and transparency back down upon our very system with a hope of finding justice. And we're grateful that you are here in with us today. We've got a lot to get into today is day 18 of the Derrick Shovan trial. And so it's, uh, it's definitely been an interesting day and it starting to transition where we're getting into more professional witnesses today. We heard from the doctor who actually pronounced George Floyd dead. We also heard from the chief of police that had some very interesting testimony. And then right now, in fact, I think they may be wrapping up with her, but there was another Lieutenant who was the field training officer. And so we're getting into this a more professional witnesses and more relevant information. And so we're going to get you up to speed on everything that took place today. Then we're going to change gears a little bit. Also some pretty big news came out of the Supreme court today. SCOTUS, there were new orders that were announced and that old lawsuit that was filed against Donald Trump over Twitter. If you remember, Donald Trump blocked some people on Twitter, and there were some people who said that that was a first amendment violation. And so they sued him. Well, the Supreme court kind of weighed in on it. What that court did is not that interesting, but what justice Thomas wrote is interesting because it directly relates to free speech and big tech and some of the big tech censorship. And since he is part of the conservative majority, many people are speculating that maybe this is the direction the court is going, or they may be open to maybe open to revisiting some of these big tech cases. So want to get into that as well. And then lastly, kind of a fun story, a ridiculous story, but I wanted to chime in on this CBS 60 minutes story as it related to Ron DeSantis. Normally I don't like to, well, that's not true. I do like to slam dunk on the media. I do that all the time, but this is a really bad one. This was one that you can see how out of context they took him, literally just by comparing and contrasting the two paragraphs. And so I wanted to make sure we spend a little time on that just so we can rub their noses in it. So let's get into everything today before we do quick reminder, last week, I forgot on Friday because miss faith was out of the office. We had a little bit of a snafu happening on Friday. There was a last minute sock that got eaten by her very beautiful dog, penny. And so, uh, on Friday we were sort of, I didn't know what was going on. And, and so when we were doing show prep, you know, she told me that the dog penny was, was, uh, had consumed a sock and had been very sick. And so they were at the vet and lo and behold, I forgot to post over on locals, our live chat. So Ms. Faith is back here today and the good news is the sock has been

Speaker 2: 3:26

Past. It's gotten out clear we're in the clear,

Speaker 1: 3:33

So that sock is not going to do any more damage to penny. So good news on that, make sure you continue to send your love to miss penny and Ms. Faith, but we're back in business. So the point is of all that is that the slides will be posted over on locals after the show, all the materials that I'm going to go through will be over there and she is going to be clipping questions from local. So we'll actually have some questions today. Unlike Friday, where I was, I went over and spent some time over on YouTube, which was very nice, good to see everybody, but she will be clipping questions. So if you have any of those, send those over to her on our live chat, over@watchingthewatchersdotlocals.com. Okay. So let's get into the news of the day.

Speaker 2: 4:11

And as we know, stay 18 day eight

Speaker 1: 4:15

Scene of Derek Shovan trial picked right back up where we left off last week. You may recall on Friday sort of a half day, I think the judge was honoring good Friday. The schedule was a little bit ahead of schedule. So the judge gave him a little bit of a break, but we were right back in gear today. We started off with the medical doctor who actually pronounced George Floyd dead at the hospital. And so we're going to go through some of his testimony. Then we're going to talk about this police chief who came out and gave some very interesting testimony, some very good for the prosecution, but also I think a lot of it was very helpful for the defense and that's really where we're going to spend most of our time today. There was another Lieutenant, a female police officer. Who's been with the department for a long period of time. But as I was wrapping up show prep, she was still testifying or at least where I was on the video. So we're not going to get to her today. But if there's anything from her we'll of course watch that tonight and we'll deal with that tomorrow. So let's take a look at our trial board. Here we are. You can see not much has changed today. We heard a lot from Steve Schleicher was the prosecutor who was really out there asking questions on behalf of the government and still remember we're in the case in chief right now. So we're in this side of the diagram, the government are calling their witnesses and they're presenting their case. Mr. Nelson, here, Eric Nelson, the defense lawyer for Derek Shovan is cross-examining them. And so right now we're just going through the government's witnesses. These are all people who are being called by the government and testifying on behalf of the government against Derek Shovan. And then Eric Nelson gets to come out and ask them questions. This is where we're at on the witnesses for the last few days. I didn't add some of the people, I think from a Monday through Thursday or Monday through Wednesday last week, but I'm going to get them on this board right now. Today. We heard from Dr. Lang and Feld, who was the ER doctor or first responding doctor who helped with Floyd and ultimately pronounced him dead. We also heard from the police chief, we're going to get into him. And then this is that Lieutenant training commander who we're going to hear about maybe tomorrow, if any of her testimony was consequential, but the day started off interesting. They had a lot of argument conversation about body camera footage and about what to include and how much to include and when to include it. And they were just kind of battling back out, uh, back and forth over this all morning. And it was pretty interesting. In fact, they are going to be admitting more body cameras, but they're just kind of going through and literally taking out bits and pieces, cutting out seconds, cutting out minutes here or there because the judge does not find them relevant. And this whole issue was brought about by Eric Nelson, the defense attorney, he was saying, Hey, the prosecution played all these videos, all these body camera videos, and they didn't include the full thing. So he wanted to come back back in and sort of for the sake of completeness, there's a doctrine of completeness. You know, if you're, you can't take situations out of context, like CBS news, 60 minutes, did you want to include the full thing so that everybody knows what you're talking about? Put it in context. Don't just clip out little bits and pieces here and there. So when the government came out and submitted just little bits and pieces of the body camera, Eric Nelson came back out and said, no, we want way more. We want, we want to include all of it for context. And so the judge right now, he said, he's going to deal with a lot of this on Wednesday because tomorrow they're having to deal with another issue. And so the way that this format is working is they're dealing with issues early in the morning, before they start calling witnesses. And so tomorrow they're going to be dealing with, if you recall, from last week, there was that Morris Maurice hall, who was the person who was in the car with George Floyd, who was allegedly his drug dealer, according to George Floyd's girlfriend last week, she said that they had previously bought drugs from this guy. So last week, this other individual who may have been selling drugs, or who may have previously sold, who nobody knows, right? Nobody knows what's going on with this guy. And so the girlfriend says that maybe he should be implicated or at least somewhat connected to the ultimate cause of death, sort of by, uh, by extension. If he's, if he was the person who was selling drugs, if he sh sold George Floyd, fentanyl medication, drugs, prescription pills, whatever, then maybe he is closer to this case. And other people had previously thought. So what happened is somebody sent a subpoena to him. I'm guessing it was Eric Nelson last week, sent him a subpoena, said, Hey, we want you to testify very next day. I think it was the very next day, him Maurice hall, who is that, that potentially co passenger with Floyd then lawyered up sent in a notice that, Nope, I am going to be invoking my fifth amendment, right against self-incrimination. And in fact, they wanted to quash the subpoena in general, just so that he didn't have to come back into court long way of saying the judge also talked about that today. So they're going to deal with that issue tomorrow about whether or not he can come into court wearing plain clothes or what they're going to deal with him about that subpoena walkie he can testify about. So that's a whole different can

Speaker 3: 8:56

Of worms. Then on Wednesday, they're going to get back in and talk about some of the body camera issues and what can come in and what can come out. So that was all before we even heard the first witness this morning, a lot of activity, but then we're not done yet because the judge came out and held. What's called a Schwartz hearing, which I had not heard about, but this is something that apparently exists in Minnesota. And this is normal. They'll call different hearings different. Uh, but by the case names that were decided in that States. And so, you know, ultimately you have the Supreme court, which is kind of the, the, the binding authority of any particular state. And so you're typically referring to cases that came from the state Supreme court, not from a federal jurisdiction. So, uh, in Minnesota, there's a case called Schwartz. And basically it involves juror misconduct. And there are some rules that, that you have to go through in order to rectify any potential allegation or claims of juror misconduct. And so that's kind of how this started today. The judge brought everybody in all of the jurors into the room, shut off the camera, shut off. The audio, had a conversation with them, turned everything back on. Apparently there were no problems. This is judge Cahill explaining what happened is that I talked to the jurors satisfied with their answers. In fact, there was no jury misconduct. So we're going to keep this train on the tracks, but leads many to ask themselves what happened here? Is this the start? Is this a pattern? Are we going to see more of this type of stuff? Here is judge Kay Hill, first thing this morning, having some questions inquiring into the jurors and their conduct.

Speaker 4: 10:28

All right, we are back on the record and on audio and video, the court had just conducted a Schwartz hearing with the jurors regarding the matter. Um, the court makes the finding that there was no jury misconduct and that the jurors were credible in their responses. And accordingly, uh, no action will be taken. All right. Anything, uh,

Speaker 3: 10:57

All right. So don't know much about what that was all about, but that judge did say that he inquired found no issues. I looked up what a Schwartz hearing was over in Minnesota. You can take a look. Here's what it says. Defendants have a constitutional due process, right? To a fair trial and an impartial jury, right? So if the jury is doing something that is misconduct, we got to know about it. Otherwise you can't get a fair trial where alleged misconduct has occurred on a criminal jury, Minneapolis and Minnesota were apply, apply this rule 26.03, and they want to identify misconduct that was discovered prior to deliberation. So the case is still going on. So this is the appropriate time to do it. Allegations of misconduct discovered after the jury has entered deliberations is a separate issue. A Swartz hearing is the procedure by with both, both rules are carried out. So it says here it's governed by a procedure that was set forth in this case, Schwartz versus Minneapolis later codified into the rules of criminal procedure. They said they should be granted

Speaker 1: 11:54

Liberally upon a prima fascia showing by the moving party. So that means that if you, you know, whoever was moving for this, they noticed some sort of juror misconduct. And as long as they PRI uh, present enough evidence, so sort of on its face, if they just say, well, look at, look at the face of that thing. Yeah. That kind of looks like misconduct. Then the judge is going to hold a hearing. So a source hearing kind of a low bar. If you just have a little bit of a complaint, it sounds like the judge is going to grant this. And so what happens in the hearing while we know this now jurors are questioned under oath by the judge counsel is entitled to be present and have a hearing recorded in order to create a record for appeal. So that's what happened today. They had this hearing, the judges, uh, the judge asked people about what was going on under oath. The whole thing was recorded. We as the public, didn't get to see it. So the rules of evidence, they want to balance the court's interest in protecting jury deliberations from external scrutiny, but they also want to maintain the integrity of the court system. And so that's about it, you know, I'm not real sure what else took place there? Not sure how relevant it is. Sounds like it was pretty quick. The judge didn't take hours to inquire into this thing, probably just called some jurors in and I'm sure other people know what's going on. But if the judge is not, you know, feeling like this is an issue, then I think we can kind of move on. But it is interesting because we want to Mark this down. Anytime that there are juror fluctuations, we've just gotta be cognizant of that. Because if we start to see a pattern here that may lead the judge, so, you know, uh, impose some, uh, sequestrations or do something, and this is a volatile trial, so we're just sort of, everybody's on high alert. What's going on with the jurors. We want to make sure that they're safe and secure and that there's nothing strange going on. So that was out of the way. Now let's get to the first witness. This was Dr. Langenfeld Langenfeld and he is the doctor who sort of, uh, received George Floyd, uh, landed in his office or his hospital. And he was the person who was doing the initial diagnoses on him and trying to save his life and ultimately declared that there was nothing that they could do and that he had died, passed away. And so the kind of interesting testimony he did not really look like he was that interested in being there kind of a, I think he said it was his first, first time testifying. And there were some objections that went on here. He was talking about this, the prosecutor here who was Jerry Blackwell said specifically, while, you know, were you trying to save his life? Objection. You know, that's argumentative. And, and so it was, it was very kind of by the book medical testimony. And I want to show you this because we're going to play this next clip. And I want you to listen to this clip. And I'm only going to play at one time, but try to, you know, try to think about it in terms of, if you are a, if you're pro prosecution, if you're pro you know, George Floyd, you want to see Derek Shovan convicted. You're going to listen to this clip one way. And if you're somebody who is on behalf of Derek Shovan, if you think that he deserves a fair shake, that this was an overdose and that he should be acquitted, you're going to hear it another way. And so this, this sort of this one clip, you know, remind reminded me of one of those things that you see on the internet. One of those, I don't know if it's a meme or whatever, but it's like Laurel and Yanny, right? Laurel Jani, and Laurel and Yanny. And like it just, however you're thinking about it is how you hear it. So this is kind of one of those things. So what we're going to do is we're going to listen to the full clip that I'm going to, I have actually written out. I wrote out, I Tran a transcript of the last couple sentences, and I want to just show you how the defense is going to take this statement and run with it. And I'm going to show you how the prosecution would take this statement and run with it. And again, this is the prosecution witness. So this is Dr. Lang and Feld. And remember, he's talking about receiving George Floyd and having to do an initial diagnosis, right? This is all happening quickly. Floyd has been in cardiac arrest without a pulse for about 30 minutes. By the time he gets him, by the time he calls it and says, no, there's nothing we can do. And pronounces him dead. It's been about 60 minutes now. So George Floyd is somebody that does not have a pulse. And so this doctor is going to talk about the difference between heart activity and at some moments, when, when a person is passing away, the heart may not be pumping and creating a pulse in the body because blood is not moving throughout the veins and the arteries, but they still have some electrical energy in their heart. Meaning it's still, it's still sort of working, but it's not pumping, which is different than well, it's not pumping. And there's also no electrical activity in the heart also. So it's just, it's just dead. Right? And so this doctor, after about 60 minutes, then it comes in and says, all right, that's it. So we called it there. So you're going to hear some of this technical language, but what this prosecutor Mr. Blackwell is trying to do here is get him to say asphyxia, asphyxia, oxygen deprivation. So they're going this whole route there they're sort of maneuvering the case where it was not that the wind pipe. Well, I think it was all of those things, but he's, he's, you're going to see him and listen to him, hammer in, on asphyxia and oxygen deprivation, which was certainly caused in the, in the prosecutor's argument by Chauvin's knee. And so that is what you're going to hear. If you're pro pro prosecution, if you're pro defense, you're going to hear a lot of modifiers in there. You're going to hear that. He's not really an unequivocal statement from this doctor. It's a little bit, uh, narrow much to the prosecutions of dismay, I believe. So let's take a look into this clip. Let me wind that up again. Here's Mr. Blackwell talking with Dr. Lang and Feld

Speaker 5: 17:11

And at the end of the 30 minutes, uh, did you pronounce him, uh, formally, uh, that yes. Uh, at the time you pronounced him dead, was he still in some degree, uh, and, uh, PDA or as systally in terms of describing his heart? I think it's probably best to think of these as sort of a spectrum, um, where pea is some degree of electrical activity still running through the heart, but the heart's not pumping. Um, and then eventually that will devolve into a systally where both the heart is not pumping. And then the electrical activity stops as well. And so at the end of the case, um, the Mr. Floyd was still in PA, but there was virtually no cardiac activity. Um, and, and at that point in the absence of any apparent reversible cause, and because Mr. Floyd had been in arrest for, by this time 60 minutes, I determined that the likelihood of any meaningful outcome was far below 1% and that we would not be able to resuscitate Mr. Floyd. And so I then pronounced him dead. And doctor, uh, was your leading theory then for the cause of Mr. Floyd's cardiac arrest, oxygen, oxygen deficiency, that was one of the more likely possibilities. I felt that at the time, based on the information I had, it was more likely than the other possibilities. And Dr. Is there another name for death by oxygen deficiency? Asphyxia is a commonly understood term. Thank you back to Langenfeld no further questions.

Speaker 1: 19:01

All right. So there it is. And he leaves there, so he just drops the mic right there. If he's not listening. So it's, there it is now it's over. So Mr. Blackwell, Oh, oxygen deprivation. Oh, that was one of your main theories. Oh, and you were the attending doctor and you're pronounced. Oh, and it's oxygen deprivation. What's another name for that asphyxia. Got it. There you go. No further questions, jury, judge. We're done here. And so that's, that was a structured exit, right? That was the, that was the climax of this testimony. And you know that because he had no more questions after that. So everything was sort of working its way up to that. So Mr. Blackwell comes out, Oh, it's fix you up. Boom drops the mic. No further questions. We'll walks on off. Eric Nelson comes back out. So if you're, if you're somebody who's sitting there going, wow, that's pretty devastating. You know, he came out and he said, his primary theory for the death of George Floyd was in fact, asphyxia sounds pretty damning. What else can you say there? We have a medical doctor who's making that claim. Well, let's take a look at the transcript and we can read it both ways. We can read the transcript in favor of the prosecution and we can read it in favor of the defense and you can see how one sentence or one paragraph can really be interpreted two different ways. So here it is, the prosecutor says, and doctor was your leading theory then for the cause of Mr. Floyd's cardiac arrest oxygen deficiency, as we can see here, you can kind of follow the bouncing ball. That was one of the more likely possibilities. I felt that at the time, based on the information I had, it was more likely than the other possibilities. Is there another name for death by oxygen deficiency? He says asphyxia is a commonly understood term. No further questions. Thank you, Dr. Langenfeld. So if you're the prosecutor, what are you really excited about? You said that was one of the more likely possibilities. It was more likely than the other possibilities. That was what was, Oh, let's fix ya. Thank you. Oxygen deficiency means a[inaudible] that's a commonly understood term and that's a pretty persuasive statement. If you are the government. Now, if you're the defense, what do you read? What, what part of this sentence stands out for you while you say? Yeah, that was one of the more likely possibilities that I felt at that time. Also based on the information that I had at the time, that information showed that it was more likely than what other possibilities. So the defense is doing cartwheels. They say, yeah, this was his opinion at the time, which has obviously changed. This is no longer the time. And also he was judging this based on the information he had at the time. Guess what? He has a lot more information right now. He also has information that the toxicology report came back. He's got 11 nanograms per milliliter of fentanyl in his blood. Did that. What did he know that at the time guessing nuts. And he's saying that there were in fact, even at the time, there were other possibilities, which he was considering. And so you can see how this one statement is just, it can be interpreted both ways if you're the government. You're very happy that the first doctor who saw them said, this looks like it was a[inaudible]. He did not have oxygen deprivation. Uh, he was oxygen deficient, which led to a [inaudible]. He died. And this is based on a medical exam. Saw him came in, was testing his CO2 and just, he didn't have enough blood in his body. Not enough oxygen in his blood defense comes out, just, you know, shreds that up. Okay. At the time there's all of these other things. In fact, when you made that conclusion, you didn't have the full picture, the full scope, the full breadth of the information that was available. Right. So that was his testimony. Then we're going to change gears and we're going to talk about the police chief. And so, um, I, you know, when I first thought that the saw that the police chief was coming in here, I'm thinking, wait a minute, you know, Shovan is just a regular kind of lowly patrolmen, somebody who's on the streets, police chief of somebody who's high up, you've got sergeants, you've got lieutenants, you've got commanders. And you've got deputies for all those different positions. So you've got this massive hierarchy of officers, you know, and, and, and many of these, I'm not sure how big Minneapolis is, but some of these are billion dollar organizations. I think the budget for the NYP is a billion dollars, massive, massive organizations. And so what is the police chief who wasn't there, who doesn't do much of anything other than sort of set policy? You know, there's sort of like politicians, many of these police chiefs and what is, what, what is he getting called down for a trial that he had nothing to do with, he didn't train Chauvin. He didn't do any of this stuff. Presumably that's, what's what I'm thinking. But then I start thinking, well, if they are calling him, maybe he does know something. Maybe there's a good reason why the chief of police of the entire Bureau and the department is coming back down to testify in this trial. And then it's pretty obvious in my opinion, why would you do that? If he's going to be a favorable witness, this is a pretty good person to have on your side. Not only did, do we think this is wrong, Derek Shovan,

Speaker 2: 23:47

He's offended. The chief of police, the person who's in charge of the entire department says what he did was wrong. So what do we call that? When we're talking about arguments, it's called an arguments from authority or an appeal to a thought.

Speaker 1: 24:02

And so if you go on Wikipedia, you can see an argument that looks like this. It says it's also called an appeal to authority or argumentum ad[inaudible]. It was a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as

Speaker 2: 24:15

Evidence to support an argument. So it is an argument in where an opinion of an authority

Speaker 1: 24:22

Is used as evidence to support an argument. And so some people say, well, that can be a good form of argument. If everybody agrees on the reliability of the person who is in the position of authority, if you have context and you have that person in a position that everybody sort of relies on and says, yeah, that's a, that is a good position,

Speaker 2: 24:41

40, then maybe it's very relevant and it's perfectly okay.

Speaker 1: 24:43

Acceptable to do in context. So that might be one perspective that this police chief is in fact, yes, it is argument from authority,

Speaker 2: 24:51

But who cares? Because it's the police chief.

Speaker 1: 24:53

He is an authority and we should be listening to him for his opinion on this, because he's a reliable source of authority. That's one way to look at it. Others look at this, like it's a fallacy to cite an authority on the discussed topic as the primary means of supporting an argument. So there's another contingent here that says, all right, well, he's a police

Speaker 2: 25:12

Chief. So what he wasn't there. He

Speaker 1: 25:15

Doesn't do any training. Doesn't write any of the manuals. He just kind of goes out there, shakes hands, kisses, babies. Gladhands the politicians. And that's it. So does he, when's the last time he even made it

Speaker 2: 25:26

Arrest, right? Who knows?

Speaker 1: 25:29

You're going to see this sort of framing out, and this is exactly what the government does. They come back out the prosecutions, come back out. Okay. So tell me about everything, Mr. Police chief. I've been doing this for, you know, all this long and I've all these credentials and these are my responsibilities.

Speaker 2: 25:43

And most importantly, here are my opinions. And this is why

Speaker 1: 25:47

Police chief is so effective. Right? All the buck stops with the police chief, the buck stops with the president or the CEO or the executive who's in charge of making that decision.

Speaker 2: 25:55

And here they want to know, listen, Hey, about

Speaker 1: 25:59

Your training policies, about your departmental policies, about use of force, about objective reasonableness, about whether or not what Shovan did was in violation of anything that you can think of as it relates to Minneapolis. We want you to come in here and talk

Speaker 2: 26:12

About that. Can you do that? Sure. I can do that. And so they bring him in and he does just that

Speaker 1: 26:18

Let's see in this next clip, here's the prosecutor, Steve flicker, who is going through and just going, what about this policy? Is that in violation of that? Yes, it is. What about this policy? How about that one? Is that wrong too? Yes, it is. And on and on and on. And it's effective.

Speaker 2: 26:32

Why? Because the jurors are sitting there going, that's the chief of police

Speaker 1: 26:36

And he's saying, this thing is wrong. And this guy looks reasonable. Looks like somebody we can empathize with, with he's

Speaker 3: 26:44

Out there coming down on everything that Shovan did. So naturally if you're a juror and you like this person, and you think that they are an authority figure and they are in a respectable position, gosh, if they, if they're so unequivocal about this, how could I disagree with them? They're an authority. They're the chief of police. If they're looking at this thing and saying that this is wrong and there's no excuse for anything you see here, who am I to disagree with that it's an appeal to authority and it's very effective, which is why they're doing it. So here is Steve Schleicher and this is a line of questioning with the police chief. And remember, this is a police chief, you know, this is somebody who's at the top of hundreds, if not thousands of employees. And he's being asked to weigh in on a use of force case that happened back in may of last year. Here's Steve Schleicher.

Speaker 6: 27:32

Oh, sir. Um, based upon your review of all of the information that you've just mentioned, um, do you believe that the defendant followed DuPont departmental policy five dash three Oh four regarding deescalation? I absolutely do not agree with that. And how so? Um, that action, um, is not the escalation. And when we talk about, uh, the framework of our sanctity of life, and when we talk about the principles and values that we have, that, that action, um, goes contrary to, uh, to what we're taught as you reflect on exhibit 17 and Misty asks you, is this a trained Minneapolis police department, defensive tactics technique? It is not. Or we read the, uh, departmental policy on neck restraints. Is this a neck restraint? Um, be conscious neck restraint by policy mentions light to moderate pressure. When I look at exhibit 17, um, and when I look at the facial expression of, of Mr. Floyd, that does not appear in any way, shape or form, if that is like to moderate pressure. So is it your belief then that this particular form of restraint, if that's what you, if that's what we'll call it, uh, in fact, violates departmental policy. I absolutely agree that violates our policy. Are you aware now that the defendant maintained this position on George Floyd for nine minutes and 29 seconds? I am aware of that. And I believe you testified that for assess to be reasonable when it's applied at the beginning and through the entire encounter, is that right? That is correct. Is what you see in exhibit 17, in your opinion, within Minneapolis police departmental policy five dash 300 authorizing the use of reasonable force. It is not. And why not? That is, that is, uh, it has to be objective reasonable. We have to take into account, uh, circumstances, information, the threat to the officer, the threat to others. Um, and we, um, the severity of that, uh, so that is not a part of our policy. That is not what we teach and, uh, that should be condoned.

Speaker 1: 30:19

So I, he said condoned there. I think he means condemned rights. So anyway, so the point here is you just saw sort of a laundry list, right? Yeah. Okay. What about this policy? What about, is this a defensive policy? Is this approved? If an officer is being attacked, can he use this defensively? No, it's not. All right. What about, is this a, you know, would you consider this to be a valid neck or workers' restraint? And he says, no, it's not anything that talks about neck restraints is allowed, but it needs to be light and moderate use. And so if you saw that, that imagery, I put a gray box right there in front of Floyd's face just to pay him a little dignity and respect. And also to please some of the tech people who don't like to see that stuff on their platforms and Ninja for it. So that is what he is talking about. He saying, no, yes, there may be some net conversation, neck restraint conversations in our manual somewhere, but not from what I saw because it's supposed to be light, moderate. Also, is this a reasonable use of force? The prosecutor asked him, no, it's not. So he's opining on a lot of things about reasonableness, about objective reasonableness about whether this was an appropriate use of force. And then he says, was this was this within a policy? And he gives you some specific examples of policies. No, it's not, no, it's not. So if you're somebody who's sitting on the jury panel, you're going dang, like it's unequivocal. Even the police chief is saying this stuff is out of bounds and Chauvin, of course, allegedly did all of that. And so the prosecutor was just kind of going down the list and this next clip, you're going to hear that he also is talking about sort of, this is just out of alignment with some of our fundamental policies, some of our ethics and our values that are a part of the police department. So let's play this next one. And then we're going to hear what Mr. Nelson does in order to combat some of this stuff. We've got two clips that are from the prosecution asking questions, and then two clips from Mr. Nelson doing the cross examination. And so here he is, again, opining he's made, he's giving his opinion on whether or not what he saw that was connected to that video. W what happened with Shovan and Floyd, whether it was in Paul, within policy, whether it violated the Minneapolis police department guidelines or procedures. And here is that,

Speaker 6: 32:24

And do you believe, or do you have a belief as to when this restraint, the restraint on the ground that you viewed should have stopped once Mr. Floyd? And this is based on my viewing of the videos, um, once Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting, and certainly once he was, um, uh, in distress and trying to verbalize that, um, that that should have stopped, um, there's, there's an initial reasonableness and trying to just get him under control over the, in the first few seconds. But, but, uh, once there was no longer any resistance and clearly when Mr. Floyd was no longer responsive and even motionless to continue to apply that level of force to a person proned out handcuffed behind their back, um, that that in no way, shape or form is anything that, um, uh, is by policy is not part of our training. And it is certainly not part of our ethics or values.

Speaker 1: 33:45

All right. So a couple of big statements right there. He just said the chief of police came back out and said, not part of our training, not part of our policies, not part of our ethics and our values, pretty pretty blanket statements there. So if Eric Nelson come back out and say, well, it is kind of part of this training, or it's a part of that policy or our, our, one of our values is that we protect our own lives. As police officers, we protect our partners lives. Then you can make an argument that if Shovan under the totality of circumstances with Eric, which Eric Nelson spent a significant amount of time diving into with him about sort of risk assessment policies and how an officer is supposed to decipher what is happening around him or her in a particular incident, and then how to process that and act accordingly. So they dive into this and we have a police chief who wasn't there, who's talking a lot about policies and trainings and values. Who's just sort of given, you know, blanket statements and spreading those out and saying, this is, this applies to everything. Well, what Eric Nelson's going to do is come right back out and say, well, let's listen to it. Let's see what he has to say. Basically, he's disqualifying him from the boots on the ground perspective. He's saying you are not somebody who trains this stuff. You are not somebody who writes the policies and procedures on this stuff. You're not even somebody who makes arrests often. Yeah. When's the last time you did that long time ago. And he say, so maybe there are other people in the department who are better suited to give their opinions on these issues, like use of force issues, like training issues. What do you think about that, Mr. Police chief? Do you think that that might be reasonable or not? Here he is. If an officer

Speaker 6: 35:24

Sir was trained in a particular handcuffing.

Speaker 1: 35:28

So let me frame that out a little bit better. So it is, you're going to hear from him in this clip, what he's talking about is sort of a, he's giving some hypotheticals and he's, he's the police chief through certain scenarios that might require an officer to change their procedures or change their policies. And so he's given an example about putting an officer in handcuffs and how that might change. And so he's saying, okay, yes, you might technically have a, a policy or procedure that's on the books. But if an officer goes to training and they learn something that might be a little bit different than the policy, but it's called a guideline. It's a little bit different. It's sort of an interpretation. So the way that this works on a high level with, with the government is we have, what's called the U S code. Those are the laws, that's what the law says. Then we have what are called the code of federal regulations, which are regulations that interpret the laws. So you sort of have the original law, and then you have the interpretation of that and how you run with that. So it's like a restaurant, right? You have a sandwich that has all of the ingredients on there, so they know how to make it. But if a customer comes in and says, well, I don't want that on my sandwich. Get that off of there. And they take it off while technically they're violating the menu, but they're not violating the guidelines, which is to make the customer happy and serve them a delicious sandwich. So we use a lot of sandwich analogies on this show. It's because they're easy. But the point is that it's something where they can make some ch make some adjustments to improve their service. They can take the thing off the sandwich, deliver the customer, a happier sandwich, something that they're more satisfied with, even though it's technically sort of different than what the original rules are. So you have this all, all the time in your life, right? I'm going to exercise every day. You go five days a week and you don't fire yourself over that. It's close enough. It's sort of within the guidelines, it's not dropping below the standard of care. It's saying you can't, you know, pull out a gun and start shooting defendants. That's not what we're talking about, but he's giving an example saying, all right, look, if you have training on how to handcuff somebody and they go, and they get a different training from somebody else that says, well, this is a better way to handcuff somebody. And that is not in violation of the policy. They're learning some guidelines that just allow them to handcuff people better, but not in a way that jeopardizes the underlying policy. Is that okay? And how does that work in your department? So this is the police chief now saying, all right, well, this is Eric Nelson. Who's fleshing out this hypothetical. And the police chief is then having to respond and say, yeah, this is how this is the authority figure that I would defer to in that hypothetical. This person might be better to answer questions about that than I am here is Mr. Nelson,

Speaker 6: 38:04

If an officer was trained in a particular handcuffing technique, and then they go to their defensive tactics training and they say, this is a better way to handcuff a suspect. It's not a policy change. It's just the best practice change. And they can still use the old way they did it. Uh, it would, uh, counselor would, it would have to be something that the training staff would have to not just an officer saying, I want to do it this way. And I mean, it's something that would have to be authorized

Speaker 7: 38:36

Through her or training. So we can talk about that kind of thing with the training, the use of force defensive tactics training. Right. That would be the better place to talk better people to talk to about that. Yes. Yes. Still going. Okay. All right.

Speaker 3: 38:57

That was a mic drop, right? Oh, so there would be other people better suited to talk to about this. Oh yes. You saw him unequivocal. Yes, definitely. And Mr. Nellis has gone. Uh huh. Perfect. Good. Cause I have somebody by the way, who's going to come in and talk about this soon as our case in chief is, is ready. We're going to come out and present. Somebody says, yeah, perfectly reasonable to do that. And here's why, and they're going to have a bunch of explanations for it. So they got the, uh, the chief of police now saying, well, you know, I can't answer that question. You're going to have to defer to the people who run that, who run the training program, go ask them. Oh, so there are other people that I should ask who might be better informed about how this works. Oh, definitely. Yes, definitely. Okay, perfect. Thank you. And so what he's doing is if you rewind the clock, we just talked about the appeal to authority, not, not a bad or fallacious thing to do. If everybody is sort of agreeing on the authority figure, he's the chief of police. It's hard to minimize his role in this entire conversation. But Eric Nelson just did that. Just took a question, asked him something specifically about it. He said, well, that's outside the purview, kind of the policy, the political answer that police chiefs routinely give because that's their job. They're not supposed to be involved in all of the training in the manuals and all that stuff. That's all delegated down. You work yourself up to police chief, so you don't have to be involved in any of that. And so that's what this guy did. And so he just sort of, uh, by reactions. Nope. Oh, it's go talk to them about it. Nelson says yes. Perfect. It's great. We know that you're not the authority figure to come out here and talk about use of force. So what Eric Nelson is doing is he's reframing this from the positive appeal to authority, to the negative appeal, to authority, which is called the appeal to false authority. This is a fallacy that is used when a person appeals to a false, false authority as evidence for their claim. They are from authority. They're the results of citing a non authority as an authority. So in this case, you can make the argument that the police chief is not an authority on use of force, right? As he just said, you're going to talk to other people, the people who do the training about it, the example that they give here on Wikipedia, it's saying it's an appeal to authority in an unrelated field, like citing Albert Einstein as the authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics. Okay. Right. He's a physicist. He's not a religious scholar. And so why would you ask Einstein about the old Testament? You wouldn't, it's not relevant. So same thing here. Why would you ask the chief of police about use of force and how to, you know, weigh those things? When he's, presumably, as we learned today, not an expert on use of force. There are other people

Speaker 1: 41:34

Who are better suited to answer those questions still very effective. I think from the prosecution's perspective, now here is another clip. And I want to, uh, I want to sort of warn you on this one. There, there is body camera footage in this, in these clips, but I did draw a, a great out marker on the camera, on the, on the video file so that you can't see Floyd. Now you're probably gonna see some images, cause I'm not a video editing guru, but I did this very quickly. So if you see some of Floyd, I apologize for that. Shouldn't, it's all great out, but a little bit of a content warning. If you've already seen this video and you don't want to see it again, you may catch some bits and pieces of it, but I tried to gray out some of the more gruesome stuff. So that is forthcoming, uh, turn this off if you don't want to see any of it. But like I said, most of it is blocked out. But what I want to do is frame this out. So this once again is Eric Nelson coming in and asking the chief of police about this concept called camera perspective, bias, very powerful clip. This is rolling around the internet right now because the chief of police essentially comes out and says, yeah, you know, based on that different camera angle, there may be something else going on with that need might be in a different location based on the flipping of the cameras. And so this next clip is about a minute and 30, maybe a minute and 45 seconds in real time. This took about five minutes to play out in court because there's long portions of body camera video. And what I did is I sped those up dramatically. So you're going to see, you're going to hear from Nelson. You're going to see some very, very fast camera, which is me fast forwarding through the, uh, the body cameras. Then we're going to see Nelson again. Then another fast forward, then we're going to hear from this, uh, police chief at the very end of his testimony. And you're going to hear Eric Nelson say, that's it, I'm done another Mike drop. And he leaves then, then of course, uh, Steve Schleicher, I think came back out and tried to clean it all up. And so here is that final clip, little bit of a content warning. If you don't want to see any of this, but here is the last clip of the hearing today that we're going to cover.

Speaker 7: 43:36

Are you familiar with the concept of camera perspective bias? I have not counseling. Okay. Now again, if I may take that down, I stipulation I'm going to show that same time frame exhibit 2000, excuse me. One zero one nine. That same perspective from Mr. King's body camera and I'd offer one zero one nine one one zero one nine. Any objection, 10 19 is received, which the publisher in Greece agree appears to be the same timeframe. Yes. All right. Now, lastly, chief, I'm going to show you one last video. We can take this down your honor. Exhibit. I would offer exhibit 10 20, which is a side-by-side of the two, 10 20 is received and permission to publish.

Speaker 3: 44:42

All right. So here we're sped up now and you can see that they're just connected there. They're in there. They're matched up. So on the right side, you've got the body cam on the left side, you've got the bystander video and they're they're matched in real time. And so he's sort of just talking through.

Speaker 7: 45:01

Would you agree that from the perspective of officer King's body camera, it appears that officer Chauvin's knee was more on Mr. Floyd's shoulder blade? Um, yes. Let that hang further questions. No further questions. Let that sit.

Speaker 3: 45:24

Mr. Slasher, Shalisha come back up and ask questions. So pretty powerful way to leave that line of questioning. This was something that was well orchestrated and I gotta be honest. This police chief was very honest about this. Just said yes. Yeah, it does. It looks like that. Right? And that gives him a ton of credibility, a ton of credibility. Now the jurors are hearing that and they're, they're saying the police chief, just, he watched the same body camera that we watched. It kind of does look like Chauvin's knee is across the shoulder blade, not across the neck. So what do we do with this? Let's jump into some questions. And for some reason, our slides are not sinking. So I'm going to make a last minute adjustment over here. Ms. Faith had sent me a couple things and we're going to take some questions over from locals.com. So if you want to ask a question, head on over to watching the watchers.locals.com, there's a little bit of a live chat community that takes place over there. And we take questions from you as you're chatting over there and we throw them right in this slide deck, which is now available for me. It's still loading up on my screen over here. And I'm just, just running the clock out basically until this continues to load. As you can see now, here we are. We've got first question coming in from news. Now, Wyoming says I can see the prosecutor refusing to give immunity to Floyd's friend because he really doesn't help the prosecutor's case, but could help the defense. So the fifth seems pretty hard to get over without immunity. Yeah, it's a good question. And that is a very, very interesting question. So I'm not real sure where that's going to go. They're going to be addressing that first thing tomorrow. It sounds like, and I think he's got a public defender and I think he's also in custody. Is that accurate? So have they already charged him with a crime or why is he in custody? I don't know much about it. I sorta thought he had not been charged with a crime, but then I saw that he's got a public defender. So he actually may in fact, be in custody. We're going to get to the bottom of that. That's about, uh, Marie's Mo Mo Maury's somebody

Speaker 1: 47:30

Maury's. They filed a notice or a motion that he's going to be invoking the fifth amendment. So we'll see where that goes. Jeremy says, how can he testify if he invoked the fifth? He can't, he won't, but they are still going to talk about that. You know, he may still have to come into court and go through the motions, right? Sit up there on the stand and say on advice of counsel, I hereby invoke my fifth amendment. Right. And so they may just want him to do that over and over and over again. We have Bianca Realty says, Rob silly question about the trial. Why is the government against the police officer? And he has a private defense. If he was on duty, I get confused by that.

Speaker 3: 48:05

Shouldn't the government be defending a police officer. So, uh, now, so it sort of depends on what side the government is.

Speaker 1: 48:17

He's no longer employed. So he was fired. So he's not a part of the police department anymore. He was still a part of the police union. So the police union is representing him and they are the ones my understanding or who are paying for his defense with Mr. Nelson. So he still does have some sort of a big entity behind him, which is the police union and the government, because they have fired him. They sort of severed that relationship.

Speaker 3: 48:40

And from, from a political, you know, from a little, uh, political perspective or even a

Speaker 1: 48:46

Civil PR, you know, I, I don't do employment law. I don't do employment or, or, or any of that type of civil law, but I'd be curious, you know, if Derek Shovan is acquitted, would he then have any potential claim against the government for wrongful termination or seek compensation? Because their argument is going to be that he sort of, he violated the terms of his employment by acting outside of the scope of employment, right? It's like if you hire somebody to run your cashier and they steal from you, or they do something, you know, a client, somebody comes into the front of your, of your restaurant and they spring out and beat the heck out of that person. Right? That's that's outside of the scope of your employment. So how can an employer be liable for something that was totally

Speaker 3: 49:26

Unforeseeable if they walked into your restaurant

Speaker 1: 49:28

And slipped on the ground and they sued the restaurant. Yeah. You can be liable for that. You've got a duty to secure the premises and make sure that it's safe. But if one of your employees just did something that was totally non foreseeable totally out of the ordinary. Well, would you still be on the hook for that? The government, in this case, they're going to say, no, we didn't authorize Shovan to do any of that stuff. So he's fired. We're not representing them. He's on his own a little bit different than if they operate within the confines. Like let's say, uh, you know, this was a legitimate shootout and the police still had his back

Speaker 3: 49:57

Then, then yes. I think that they would

Speaker 1: 50:00

Support and aid him in the defense, but here they fired him. They terminated that employee employment relationship. Good question. How consulting says, arguments should be valid and sound on their own. If a person isn't authority and they speak out of their, we shouldn't pay them any mind and parent it, authorities are supposed to speak rationally, which requires checking the argument. Yeah. And look, look, we, we, we all know what this police chief is doing. Right. He's trying to save his department. He's trying to get out there. He knows that public is one, one way. He knows that he's got to come out here and sort of row with the political tide here. So, you know, I'm not, I don't, um, I don't fault him for doing that. And quite frankly, I think that his testimony was pretty sincere, pretty credible. I think his opinions may have been a little bit biased because I don't think he's particularly qualified to make some judgment calls on some of the things that he was passing judgment on as Nelson pointed out, Hey, maybe there are other people who are better suited to answer that question. Wouldn't you agree with that? At least. Yeah. Actually I would. So he's pretty honest guy. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:58

And he's, he's playing it, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1: 51:01

Even handed, which is a good thing. And that that's all you can expect out of witnesses in this situation. Bessie, Bessie Manto says defense should ask the police chief if he would be fired. If he says that Chauvin's actions were by the book. Yeah. Right. I think we kind of know the answer to that, to that. If he came out and said,

Speaker 2: 51:21

Actually, actually, Steve, there is a, a provision

Speaker 1: 51:25

In here that talks about this that maybe Shovan could use in order to justify his actions like this, this, you know, this is kind of a situation where it's like the law, you know, w when you, when you hear a judge

Speaker 2: 51:38

And they're, they're sort of passing rulings

Speaker 1: 51:40

And drafting opinions based on facts in front of them, they can kind of maneuver it however they want, because there's so much material out there

Speaker 2: 51:46

In the legal world, just billions of pages of documents. So you can kind of pick and choose

Speaker 1: 51:52

Craft, whatever argument you want and make an argument for. It may not be a good argument, but you can try. And so that's what this police chief's testimony sort of felt like to me, he, he could, he could reach a conclusion and then navigate his way to get there.

Speaker 2: 52:06

However he wanted. And he was

Speaker 1: 52:08

Going to do that. And as a police chief of somebody, who's got a whole department to run and the whole city

Speaker 2: 52:12

Interface with, he's got a tall order, we're asking a lot

Speaker 1: 52:16

This guy, right. And so he's got to come out. And I think he did a pretty fair job of answering questions without being overly biased, which is all we can ask at that moment. Pinky two says, Rob, this testimony seems devastating. Can cross examination, turn this around. So I think it, I think it did. I mean, I think basically what you hear from the police chief is that's not policy, that's out of bounds. That's not allowed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nelson comes back out and says, yeah, but you're not the authority figure who gets to make those decisions.

Speaker 2: 52:43

Are you? No, I'm not, actually,

Speaker 1: 52:45

There are many other people who are better suited for that. Next up, we got Sharon, Courtney says, what might the C of P have against Shovan?

Speaker 2: 52:53

Could he be, could he be prejudice

Speaker 1: 52:55

Against him because he's white or some other reason? Well, I think Sharon, that, that, that just sort of comes from his role as the chief of police. You know, he's thinking about the,

Speaker 2: 53:04

The tuition, not the individual. So yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:09

That's when you're watching his testimony, I think you have to watch it through that

Speaker 2: 53:13

Clench lens, right? He's not gonna, he's not gonna jump.

Speaker 1: 53:17

[inaudible] the entire department for Derek Shovan, that's not going to happen. Next up we got mob. Fox says, have to disagree. You can gauge use of force as that literally does it for a living he's supposed to be oversight over the police force. He likely does this frequently. You don't really need practical policing experience to do this just as just like a lawyer doesn't require having been a cop to prosecute people. So that's a, that's a good point, mom. That's a, that's a fair,

Speaker 2: 53:40

Their interpretation of it. So I think

Speaker 1: 53:43

What Nelson's response is going to be is, okay, you have a police chief who does what he does. And we have this use of force expert on our side, who does what he does. And you just put them both up in front of the jurors. You let them decide the benefit that Nelson has now is that the chief of police just came back out and said, yeah, there actually might be other people who are more qualified than I am to opine on some of that material. Next up we've got, want to know, says, do they need to prove Shovan thought Floyd could die to prove guilt or not? Does the training have time limits mentioned for someone on drugs? So no, they didn't. They don't need to prove that that Shovan thought Floyd could die. So that's how it sort of peering into his mind and diving in there and trying to decipher what's going on in there. And the, the charges that we have seen now are not first degree murder charge, right? It's not like he woke up and predetermined or premeditated that he was going to go kill George Floyd. He, something happened. And so the different, the, the, the threshold that we're talking about in Chauvin's charges are much lower. It's talking about, uh, you know, deprived mind and sort of, uh, a recklessness and carelessness that led to somebody dying. Good question though, does the training have time limits mentions for someone on

Speaker 2: 54:49

Drugs? Um, so I'm not sure this is a training have time limits mentioned. So, so not, not that I heard that they, they did talk about timing in it in, in basically

Speaker 1: 55:02

Asking the police chief, for his opinion on laying on putting a knee on the neck for nine minutes and change. So that was obviously a long period of time that he commented on. But if, if you're asking whether training expires or something like that, for most police training, the answer is no. Now they do have certain departments, certain requirements that they meet certain thresholds every year. And so they've got to sort of have a maintenance that they do, but, um, but I think that's, I think that's about it. We have next up Liberty or death says, it looks like Mr. Nelson watched my cousin Vinny keeps coming with those mic drops. Yeah. I noticed that he had, I think, two of those today. Good exits. And so did Mr. Blackwell, he also had a, he attempted one, but I don't think it was as effective as he thought news. Now Wyoming says the last question from this, Mr. Nelson to the chief about not applying medical aid in the middle of the gunfight still seems to me the most ridiculous

Speaker 2: 55:54

[inaudible] yet about not, yeah.

Speaker 1: 55:56

Applying medical aid in the middle of a gunfight. I'm not sure I caught that one, but that is interesting. We have, next up, we got my Fox says, can we have a small PSA about how bad of a choice it would be to take the stand as a defendant for yourself and how it can't really help. Yeah. So, uh, happy to do that Mo in 99.9, nine, nine times out of a hundred or a thousand or whatever numbers you want, the defendant does not take the stand. This is just a general rule for lawyers. You have

Speaker 3: 56:24

A right against self-incrimination. You do not have to get up there and explain yourself. And the government can't even comment on that. So if they say like, let's say in the Shovan trial,

Speaker 2: 56:33

That the prosecutor

Speaker 3: 56:35

Stood up and said, Hey, look, you just heard from 300

Speaker 2: 56:37

Witnesses here. Guess who you didn't hear from

Speaker 3: 56:40

Derek Shovan he could come up here and he could explain what was going through his mind, but he's not going to do it. Right. He can come up here and explain that he's not guilty, but you're not going

Speaker 2: 56:48

To hear from him. Well, that's

Speaker 3: 56:51

A huge problem. Judge would have a fit about that and probably result in a mistrial. And this is for good reason, right? Because you can't penalize somebody for not testifying against he's exercising his right against self-incrimination. You can't call them out on that. So traditionally the rule is don't testify.

Speaker 2: 57:09

Now there are exceptions to this very small, very few, but there might be one in this case, we don't know. Okay. The difference here is that Derek Shovan is H

Speaker 3: 57:25

To police officer he's used to testing

Speaker 2: 57:28

Fine. And he's kind of the only person that can explain what happened here. So

Speaker 3: 57:32

My gut instinct is now Derek Shovan can't testify. You can't put

Speaker 2: 57:35

Him on the stand, but thank you might have to,

Speaker 3: 57:38

We'll see where this goes. Now, bear in mind. He's a little bit different than a regular witness. Okay. He's been a practicing police officer. Somebody who's been serving whatever for long time. I think 17 years, if not longer than that, my guess is he's probably testified in many trials. So he knows how to testify and he knows what is necessary and how to do it appropriately. One of the big reasons you don't put your defendants on the stand is because they are not good

Speaker 2: 58:01

Witnesses. That's just, just nice

Speaker 3: 58:04

Times out of 10. They're not good. They might think that they're good, but they're not. They're going to get skewered up and just twist it up into a pretzel by the prosecution. But

Speaker 2: 58:12

Derek Shovan

Speaker 3: 58:14

Maybe may not be right. He can sort of take the stand and just testify like a regular police officer would when they're conducting an arrest. I mean, he could like literally he could say no. So at on May 25th, at 8:37 PM, I was, uh, seated on duty at this location. I got a phone call from this person I responded and I showed up there. I made contact with and just run through the whole thing. Just like a government prosecutor would do. If they're prosecuting a crime

Speaker 2: 58:39

Call showing up, what did you do?

Speaker 3: 58:41

Walk us through it. And he would just go by, okay. So why'd you do that? Why did you put the neon? And this is what I did. According to this, I thought this process through sound speed,

Speaker 2: 58:49

Very reasonable cross examined him. And he can, he can sort of, you know, defend himself along with his attorney. It's gonna be objecting

Speaker 3: 58:57

And making sure that he's spring in the life and protect,

Speaker 2: 58:59

Acting him. But I don't know. I think that the jury may need to hear from him, but generally speaking MA's right. Okay. Don't testify if you're a defendant without explicit approval

Speaker 3: 59:15

From your authority and some pretty good conversation about what to expect. Good to you ma

Speaker 2: 59:22

We have news. Now. Wyoming said

Speaker 1: 59:24

Floyd's friend is in custody on a separate warrant for domestic violence. I believe. However, since others have said he was the dealer who provided drugs to Floyd, it is always possible for charges there. I don't think the judge could force the prosecutor to give immunity. Can he,

Speaker 2: 59:37

Uh, no,

Speaker 1: 59:39

I don't think he can force the government to do that, but he might, you know, I don't know. Uh, I'm sorta thinking this through on the fly and I don't, I've never seen,

Speaker 2: 59:48

I've seen this play out, but I'm wondering if the judge could carve

Speaker 1: 59:54

Out some sort of sealed testimony

Speaker 2: 59:58

Where he can tell

Speaker 1: 59:59

Testify sort of under sealed sort of protected credit, create a bubble as it were that the testimony is given under the guise of immunity. If the government doesn't give it to them, give it, give it to him

Speaker 2: 1:00:09

For that reason. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:00:12

Interesting. I have to think through that one. Very, very interesting question. So this is a new issue, which is going to be interesting to explore. So thank you for bringing that up there. News now, Wyoming. And what did I do? We got a couple more questions on this segment. One last one on this segment, it looks like, or two we've got from miss faith

Speaker 2: 1:00:28

Says Liberty or death in

Speaker 1: 1:00:30

The house. As I think if acquitted Shovan may have a wrongful termination claim, but for the police falling back on a possible morals clause for making them look bad. So he thinks that there may be a wrongful termination claim if they don't have a morals clause. Yeah. So I'm not sure about that one. And then the last one, this looks like Joe Snow is responding to boom, boom for love says, I think there is 0% chance. He will be acquitted because I think they would be able to meet the statute for manslaughter or at least squeeze it in to fit into fit, to avoid backlash from the writers. Can they just change the charges at any point during the trial S uh, no, they cannot just change the charges,

Speaker 2: 1:01:06

But they did

Speaker 1: 1:01:07

Add the manslaughter charge. No, the third degree murder charge was a charge that came back. Manslaughter was always, there was second degree manslaughter. Third degree was the one that we were talking about. That's the one that came back because it was already, it was originally charged, but then it was dismissed until the Supreme court brought it back. So it's not like they're just manipulate, moving these charges around one was there and then not, and then it's back again. So

Speaker 2: 1:01:31

That was really the extent

Speaker 1: 1:01:34

Of where the charges came from. But no, they can't just change it to first degree murder. There, there are procedures that they have to go through in order to swear in super, super Vening indictments and things like that. Good questions today, a lot of interesting issues are percolating percolating

Speaker 2: 1:01:50

Over here. I'm excited about it.

Speaker 1: 1:01:53

It'll be fun. So we're going to be back here talking more about Shovan all week, in fact. So make sure you stick around, join us on locals, locals.com. Find our group called watching the Watchers

Speaker 2: 1:02:03

And get plugged in. Ask

Speaker 1: 1:02:05

A question and we'll see you over there. All right. So next, next story. We're going to change gears a little bit. We're going to leave the show and stuff behind. We're going to talk about the Supreme court Supreme court of the United States issued a new set of orders today in those orders,

Speaker 3: 1:02:20

We saw an opinion by judge

Speaker 2: 1:02:22

Thomas, as it relates to Twitter

Speaker 3: 1:02:25

And free speech, which is very interesting because Thomas is one of the more conservative judges. And this has been an issue that has been floating around for some period of time. I want to do a little bit of backstory on this. So if you remember back in 2017, Donald Trump was still the president. He was still on Twitter and

Speaker 2: 1:02:42

He blocked

Speaker 3: 1:02:45

Some people on Twitter. And what happened, there was an organization known as the Knight first amendment Institute, and seven people that Donald Trump had blocked. And they sued him. They said that they violated Donald Trump as the president. They violated the first, their first amendment rights as citizens by blocking them, right? We're citizens. We have a right to express ourselves. First amendment free expression, Donald Trump, the president, and elected official in office

Speaker 2: 1:03:10

Block them. That's a deprivation of their rights. So they went and sued and the district court said, we agree with you, Donald Trump

Speaker 3: 1:03:20

Is violating your rights and the U S court

Speaker 2: 1:03:23

Of appeals upheld that ruling said, yeah, you're right. You're violating their rights. So what happened? Well, Donald,

Speaker 3: 1:03:31

Trump's not a president, not the president anymore. And this case is now moot is what the Supreme court says. So what happened before we got to this moment in time, there was a us solicitor general, a guy by the name of Jeffrey Wall, who was the top lawyer. And he was working for the Donald Trump administration. And when the second circuit court of appeals said, yes, also, you can not block people on Twitter at Mr. President. He said, well, why don't you guys take this up to the Supreme court? So they did. They took that second circuit position up. And the conversation was about asking the Supreme court to weigh in on elected officials conduct. What kind of an elected official do on Twitter, on social media, right? Th this is the court asking what the president of this country can do.

Speaker 2: 1:04:17

It's kind of a big deal. You don't want a second

Speaker 3: 1:04:20

Circuit court or a district court saying, well, Mr. President, sorry, you can't block people with your Twitter account and you have the president going, what did you say? I just appointed you buddy boy, right? So you have this sort of sacred division of power. You want the Supreme court to weigh in on that, not a lower level position. So that's where we're at. Now. The Supreme court has in fact heard this case. So this was appealing itself all the way up. And we have an opinion today that came,

Speaker 2: 1:04:45

Came out kind of, not really, but kind of, and this might give us a little hint.

Speaker 3: 1:04:51

It's about where this is going. And so I want to run through this a little bit. Here is the opinion, as it came out today, decided April 5th, 2021. And it says it's in the Supreme court of the United States. And you're going to notice it says Thomas J concurring. So that's just judge Thomas. And you'll see here. This says on petition for writ of certiorari it's Knights, first amendment Institute. They were originally suing Donald Trump, but now he's in an office anymore. So now they're suing Joe Biden, who is the president. So it's nights of America now, or nights first amendment Institute from Columbia suing Joe Biden. And you're going to notice that this is the majority opinion. This is the whole opinion right here. This is everything that we've got. It says the petition for writ of certiorari is granted. So the Knight first amendment university

Speaker 2: 1:05:39

Was the original, uh, plaintiff here.

Speaker 3: 1:05:43

The president went up to the district court. They won, went up to the court of appeals. They want courts, uh, Trump's people took this up to the Supreme court. Supreme court says, we're going to hear that

Speaker 2: 1:05:53

Case. We'll take it doesn't happen often, but they did. And what did they say? This?

Speaker 3: 1:05:59

This is all you got. They said, yeah, it's granted. We're going to hear this case. By the way, the judgment is vacated. The case is remanded back down to the court of appeals, with instructions to dismiss the case as moot

Speaker 2: 1:06:08

Moot. Okay. We heard a lot

Speaker 3: 1:06:10

About that word, moot, moot, moot, and rightness, and all of these standing issues from the election litigation that was taking place right after November 3rd. And so they're saying, this is Mo this is the whole opinion. So this is not even really what's important. What did they do? They accepted the case and they said, it's over. He's not president anymore. There's nothing to solve here. So dismiss the case. We're not going to make any final new law or give you any clarity about this. So judge Thomas then comes back out and says, Hey, before you send that order out, I got some things to say about this issue. And that's what we're going to go through right now. So here is judge Thomas writing a concurring opinion, and he's talking about Twitter. He says, when a person publishes a message on a social media platform, Twitter, the platform by default enables others to republish or retweet the message or respond to it. The user who generates the message can manually block people from republishing or responding. Donald Trump did that. He blocked several people. They sued second circuit upheld it. They said that Trump violated the first amendment and onwards because of the change in the presidential administration, the court correctly vacates the second circuit's decision. So it was a different

Speaker 2: 1:07:14

Biden's in office. So just get rid of this case. There's nothing we can do. It's over. If you are saying

Speaker 3: 1:07:20

Successful in your lawsuit and Donald Trump unblocks, you guess what? He's not president anymore, and he's not even on Twitter anymore

Speaker 2: 1:07:26

Either. So what do you want us to do anymore? It's moot go away. He says,

Speaker 3: 1:07:31

[inaudible] have a point. Well, let's back up a little bit. He says, I write, so why is he writing this opinion? He says, I write separately to note that this petition highlights the principal legal difficulty, that surrounds digital platforms. Namely applying old doctrines to new digital platforms is rarely straightforward. Respondents have a point, for example, at some aspects of Trump's account resemble a constitutionally protected public forum. So he's siding with the people who got blocked. He's saying, yeah, it kind of does feel like a public forum when you're on Twitter, but it seems rather odd to say that something is a government forum when a private company has unrestricted authority to do away with it. So we talk about this, right? If the, if you know, free speech and a lot of your bill of rights, it's to restrain the government from encroaching on your freedoms, but not private companies,

Speaker 2: 1:08:20

But the

Speaker 3: 1:08:20

People who are saying that Donald Trump blocked them, that he was violating their rights. He's not a government, Twitter's not a government entity. He's a government politician. So the court is coming back out and sort of opining on this, but they're not reaching the true issue here. They said, well, just dismiss it. It's moot. But what about the issue? What about kind of, kind of president block somebody

Speaker 2: 1:08:39

On Twitter? We still don't know. We don't know the answer to that because they just

Speaker 3: 1:08:43

Dismiss this case. Judge Thomas is telling us, maybe we should think about this. He says the disparity between Twitter's control and Mr. Trump's control is stark to say the least Trump blocks several people from interacting with his messages, Twitter barred, Mr. Trump, not only from interacting with a few users, but they removed him from the entire platform. Thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages. At the time he had 89 million followers. And this was the same point that I made back when this happened. I said,

Speaker 2: 1:09:12

Specifically, not

Speaker 3: 1:09:14

Only is it Trump's inability now to communicate with 89 million people, but what about 89 million people who were relying on this medium to communicate or to hear from their president? So Twitter was saying he doesn't have a right to communicate his message out, but what about the people who have a rights or

Speaker 2: 1:09:32

At least us got an agreement

Speaker 3: 1:09:34

With Twitter to receive those message.

Speaker 2: 1:09:37

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:09:39

Right. The second circuit and the district court said, yeah, that's a pretty big problem.

Speaker 2: 1:09:43

Cool. Twitter just removed him entirely though. Okay.

Speaker 3: 1:09:48

Under its terms of service, Twitter can remove any person from the platform, including the president of the United States at any reason, for any reason or no reason that was effective. June 18th, 2020,

Speaker 2: 1:10:01

This is cited in the Supreme court case. The Twitter company can

Speaker 3: 1:10:06

Anybody at any time, for any reason, including a precedent from the Supreme court, this is not the first or only case to raise issues about digital platforms. Well, this case involves a suit against the public official. The court properly rejects today, a separate petition alleging that digital platforms, not individuals on those platforms violated public accommodation laws. The first amendment in antitrust laws, the petitions highlight two important facts. Today's digital platforms provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech, including speech by government actors. Also unprecedented. However, is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of so few private parties. We will soon have no choice, but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure, such as digital

Speaker 2: 1:10:51

Platforms. Yeah. Never seen anything like this. If you notice on our channel, we talked

Speaker 3: 1:10:58

About the digital bill of rights. We had a couple Saturday

Speaker 2: 1:11:00

Workshops on that kind of a fun

Speaker 3: 1:11:02

Thought experiments, knowing that this is going to be something that is relevant in all of our lives. And it's going to continue to, to, to move this way, right? Facebook's going to get bigger. They're going to keep gobbling other companies, same with Google, same with Twitter, sort of accumulating more and more assets and clamping down on their

Speaker 2: 1:11:23

Control as this continues. And judges

Speaker 3: 1:11:26

Thomas is rightly I think acknowledging that this might be a pretty big problem. In fact already is a pretty big problem. And he goes on, he says on the surface, some aspects of the Twitter account resemble a public forum. And so you're gonna notice here, this is section one. So we're gonna be talking a lot about public forum. What is a public forum? It's a designated public forum. It is a property that the state has opened for expressive activity by part or all of the public, right? So Twitter doesn't sound like that. The state has not opened it

Speaker 2: 1:11:55

And they haven't done it for expressive yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:11:58

Activity of all of the public it's Twitter. It's a private company. Mr. Trump often used the account to speak in his official capacity. And as a government official, he choose to make the comment threads publicly accessible, allowing any Twitter user to respond to his posts. But the second circuit, they concluded that Trump's Twitter account was a public forum. It there's that it was his intention with, among other things, the frequent description of public forums as government controlled spaces. So the second circuit said that Mr. Trump actually did have to unblock those people and allow them to communicate.

Speaker 2: 1:12:28

Judge Thomas

Speaker 3: 1:12:28

Says unbridled the control of the account resided in the hands of a private party, which is Twitter. The first amendment doctrine may not have applied to respondent's complaint of stifled speech, whether the government use of private speech implicates first amendment often depends on government's control over that space. So a government agency that leases a conference room in a hotel to hold a public hearing about a proposed regulation can not kick out participants because they express concerns about the new record

Speaker 2: 1:12:57

Subject.

Speaker 3: 1:12:57

[inaudible]. If a part of the problem is private concentrated control over online content and platforms available to the public, then part of the solution will be found in doctrines that limit the right of private companies to exclude. So, so that's the next question then, if you are a private company, and so I've thought through some of the,

Speaker 2: 1:13:14

This in our digital bill of rights conversation. And so Mike

Speaker 3: 1:13:18

Perspective on that was there are certain things in this country that we do not allow

Speaker 2: 1:13:22

You to do because we have decided as a country that's just too wrong. Okay? Slavery is one of them. Segregation is one of them. We have this

Speaker 3: 1:13:34

Cited as a society that if you may not like one particular race, but you can't discriminate against them. If they want to come into your sandwich store and buy a sandwich, you can't say I don't like your skin color

Speaker 2: 1:13:44

And get out, right. That might be

Speaker 3: 1:13:46

Your free expression. That might be your freedom of speech,

Speaker 2: 1:13:50

But that's too bad. Okay? You might have a bus

Speaker 3: 1:13:52

Us entity that says all of the black people sit at the back. All the white people sit at the,

Speaker 2: 1:13:55

The front, that's a private company

Speaker 3: 1:13:59

Operating on public roadways or, or finding an example of that five. Find the private sandwich shop owner who says white, sit over there and black sit over there. No we don't. We that's not allowed in this country. We say the answer is no, those are private companies, but we, we elevate the standard up. We say, no, your freedom of speech, your freedom of association, your right to serve that sandwich to whomever you want does not outweigh equality and desegregation. And so we've already done this. We've already prioritized certain rights in this country, civil rights. And so here, my position was that speech is so paramount. It's the first amendment that the standard on that should be raised and other private entities should not be able to drop below the standard of free expression, free expression, free ideas. And some of the protections provided under the first amendment. They can not drop below that standard, just like a private company. Can't go and slave a bunch of people. It's not lawful in this country, 13th amendment. And many others have said that certain types of discrimination are not allowed. So why does that not apply to free speech and private companies? We want to raise that standard up. That's been my argument. Let's see what Thomas has to say about it. So he says historically to legal doctrines limit a company's right to exclude. So let's go through this first, our legal system and its British predecessors had a concept known as common carrier to special regulations. He goes through some of the history here. Some scholars have argued that common carrier regulations are justified only when a carrier possesses, substantial market power. Others have said that no substantial market power needs to exist. I think it's pretty obvious here that you could easily say Facebook, Google, Twitter, they all have almost monopolies on their market space. What other microblogging platforms can you name Twitter? That's it parlor kind of what's it though. Google, what else do you have? Bing, Facebook. They own Instagram. What else do you have? Tik TOK, right? Amazon who competes with Amazon, Walmart, maybe they're essentially monopolies. They have all of the power internet platforms of course have their own first amendment interests, but regulations that might affect speech are valid. If they would have been permissible at the time of the founding. So they're going to this case, which was decided back in 19 2010, the long history in this country and in England of re of restricting the exclusion right of common carriers, let's see, may have similar regulations today from triggering heightened scrutiny, especially where restriction would not prohibit the company from speaking or force the company to endorse the speech. So we're seeing some modifications here. So common. So, uh, some complicated stuff going on here. They're, they're talking about an exclusionary rights. So you're a company. You're you have the sandwich store. You have somebody who comes in in a particular race that you don't

Speaker 1: 1:17:10

Like, you exclude them. We, as a society have said, no, you can't do that. Right? That's discriminatory. Uh, people can have equal protection or due process claims. They can, they can Sue you into oblivion and people are doing that. Right. We're seeing that right now with, uh, the, you know, the gay wedding cake or whatever that story is about, right? These are things that are being litigated and in court.

Speaker 2: 1:17:28

So what he's saying is when

Speaker 1: 1:17:30

You go back and you talk about this right to exclude, what are the rules surrounding that? When do you get to invoke that, right? How does this all work? And he says, one of the things is where a restriction would not prohibit the company from speaking. So it's not going to limit their ability to speak. So forcing people to be on Twitter, you know, not kicking Trump off does not prohibit the company from speaking. And it does not force the company to endorse

Speaker 2: 1:17:52

The speech. So, okay. So those

Speaker 1: 1:17:54

Two things are met. There is a fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers or places of accommodation to be regulated in this manner. So as long as the person who's getting booted off their platform, if they weren't forcing the company to speak and they weren't doing something to interfere with their ability to speak and the company doesn't have to endorse their ability

Speaker 2: 1:18:15

To speak, then no, they might be a common carrier. And yeah,

Speaker 1: 1:18:18

You can't put them off. He also says in many ways, digital platforms that hold themselves out to the public resemble traditional common carriers though digital networks, instead of physical, they're at the bottom of communication networks. And they carry information from one user to another, just like anything else. Traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network, connecting people, digital platforms do much the same thing. He said, the analogy to common carriers is even clearer for digital platforms that have dominant market share, which of course are Facebook Facebook's suite of apps valuable, largely because they reached 3 billion people. Google has 90% of the market share. Google brought in 182.5 billion, total that's 40.3 billion

Speaker 2: 1:19:01

And net income that these companies,

Speaker 1: 1:19:04

We have no comparable competitors highlights that the industries may have substantial barriers to entry.

Speaker 2: 1:19:09

Yeah, because they have the network effect, right? We've talked about this. Once you get that big, you pull it up,

Speaker 1: 1:19:15

You climbed up a nice ladder that everybody laid out for you. When you get to the top, you pull it up so that nobody else can start their own companies. It's exactly what happened

Speaker 2: 1:19:23

Exactly to be at. And it's clear, okay. Amazon

Speaker 1: 1:19:29

Eliminated an entire compete, competitive index

Speaker 2: 1:19:32

Industry. They remove parlor off Amazon web services. Do you know who contracts with Amazon web services to run their, their servers?

Speaker 1: 1:19:40

Twitter does. So Amazon was contracting with Twitter for a multi-year hunting, you know, a hundred million dollar, whatever, how many millions of dollars to run their operations

Speaker 2: 1:19:49

And Amazon boots off their biggest competitor at the time. How can

Speaker 1: 1:19:57

Anybody come in? How can anybody work their way up

Speaker 2: 1:19:59

The industry? If you have this collusion among the big people up top problem,

Speaker 1: 1:20:04

To be sure much activity on the internet, derives value from network effects, which is what they talk about. But dominant digital platforms are different. Unlike decentralized digital spheres, such as email control of these networks is highly concentrated. We got Zuckerberg. We got Larry Page. We got surgery brand in the house, much like a communications utility. This control this concentration gives some digital platforms, enormous control

Speaker 2: 1:20:26

Over speech. As we saw

Speaker 1: 1:20:29

In this last election, blocking a listing, not renting the Hunter Biden story, Amazon banning books. Twitter can narrow a person's information flow. Google search algorithms can just suppress content by D indexing or downloading a search result. They control the whole frigging country folks, the whole country and the politics.

Speaker 2: 1:20:50

No, it so does judge Thomas. Every time

Speaker 1: 1:20:53

Congress has a hearing, Jack Dorsey comes in, surgery brain comes in now he doesn't even come in. And Sundar now comes in. Those guys are above the fray. Zuckerberg. Yes. Senator yes. Senator. Yes. Senator Hey Mark. Just press somebody pressing the yes. Senator button behind him. Okay. Cause they know it's irrelevant. These Congress, people have no idea what they're talking about. They couldn't find the like button. If you pay them a million dollars

Speaker 2: 1:21:15

Oblivious, they know they run the whole thing. That's why they can

Speaker 1: 1:21:19

Go into these congresspeople and lie to their faces. Hey, is it true that you're, you know, doing this

Speaker 2: 1:21:25

Activity? Oh no, not at all. Wake up

Speaker 1: 1:21:28

The next morning. They just did it to a thousand more people because they are operating with

Speaker 2: 1:21:34

Total immunity has, are,

Speaker 1: 1:21:37

Uh, ferment is incompetent and here is judge Thomas trying to do his part. He says it changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or the train and instead swim the Charles river or hike the Oregon trail. But in assessing whether a company exercises, substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable for many in today's digital platforms, nothing is. And if it is even

Speaker 2: 1:22:03

Comparable, they just take it off the internet like Amazon did to parlor. Even if digital platforms are not close enough to common carrier

Speaker 1: 1:22:13

Legislatures might still be able to treat them like places of public accommodation. So now what he's trying to do is create a,

Speaker 2: 1:22:20

A framework in which to fit this problem. And because

Speaker 1: 1:22:25

He's an originalist and somebody who is looking at the, you know, the, the language as it was written, and as it applied under the founding fathers, he's trying to craft a solution that that is, is sort of stacked on top of some of these old doctrines here,

Speaker 2: 1:22:38

The public accommodation space. What else do we,

Speaker 1: 1:22:42

We have once again, the doctrines such as a public accommodation that reduces the power of the platform to unilaterally remove a government account, might strengthen the argument that an account is truly government controlled and creates a public forum. So he's sort of, he's making these analogies between private and public forums, the similarities between some platforms and common carriers and places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments. And so he flushes of that out. None

Speaker 3: 1:23:06

Of this analysis means however, that the first amendment is irrelevant until a legislature imposes, imposes, common carrier or public accommodation restrictions. Only that the principle means for regulating digital platforms is through,

Speaker 2: 1:23:18

Are those methods. Interesting

Speaker 3: 1:23:21

Speech doctrines might still apply in limited circumstances as this court has recognized. Although a private entity entity is not ordinarily constrained by the first amendment. He citing us case law. It is as if the government coerces or induces it to take action. The government itself would not be permitted to do so such as sensor and expression. All right, so this is all government stuff. There, there are no threat is alleged here. What, what threats would cause a private choice by a digital platform to be deemed? All right. So couple other things.

Speaker 2: 1:23:48

This is the last page here. The question

Speaker 3: 1:23:52

Facing the courts below involved only whether a government actor violated the first amendment by blocking another,

Speaker 2: 1:23:58

That issue at least to some degree

Speaker 3: 1:24:01

On an ownership and the right to exclude the second circuit feared that then president Trump cut off speech by using the features

Speaker 2: 1:24:09

Twitter made available to him. But if the aim is to ensure that speech is not smothered, then the more glaring concern must Perforce be the dominant

Speaker 3: 1:24:19

Digital platform themselves is Twitter made clear the right to cut off. Speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms. The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the first amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified, raise interesting and important questions, just put this petition gives us no opportunity

Speaker 2: 1:24:36

To confront them. Very interesting opinion. And

Speaker 3: 1:24:42

It sounds like he's, he's going back to some of the common law underpinnings of American jurisprudence, specifically the public accommodation rules and the public forum rules, which is an interesting way to interpret this. And, uh, I like, I like it. I like where it's going, because I think that these tech companies have way, way too much power

Speaker 2: 1:25:01

And they know it and they're acting

Speaker 3: 1:25:03

With impunity. All right. So let's take a look@someofthequestionsoverfromalocals.com.

Speaker 2: 1:25:09

The name of

Speaker 3: 1:25:09

Our community over there is called watching the Watchers. And it looks like we have a couple of these who are Chi-Ming in news. Now Wyoming is in the house. As I still don't buy the argument about first amendment rights, being violated by blocking them. Someone gives a speech and there are protestors that person doesn't have to hand the protestors, his microphone.

Speaker 2: 1:25:29

So by blocking them on Twitter, he was removing that microphone that has many millions of you were saw. They could still say what they want, just not with his mic. So,

Speaker 3: 1:25:42

So, uh, you know, if I have to pick a side on this thing, I am pro

Speaker 2: 1:25:45

So not blocking, uh, anybody, if you're a government official, no blocks and no bans. I am yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:25:54

More pro free speech. So if Donald look, if Donald Trump wants to comment on something or, or, or post something on Twitter, somebody wants to blow him up in his replies or his comments.

Speaker 2: 1:26:05

That's fine. I mean, maybe a block could just mean,

Speaker 3: 1:26:09

No, look, tech tech can accommodate this stuff. If Trump doesn't want to see it, why don't you just block it for me? So I don't see that stuff. This person's a troll. They're annoying me. It seems so ridiculous. We're talking about this, but it's like, it's like critically important. All right. We also have a next, next question. Jeremy Machida says, if it was ruled to be wrong for blocking people on Twitter, then how is it okay for Trump to be blocked by Twitter?

Speaker 2: 1:26:34

That's a great point, Jeremy. It's a good question.

Speaker 3: 1:26:36

You should ask Twitter about that. They keep talking about free speech and they don't want to minimize people's involvement. They want to bring us to

Speaker 2: 1:26:44

Got there by banning people,

Speaker 3: 1:26:47

Everybody or death says, I love me some justice, Thomas, his opinions like this one are like playing poker with the gambler. I see your point. Raise you another. It was rumored that Alito and Thomas were considering retiring this or next year. I hope not. Oh my gosh. I hope not. Uh, his

Speaker 2: 1:27:02

Two, uh,

Speaker 3: 1:27:03

Maybe here's to wishing they stay until Trump is back in or DeSantis is behind the resolute desk. Can't imagine who Kamala would appoint. Yeah, that would be a big problem. Alita is pretty young. Thomas is getting up there, but Alito is pretty young. Hopefully they stick around for awhile. We have Jeremy[inaudible] says, I believe did Twitter commits digital homicide when they ban users from their platform? Yeah. You know, I got to, yeah. I think, I think that you're right. And people are starting to reorganize a little bit out there. It's going to take some time. I mean, we're not going to see a Twitter alternative in the next 12 months, but we're going

Speaker 2: 1:27:37

The roots of one start to take hold.

Speaker 3: 1:27:40

And that will be a good thing. Want to know, says, Rob, how was it discrimination to have to show ID to vote, but not to get immunized? Can police hold you still for 24 hours to prove identity? How does one get a job under ins rules without ID and a social security,

Speaker 2: 1:27:56

Social security card?

Speaker 3: 1:27:57

Well, how do you get a bank account without an ID? How do you get on an airplane without an ID? I mean, everything requires an ID. The ID, the idea that you don't need this to vote is just asinine to me. I don't know even how they justify that. Other than saying it's voter suppression. I get that. I mean, I get why they say it and I get why they want it to be such a low threshold. Because if nobody has an ID, you can just go round up

Speaker 2: 1:28:20

Votes. Doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 3: 1:28:23

We have boom, boom for love says, how are they going to keep the riff Raff out of the new platforms like Trump or Lindell? What's the stop, the left from trolling us over there and then blasting canceling us because we were speaking the truth and not being

Speaker 2: 1:28:35

Censored. A

Speaker 3: 1:28:37

Good question. Boom, boom. For love, boom, boom. I think that this is a, an issue. If I can be candid about this, that is going to be solved by blockchain, by decentralized social media platforms and by new technology, that's going to solve this problem. I, people are tired of having the I'm tired of this. I don't know if everybody is, but I'm tired of it, of having the news sort of digested for me. It's like those birds that, you know, regurgitate, they consume the, the little worms for their children. Then they cough it up and they yack it into their kids' mouth. That's what the news media is. They go through a bunch of stuff. They digest it, they regurgitate it and vomit it back in our direction. And I'm sick of it. I'm tired of it. And I think a lot of people in this country are. And so if the Facebooks and the Twitters are going

Speaker 2: 1:29:21

To be running

Speaker 3: 1:29:23

Their networks the way they want to run them, people are going to just bail out. And I think that's already happening and they're going to set up shop somewhere else. And I was talking about Balaji biology, a screen of Austin. I listened to him all weekend long about his idea for this new concept of what's called a network state. You go from a God state where people are sort of under the rule of, you know, maybe the old Catholic church or the old Lutheran churches or whatever, right? All of these different sex people sort of identify with their religious organization, but

Speaker 2: 1:29:51

Then society

Speaker 3: 1:29:53

Evolves. We don't need that. God-like container anymore. Now we need a nation state container. So we got the United States and Russia and China and Mexico and Canada and all of these different countries around the world, in the nation state. But there's a next evolution that's coming down the road and it's going to be the network state. It's going to be based on blockchain. It's going to be decentralized. And a good segment of this world is going to grow out of the nation States community into the network state. And this is a solution to this problem. And I've been saying for a long time, and it's going to take conservatives and Republicans and libertarians and free minded people some time to work themselves out of this current system. And it is going to take time. It's going to take a whole generation, but the groundwork is being laid right now.

Speaker 2: 1:30:36

It's crazy world. And

Speaker 3: 1:30:37

It's very interesting. And I think there's a lot of promise to that. So rather than thinking about how are we going to get and build up the next platform, the next Twitter, the next Facebook, the next Periscope,

Speaker 2: 1:30:46

Whatever. How about

Speaker 3: 1:30:48

That? How about we just have a social network that is decentralized and doesn't even have a compass.

Speaker 2: 1:30:53

How, how would that be? Okay. It's run by other users. There is no Google. There is no censorship. The framework for that is, is being laid right now.

Speaker 3: 1:31:05

Gonna be an exciting time. Uh, next up, let's take some more questions

Speaker 2: 1:31:08

Because we've got my slides

Speaker 3: 1:31:11

Out of order. Again, let's go back over here. Next up we have Chris Wiseman says it's a tough stretch to call a bakery, a public accommodation for civil rights purposes, but social media platforms are not. I think that if the federal government can regulate airwaves telephone, energy grid, the internet and the platforms built on the infant internet infrastructure are perfect candidates for common carrier status. Unfortunately this means they capture the space. The unintended consequence is regulatory capture and allowing them to keep out new market entrance. Yeah, it's a great, it's a great comment, Chris. Thank you for that brilliant comment. And I think right on the Mark and that's kind of the point, you know, we, we, we hear a lot of these tech companies. Like they, they care about the little guy there at the top. They pull the ladder up. Nobody else can

Speaker 2: 1:31:55

Get in, which is why

Speaker 3: 1:31:57

We need an alternative system. We have Nadar bless ear says I don't get why it isn't as simple as changing section two 30 to say that these tech companies can not be held liable for what users put on their site. As long as they do not violate the user's constitutional rights, then their excuse of being liable is irrelevant. I totally agree with you. This is not that complicated of a, of a fix. The, the problem here is that nobody really wants the fix. And I think that nobody really wants to talk about the ultimate problem, which is that these companies want censorship. They want to control the narrative. They did a lot to do that. Mark Zuckerberg spent tens of millions of dollars, literally influencing the allies

Speaker 2: 1:32:35

On record the Chan whatever initiative we talked about

Speaker 3: 1:32:39

About it. Back on this channel, we talked about where the money was going and how it was being funded. And w

Speaker 2: 1:32:44

We drew arrows to where it was going here. Okay. They want it

Speaker 3: 1:32:49

To influence the election. They want to have this type of control because it's power. Yes. They're making money, money, hand over fist. That's fine. They got enough money. Once you get 50 bucks

Speaker 2: 1:32:58

Billion, I'm told that's enough, you got enough. So what else do they do?

Speaker 3: 1:33:02

Well, they want influence and power. And so they get that by keeping things

Speaker 2: 1:33:06

The same, because a lot of the ladders have already been pulled up Amazon,

Speaker 3: 1:33:11

Right? They, they made it to the top, not having to pay

Speaker 2: 1:33:14

Sales tax. They got big. The rules changed now. They pay sales.

Speaker 3: 1:33:19

So the other guys who also want to get big by not paying sales tax for a good portion of their founding doesn't work for them, worked for Amazon, but not for everybody else.

Speaker 2: 1:33:27

So that's what they want. It's part of the,

Speaker 3: 1:33:30

The plan is part of the structure we have Besame Santos says, I can't believe that no other SP justice joined a Thomas in his opinion. Well, Thomas is kind of the, he's kind of the, the, the lonesome Wolf out there. We have Joe Snow says my local PD has me blocked from commenting. I've sent them precedent regarding this and still blocked. Hey, you should send them the second circuit ruling say, Hey, there's a court of appeals on it.

Speaker 2: 1:33:56

Take that up, take it up to the Supreme court. That's funny.

Speaker 3: 1:34:00

No doubt says the division between public and private brings up an interesting issue. Does a government official get protection on these platforms, but someone who is not a government official, but who wants to be, it does not get the same protection. Well, right now we don't really know no doubt. And that right now, Supreme court hasn't said, they just said, Hey, that case is going to be dismissed. It's moot. We have no clarity on it. The Supreme court has been useless on a lot of the topics that we talk about on this channel. They're talking about other stuff, but nothing that we care about, right? They gave us no guidance on whether a state legislature

Speaker 2: 1:34:33

Can allow the, the provisions

Speaker 3: 1:34:36

That govern their elections to be usurped out from under them, by the executive branch or by the judicial branch, or even by, uh, you know, committees like the secretary of state or any of these settlement agreements. No answers on that. Trump lawsuits, no answers. The attorney general lawsuit, no answers. We want to know what can we do about big tech, no answers. It's mood. It's we'll deal with it later.

Speaker 1: 1:34:58

What are we doing over there? Uh, it's a disaster. So, uh, we don't know. Uh, no doubt. We don't know about, about how any of this stuff works because there's no guidance on it right now. It's status quo. That's what we know. Supreme court says. It's status quo. Sasha SEASHA says hi, Robin, Ms. Faith, joy, Twitter will block someone talking about an election F-word but you can have underage sexual stuff on Twitter that won't take it down. They won't take it down. Even after the victim requests them. It's ridiculous. Oh yeah. That's gross. All right. We have Chris Wiseman says it will be interesting to see if night's center takes this decision and demands that YouTube force, the white house account to keep the down-vote feature and reopened the comment section. We were to have the most popular president in the U S has comments turned off and always gets ratioed. You know, I saw that and I actually went over to, uh, it's the white house, right? The white house channel on YouTube comments are turned off massive amounts of downvotes and it's on like every video. It's not just, you know, one video. I was thinking that maybe this was something where there were these trolls who were, you know, sort of organizing these downvote campaigns. So there's a, the white house would post a video. They would post it over to a forum. Hey, you know, sleepy, Joe posted a new video, go down, vote that everybody on the forum would rush over to YouTube. And downvote the hell out of that. But YouTube, according to their, their, their rules, and according to their Twitter account, they say that they are monitoring the downvotes for spammy downvotes. So, in other words, if you don't watch the video, if you just show up on a channel, you don't click play and you just hit the download button. Well, they're going to know you didn't watch it. And so they're not going to count that downvote, but these are downvotes that just stay. People are watching this stuff and clicking the downvote. They don't like it, which is strange for somebody who got more votes in history and everybody loves and uses whatever. Now, uh, we got my Fox as the real problem is that Twitter is too big. The solution isn't to limit what a private company can do with their property, but to expand the markets and promoting competition, I feel like restricting them would do the opposite. Yeah. So I understand your point there, ma I think that if you, I think that they are, they are, they are largely protected by section two 30. So section two 30, I think was, was created back in the late nineties when the internet was a new thing, the internet is not a new thing. One of the underlying justifications for section two 30 was to prevent them from liability so that they could grow so they could grow and blossom. Now that the biggest companies in the world, now they have it all, do they still need that protection against civil liability? I'm not so sure that they do. And right now they're the only people with the market share to essentially control the market. Whether, whether there's new entry, barriers to entry or whatever, uh, they, they, they keep the gate closed so that nobody else can come in. I'm not real sure what the answer is, but I do know that I like that justice Thomas is talking about a solution and a legal framework. And I also think that free speech is so important that it's just like the segregation conversation. You can't segregate people because we value

Speaker 3: 1:37:56

Equality more than we value segregation. You can't ban people for political speech because we value political speech more than we value. You know, not having a couple, a couple of data points in your software code from some person that you don't think they should

Speaker 2: 1:38:09

And be on your platform. I just think that if I have to, to the

Speaker 3: 1:38:15

Aside, I'm going to be more free speech pro speech pro expression, because I just don't think it's as dangerous. And I think that the dangerous conversation was just a fib

Speaker 2: 1:38:23

Anyways, cause they're talking

Speaker 3: 1:38:26

About dangerousness, but they're still banning Donald Trump. When he's saying things that are not dangerous, it's not about speech or dangerousness. It's about banning your political enemies. And at this moment in time, I think that if you're on that side of favoring, banning of anybody, you're, you're, you're close

Speaker 2: 1:38:40

Sorta that, to that category

Speaker 3: 1:38:43

People. And I mean the censorship category, it's not a good category to be in. I think it's on the wrong side of history. We have SAUSA CISA says power is domination control and therefore a very selective for a form of truth,

Speaker 2: 1:38:55

Which is a lie. It's good. Good question. There. Good comment.

Speaker 3: 1:38:59

Faith here, who says from Jeremy says in keeping with the news and animal kingdom analogies, I would argue that the news media craps out stories more like how the civet cat eats coffee beans, and then people make coffee from the beans after they have been through the cat's digestive

Speaker 2: 1:39:14

System.

Speaker 3: 1:39:16

That is a much more visual analogy than the one I used, which is the regurgitating bird vomited out into all of our Brian Stelter is regurgitating food for us. We have Osaka says, Hey, Rob, hypothetical question. Could someone Sue the police under the first amendment violation? If the person reported a crime was an arrested in charge and accused, but later found out to be the victim and not guilty of the crime. Police are a government entity. They did punish someone for speaking up. So it's a good hypothetical question. Oh, sock. I think it's a little bit too broad. I mean, really the answer is, yeah, you can Sue anybody for anything. The, the, the follow-up question there is, well, what are the damages? And is it worth a lawsuit? So if the police tell you to sit down and

Speaker 2: 1:40:01

Shut up, do they really violate your first amendment rights maybe? And if you see

Speaker 3: 1:40:09

That maybe you'd win, but what would you get? What was the damage that was caused? What

Speaker 2: 1:40:13

It was a harm of you not being able to speak out and you have to go and ask for damages for that. Thank you.

Speaker 3: 1:40:19

Compensated accordingly. So typically on these types of claims that are just sort of vanilla, first amendment claims, it's not worth the lawsuit because you're not going to get anything you're going to come out of pocket to spend, I don't know, 50 grand, a hundred grand on suing a government entity and not winning anything. So nobody does it. Uh, last question on this segment comes from, mafic

Speaker 2: 1:40:38

Says a little off key, but I just

Speaker 3: 1:40:41

Remembered. Do you feel like felony murder rules are applicable with assault charges or should the predicate require at least aggravated assault to be considered a valid predicate? Does it go against the idea of death in the, of particularly violent

Speaker 1: 1:40:54

Felony to use aggravated assault? Only as

Speaker 2: 1:40:56

Ma this question is complicated.

Speaker 1: 1:41:01

Very complicated question. So we can address that later. But basically what he's talking about probably is the George Floyd case and about whether felony murder, which typically requires an underlying felony offense. So the example would be if you use the bank robbery

Speaker 2: 1:41:17

Example that we often use on

Speaker 1: 1:41:19

This show, somebody a bank robber, they're the they're the getaway driver. Somebody goes into Rob the bank and somebody dies in the robbery. The person who was driving the getaway car is charged with felony murder because somebody died in the bank. The, the underlying

Speaker 2: 1:41:32

Felony was bank robbery

Speaker 1: 1:41:38

Died in the commission of that felony. Therefore the getaway drivers charged with felony murder. You have a separate felony

Speaker 2: 1:41:44

That happens because you were involved in that you get

Speaker 1: 1:41:49

Charged with an underlying felony, even though you're not responsible for the death of that.

Speaker 2: 1:41:53

Okay. High level in the Derek Shovan case, same situation, he's being charged with murder for doing something to somebody else. The question is what was the underlying felony? Was it the bank robbery? And remember,

Speaker 1: 1:42:12

And the bank robbery example, we're not talking about the person getting shot inside. We're talking about the bank robbery during the commission of the bank robbery, which was, which was its own independent felony. Somebody died. So that is the basis for felony murder. In the Shovan case, what they're saying is that Derrick Shovan

Speaker 2: 1:42:29

The underlying

Speaker 1: 1:42:30

Felony was the assault on,

Speaker 2: 1:42:34

But how do you kill somebody without assaulting them? You have to do something to their physical body, right? You either

Speaker 1: 1:42:44

Some poison in their food. That's, that's a, that's a physical touch. You're, you're introducing something into their body. In this case, there was a neon George Floyd's neck. So they're saying he physically assaulted them, that resulted in,

Speaker 2: 1:42:54

In the death. So there are these

Speaker 1: 1:42:58

Different legal doctrines that are, that are complicated and a lot of attorneys are trying to flush it out right now. Jonathan Turley is trying to flush it out. My understanding here, uh, more specifically to your question is we need more, more details about, uh, I think this is what your question is. You didn't say it in your question, but I think it's, uh, specifically, uh, applicable to the George Floyd case, the Derek Shovan trial, in which case, my understanding is that Minnesota has a weird sort of merger doctrine in between the two. So the underlying predicate felony gets merged into the murder charge in a way that you don't necessarily need to. It, my understanding is it kind of doesn't fall into either category. The general distinction here on this question is that there are some jurisdictions in this country where the underlying assault sort of merges into. It becomes the underlying felony four felony murder. So you can still be charged with felony murder in other jurisdictions. They say, no assault is part

Speaker 3: 1:43:52

Of murder. It cannot be a part of felony murder because you need an underlying felony. You need like a bank robbery in order for it to be felony murder. In this case, how can you be charged with felony murder

Speaker 2: 1:44:02

And murder, which is the actual assault. Okay. Derek Shovan was charged with killing, killing Georgia.

Speaker 3: 1:44:09

You read the statute, but he's also charged with committing a felony that resulted in George Floyd's death. And he's being charged with felony murder for somebody dying while he was committing a felony. The question is, was the assault a felony that could be the predicate for the felony murder, or does that charge need to go away? And does it only need

Speaker 2: 1:44:26

Be the regular murder charge? Ma this question I can prepare, I could prepare like 30 slides on this question, but that's all we got

Speaker 3: 1:44:36

Time for them. So good question. Lot of analysis on it, the point is he's being charged with three charges. And so I think we can just operate on that basis. I think a lot of the other stuff about, um, merger doctrine and predicate felonies and all of those other things, I think it's largely academic at this point because the issue has been settled. We know what the three charges are. We know what the court of appeals said about the third degree murder charge. And we just got to sort of accept it at that. Uh, I don't think unless, unless somebody is appealing stuff up to the court of appeals or the Supreme court, I think that it's just academic at this point, but it is, it is a good academic question. It's, it's, it's an interesting one. And my understanding is that Minnesota does it almost uniquely sort of the, there there's, there's two ways to handle it. Assault gets incorporated in assault does not get incorporated in here in Minnesota, I think is sort of a mix between the two it's like a modified merger rule, which is, you know, it is what it is. All right. So good questions. Once again, those all came over

Speaker 2: 1:45:27

From watching the Watchers, locals community@locals.com. Find our group called watching the Watchers. Good questions today. Good questions, challenging questions. I like them. All

Speaker 3: 1:45:38

Right. And so for our last segment of the show,

Speaker 2: 1:45:41

We're going to talk about Florida. Ron DeSantis is in the news. He was taken out

Speaker 3: 1:45:47

Context of course, by a CBS 60 minutes interview. And this was one that was very interesting because you can just see how egregious this whole thing was. And it was not just deceptively edited. I mean like the whole thing was taken out of context in a way that even Democrats are not happy about it and nor is Publix, which is a very reputable grocery store apparently over in Florida. And so this first story comes over from the daily wire.com says Publix and a Democrat state official. They blast absolutely false and offensive CBS 60 minutes smear of Ron DeSantis. And so this one is, I was just like, I was shocked. Honestly, I am not shocked anymore, but it's just surprising that the people who draft these stories can be so dishonest, like in your face dishonest. And they know that we're going to find out, they know that the internet knows, but they do it anyways. It's like egregious. Anyways, here's the story. Florida's largest grocery store and a Florida state official, who is a Democrat slammed CBS 60 minutes on Sunday because they aired a deceptive segment about Florida governor Ron DeSantis segment featured reporter Sharon Alfonzo, who is just a terrible human ambushing DeSantis at a press conference last month and aggressively questioning him using a misleading narrative about the way he has responded to the coronavirus pandemic. 60 minutes deceptively edited the interaction to remove nearly the entire portion of his response in which he thoroughly answered her question and then diffuse the central part of the segment. And so we're going to go, we're going to go through this. We're going to see a transcript of it. We're going to play. I think the 60 minutes version, we're going to play the actual version. Then we're going to compare and contrast the transcripts so you can actually see how bad this thing was. And what's so funny about this

Speaker 2: 1:47:27

Clip is in the clip. She's

Speaker 3: 1:47:29

Like, well, we tried to get an interview with him and he wouldn't answer.

Speaker 2: 1:47:32

There are questions. And then they clip out like 60 seconds, two minutes of his full answer. So

Speaker 3: 1:47:39

You can make the point that he didn't agree to an answer or to an interview. Al Fonzie tried to suggest that public's the largest grocery store chain in Florida had engaged in a pay to play

Speaker 2: 1:47:49

Scheme by donating money to the DeSantis campaign

Speaker 3: 1:47:52

In exchange for being awarded a contract to distribute vaccines.

Speaker 2: 1:47:58

So this reporter comes out, Hey, Rob,

Speaker 3: 1:48:01

Isn't it true that you got a hundred grand from Publix and then conveniently Publix is just now running all of our vaccines in our state. Isn't it

Speaker 2: 1:48:09

Interesting. You want to answer that there? And the Sante says the irresponsive

Speaker 3: 1:48:15

Simple suggestion, that there was a connection between campaign contributions made to governor DeSantis and our willingness to join other pharmacies and support of the distribution efforts is absolutely false and offensive. Oh, this came from Publix. So Publix came out, they said an escaping statement slamming the segment. We are proud of our pharmacy associates for administering administrative more than 1.5 million doses. And for joining other retailers and other States to help emerge from the pandemic state representative, Jared Moscowitz, who is

Speaker 2: 1:48:41

Also slammed 60 minutes over the segment saying to Santas, his office did not push for selecting Publix Moscowitz

Speaker 3: 1:48:49

Is the director of Florida's division of emergency management and is overseeing the state's response to the pandemic, including rolling out the vaccine distribution and ensuring mass get to the frontline

Speaker 2: 1:48:59

Workers. 60 minutes.

Speaker 3: 1:49:01

I said this before. I'll say it again. At Publix was

Speaker 2: 1:49:03

Recommended by Florida. As other pharmacies were not ready to start said Moscowitz period.

Speaker 3: 1:49:09

Full stop. No one from the governor's office suggested Publix. It's just absolute malarkey. So good for this guy who is chime in and jumping on the back of Ron DeSantis and saying, no, he's doing a good job. We're distributing vaccines.

Speaker 2: 1:49:21

And they're just

Speaker 3: 1:49:23

Flat out lying. Here's a copy of that tweet. Here's Jared

Speaker 2: 1:49:27

[inaudible], who apparently is a Democrat. I said this before. I'll say it again. It was recommended by Florida person, Florida person. It's absolute

Speaker 3: 1:49:35

Marcie. This is Jared mock Moscowitz director of the Florida division of emergency management. He's a Democrat served as one in the state legislature until 2019 campaign for Gore campaign for Obama. He's not falling for this absolute and neither should you. So you'd like to see that you like you like it. When people from both sides of the aisle come together and recognize what an absolute dumpster fire the state of our media is currently here is the clip from 60 minutes. Here's one minute that we've got looks like this was, this was spreading around by them on Twitter, 60 minutes at 60 minutes, doc, uh, not.com on Twitter. Here's their clip. What you're saying is wrong. Governor DeSantis tells Sharon I'll Fonzie in response to a question about whether the public's grocery store chain gained influence through a campaign donation on his behalf, it's wrong. It's a fake narrative. He says, here's the clip

Speaker 8: 1:50:24

We wanted to ask governor DeSantis about the deal, but he declined our request for an interview. We caught up with him South of Orlando, where he answered says, you know, donated a hundred thousand dollars to your campaign. And then you rewarded them with the exclusive rights to distribute the vaccination in Parsi. What you're saying is wrong.

Speaker 9: 1:50:44

That's a fake narrative. I met with the County mayor. I met with the administrator. I met with all the folks at Palm beach County. And I said, here's some of the options we can do more drive-through sites. We can give more to hospitals. We can do the publics. And they said, we think that would be the easiest thing for our residents.

Speaker 8: 1:51:00

But Melissa McKinley, the County commissioner in the Glades told us the governor never met with her about the Publix deal. The criticism is that it's paid to play that role

Speaker 9: 1:51:10

Wrong. It's wrong. It's a fake narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative. And you don't care about the facts because obviously I laid it out for you in a way that is irrefutable. And so it's clearly not

Speaker 8: 1:51:24

[inaudible]. Yeah, it's actually a fact.

Speaker 3: 1:51:27

All right. So look, we know it's 60 seconds. We know that they're going to clip things and assemble it together. But this is so dishonest because not only did she go out there and say, well, he didn't, he refused to answer us. He did. He, as we're going to see, he gave her a very long answer in everything that she needed. And she is still going to come out here and sort of do this. Like woe is me, uh, facade that he's not answering our questions when, as we're going to see, he gave her a very long and explicit answer. So here is from 60 minutes. Here is what this looks like. This is the transcript. So how the wealthy cut the line during Florida's frenzied vaccine rollout. So Ron DeSantis right now is somebody who is capturing a lot of attention. So of course the media is unhappy with him. He has, he's running a very nice state. Florida's open. They're doing well. They're doing great, California by contrast had a lot of the opposite mechanisms for dealing with COVID. Everything was locked down, masks all over every single orifice, multiple times, just wrap yourself in bubble wrap. Cause everybody's hyperventilating and fear over there. And their state is about doing the same. Well as this Florida is in terms of total numbers and deaths and all of that stuff. And so people are asking themselves, maybe this whole thing was a sham and a facade. It may be Ron DeSantis is doing something well here. And he's just, poo-pooing every single narrative that Fowchee and all of these other hysterics have been screaming about

Speaker 2: 1:52:48

The last year. So he's enemy number one, because he's not

Speaker 3: 1:52:52

Walk step with the traditional thinking or the traditional narrative. I'm not even sure most Americans follow the narrative anymore, but this is the media narrative. And it's on 60 minutes, which was one of the most watched shows of this variety that we have in the country. So here is the transcript that

Speaker 2: 1:53:07

They posted. You can see it right here. We'll just,

Speaker 3: 1:53:12

We'll go through quickly. We wanted to ask governor DeSantis about the deal. He declined our request

Speaker 2: 1:53:16

For an interview. Okay? So he's not answering

Speaker 3: 1:53:18

Any questions about this. He must be, Oh, you know, Publix, they donated a hundred grand a year campaign. What you're saying is wrong. That's wrong? She says, how is that? Not pay-to-play, that's a fake narrative. He says, we think it would be the easiest thing for our residents. Oh, but Melissa McKay. So they cut them out. So this is about all that we get. Let's take a look and let's just underline some of this. We got Ron DeSantis in here. That's his sentence that we have. That's a fake narrative. I said, here's what we think it would be the easiest. So

Speaker 2: 1:53:43

This is him. Okay. Then the rest of this. Nope. That's 60 minutes. 60 minutes. This is Ron. And this is

Speaker 3: 1:53:52

No, no, you're wrong. 30 miles away. You're wrong. You're yes, sir. Okay. So we see what that, what that looks like now here is the

Speaker 2: 1:53:58

Full answer. Okay. So it goes from about

Speaker 3: 1:54:02

One paragraph, like right here, really

Speaker 2: 1:54:06

Into this full paragraph. We can see it right here. Okay. It's a lot of, a lot of answer there. And what you'll

Speaker 3: 1:54:14

Notice is what they clipped out

Speaker 2: 1:54:17

Is the stuff that is not in bold

Speaker 3: 1:54:20

On edited video show, 60 minutes, cut out everything in bold from the transcript, pretty wild. This posted over by Jerry

Speaker 2: 1:54:26

Done levy, give him a follow. So all of this stuff in bold was clipped out, which means

Speaker 3: 1:54:33

That this stuff underlined here in red

Speaker 2: 1:54:36

Is what they left in.

Speaker 3: 1:54:38

So they actually, this wasn't like they just clipped the beginning or the

Speaker 2: 1:54:41

End off. Right. And I do video

Speaker 3: 1:54:43

Editing here. You notice this I've been posting the Derek Shovan

Speaker 2: 1:54:46

Clips. What do I do?

Speaker 3: 1:54:48

I leave the whole thing in there. I don't clip out the first 30 seconds, remove the next 30 seconds and then add in the remaining 30 seconds and take everything out of context. I leave it all in there. I'll clip off at the beginning. I'll clip off the end. Sometimes I speed it up. Sometimes a lot of gray box for a little bit of dignity in there. That's it? What this person did, what this organization did is they clipped out. They just said, Oh, we like this sentence right here. We're going to take that sentence. The rest of this is a pretty explanatory. Okay, we're going to clip out this section. And then we also, we don't like this. We don't like this part here. So we're going to clip that out too. And we're just going to jump over to another sentence and we're going to splice that back in. So they're just taking little bits and pieces out of a full paragraph and they're reassembling it in a way that makes him look kind of like

Speaker 2: 1:55:33

Jerk. Can you believe that this is for my reputable journal list on a national program in two and 21 right

Speaker 3: 1:55:44

Now they're trying to pass this off as real news. This is I think the full clip from Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 9: 1:55:50

So first of all, that, what you're saying is wrong. That's that that's a fake narrative. So first of all, when we did the, the first pharmacies that had, it were CVS and Walgreens and they had a long-term care mission. So they were going to the long-term care facilities. They got vaccine in the middle of December, they started going to the long-term care facilities the third week of December to do LTCs. So that was their mission. That was very important. And we trusted them to do that. As we got into January, we wanted to expand the distribution points. So yes, you had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites. You had hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more. So we reached out to other retail pharmacies, Publix Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission. And we said, we're going to, we're going to use you as soon as you're done with that for the Publix, they were the first one to raise their hand, say they were ready to go. And you know what? We did it on a trial basis. I had three counties. I actually showed up that weekend and talked to seniors across four different publics. How was the experience? Is this good? Should you think this is a way to go? And it was a hundred percent positive. So we expanded it and then folks liked it. And I can tell you, if you look at a place like Palm beach County, they were kind of struggling at first, in terms of the senior numbers. I went, I met with the County mayor. I met with the administrator. I met with all the folks at Palm beach County. And I said, here's some of the options we can do more drive-through sites. We can give more to hospitals. We can do the publics. We can do this. They calculated that 90% of their seniors live within a mile and a half of a Publix. And they said, we think that would be the easiest thing for our residents. So we did that. And what ended up happening was you had 65 Publix in Palm beach. Palm beach is one of the biggest counties. One of the most elderly counties, we've done almost 75% of the seniors in Palm beach. And the reason is because you had the strong retail footprint. So our, uh, way has been multifaceted. It has worked. And we're also now very much expanding CVS and Walgreens. Now that they've completed the long-term care mission. Yes. And it's wrong, it's wrong. It's a fake narrative. I just disabused you of the narrative. And you don't care about the facts because obviously I laid it out for you in a way that is irrefutable. And so it's clearly not. No, no, no. You're wrong. You're wrong. You're wrong. Yes, sir.

Speaker 3: 1:58:12

Absolutely rotten for this person to do that. What they did here was so detestable, in my opinion, I think it's so low. You know what I do on this show? I try, look, we represent a lot of people. Who've been charged with some pretty gruesome things. And I like to try to find favor in what people do in, in the world. I can, I can typically make a pretty good argument and articulate something positive. This is just so, so, so bad. It is intentionally malevolent.

Speaker 2: 1:58:42

I mean, at this person went through

Speaker 3: 1:58:44

Ruined, selectively, picked out the video clips to create a narrative that he needed.

Speaker 2: 1:58:48

Exactly. Disabused. He addressed it clearly.

Speaker 3: 1:58:54

So isn't it true that you've got this connection with Publix. They gave you a hundred grand and you sort of opened up for them. He says, no, no, that's not true at all. We, yeah, we're working with Publix now, but we also tried CVS. We tried Walgreens. We tried Walmart. They were focused on LTCs long-term care. We wanted to find an organization that was ready to rock and roll something that was in, in close proximity to all these seniors. We started on a trial basis. We had a, a positive experience. So we started with three counties and 4k and then beefed it all up. And so we rolled it out. And so everything that she said was just a narrative, 100% a lie. And then they went in and edited out the clips in order to perpetuate that lie, knowing that this was so obviously recorded and it was just so dishonest. And then they ran it across the news all across this country.

Speaker 2: 1:59:42

This is just one example. Really?

Speaker 3: 1:59:45

How often is this going on? I don't, I, it just all the time, I would guess. Here's the difference? Here's the compare and contrast between the two on the left is the fake news on the right is the real news. Obviously one is not like the other, this is an actual thing.

Speaker 2: 1:59:59

Answer 60 minutes,

Speaker 3: 2:00:02

Garbage reporter, Sharon Alfonsi should be ashamed of herself. I should 60 minutes. And I honestly don't know why anybody watches any of the news anymore because it's, uh, uh, mostly fake at this moment. But at this point in time, all right, we've got a couple of questions in over here on locals and let's chime in and see what we've got going on here. First one in the house says, could anyone even calculate the cost of what our nation has lost by big tech and the news media controlling the narrative. There was no way to measure the loss of confidence in our leadership. This includes Ron D my heart was broken. When I heard the 60 minutes interview, I had always trusted this group. Yeah. So 60 minutes, it's just like the others, right? They're all,

Speaker 2: 2:00:43

Y'all, they're all getting in lockstep. I think with one another it's too bad.

Speaker 3: 2:00:50

We have news. Now, Wyoming says it's more apparent now, but this was always the case. Newspaper articles from the same newspaper would be different depending on the neighborhood it was delivered to. I suspect that, right. I can't imagine that if I lived 80 years ago that I'd wake up and go, Hey, these, these, these news reporters are great. I'd probably be the same

Speaker 2: 2:01:08

Back, then mad at some reporter or some journalists, but it's really bad. I mean, that,

Speaker 3: 2:01:14

That example is so obvious. There are some examples, you know, Trump was the victim of a lot of this, for sure. You know, the find people, stuff, the drinking bleach stuff, all of it. They just

Speaker 2: 2:01:24

Sort of, they try

Speaker 3: 2:01:27

To do this. This one was just obvious. Cause they, they like literally sentence by sentence. They pick that sentence out. They pick that sentence out and that sentence out and they just reassembled them to create a narrative when his answer was like that at all. All right, next up, we've got farmer's daughter four says Robert, I used to live in Florida and Publix is huge. They were chosen because they are larger than drugstores, like Walgreens and CVS. So those

Speaker 2: 2:01:48

Are good reasons. Liberty or death

Speaker 3: 2:01:51

Says, would love to see Publix file suit for defamation.

Speaker 2: 2:01:56

Yeah. That would be good to see Jeremy

Speaker 3: 2:01:59

[inaudible] sounds more like the whole story is he didn't answer her questions the way she wanted him to. Well, he gave her a direct answer on that. There was no further need for any,

Speaker 2: 2:02:08

He told her exactly what happened. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 2:02:10

With all these companies, we scaled our way up. We did some trial runs. We have some data data analysis that we did. 90% of our seniors in this County live within one mile of Publix. All right, this is the best fit. It's like what competent leadership looks like. And

Speaker 2: 2:02:24

So they don't like that. So

Speaker 3: 2:02:26

The purpose of her asking the question was not to get an answer. It was to get a sound bite that she could extract for her new story, which is exactly what she did. And so she picked out a couple of different sentences, reassembled them in a way that made him look like a loser and

Speaker 2: 2:02:39

It's not true at all. And a lot of people

Speaker 3: 2:02:42

Watched it and a lot of people believe it. And it's very disingenuous. We have Bianca Realty says Rob. So he gave public exclusive distribution along with Walgreens and CVS. The NW governor puts infective people in nursing homes. The MSM tries to go after my beautiful state that handled the virus very well and protects our civil liberties. There is no logic middle ground with these people. Like he said, you are wrong, you are wrong. You don't care about the facts. Let's have unity. Let's just unify by making anyone who has different views.

Speaker 2: 2:03:10

He's look bad by any means necessary. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 2:03:14

It's a good one. Bianca. And I, I will tell you, I do like Ron, you know, I'm not sure, you know, he's, he's looking, he's looking pretty good by the way. He's looking a little slim. Right? Do you notice that he's getting a little bit, a little bit of that, that tape

Speaker 2: 2:03:26

Can glow wonder where he's pulling some of those tips from, huh.

Speaker 3: 2:03:31

And he's slimming down a little bit. He's running for president. We already know that. And he's doing a good job with this coronavirus stuff, especially for the civil libertarians. Like you, Bianca people are sort of tired of this stuff. We have Liberty or death says, can we cover the Georgia election lawsuits? There are four lawsuits that have been filed so far, tons of interpreters and pro hoc VJ looks like a big case, should be fun. I'll take a look at it. Liberty. If it's something that I can do

Speaker 2: 2:03:56

Talk about, I'll talk about it. But YouTube has a policy

Speaker 3: 2:04:03

Specifically about this. It's a 20, 20 election community guidelines policy. So I get a little bit nervous. Obviously I'm interested in those lawsuits. So I'll take a look at them and if we can bring them on the channel, we will, we have Joe Snow says I click the downvote and rarely watch for more than a minute. I don't like being lied to.

Speaker 2: 2:04:22

It's hard to watch those. It's just like watching somebody read. I mean, I read on, on the show a lot,

Speaker 3: 2:04:29

Not really the interesting part of it. And I'm not particularly good at it. Uh, we got, Jay bone says, should public move forward with a lawsuit against uh,

Speaker 2: 2:04:39

Yeah. I mean, yeah, potentially because she's claiming that there's this sweetheart deal. She just got disabused of that notion from Ron DeSantis. If she continues

Speaker 1: 2:04:51

To, to make that claim. Yeah. Maybe

Speaker 2: 2:04:53

There should be some sort of civil suit against them. And

Speaker 1: 2:04:57

Lastly, the last one of the show comes over from souls

Speaker 2: 2:05:01

Under siege, which is the name of a band, or should be the name of the band. If I started a band, that's a good name for it.

Speaker 1: 2:05:08

This is why I commented earlier. There was no point calling out the hypocrisy and double standards. The agenda couldn't be more clear and people need to be talking about solutions instead of pointing out the obvious our government has been. So in infiltrated and we are all equally in danger. This is not about race and gender soul under

Speaker 2: 2:05:26

With a little word of warning. My friends, I don't disagree. I mean, I think that most of our institutions are on the ropes, unfortunately, but that's okay. We don't need them. We really don't. People get all freaked out about the government.

Speaker 1: 2:05:43

Oh, it's not working. Everything's a mess who cares? You know, most of the government

Speaker 2: 2:05:48

Is just leaching off of the rest of our happiness

Speaker 1: 2:05:51

And wellbeing. And as long as we wake up every day, we connect with our loved ones. We connect with our friends and family. We wake up, we answer to our higher power. We reach out, we live our calling. We are passionate about what we do. We act of service to the world and to other people,

Speaker 2: 2:06:04

Well that who cares what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing in Washington, really one way to think about it.

Speaker 1: 2:06:10

All right. So that's it for the program. Everybody want to say thank you to our supporters over@locals.com. Thank you to everybody who keeps the show a roll. And we got Sharon. Courtney saw her today, big hello to my Fox and miss faith, joy and penny. Who's still alive

Speaker 2: 2:06:25

And well. And with us and one whole sock lighter today,

Speaker 1: 2:06:28

Which is good news. We also want to say hi to Jack Elia. We've got the Mariner. We have underscore shades in the house. We got penny T I G we got, see the veil. We have Karl say hi to remark. Number two, all supporting us over on locals. And we had a whole slew of people sign up over the weekend. We're grateful that you are here. Let's say hello to everybody. I want to welcome. Sovereign night, joined us over

Speaker 2: 2:06:50

On locals are watching the Watchers community, waffle, very delicious

Speaker 1: 2:06:55

Just in the house. We have FF huggy. We have GMO, we got Lisa lemon who signed up. We got Tony ammo. We have it's jelly in the house. We got tweak who signed up. We have T S P E V. And we have C Chicago who all joined up. And if you want to be a part of the crew, head on over to watching the

Speaker 2: 2:07:13

Watchers.locals.com

Speaker 1: 2:07:15

And there's some pretty cool stuff that you can get when you join our community over there. First and foremost is a copy of my book. You can see it right here. It's called beginning to winning how to fight your case and succeed in the criminal justice system. It's available for free download over on our community, or you can buy it on Amazon. If you want it. The slides MySpace is going to post over there. Those will be available. Also impeachment party documents.

Speaker 3: 2:07:36

I have my existence systems available right now for you to download. I spent all day Saturday shooting. This course I recorded, I think 23 videos for this course, which brings the total to like 32 videos of part of my existence system. Course. It's a walk-through step-by-step on how to fill out every one of these blocks and how to utilize the system that I am a huge proponent of. So that's going to be coming out soon, like maybe by the end of the week, and I'm going to make that available. But the point is is if you're on locals, you can get this template right now. You don't have to wait. It's all over. They're available right now. So you can go check that out. The co the course will be forthcoming, and there's probably going to be a pretty good promo code over there on locals. I would guess. I'm not sure about that yet, but I would guess you can also share some links with people and may meet all of the great people. All of those questions that you saw coming in today, all came from our lovely supporters@locals.com. There's a watching the Watchers group over there. And so we invite you to go check that out. That's it from me though today, before we leave quick reminder, I am a criminal defense attorney here at the RNR law group. We're in Scottsdale Arizona. We offer a free case evaluation. So if you happen to know anybody who's been charged with a crime in the state of Arizona, we would be honored and humbled. If you sent them our way, we'll take very good care of them. We have a mission to provide and help good people who have been charged with crimes, safety, clarity, and hope in their cases and in their futures. And so we can help with anything. Anytime somebody has been in charge, uh, in trouble with the law, we can help things like DUIs, domestic violence, drug crimes, misdemeanors, felonies, traffic, violations, anything, and everything in between. We can help you clear up old cases so we can, uh, remove your mugshot off the internet. We can restore your rights so you can possess a firearm, your right to vote, become a full citizen. Again, quash those old warrants deal with any license issues, license, no suspensions or anything like that. And so if you happen to know somebody who would use any of those services, any of that, that help, we love to help people. We have a, a strong passion for it. We have an awesome team of people here, and we're not too bad at it either. So if you, if you trusted us enough to send somebody our way, we would be honored and humbled and grateful. And that's it for me. We're going to hop on clubhouse right here for a little bit of time. So if you want to talk just for a little bit, head on over to clubhouse is the link in the description below wherever you're watching this. Otherwise I will be back here tomorrow. Same place, same time. It's going to be 4:00 PM Arizona time, which is Pacific time. So 4:00 PM Pacific 4:00 PM, Arizona, 5:00 PM, mountain 6:00 PM central in Texas, 7:00 PM on the East coast. Everybody sleep very well. Hope you had a lovely dinner. If not eat some food, get some rest, and I'll see you right back here tomorrow.

Speaker 10: 2:10:16

Bye-bye.