Assange persecution is 'defining the First Amendment' - Kevin Zeese
Channel: #Unity4J
Date: 2019-01-19

Joe Lauria interviews Kevin Zeese in the #Unity4J 13.0 vigil.

"Every political movement begins with education. It begins with getting the truth out. We get so many lies from our mass media that we need an antidote and Wikileaks provides that antidote." 

"My sense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks is this is a breakthrough media effort. It really democratises the media in ways that are urgently needed. Rather than a corporate media outlet  controlled by its advertisers, its board members which are also often from corporations, its investors often from big corporations and with close ties to the government and sometimes kow-towing to the government on what they will talk about and publish."

"Wikileaks is the opposite. It's democratised. It gives people in government, people in the corporations the tools to expose the truth and that's very frightening. That's such a loss of control for the government over the media. To actually have people able to leak the truth anonymously from the Pentagon, from NSA, from the CIA, from the National Endowment for Democracy and from big corporations is just like an astounding transformative process that immediately scared the power structure and particularly when the materials leaked by Chelsea Manning exposed the day to day workings of the Iraq war. Raw material, raw intelligence material showing what was happening on a daily basis. Videos that were taken by people in the military showing what they were doing. Wow!"

"I see the persecution of Julian Assange as defining the First Amendment for now and the future and if he is prosecuted, I hope he is not prosecuted, that case will be the equivalent of the John Peter Zenger case. The Zenger case helped to create the First Amendment and I suspect that if Julian is prosecuted no matter how it turns out, that will help to define free speech for the remainder of this century and beyond. It will be a breakthrough moment. It will show us we need stronger free speech, protections of the media than we currently have."

"What Consortium News is doing, what these vigils are doing are so important because it sets the table for where we're going to have to go with this Assange case. People should know that it's going to take a movement to protect Julian Assange. It's not going to happen without people power standing up for him because the power structure is opposed to him. And that's why there has been so much effort at character assassination to make Julian Assange is someone you're not allowed to like, to make him into a sex-abuser, make him into a Trump fan. All this character assassination has been intentionally done to prevent a movement from growing to support who I think is the most important journalist of the 21st century because he's broken through and democratised the media."