 It's hard to exaggerate the monumental importance of the case of Julian Assange. It's not the destruction of a man's life, but doing his job better than almost anyone else. It's also the destruction of Western government's claims that they champion a free press. Our website, The Tourism News, has provided the most comprehensive coverage of the Assange case in the English language. We were inside the Assange courtroom in London and followed every hearing later by video link to the courtroom. We've just come from Australia yesterday where we have close contacts with Assange's family and supporters there. Within weeks, Julian Assange could be extradited to the United States to face up to 175 years in an American dungeon. The Home Secretary of Britain, Preet Patala, is now making her decision whether to do that, whether to send Assange to the U.S. despite an earlier lower court decision not to send him because of his suicidal tendencies and the conditions of those American prisons. We know Assange's case quite well. I can assert without any hesitation that Assange is not a rapist. He's not a spy. He's not a hacker. He's not an agent of Russia or any other government or anyone else. He's a publisher. And he's slowly being killed for his work as a publisher. And for no other reason. Julian Assange is one of the most important press freedom cases in history for those of us who are concerned about free speech. Harold Pinter, after which the Penn Pinter Award is named, said this about the U.S. government and its activities around the world. It's aggression around the world. He said that the American media acts as though, quote, nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. Well, Julian Assange and Ricky Leakes have showed that it did happen. And for that, the U.S. has imprisoned him in a major European capital and charged him with reviewing its wrongdoing. It is an attack on press freedom usually associated with the most oppressive totalitarian regimes. Assange's case goes to the core of how we define ourselves in the West. Are we democracies that uphold the right to criticize our governments? Or are we growing autocracies that crush dissent? Assange is the symbol for an answer to that question. The really horrifying thing, and Niels Nelson, the UN Special Rapporteur in Georgia, said, the really horrifying thing is about this case is the lawlessness that has developed. The powerful can kill without fear of punishment. And journalism has transformed into espionage. It is becoming a crime to tell the truth. Silencing Assange was the beginning of the recent tide of censorship in the West, with the war in Ukraine being used now as an excuse to shut down anyone who doesn't agree with the enforced and only narrative. Before the U.S. government was pressuring social media covers like Facebook and Twitter and open congressional hearings to shut down what they call disinformation. What the government doesn't agree with. They did it through the proxy of Facebook and Twitter and other social media, which even that was a violation of the First Amendment, which says the government can't do it, certainly not directly. But now we've moved on, as Ulrich mentioned earlier, to this disinformation governance board under the Department of Homeland Security, which is a law enforcement agency, to police speech. We have direct government control over what people say and write. Now, what you will say, in 1917, lost by one vote in the U.S. Senate to put formal government censorship into the Espionage Act. He failed, but a year later he was able to pass the Sedition Act, which lasted only a couple of years. But with that he put the leader of the American Socialist Party, Eugene Deft, in jail for two years for simply making a speech against the draft during the First World War. And it is this Espionage Act that Assange is being charged under, not the Sedition Act, because that was removed. But the Espionage Act still has its own constitutional review, and many people's review, including Daniel Ellsberg, the leader of the Pentagon Papers, that the First Amendment conflicts with the Espionage Act and it should make an exception for journalists and publishers to publish classified information. Even Joe Biden, when he was vice president on 2010, went on American TV and he said that we cannot charge Assange with Espionage unless we can prove that he stole the classified documents. But if you just receive them as a journalist or a publisher, we can't do anything to him. And that's why the Obama administration did not indict Assange. They let it go, but the Trump administration did. The problem is Joe Biden is president now and he's not ending Trump's prosecution. So he's going back on what he said in 2010. He's allowing this extradition process to go ahead. So it began with Assange, but now its efforts of the U.S. are underway to stamp out the smallest spark of dissent, lest it grow. The U.S. government is demanding total control of the narrative, and the word total is in totalitarianism. I spoke briefly earlier about Consortium News has now become a target of PayPal shutting us out and this private government would form a high level U.S. security officials on their board. The going after anybody who doesn't say what the government wants right now. And using the cover of Ukraine war is a way to push this kind of thing through. So I think we here in the West have to understand what's happening in the midst of this war hysteria. We have to rationally analyze this crisis and what's happening to our free speech. We cannot put up with censorship of the press. No matter what we think of the war or anything else, there are irresponsible people in the media in the U.S. who are actually calling for direct war with Russia. The Pentagon is the one pushing back against that. People within even the State Department. And some will think a nuclear war could be won. There was such an article in the Postal Journal the other day. This is something we should try to see if we, the Americans, can win it or the West. So this madness has to stop. Assange is the most dangerous man alive to the Western establishment because he was destroying the myths with which it retains its legitimacy. And thus they are destroying him. Julian Assange is dying. He had a stroke. And so too is Western democracy. And if the world does not rise up in its defense, we will lose that battle. Thank you. I think this is a major task for Penn. Please think about it. Penn International has a special group of centers. We are about 20 centers, including the American Center. They joined. And we are trying with every possible way. I mean, Australians have now written into the Prime Minister. And I mean, we are really trying to do something, but it's tough. I mean, laws sometimes are very unjust and can be big, big impediments to justice. Just a paradox. But if we think of Nazi Germany, everything was done under the then valid laws. So any other intervention, please? That's an excellent point. And I've often thought about they could make laws to justify criminal behavior. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Nazis.