 We are now two weeks into the extradition hearing against Julian Assange. He faces 175 years in a US prison for the crime or the alleged crime of espionage. Of course he was just providing public interest material to newspapers. It was an incredible thing that he did when it comes to WikiLeaks. Today in court, Jen Robinson, his defense lawyer, gave explosive evidence that Assange was offered a pardon by representatives of Donald Trump if he agreed to reveal the sources of the 2016 DNC leaks, the leaks from the Democratic National Convention. Assange refused and the evidence strengthens a narrative that Assange has found himself not accused of a crime by a normal legal system but the subject of a political campaign by a US president with no respect whatsoever for the rule of law and we'll have to wait and see obviously and whether the judge accepts that argument and we'll be giving you updates as that trial goes along. What I want to focus on now though is not the legal arguments, the legal wrangling, which to be honest is slightly above my pay grade. I've no acclaim to be an expert when it comes to extradition law, but what Assange's trial reveals about our broader political context and especially the attitudes and reactions, the responsibility or lack of of our liberal establishment. So we'll talk in detail in a moment about The Guardian. They broke so many of the stories that Assange leaked and have remained relatively silent throughout this period of his trial. First though, I want us to look at a clip of someone who gave his support to Assange this week and it's not a liberal hero, it's someone who's usually thought of as an antagonist to liberals. It's podcast host Joe Rogan. Julian Assange is literally been tortured. I mean, the guy was locked in that embassy for how many years with no exposure to daylight just completely trapped and you've seen videos of him skateboarding around the embassy. I mean, it looks like he's going crazy in there and now he's in jail and on trial. The whole thing is, it's so disturbing because when it boils down to what did he do that is illegal? What did he do that people disagree with, that people in the United States disagree with in terms of the citizens? Well, he exposed horrific crimes. He exposed things that were deeply, that the United States citizens are deeply opposed to and the fact that that is something that you in this country can be prosecuted for, that they would try to extradite you and drag you from another country. They kick him out of the embassy and bring him back to the United States to try him for that. It seems like we're talking about some kangaroo court. It seems that we're talking about some dictatorship where you have these no protection to freedom of speech, no protection under the First Amendment, no protection under the rights of the press. That was Joe Rogan speaking. We have to say, I mean, I agree with what he said there about Julian Assange. We don't know what the hell he's done to his studio. Quite a lot of ad money. I think that guy must get any looks like he's in a go-kart or something or the Death Star is what's supposed to say. Didn't you falsify a hundred million for the Joe Rogan that kind of writes to the podcast? That's what I heard, but it's still on my podcast feed. So I don't know why. It's going over, I think, in November. All right, that makes sense. Well, maybe he'll get a better studio there. Maybe this is sort of in between awkward period. I want to ask you though, why do you think that Joe Rogan makes better statements when it comes to Julian Assange than the newspapers which ought to declare themselves the brokers of truth and who worked quite closely with Julian Assange? He doesn't overthink it, does he? I mean, people are saying in the comments he's a simpleton. He's the first to say he's not, you know, immensely intelligent or, you know, he's not particularly well-read on many of these issues. He listens to what people have to say. And I think, and that's the quality of somebody like him. There's lots of voices like him, not nearly enough. But basically, in receipt of the facts, okay, what's he been charged with? Who else has been charged with that? What's happening to Assange is unprecedented, using espionage law from 100 years ago to attempt to extradite a journalist. That's what he is. That's what he did. The exact same charges could be used against you, me, the editor of any newspaper in this country, any BBC journalist. And so it has a huge public interest. And at the same time, you know, he has this huge platform without necessarily being dependent upon a line manager or, you know, the head of the BBC or a political editor telling him what he has to do. The great line, of course, you've said it before, Chomsky to Andrew Ma, well, Ma says, nobody tells me what to think. And Chomsky says, well, you may think that, but you wouldn't be here asking the questions if you didn't think what they want you to think. And somebody like Joe Rogan, to a lesser extent, people like us too, you know, we're not necessarily dependent on the goodwill of certain people with certain opinions in order to have our platforms. That's why that's the material explanation for why Joe Rogan is saying the things he's saying. He couldn't say that if he was, if it was a BBC podcast, because they're not permitted to say those things for that, with that level, you know, they might say, Oh, well, maybe, you know, there's the argument that no, he's sort of hard, you know, hard on sleeve. This is bad. It's, it's unprecedented. It's wrong. It should be resisted. And that's quite rare because of the niche he occupies. And I mean, the thing with Julian Assange is obviously, I mean, if you look at the previous 10 years, there are lots of complications there. There are lots of, you know, moral quandaries that one might get into when discussing the record and history of Julian Assange. But in this particular court case, it's really fucking simple, which is that someone is being done by the world's most powerful state for espionage, when what they did was leak public interest information to mainstream newspapers. To return to Joe Rogan quickly, I've got some, I'm looking at some tweets, are you planning to mention that Joe Rogan's also spreading lies about leftist starting forest fires on the West Coast? I don't know about that particular allegation, but what I would say is I'm definitely not here in any way to endorse everything that Joe Rogan has ever said. I wouldn't want to. I do want to now focus though on the Guardian. So as I've mentioned already, the Guardian was the paper of choice for Assange when he did some of his most explosive leaks, the Afghan, Afghanistan papers, the Iraq papers, they were done through that newspaper. Now you might expect that to mean that the paper has some loyalty to the person or it doesn't even need to be personal loyalty actually, because I don't think that's what this is about, but to feel some responsibility for when someone is facing 175 years in jail completely unjustly because of the kind of practices that helped your newspapers for standing for the kind of principles which you are supposed to embody to speak out in defense of that person. Now I looked under the Julian Assange tag on the Guardian for the last week, and there are some news articles about this court case, but they're all just, you know, fairly standard bland write-ups of what happened in court, many of them just copied and pasted from Reuters. There hasn't been a single leader in support of Assange, and there hasn't been any comment pieces devoted to Assange, apart from one in the lifestyle section by Hadley Freeman, and she does not take issues of press freedom particularly seriously. If you go by the contents of this piece, which she felt was so important to write in the middle of this extradition trial, I'm going to read you some sections from it. So it was in the Ask Hadley section, and she was asked a question from a man called Joel who says, we live in a time of so much insecurity, but is there anything we can expect from this increasingly ominous looking winter with any certainty? Now I hadn't read the Hadley Freeman column before, so it's kind of weird how she gets to, you know, completely relevant answers from the question she was asked, but let's go to the answer. She writes, events may overtake us, but the cliches we use to describe them are frequently, one might even say reassuringly, predictable. I was thinking about this while reading an interview in the Sunday Times magazine this weekend with the lawyer Stella Morris, aka Sarah Gonzalez-Devant, aka the mother of Julian Assange's two youngest children. Like Boris Johnson, it is impossible to get a precise figure on how many children Assange has. Funny how a shared peccadillo can really highlight the similarities between two seemingly very different people. She goes on, the interview largely took place as far as I can gather in the Japanese Kyoto Garden in London's Holland Park and in Holland Park, and Morris described how romance blossomed for her and Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, Japan, Holland, Ecuador, perhaps Assange's right, and we truly live in a world without borders now. Morris, 37, accompanied by her and Assange's three-year-old and 19-month-year-old son, talked with feelings about Assange's possible extradition to the US. His extradition hearing began on Monday at the Old Bailey. She goes on, even now, I don't know whether my children will ever be held in their father's arms again, this is what the mother of the child is saying, to which one struggles not to reply. Yes, that's incredibly sad for your children, but it is also not an entirely unforeseen turn of events given you conceived them with a man avoiding extradition to Sweden to face one allegation of sexual assault on another of rape. She goes on to criticise Morris for saying those allegations against Assange have been politicised. Look, even if somebody murdered my dad, who I love more than anybody in the world, I would still say they have a right to see their children in the future. I mean, that's kind of inhuman, it's kind of strange. Forget Jean Assange, the kids should meet their dad. That's kind of odd, right? That's a really barbaric thing to say. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just a really, I mean, I just think it's very telling, because I don't, I mean, this article, it's a stupid article. I mean, I think the idea that when someone is on trial to be extradited for espionage when they leaked public interest information in the paper you are writing in, for you then to use this just as an excuse to mock their partner who's worried that their, you know, the father of their child is going to get extradited and locked away for 175 years is pretty callous. And whatever allegations were against Julian Assange in Sweden. But I think more importantly than Hadley Freeman's particular article is the fact that, as I said, this is the only thing other than bland news stories, which are basically write-ups of Reuters reports, which has been in the Guardian over the last two weeks, which mentions Julian Assange and attaches some sort of opinion. This is the newspaper which published all of or most of his most significant leaks, public interest leaks, which changed politics in many respects. And now he's on trial for espionage. He's facing the consequences. No one at the Guardian did. And now all you can do is publish these sort of catty articles, which take the piss out of the mother of his child. And the children fundamentally, I mean, they won a Pulitzer as well, right? I mean, you know, the Guardian's global prestige was massively boosted. And, you know, this has been a terrible time for the Guardian over the last 10 years in terms of the economics of the news industry. But after the New York Times, they've been like kind of the second most influential, most widely read online. I mean, I'm not including the mail online because it's a paper, but in a very different way. Anglophone, English-speaking paper in the world. And that is a no small part because of their collaboration with Julian Assange. And it has to return again. We have to get down to the kind of nuts and bolts of the argument here. Even if you don't like Julian Assange, even if you'd like him incarcerated forever, free societies don't extradite journalists under charges of espionage. That's not how a free society works. I don't want to live in a society that does that. And the whole point of the rule of law and due process is it applies equally. You don't just apply it to people you like or that you get on with, right? It applies equally to all. And if we don't have that kind of system, then very quickly you live in an authoritarian hellhole. And so it's deeply disturbing. You know, to be fair, many journalists have been very clear about this in terms of the extent of the consequences. Should he be extradited? It's not in the Guardian, but you very see it on social media and so on. People voicing quite clearly their opinions. It's a huge, huge case. There's a crisis of free speech right now in Britain and the United States. This is the number one case. This is the cause celebra of freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of the media.