Where Should We Draw The Line On Free Speech With JD Rucker And Chase Geiser | OAP #51
JD Rucker is the Co-Founder of FreedomFirstNetwork.com and the Editor of TheLibertyDaily.com.
In this episode we discuss freedom of speech and whether or not any speech should be regulated or if regulating speech at all creates a slippery slope bound to infringe on speech rights that should be protected. We also discuss what's going on with the pandemic and the political and corporate response to approaches they deem controversial.
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/RealChaseGeiser
JD's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/JDRucker
You clearly know nothing about me if you think I'm cool because I'm pretty darn lame, actually.
I'm a podcaster.
I have noqreport.com.
I'm co-founder of FreedomFirstNetwork.com.
We also publish at AmericanConservativeMovement.com, conservativeplaybook.com, based underground.com, truthbasedmedia.com, uncanceled.news, conservative playlist.com.
No, no, no, just N-O-Q stands for news, opinions, and quotes, even though John B. Wells told me that it should be news, opinions, and questions, mostly because I don't really do quotes anymore.
So that was a concept that we came up with in 2017.
It's like, hey, man, we'll make like memes and of quotes and people will share it.
And it really never worked out.
So I'm thinking about changing it.
Actually, we're probably just going to move everything over to a new website soon.
I mean, and I'm talking somebody of that stature with, you know, we're talking at least bare minimum $2.5 billion in backing in order to get a viable third party.
So the challenge there is, you know, you can get a third party started.
You can get it going.
You can get it, you know.
That stuff is easy, as the libertarians have proven for the last three decades.
It's easy to get a party going, but you have to be able to break through the atmosphere.
You have to be able to achieve enough velocity to be able to actually make it into that space because everywhere outside of that space is where the Republicans and the Democrats reside.
That's why they have control.
And nobody's been able to get enough speed and momentum to be able to do that.
It's kind of like you can take a 747, you can get it up, you know, 30,000 feet, but you'll never take it into space.
It just can't happen.
And so unless you were to take somebody like a Trump and, you know, or even an Obama, you know, we'll take it from the other side.
You know, let's say Obama decides that he wants to, the Democratic Party has been, has gone too far to the left.
He wants to have more of a common sense centrist party, you know, that will end up still being too far to the left, whatever.
You know, he could probably pull it off with enough financial backing.
But outside of probably those two men and maybe a handful of others, or say raise the amount to five to $10 billion, no, you could not have a viable third party.
There's just not, you can't get the ground swell and it's just too hard.
You know, our greatest strength right now to be able to do something like that would be the internet.
And our greatest weakness for being able to do something like that right now would be the internet because you have the attacks coming from both sides.
It's just there was a little bit of, they got busted doing some kidding.
What did they do?
Nothing bad.
Just fake accounts, bought accounts, purchased accounts.
I was just there today, as a matter of fact, for the same thing, not from them, but from a conservative, conservative news outlet that's like, hey, would you like to be paid to promote our site?
They don't ban accounts for buying fake followers.
That's, that's, uh, though, they'll ban them for buying sock puppets.
They'll buy them.
They'll ban them for purchasing tweets, let's say, or Facebook likes.
But buying followers is something that that's actually, there's nothing in the terms of service that says that that's against the rules.
Artificially inflating an account is not illegal.
Artificially inflating a post is against the terms of service.
So you would have to, somebody would have to, and here's the thing is that, you know, Twitter and Facebook, as much as I dislike both of them, they've both been through this thousands, hundreds of thousands of times already.
They know how to recognize what's real and what's fake.
And I'm certain that there have been people who have gone out and tried to do exactly what you just said, which is to try to sabotage an account by going to framing them, making it look like a sites are called.
What is it?
Mechanical Turk, I think is one of the old ones.
I don't know if it's even still around, but going there and saying, hey, I'll pay five cents for retweets on AOC's account, and they would recognize it.
They would be able to determine.
They probably have people there that will tell them, hey, yeah, this was purchased in Scandinavia by Boris.
Do you think that the social media platforms have been fair in the way that they've enforced their terms, or do you think that the censorship is intentionally one-sided?
These are content networks that take advantage of platform protection through Section 230, but you can't consider them to be actual platforms, you know, because they do put editorial bias into it.
That's unambiguous.
They could say all day before Congress that they don't, except they do.
It's demonstrable.
They absolutely, positively, 100% do.
And so, you know, but I mean, what are we supposed to do about it?
We have a feckless GOP in Congress and a Democratic Party that actually likes what's happening.
So nothing's ever going to happen with Section 230 or with these protections unless somebody, private citizens, take it and they go through the court system.
If they can get the evidence out through the court system and not stop waiting around for legislation or signing petitions or calling for boycotts or this, that, or the other, then there could actually be something that could happen.
But right now, the prospects of that happening are nil.
Well, the idea that Twitter and Facebook would be held liable for any content on their platform is sort of the other direction is alarming too.
Because I mean, I understand that not exactly platforms because half the tweets I see in my feed have disclaimers that have been added by Twitter, right?
And so they're certainly adding their own position into the content that's consumed on these platforms, so to speak.
But the idea that they could be held liable, say, if a mass shooter live streamed, you know, right.
So I guess new legislation would have to come in to protect them despite the fact that they're section 230 in principle is absolutely necessary.
Okay.
The concept of it does make sense.
And this is where it comes down to actions that are taken.
You have to have, number one, you have to have a reasonable sense of legality when it comes to something like that.
Like you said, a mass shooter goes on Facebook, Facebook.
If somebody wants to sue, they would have to demonstrate that Facebook was made aware, that it was escalated to the appropriate people, and that then they did not take action.
That's different.
That's similar to what's already happening with Twitter right now with the lawsuit by the parents of the 14-year-old, well, at the time, 13 and 14-year-olds whose pictures were put up on Twitter and shared widely, you know, through the city.
They said they replied to the mother of the victim that they did not see it as a problem.
And it wasn't until seven days later when the Department of Justice intervened and demanded that they take it down.
That's when Twitter, Twitter finally said, oh, okay, fine.
Now, a situation like that, where, again, an illegal action was taken, the platform was used for illegal distribution of child porn.
The platform was made aware of it.
The platform willfully declined to take down the content and allowed it to stay up until you got Washington, D.C. and literally the Department of Justice to make a call and to get it finally taken down.
Should they be held accountable for that?
Absolutely.
Because that's not something where it's like, oh, you know, well, you know, it was a mistake or it flew under the radar.
They looked at it and determined this is acceptable content.
So does that make me, you know, is that protected speech?
I would say not.
You know, I think that the vast, vast, vast majority of speech should be protected.
But I'm not an absolutist when it comes to this.
I am a right on the edge.
Okay.
What people call hate speech, I think it's free speech, you know, for the for the most part.
You know, if I were to, if I were to say, you know, I shouldn't get now, let's be clear, there's a difference between cancel culture and, you know, legal, um, the legalities behind speech.
So sure.
If I were to say, you know, oh man, you know, well, I'm not even going to say it because it's hard for me to even say these things because you're also talking to basically a prude who very rarely, if ever, curses, let alone sure.
I think that there are scenarios that, you know, like you said, is it legal to walk into a building and make a statement, you know, fire, yell fire in a burning theater that ends up killing four people who get trampled because, you know, even though there was no fire and your intention was to kill them.
So how do you, how do you make a system, a legal system or legislation that can make those type of instances illegal without creating a slippery slope?
You know, and I mean, I think that, I think what it really comes down to is, is, you know, is speech intended to harm?
And I'm not talking about harm someone's feelings.
Right.
Is speech intended to, you know, cause, is speech used in the act of a crime or on or to set up as a predicate for a crime, you know, even a minor crime?
Should that be the consideration?
And I would say that's as close to my view of acceptable as possible.
You know, should I be able to go to go yell a racial slur at somebody in public?
I'm saying, should I go to jail if I were to see in the, you know, did I break the, you know, am I breaking free, am I breaking hate speech laws if I say, you know, whatever.
I don't, again, no need to repeat it.
You understand what I mean when I say racial slurs.
You know, you know, was it, was my intention to do emotional harm?
You know, yes, that's why people use racial slurs.
Should that be illegal?
Probably not.
You know, and again, I'm not an attorney here, but I also, you know, I'm not, I do have at least a certain sense of understanding.
And here's the important part.
If there's a takeaway to all this, it's that the chances of free speech getting out of hand are far less than the chances of our First Amendment rights being suppressed.
So if I'm looking at this just from an odds perspective, okay, I'm going to err on the side of free speech because the attacks going in the other direction are far more prevalent and today far louder than anything that we can say and do.
It's funny, I got retweeted by Candace or I wrote a story about, so are you familiar with the Candace Owens Aspen COVID tests?
So The reason I bring that up, I'm not name-jumping.
The reason I was saying that is because I got to experience.
I generally have a pretty tame Twitter account, but I'm blessed with not having a whole ton of trolls that are out there who attack me, but because she retweeted it, I was copied on.
I got all these comments.
Every time somebody comes in there and says something, I get copied on it.
It's in my notifications.
And so that was like, oh, wow, this is really eye-opening.
And everybody's like, oh, so basically you're saying baked a cake bigot and this stuff.
You guys are hypocrites from that.
And here's the thing: the article itself and the actions that she's taken, none of them were against this person's right to run their own business, right to say whatever they want to say, right to deny service.
This all came down to, you know, us, both her and me pointing out the lunacy of what we're seeing, the potential, not just hypocrisy, but more importantly, the tyranny that can evolve from this.
And tyranny doesn't just have to come from government.
I know by definition it does, but what we're seeing is the oppression from local businesses, from educators, from people in authority, not just government people.
Everybody is starting to become a COVID vaccine nanny.
And again, I'm coming in blind.
So for all I know, you're out there, you're out there with Jill Biden pushing for vaccines all day.
We had a baby that was born really early, and I know babies never die from it.
So don't get me wrong.
I'm familiar with the issue, but I just decided, you know what, I'm going to take the risk and get the vaccine.
But I hate this was back in April, and this is like before things started to get really heated in the argument.
I think that if I would have waited to get the vaccine and seen the authoritarianism that was really going to come into the conversation, I probably on principle wouldn't have.
I said, you know, it's like if you were to go into a gas station and grab a Snickers bar and you buy it.
And as you're walking out, the clerk says, by the way, you're crazy if you think there are any razors in that Snickers bar.
You'd be like, are there?
And I feel like the left, the way they've acted about the vaccine, has made people more reluctant to get the vaccines than they would have been had nobody ever said anything.
You know, it's like, and so I don't know.
And I think there's good science supporting the side effects as being an issue.
I think what's happening is that I think a lot of people on the right are overcalculating the side effects and a lot of people on the left are just pretending that they don't exist at all.
When I think both of those are mistakes, but I could be wrong.
Lieutenant General Tom McInerney had gotten the first shot of, I don't remember if it was Pfizer or Moderna.
And he went and, you know, he was actually going in to get something, something else done with skin treatment.
And he actually doctors said, hey, while you're here, you know, you just go down and get the shot.
This is early on.
He's like, oh, okay.
So he gets his jab and then he It's calls his doctor friend who's not who's not a you know his doctor, but who's a friend who is a doctor and she's like, No, you know, suck out the poison, you know, get somebody to suck in your arm.
And since then, you know, he has become very adamantly opposed.
But the reason I bring him up is because I think he does fall in line with what you're saying as far as why is it so hard for us to get the message out about the vaccines.
I think a lot of it starts with we're making them sound so bad that people don't think it's real.
But here's the thing: in many ways, the facts are so bad that you have to almost tone them down in order to get people to look at them and then kind of ramp it up slowly versus just hitting them with, you know, whatever.
Well, I think from an anecdote, from an anecdotal standpoint, I've been fortunate enough not to know personally a single person who's been hospitalized from COVID.
However, I do personally know several people who have been hospitalized after taking the vaccine.
I think that they say on one side, you say, they say there's no side effects.
On the other side, they say that anybody who takes it is doomed to die.
You know, they're, they're not going to see 2022.
You know, the legions should start popping up on their skin at any moment.
And we do need to look at this scientifically.
And this is where we go back to both mainstream media and big tech as being, I think, the root cause to the lack of discourse.
Okay.
You know, you, you can't say anything.
You can't even mention the word ivermectin.
Okay.
I posted a tweet today that showed the difference in deaths per 100,000 people in Africa, where ivermectin is readily available to about half the population, okay, over the counter.
And it shows the ivermectin, ivermectin countries, and then non-ivermectin countries.
They found it in deer in Michigan to the point that now, you know, there was this group that started forming until the authorities came and said, no, no, no, no, no, guys, put your guns down.
No need to go hunt down all the deer in Michigan.
Yeah, it's a crazy disease.
And I think that's the other part of it.
We're talking about how the right can overblow the adverse reactions.
There's also the underplaying the realities of COVID.
Listen, COVID-19 is a real disease.
It is a legitimate disease.
It is extremely risky for anybody over the age of 70.
Okay, it is.
And I've known people that are, you know, and it progresses.
You know, once you get into, like, I've known people in their 20s who have gotten it, it's like, I didn't even know I had it.
I've known people in their 30s that are, you know, it's kind of mixed there, depending upon their level of health.
I've known people in their 40s.
It's like, man, this, this kicked my butt.
Okay.
And we saw Joe Rogan.
He's like, he's like, I thought I was going to die for a day, but I took ivermectin and yeah, he's 54.
So then you go up and the one person that I personally know who died from COVID was in his 60s.
Old colleague, Very sad scenario there because it wasn't Phil Valentine, was it?
No, no.
No, this guy was, you know, not only was he in his 60s, but he weighed probably about 360 pounds.
So he was kind of an ideal candidate to not be able to survive it.
You know, but you go on up.
So the statistics, and you can look at the Stanford study that is quote unquote released, except you can't share it because Facebook will fact check you on it.
It's pretty hilarious because you have two Stanford PhDs who have been doing this the same study.
They're studying for infection fatality rates amongst the various age groups.
And they've been doing this since last May.
So they've been doing this on an ongoing basis, you know, publishing the reports.
You can't post their new reports.
If you do, these virologists, these experts from Stanford with PhDs, if you post their study that shows that anyone under 70 has a has a less than 1% chance of dying from COVID if they're infected, if you post that, Facebook will replace it with a link to a fact check written by a grad student who has no scientific background and it was written months ago.
This is why we're supposed to have liberty because in these situations, there are no experts.
And so the idea that any group can mandate behavior out of another group in a very confused situation or confused time, especially, I mean, I always am averse to that notion, but especially in a confused time, it doesn't make any sense to me because frankly, I mean, there are experts in virology and there are experts in statistics and data analysis and what have you, but there are not really that many experts in COVID-19.
I mean, you can't really become an expert in anything, any one thing specifically in such a short period of time.
It's sort of a new phenomenon.
I guess there are COVID experts, COVID virus experts, but I don't know.
I've got a doctor friend who he's in the 70s, so he's at risk.
He's a retired doctor.
He was for months.
He would tell me I was wrong.
And we're talking about a guy.
He's a conservative.
He is, I would say, to some extent, a conspiracy theorist.
And I really do believe, I hope he's not watching.
Because I was about to say something kind of mean, but I really do believe that the reason that he was opposed to fighting against these drugs, these injections, was because he had taken it.
And as a result, it's kind of like, well, now I have to, I have to To debunk those who are saying that it's bad because if it's bad and I took it, then that would make me dumb or make me whatever.
You know, finally, I was like, look, you know, you took it because you made a calculated judgment.
You, you researched it, you know, and he said, look, if I was 50, and he told me, if I was 50, I wouldn't have taken it.
If I was 30, I definitely wouldn't have taken it.
If I was 20, nobody better even come close to me with it.
Three days ago, study said, said natural immunity is 13 times more effective than the vaccines.
Part of the study that nobody's talking about, though, is that they're now finding that those who have natural immunity who did not take the vaccine have an actual, actually, a less chance.
So it's not like it's like, if you have natural immunity and you add the vaccine, that your chances get better.
No, they actually get worse.
Apparently, there's something in some vaccine that inhibits natural immunity.
Maybe we're talking about this, a different study, or maybe I misread it, but I thought that the results of that study said that the highest immunity was found in those who had natural immunity and only one of the two Pfizer doses.
So you're no, the same study, but you're talking, so you're talking about the, you probably, did you read the story from Natural News or did you read it from the Epoch Times?
So one of the articles, and I don't remember which one it was, one of the articles said that part of the data that was not published within the study for the sake of not wanting to concern people because it and also because it wasn't scientific.
It wasn't, they didn't have enough of a sample of people who had not been vaccinated.
But so it was considered anecdotal.
It couldn't be considered scientific.
But that the people who were only vaccinated or who were only had natural immunity and no vaccines demonstrated a higher resistance to COVID.
But again, not enough people to be able to show that.
And I'll find you the article and send it to you because it's eye-opening.
Just like we've seen with one shot, two shots, three shots.
call it delta we're going to call it google we should call it the google variant next time i swear to god i wish there needs to be a nike and a disney variant as long as they're not did you catch the nike yet sales plummet it makes your it makes your feet swell up uh so where were we man i'm sorry i just got distracted i was we're talking about disney villains i mean uh the cdc same thing Yeah,
How do you explain the phenomena that is the fact that the vaccines were really initially at least a very, very impressive accomplishment for the Trump administration, right?
To get something optional available in such short order was totally unprecedented.
You know, Trump bragged about it, supported it.
I don't think he's lying.
I think he actually believes that what he did was great.
All the supporters were, you know, seemed to be on board with his hyper, you know, with Operation Warp Speed.
Then as soon as Biden gets into office, and it may have happened before, I don't know.
You might be a little bit more familiar with the zeitgeist, but it totally switched.
Now all the Democrats are pushing these vaccines that basically exist because of the leadership of the Trump administration.
I know that Trump himself didn't do the research and make these vaccines, but he created the environment that was conducive to them existing.
And all the left is, you know, are supporting the vaccines, and everybody on the right is like inverted.
How did that happen?
Like, I thought that the left would always only hate anything Trump did.
The, you know, first and foremost, there was no shift from, you know, when Trump was pushing the vaccines, at least everybody that I know in my circles, everything that I was reading was still like, no, we don't support it.
We love Trump, but we wish he would stop pushing this.
You know, it wasn't, there was less partisanship there.
It was just kind of like, ah, we understand.
Okay, fine, but we're not going to take it.
So, right.
Or maybe we're going to take it or, you know, but we don't want as long as they don't start infringing on our rights.
You know, as long as they focus on freedom and choice and all this stuff, great.
Fine, make your vaccines, make people happy.
You know, hopefully that'll fix things and make it to where I don't have to wear my damn face mask anymore.
You know, that was kind of the attitude.
There was no shift.
Okay.
After he left and it became Biden's vaccine, there was no shift.
People were still saying the same thing, but you're right.
You've got Biden and Harris.
They're both all like, oh, no, you know, Harris specifically said, I would not trust a vaccine put out by that man or whatever.
So I'm not, and keep in mind, I'm not suggesting by any means that the Republican Party or the conservatives or libertarians or anybody is not guilty of what I'm about to describe.
But let's get real here: that on the far left, even on the left of center and within the Democratic Party, the narrative is determined by the need of that particular moment.
Which we can take back and go into literally, we can go into literally any subject from that jumping point because it applies universally.
But we were talking about the vaccine.
So, so was Trump misled?
Yes.
I thought you're going down the conspiratorial angle with this.
How did they get the vaccines out that quickly?
We know they were actually prepared and ready to go before the election even happened.
The only reason they held it off was so that they didn't want Trump to be able to say, oh, look, I got the vaccines out.
You know, we know that it was conspicuous that they literally, you know, there suddenly all of them become available and ready to go within a week and a half after the election.
Coincidence?
No.
It was planned out.
But let's get into the real conspiracy here.
Did it really take that China?
Did it really just take months or was it being developed before?
We already know that, at least the delivery system.
mRNA technology has been working on that since like 2004.
We also know that spike proteins have been in study for a long time.
And I'm not suggesting I say conspiracy and people are saying, oh, you mean that it's manufactured by a weapon that Fauci started envisioned in the 80s.
No, I'm not saying that necessarily.
But I will say that this wasn't a matter of, okay, so let's start from scratch.
Let's examine this.
Let's go through the standard vaccine protocols and come up with a solution.
What it was was, hey, it's a coronavirus.
Let's get our coronavirus stuff together and it uses spike protein.
So we got this and we got this mRNA technology and we can do this.
And then it's like, okay, here you go.
These weren't developed specifically for this.
They were developed out of almost like an amalgamation of junk parts.
I don't, you know, you'd mentioned because I am too productive.
I don't watch shows or movies, generally speaking, anymore because it's just, I can't see myself supporting people who hate me, you know, who actively work against me, you know, to not only spread a message, but to who take their money.
Money that I give them is then given to causes that I oppose, you know.
And as much, you know, I'm not one that, I'm not part of cancel culture.
So I don't say go out there and boycott Chipotle because they have, they have.
And having spoken to them, having had spoken to them, I don't know.
If I read it, I would know which was right.
It seems to me that in the instance of security and privacy, if you have even one vulnerability, then the whole effort is moot, right?
So if you can't have airtight privacy and security measures for like what you do on the internet or whatever, then you might as well not have any, right?
So, oh, the car was listening to me.
Damn it.
I knew I forgot something.
And so it seems to me that the same principle can be transferred to what you decide to support or not because we're sort of running out of options of alternatives.
I have to use Amazon and I don't like the CCP, but I mean, everything in this room that I'm looking at right now was made in China.
It's like, you know, again, we're getting into, into minor morals here.
It's like, oh, is my 699, you know, contributed to, to, to killing babies?
I don't know, you know, but it, it may have happened, may have not, but it did.
And so the point that I'm trying to make is that we can still be aggressive and selective with our, with how we spend our money.
And we, if we do have viable alternatives, even if it's maybe a little bit more expensive, even if driving there might take an extra 10 or 15 minutes, I guess what I'm saying is, you know, would I tell people to avoid an ice cream shop and drive an extra hour and a half to get to the other ice cream shop where, where they don't have masks?
Or would I tell people just put on your mask for that period of time?
Cause this particular private business wants masks.
No big deal.
You know, don't, that's not a hill to die on.
Okay.
So that, you know, that's making a logical decision.
I just think that people need to go beyond, you know, the whole, well, I didn't went to this shop instead of the other shop because the other shop is, is a four minutes extra drive.
That's not acceptable to me.
You know, I ate at Chipotle instead of wherever Wendy's or, or, or, you know, Chick-fil-A or something because, because, uh, you know, um, I was in more of a mood for Chick-fil-A or for, for Chipotle.
They're extraordinarily, extraordinarily into certain aspects of cultural Marxism, in particular, LGBTQ supremacy.
So they do have a whole lot of their attachment to the transgender movement in particular is very, very aggressive.
They have little promos they put out.
where they'll do a day where if you can buy the, I don't even know the name, they have like these three particular transgender divas who have burritos named after them only certain days of the year.
And if you buy those burritos, then a dollar goes to whatever one of the charities, the transgender.
Yeah, there you go.
And again, let's be clear, this is where the libertarian, I mean, somebody wants to be transgender, great, I don't care.
Do you think that a black-owned historical restaurant, say there's a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, that's been selling the best fucking barbecue for 100 years?
Well, I guess the line has to do with not necessarily the intentions of an individual action, but what are the repercussions of that action being used in other ways?
Okay.
So in that particular instance, if let's say, you know, like you said, and this, you didn't have to use a hypothetical.
We are seeing this thing, not necessarily with businesses, but with like, you know, there was that, I forget the college that said the rock was racist, so they spent money to get rid of that rock.
No, there was a there was this rock, this historic rock that was supposed to be racist.
So the college had it removed, which is irrelevant to the story, but that's the same college that has just had like a ignorant, igneous rock.
It was literally, so they had a, they had, and I didn't read the story, I only saw the headline earlier, but they had a an event that was specifically dubbed as an all-inclusive event, except for white people.
You know, there's, I'm going to, I have to preface this because if I say the line without it, without it being referenced, then it's a really bad line.
You know, and so does that extend, you know, does at what point can we embrace cultural groupings without being racist?
You know, and that's really, that is a serious question that we need to have answered because it seems to be more and more legal, heading in the opposite direction that it was in in the 50s and 60s, but it still seems to be, you know, people are accepting it, that we can do this discrimination.
Let's see, we'll call it segregation.
I don't want to say it's necessarily discriminatory because I think in some cases it's just not.
I don't think the people were like, were who did that event I was telling you about at the college.
I don't think they were sitting there thinking, you know, we have to hate on white people.
I think that truly, at least in their hearts, or at least in their brains, they were thinking, you know, this is about inclusivity.
This is about diversity.
Raising awareness is about right.
So it really is, you know, we really just shouldn't have white people there.
And so then again, this made sense to them.
So I think, again, so to be clear, they didn't think it was discriminatory, but they knew it was segregation.
So the question is, is segregation, is that acceptable in any way?
You know, we've gone through for years saying no, no, no, but maybe it is.
Maybe in certain scenarios, maybe, again, like I said, with, would it be discriminatory if, you know, I started a Bible study group and an atheist, you know, wanted to, you know, apply for a job to be secretary of the group or something or wanted to be, you know, want to sit in on the group.
It's a bad example because as a Christian, I would say, sure, yeah, come on in.
Well, and I mean, it's not just not just segregation of who can be there, it's segregation of who can sit where and who can order what and who has to pay what.
Where I moved to make his closest thing I can at least can't get aborted.
You're right, but you're asking if the market itself can correct things.
And I'm not sure if that power is legitimate or if it's earned anymore, you know, because I hate to say it.
I don't trust the will of the American people as much as I would have, say, even two or three years ago.
Because we are seeing that it is too easy to manipulate us.
We as a people are, I would say, more susceptible to manipulation than other countries, where at least in, say, like communist China or North Korea or Iran, they know they're being manipulated.
They've built their lives around this manipulation and they're okay with it.
Are we worse off because we're supposed to be free and we allow the manipulation to happen?
I would say yes.
I would say that we're no longer as free and it's not that our freedoms have been taken away.
Well, it does seem to me that cultural consensus does have an impact on the market.
And what I mean to say is when there's a certain critical mass of a market reached that has a consensus about even like a moral principle or a political position, that changes.
So, for example, enough of Chipotle's consumers have a certain position on the transgender issue that it impacted the way they were doing business.
I would say that Chipotle is actually responding to the market, not creating the market.
And we see this a lot with like the critical race theory stuff that like the diversity, the diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff that these businesses are doing.
There's a certain level of consensus in the workforce among consumers that feel like they either need to mitigate liability or for PR purposes, they need to do these things, right?
And in the case of race, I believe that had they not made it illegal to segregate or discriminate based on race in a private business, had they let it just ride in time, it would have had a deep impact on the marketplace.
And it would be very hard to find restaurants that still did segregation, even if it was totally legal.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of, let's say, I guess we're looking at timing.
You're looking at it from if none of this happened in the 60s.
I'm looking at it from, let's say that the basically segregation was legalized five years ago.
Would it have already changed by now?
Maybe, maybe not.
But I think you're right.
I think there's at least some power when it comes to the obvious, but it's when we start to get into confusing topics like transgenderism, like critical race theory, going woke, so to speak.
Is that going to be, we've seen businesses making the wrong decision when it comes to such things and have suffered as a result, you know, because they think they're doing the will of the people, but it turns out that the fans for, say, the NFL, they're just not, they're not there anymore.
Are they going to come back?
Maybe, maybe not.
But I don't think they will unless the NFL makes changes.
You know, it's not just about the vaccines.
It's not just about the mandates.
It's about their embrace of the black national anthem, for example, to coincide with the actual national anthem.
That doesn't make any sense.
Now, if they had said, you know, we're going to play the black national anthem, the Hispanic national anthem, the white national anthem, the Native American national anthem, you know, why specifically one?
Why?
That doesn't make sense to me.
And it's, are we supposed to, no, I'm not going to go down that road.