Lionizing Julian Assange Is a Symptom of the Right's Decline

Freedom of the press has nothing to do with WikiLeaks's crimes.

The moral coherence of the American conservative movement is at an all-time low, and while Donald Trump’s hostage grip is the most obvious manifestation, it isn’t the only one.

Last week, crank whisperer Tucker Carlson paid a visit to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London’s Belmarsh Prison, where he awaits extradition to the United States for trial over his leaking of massive quantities of classified material. What they discussed is still unknown, but presumably Carlson is interested in adding Assange to his stable of unsavory interview subjects. In late 2021, Carlson offered a glimpse of what he was becoming when declared that Assange was “being punished for the crime of humiliating the ruling class.”

He’s not the only Assange fan to make noise lately on what may loosely be described as the Right. Last month, libertarian Republican Thomas Massie joined with Democrat James McGovern to circulate a letter among their House colleagues calling for the leaker to be let off, claiming that by prosecuting him, the government “needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home,” giving authoritarian regimes like China grounds to dismiss American stands for freedom as “hypocritical.” Noted brain donor Marjorie Taylor Greene claims Assange’s “inhumane” detention is “for the crime of committing journalism.”

The constitutional illiteracy on display here is matched only by the moral idiocy, which far more closely matches the caliber of the Left’s standard fare than of anything recognizable as conservatism.

First, on the law, Ann Coulter helpfully explained way back in 2010 why this is not remotely a First Amendment issue:

The government isn’t trying to put a prior restraint on Assange’s publication of the documents, as in the Pentagon Papers case (though it probably could have). It wouldn’t be punishing Assange for his opinions. The government wouldn’t be prosecuting Assange to force him to give up his sources — and not only because we already know who his source is (a gay guy in “an awkward place”), but because it simply doesn’t matter.

Assange would be prosecuted for committing the crime of possessing and releasing classified national security documents that could do this country harm. The First Amendment has no bearing whatsoever on whether Assange has committed this particular crime, so whether or not Assange is a “journalist” is irrelevant.

The problem here is that people get their information from the media, which is written by journalists, and journalists have spent the last half-century trying to persuade everyone that laws don’t apply to them.

Second, WikiLeaks is an operation that publishes classified documents in the tens of thousands at a time, sight unseen. By his own admission, when he does so he has no idea what he’s actually releasing, and therefore no idea what harm it could possibly do. How did the great martyr for press freedom grapple with this staggering irresponsibility in a 2010 New Yorker interview? Essentially by saying not my problem:

Assange does not recognize the limits that traditional publishers do. Recently, he posted military documents that included the Social Security numbers of soldiers, and in the Bunker I asked him if WikiLeaks’ mission would have been compromised if he had redacted these small bits. He said that some leaks risked harming innocent people—“collateral damage, if you will”—but that he could not weigh the importance of every detail in every document. Perhaps the Social Security numbers would one day be important to researchers investigating wrongdoing, he said; by releasing the information he would allow judgment to occur in the open.

A year and a half ago, WikiLeaks published the results of an Army test, conducted in 2004, of electromagnetic devices designed to prevent IEDs from being triggered. The document revealed key aspects of how the devices functioned and also showed that they interfered with communication systems used by soldiers—information that an insurgent could exploit. By the time WikiLeaks published the study, the Army had begun to deploy newer technology, but some soldiers were still using the devices. I asked Assange if he would refrain from releasing information that he knew might get someone killed. He said that he had instituted a “harm-minimization policy,” whereby people named in certain documents were contacted before publication, to warn them, but that there were also instances where the members of WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands.”

“Collateral damage.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the concept so many of Assange’s sympathizers are the first to contemptuously reject whenever the subject turns to the fallout of actual wars.

And that’s not all he’s made public. From Front Page Magazine circa 2013:

Over the years, Assange and his anarchists have published operations manuals for the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; classified reports on the Battle of Fallujah; detailed information on U.S. military equipment, by unit, in Iraq; gun-camera footage of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad; a U.S. Special Forces manual for bolstering allied governments; CIA strategies to shore up public support among allied populations for the war in Afghanistan; Social Security numbers of U.S. military personnel; and private diplomatic exchanges.

In addition, as USAToday reports, WikiLeaks has exposed U.S. efforts to remove nuclear materials from Pakistan, State Department plans to use diplomatic personnel as spies, quid-pro-quos offered by the Obama administration to persuade foreign governments to take on Gitmo detainees, cover-ups of missile attacks in Yemen, and support among Arab leaders to strike Iran.

One of the most egregious consequences of WikiLeaks’s arrogance was the publication of the identities—and villages—of “hundreds” of Afghanis who risked their lives to provide intelligence to America and coalition forces. In response to the gift, a Taliban spokesman said at the time that the terror group intended to investigate the names it didn’t already have, and “if they are US spies, then we know how to punish them.”

Saint Julian’s response? Again, not his problem—he claimed not to know of anyone who had ever been harmed by WikiLeaks’s disclosures, but if that changed he would “review our procedures.” Otherwise, he suggested the responsibility for protecting the people he endangered was all on the U.S. military—which is like saying that since parents are responsible for protecting their kids, the neighbors have no responsibility to abstain from actively making that job harder by posting pictures and location details for their kids to the seedier corners of the internet.

And no, none of this is made up for by any scandals or other information of genuine public value WikiLeaks has exposed. Legitimate journalists or whistleblowers expose specific information about specific wrongs. They don’t pretend they’re heroes for dumping massive data troves online on the guess that maybe the next Pentagon Papers is waiting to be unwrapped.

Of course a sane society cannot tolerate the theft and distribution of confidential information about individuals, military tactics and technology, diplomatic communications, internal deliberations, etc. Whether a given piece of information should be classified may be debatable, but that’s why we have elections to periodically replace the people who determine such things. Our system is manifestly not one where one person gets to substitute his own judgment without any expectation of consequences.

None of the above, it must be stressed, is a remotely close call. And while I expect the babykilling, speech-suppressing, race-dividing, child-mutilating, statist Left to get basic ethics so backwards, the fact that any of this would need to be explained on the Right is a sign of just how badly we’ve allowed the movement’s reasoning and grounding in first principles to atrophy.