 Julian Assange is a hero and every one of you are heroes for having the courage to stand up. And it's standing up not just for Julian Assange, but this is standing up for press freedom. It is standing up for a judicial system, which is not a mockery of justice, which is what he has been subjected to. And it is standing up to demand accountability from empire. This is standing up for our democracy. So I'm going to try to just say a quick word about all that because the bottom line is that this case matters. Julian Assange matters not just for Julian Assange, not just for the work that he is doing and has done, not for the transformation of journalism that he has brought in an age of, shall we say, you know, journalism that has lost its way to put it charitably, has been thoroughly corrupted and corporate consolidated. His work is critical, but this case has enormous meaning for a broader society, and in many ways it is a poster child of what's not working and the emergency that we're facing in our democracy. So I'm going to try to say a few things about that and just encourage you to stay on this. Don't take the propaganda at face value, which tells us that this is not worth fighting, that it's hopeless, that, you know, all the myths that have been perpetrated against Julian Assange are not going to repeat here, and I'm not going to dignify those very outrageous and derogatory myths that have been perpetrated in this new era of propaganda. It's not legal to commit propaganda in the US. For decades it was not, and those protections against domestic propaganda have been repealed in the early 2010s. I don't know the date exactly, but there's a lot of propaganda out there, and it's really important not to take it at face value and to stand up for what we know is really right and really critical, because we are all on the line here, and Julian Assange is fighting for his life, he is fighting for the integrity of journalism, he's fighting for democracy, and he's fighting for everything that we depend on as well. I'm going to just make a couple more comments and just give me a nudge when the time is right. So he should be getting not only the SACCO events that he prizes, he should be getting a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He should be getting the Nobel Peace Prize for challenging empire and holding government accountable. Instead he is being persecuted for publishing information which is critical to the public interest. That's not just okay, it is essential in a democracy, and it is a routine when they publish the Pentagon Papers. In reality we are facing a dire threat to press freedom when a publisher is sitting in the dungeon of a high security COVID-infested prison unjustly for more than two years, and that's after being confined in violation of human rights law for seven years prior to that. The bottom line is that Julian Assange is a political prisoner under attack because he published evidence of US war crimes and not only US corruption and illegality. He has not been convicted of a crime, he should be a free man, the US empire is the one that should be in criminal court. It's not just Julian's future that's at stake, it's our collective future. The future of press freedom, the judicial system and democracy itself. And a big thank you especially to Julian's family for all that you are doing to carry the struggle on. And thank you for the occasion of your tour which kind of gives us a chance to come out of the closet and see each other and be heard. Because we've all kind of been fighting this in our own little private worlds being sort of denied and silenced by the larger dialogue out there. A quick comment on the extradition, it was a very humane thing that Judge Baritzer of the UK court blocked his extradition to save his life. Knowing the horrific conditions in the ADX Supermax prison where he would wind up. But it is not a humane thing that she then handed down effectively a death sentence condemning him to the life threatening conditions in solitary confinement in the most horrific prison in the UK. I won't go into the details on that but suffice it to say this process must not be allowed to continue. If President Biden has any respect for press freedom which he's now saying he does because his Department of Justice was caught spying on journalists and trying to obtain their confidential records. If President Biden really does care about press freedom then he needs to drop the appeal of the extradition decision and he needs to do that now. This harassment began under Barack Obama if the extradition was initiated by Trump and it's now owned by Joe Biden. He can stop it and we shouldn't stop until he does. The threat to press freedom is paramount. I'll just say that the charges against him, against Julian Assange and the words of his legal team are an unprecedented dangerously overbroad attempt to criminalize basic journalistic activity. Legal scholars say this would quote radically rewrite the First Amendment by criminalizing such activity that has public interest value. And this prosecution would put an end to national security journalism. National security journalism is kind of our only hope for holding imperial power accountable. So this is a critical case and it must be stopped. That is the persecution must be stopped. There are a variety of journalist organizations including and human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, a variety of journalist unions and so on have all sounded the alarm about this case. I also want to just recognize that this case is a journalistic farce. The legal persecution that Assange has endured has made a mockery of the judicial system, particularly in the UK but the US has been complicit in this and has been a driver of it. And this isn't like my opinion. I'm quoting here from the United Nations special repertoire on torture, Nils Meltzer, and if you haven't checked him out yet, Google him. He is, shall we say, an extremely experienced attorney in international law and human rights. And he tells it like it is. He studied the case. He was not sympathetic to it. He just wrote a book about it saying that he too was fooled by the propaganda and he refused to look into the case. But he was sort of pushed into doing that and he was totally shocked and transformed by what he learned. And he is now dedicated to obtaining justice for Julian Assange. And in his words, the cases against Julian have systematically violated the rule of law, have little to no basis in fact, the rape allegations and so on. They have blocked his legal defense and have effectively silenced and ensnared him for extradition to the US. Meltzer identified 50, 50 violations of legal process and a due process and law, 50 violations in the Swedish allegations alone, allegations for which charges were never filed. He's had his access to lawyers blocked. He's been illegally spied upon, which should have been caused for dismissing the case right then and there and throwing it out of court. So I just want to make that point that this is a critical case that threatens our judicial system. It threatens our legal system. It really exposes the co-optation of our media, which has really become a cheerleader for imperial power and has refused to actually look into this case or speak up for it with a few exceptions but not very many. So the case is also a poster child of the way corporate media has become a lapdog to power. The larger context here which I won't go into is in the context of empire and resurgent McCarthyism. So this is a critical case that we need to stand up and fight if we want to have a future because it's not just journalists who are in the target here. It's not just publishers. It's really the very fabric of our society and our democracy. So we all have nothing but benefit to gain from standing up and getting the word out because the facts are so overpoweringly in favor of justice for Julian and democracy for all of us. Thank you very much for being a part of this. Thank you, Jill. Thank you so much.