Remember 1968: What Will The 2024 Democratic Convention Look Like If Joe Biden Is Still Prosecuting Julian Assange? (Opinion)

On Wednesday, when asked about Australia’s recent request to drop the prosecution of Julian Assange, the BBC reports that Joe Biden said, “We’re considering it.”

What every reporter across the world missed, however, is that Joe Biden was answering a question from three weeks ago. 

All kidding aside, the president is eighty-one years old. It is entirely possible that he simply did not hear the question about his administration’s ongoing prosecution of the journalist. On the other hand, what if Biden is truly considering an about-face? Why would Biden, who once called Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” suddenly change his tune? Why would Biden whose ideological ally, Hillary Clinton, once allegedly theorized about killing the journalist through a drone strike, even consider a cessation of what United Nations Special Rapporteur, Nils Melzer, has called torture?

The answer may be simple. Politicians often do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

In Biden’s case, his approval ratings are in a state of free fall, as reported by Newsweek. Progressives abandon the president daily. Environmentalists are disappointed in Biden for drilling more than Trump, and many activists have turned away from supporting what initially appeared to be a humanitarian intervention as the casualty count in Ukraine approaches 500,000. But if we’re honest – and that’s our fundamental task here at Honest Media – we need to acknowledge openly where the heat is coming from. The prosecution of Julian Assange has become a galvanizing issue for progressives around the world.

The bad news for Biden is that when it comes to Assange, the persecution of this Australian publisher and journalist is no longer just an esoteric conversation among intellectuals and activists. Assange, to put it gently, has become a Christ figure for the international free speech movement. The more Biden tortures him, the more popular he gets and the more the recent argument of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. starts to gain purchase with the public: Biden may be a more serious threat to democracy than Donald Trump. 

We need to be careful here and provide full context: Kennedy doesn’t read either Trump or Biden as a serious threat to democracy. When he claimed on CNN that he could make the argument that Biden was the more serious threat, he was addressing the toxic partisanship and polarization in America, the two parties that want to convince their base that the opposition is evil and anti-democratic as well as government-dictated directives to censor free speech. But if democracy truly is about a system of governance by whole populations, then a president who is actively and systemically censoring dissent (and imprisoning the most innovative journalist of the twenty-first century) may well indeed represent a monumental threat to democracy, both at home and abroad.

It would be one thing, as they say, if this were just about Assange. But as journalists and candidates all over the world find themselves censored and canceled over COVID, Ukraine, the Global War on Terror, Big Pharma, ecological destruction, and the killing in Gaza, many are waking up to discover that Assange’s struggle is their own.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s cousin, Caroline, hinted last year, as the American ambassador to Australia, that the Biden administration was open to a plea bargain with the journalist over the Trump-era case, as reported by the Intercept. But what if Assange refuses to bend the knee to Biden? After all, why should Assange plead? Is the journalist guilty of anything other than practicing journalism? Aren’t we essentially using the 1917 Espionage Act to punish Assange for revealing American war crimes in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan?

Kennedy has promised to free Assange if he’s elected president. But Biden may want to beat Kennedy to the punch. If he doesn’t, remember the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the protester violence over Vietnam. Biden may or may not remember that year well, but most baby boomers do. And Chicago is also now ground zero for the American socialist movement(s), with the Socialism 2024 Conference being scheduled to take place there the week after the Democratic convention. Many activists are planning on making a two-week stay in the city for the two events.

As a writer who recently visited Chicago for an academic conference, I can tell you that I observed media and conversations about the convention all over the city. At the end of a Popular Culture Association panel I chaired last month (about the Grateful Dead and the first Gulf War), the conversation ended with a focus on Assange and his passionate advocate from the Grateful Dead community, the recently deceased songwriter and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow.

Assange is on the minds of Americans. Socialists, libertarians, human rights, and free speech activists alike want the journalist free. The war and peace conversation, as well as the new free speech movement, are approaching a boiling point. Already, the New York Times describes how Biden has had to ramp up security and preemptively expel donors from speeches due to fear of dissent going even more public than it already is. If the president doesn’t throw the progressive wing of his party a bone, we could be looking at 1968 all over again.