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Sept. 19, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:06:36
Israel's War on Terror; Fighting Campus and Government Censorship with FIRE's Nico Perrino

TIMESTAMPS:  Intro (0:00) War on Terror 2.0 (5:49)  Interview with Nico Perrino (30:58) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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- Good evening.
It's Wednesday, September 18th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, for the second consecutive day, Israel attacked not just Hezbollah but the Lebanese people.
in civilian areas in unprecedented and quite dastardly ways.
Unlike yesterday, when Israel dubiously claimed to have targeted mobile phones ordered and used exclusively by Hezbollah, a claim we deconstructed on last night's show, today's destruction, new destruction, was clearly more indiscriminate, with booby-trapped walkie-talkies exploding was clearly more indiscriminate, with booby-trapped walkie-talkies exploding all at the same time with much greater force.
Not only in civilian areas, but in civilian infrastructure like apartment buildings and even in stores that sell, not to Hezbollah, but to the public.
The devices that Israel implanted with bombs have exploded in the stores.
At least 20 more people were killed and another 400 injured.
From the start of the October 7th attack, it seemed highly likely that Israel, Israeli citizens, and its American supporters would embrace exactly the same mentality, premises, and grave self-destructive mistakes that the U.S.
made and Americans made in response to the September 11th attacks.
Mistakes that wrought so much erosion of previously observed taboos of our national credibility and values and which featured all sorts of dramatic victories that ultimately achieved nothing other than undermining our own interests as evidenced by the Taliban's instant return to power soon as the United States left Afghanistan their country After 20 years.
Now to understand this mindset of random vengeance and then dehumanization that drove so much of the American war on terror abuses that we're now seeing in the response to October 7th, not just in Gaza now, but in Lebanon as well, it is useful to dive in a very visceral way to what happened in order to understand what enabled it.
Not just to describe it, but we produced a video using one of the best videographers that we know to try and give a real sense of what that climate was like for those of you who didn't live through it or those of you who have forgotten a lot of it.
We're coming up on the anniversary of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which, coming so soon after the 9-11 attack, laid the groundwork for so much of what was to come, particularly since it was falsely blamed on Iraq, the anthrax attacks were.
We want to take you somewhat back to that period in a very illustrative way to understand how similar it is to what is taking place all around of Israeli aggression and its violence used yet again today.
And then, while the ACLU has become an increasingly partisan organization, so radically abandoning the values that once defined it and made it so great, In fact, so partisan that it has even retreated now from its defining, absolutist defense of free speech.
Another group, thankfully, has rapidly taken its place as a completely apolitical and nonpartisan, yet vehement defender of free speech, no matter whose speech is under attack and who the perpetrators of that attack are or what the cause in whose name the attackers of free speech are.
That organization is the Fire.org.
which we've talked before about to a rather significant extent.
And we are thrilled to speak to its executive vice president, Nico Perino, about so many attacks on court-free expression rapidly appearing more and more in America's key institutions, including academic campuses and increasingly in First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
victory that FIRE just achieved in response to a government attacking a citizen's First Amendment right in such a blatant way, as well as other victories that they've piled up in fortifying the right of free expression for all of us.
Before we get to that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We spent a good portion of last night's show covering what it is that Israel did in Lebanon, this really unprecedented attack where the Israelis had intercepted, very obviously, a significant part of the supply chain that feeds Lebanon with all sorts of mobile devices, a significant part of the supply chain that feeds Lebanon with all sorts of mobile
Hezbollah decided that they no longer wanted to use cell phones because of the Israeli ease of spying on them and so they resorted instead to wireless pagers and the Israelis somehow were able to get their hands on those pagers headed to Lebanon and to Hezbollah in particular, intercept them in mid-route or collaborating with the manufacturer before they left the factory and implanted bombs remote control bombs and thousands of those devices really not entirely sure where they were headed.
They ended up in a lot of cases in Hezbollah's hands, but even when they ended up in Hezbollah's hands as opposed to people in the proximity of Hezbollah, when the Israelis decided to blow up instantaneously thousands of devices, they had no idea where those devices were and
Many many of them were in classic civilian locations and shopping malls and restaurants and street fairs for produce in stores in playgrounds and all over the place wherever Someone might be who had one of those devices and yet the Israelis just blew them up instantaneously having no idea who they were about to kill and the casualties were at least 3,000 at least 10 people died yesterday including two children and
And then today again, Israel returned and launched another similar attack, although this time on walkie-talkies and other electronic devices that also made its way to Lebanon that obviously the Israelis had intercepted.
In this case, there's not even an argument.
that those were specifically designed for or used exclusively by Hezbollah fighters.
And as a result, there were massive explosions all over the city.
There were apartment buildings on fire in entirely civilian areas.
At least another dozen people in Lebanon were killed, and at least 400 people suffered serious casualties.
Here is from AP News Associated Press today.
The headline is Lebanon is rocked again by exploding devices as Israel declares a quote new phase of their war.
Quote walkie talkies and solar equipment.
Solar equipment.
Exploded in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon on Wednesday in an apparent second wave of attacks targeting devices a day after pagers used by Hezbollah blew up, state media and officials from the militant group said.
At least 14 people were killed and more than 450 wounded in the second wave, the health ministry said.
The attacks, which were widely believed to be carried out by Israel targeting Hezbollah but have also killed civilians, of course, have hiked fears that the two sides' simmering conflict could escalate into all-out war.
Speaking to Israeli troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Golan, you may remember him because he was the one right at the start of the Israeli attack on Gaza, who said we're going to starve them of all food, of water, of fuel, electricity.
It's a total blockade, which was then of course used by countries like South Africa and Nicaragua who wanted to bring war crimes cases against the Israelis and countries like Germany that were funding and arming them.
He said, quote, we are at the start of a new phase in the war.
It requires courage, determination and perseverance.
He made no mention of the exploding devices, but praised the work of Israel's army and national security agencies, saying, quote, the results are very impressive.
We have had countless experts on our show since October 7 to analyze the Israeli conflict.
And whenever I asked about the risk of escalation, namely a new front opening in Lebanon or potentially even regionally in Iran with the Houthis, many of them said, including the most informed ones, that they think that Netanyahu's goal is to prolong the war in Gaza as long as possible and then expand that war to all of Israel's enemies, drawing the United States in for decades.
It has been the dream of Netanyahu to lure the United States in to fight a war against Iran and take out Israel's greatest enemy, as we were convinced to do in 2003, when the United States, for whatever reason, invaded Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, and took out Saddam Hussein after a mountain, an avalanche of constant false propaganda, as we're about to show you.
And it seems like Netanyahu certainly has a lot of personal motives to stay in power as long as there's wars, namely that he faces the prospect of jail and a corruption trial that's very serious if he's removed.
But he also clearly is thinking about his legacies at the end of his life.
He's quite old now and he obviously is envisioning himself as some historic great Israeli leader who's going to dispatch and vanquish all of israel's enemies in the region no matter how many wars it takes no matter how many civilians are killed no matter how much it draws the united states into that conflict here just to give you a sense what i think is the key point and this is why i want to link it so much 9 11.
after 9 11 the united states had all sorts of quote successes we started bombing countless muslim countries who would constantly hear oh today we killed the number three in command in al-qaeda the number three person not osama bin laden or not the number two but the And I can literally show you, I've done this before, eight, nine, 10 different press accounts celebrating on different dates that we've taken out the number three.
And obviously it didn't have any effect.
Because there was no strategic value to these bombings, it was just a kind of way to keep the war going, to feed the war machine, to make Americans feed on this kind of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab hatred that they wanted to build and successfully did build in the wake of 9-11, and then even the anthrax attacks that they blamed on Iraq.
And from the very beginning, after October 7th, when we went on the air, we talked a lot about the dangers that Israel was about to embark on the same sort of thing, using exactly the same mentality.
Namely just a kind of avalanche of violence and discriminative violence that had no strategic aim.
Just kind of giving this cathartic satisfaction that people were just being killed.
Not even people having anything to do with October 7th or any terrorist group, just people in the region, Arabs, Muslims, who a lot of people blame just for being Arab and Muslim and therefore are happy to see killed.
And that's the reality.
Just like that sentiment prevailed after 9-11 and led to so many abuses that so many people now say they have come to regret.
Exemplifying that problem is the New York Times headline today about this new attack.
It was about yesterday's attack, actually.
Quote, Israel's Pager attack was a tactical success without a strategic goal, analysts say.
It was a tactical success with no strategic goal.
Quote, by targeting so many pagers at the same time, Israel demonstrated technological prowess and partly restored the aura of its intelligence agencies, but its long-term intent is unclear.
quote, Israel's attack on pagers and other wireless devices belonging to Hezbollah was a tactical success that had no clear strategic effect, analysts say, while it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members.
The attack has not so far altered the military balance along the Israeli-Lebanon border, where more than 100,000 civilians on either side have been displaced by a low-intensity battle.
Hezbollah and the Israeli military remain locked in the same position, exchanging missiles and artillery fire on Wednesday at a tempo, in keeping with the daily skirmishes fought between the sides since October.
Although the attack on Tuesday was an eye-catching demonstration of Israel's technological prowess, Israel has not so far sought to capitalize on the confusion it sowed by initiating a decisive blow against Hezbollah and invading Lebanon.
A second wave of blasts was heard across Lebanon on Wednesday, reportedly caused by exploding walkie-talkies and other devices, but the Israeli military did not appear to be preparing for an imminent ground invasion.
For years, we have heard that Iran is this apocalyptic cult of religious fanaticism that has no interest and value of life on Earth because they only think about the afterlife.
They don't value life at all.
They value death.
And that for that reason, if they got a nuclear weapon, they would just use it instantaneously because they don't care about the consequences.
That's what we're always being told.
They have no rational leaders.
Same thing with Putin.
For 20 years, we heard he was a shrewd, reliable, rational, self-interested, motivated, calculating leader.
And then suddenly, when we demonized him, he became a Hitler-like figure who just couldn't be trusted to even act within the bounds of rationality.
That's always what we're told about whoever we need to demonize.
Same thing about Saddam Hussein.
If he got weapons of mass destruction, he would just use them because he doesn't care about life or anything else.
Meanwhile, if you look at the Middle East over the past six months, the Israelis have done so many extreme things to try and provoke the Iranians into a war that most sovereign countries would have reacted to ways far stronger than Iran has done, including Israel's decision to blow up the Iranian embassy, Iranian consulate in Damascus.
And Iran had to respond.
No country could refrain from responding when another country just air bombs its embassy.
And yet Iran launched some of its most primitive, some of its slowest weapons that it knew likely would be intercepted and were all intercepted and saved its far more sophisticated and deadly missiles for another day.
And then when the Israelis engineered the murder of a Hamas official who had been invited onto Iranian soil to participate in the inauguration of the Iranian president, the Iranians announced and continuously insisted that they could not be talked out of major escalation, major retaliation against Israel, and so far they've done nothing of the kind.
They haven't retaliated in any way for that much more egregious violation of their sovereignty.
And now you have Israel attacking Hezbollah in these new ways, killing a lot of Lebanese civilians, which obviously is going to unite civilians in Lebanon with Hezbollah and hatred of Israel, and the perception that Israel is a threat to their country.
There seems to be almost an incentive or an attempt to provoke Hezbollah into a war and Israeli leaders and officials in our government are already talking about how this war is now underway.
It's a new phase of the war and the United States has deployed many military assets in the region saying it will defend Israel in the event of escalation.
Now, it really reminds me a lot, not just 9-11, but of the anthrax attacks, which, as I said, the anniversary of them is coming up.
And I just want to give you a little sense for what the climate was like back in 2001 after 9-11, followed a little more than a month later by the anthrax attacks.
Here from The Guardian, October 14, 2001, Iraq is, quote, behind U.S.
One, Iraq is, quote, behind U.S. anthrax outbreaks.
Look at how definitive that headline is, how obviously false it is, but how definitive it is.
That just got put into the atmosphere immediately, knowing the Bush administration did, and all the neocons who supported it, that they long wanted to do regime change in Iraq.
Look at how quickly they saw the potential of 9-11 to exploit that by just blaming Iraq lying and saying Saddam Hussein had an alliance with al-Qaeda, and then lying and saying that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis were behind the U.S. anthrax attack.
Quote, American investigators probing anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe that they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack and have named Iraq as prime suspect as the source of the deadly spores.
Their inquiries are adding to what U.S. hawks say is a growing mass of evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved, possibly indirectly, with the September 11th hijackers.
If investigators' fears are confirmed and skeptics fear American hawks can be publicizing the claim to press the case for strikes against Iraq, the pressure now building among senior Pentagon and White House officials of Washington for an attack on Iraq may become irresistible.
Plans have been discussed among Pentagon strategists for U.S.
airstrike support for armed insurrections against Saddam by rebel Kurds in the north and Shia Muslims in the south, with the promise of American ground troops to protect the oil fields of Basra.
Now, this is the reason why as soon as October 7th happened, I warned repeatedly about the danger of falling back into that war on terror mindset where any violence that the Israelis do or that the Americans do with the Israelis is instantly justified by claiming with no evidence that whoever they killed are all terrorists, which is how the war on terror mentality was launched.
No matter what you said and showed that the United States government was doing, torturing people, do process-free detentions, kidnapping off the streets of Europe, to send to Syria and Egypt to be tortured, putting CIA black sites in to prevent human rights organizations from seeing the atrocities that are only now emerging that we were committing against people who had been proven guilty of absolutely nothing.
The whole range of war on terror abuses, including the assault on civil liberties in the United States, It was all justified, including warrantless surveillance and the Patriot Act by, oh, this is necessary to stop the terrorists.
And so most Americans just sat back and said, I guess it's necessary.
We're just doing this against terrorists.
It's exactly now what Israel is doing against using a framework and a mentality that most Americans on left and right have come to say they really regret having followed in this country because of the irrationality and the violence, the senseless violence that it unleashed.
for the next 20 years.
So we are working with one of the most talented videographers I know, Thiago Dezan, who I worked with when I founded the Intercept Brazil.
He was the official videographer for us and put together some incredible packages.
And we asked him to put together a package showing what that immediate aftermath of 9-11 was like, but particularly with what has so often been forgotten, which was how the anthrax attacks severely intensified the panic and fear that Americans were under and therefore their acquiescence to exactly the sorts of rationale that the Israelis and their American supporters are now using.
For those of you who are listening to the podcast, this really is an audio-driven video, or rather a video-driven video, a visual-driven video, so it's probably not very valuable if you're just listening.
You can go on any of our channels, our Rumble channel, our Twitter channel, our YouTube channel, where we're going to publish this Video so you can watch it.
It's about six minutes long, so you can just fast forward if you're listening to it.
But I really hope you will go watch it because I think it's extremely well done for what we're trying to demonstrate.
Let's show that video.
A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.
Obviously a very disturbing.
Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, Our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.
But they have failed.
Our country is strong.
Weeks after the terror attacks and the nation was traumatized again.
And threats being sent through the mail.
Washington was in full crisis mode.
Positive anthrax culture was found at the remote mail site that serves the White House.
This is a two-front war.
There are people who would seek to do evil to this country, and they have mailed letters, obviously, to high-impact places.
There's no question that anybody who would mail anthrax with the attempt to harm American citizens is a terrorist.
And there's no question that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization, so it wouldn't put it past me that they're, you know, it wouldn't surprise me.
That they're involved with it.
There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may, and I'm saying may, have come from Iraq.
If that may be the case, then that's when some tough decisions are going to have to be made.
Somebody could have flew here from a different country and then deposited that letter.
ABC News has been told that initial tests on the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle have found a tell-tale chemical additive whose name means a lot to weapons experts.
It is called bentonite, a substance which helps keep the tiny anthrax particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together.
It's possible other countries may be using it too, but it is a trademark of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.
It does mean for me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source for the anthrax used in these letters.
The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax.
to kill several million people.
We in the FBI are pleased this morning to announce a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for terrorist acts of mailing anthrax.
Five years after the attack, Amerithrax investigators are nowhere near an arrest.
I wouldn't say stuck.
What I would say is it just meant there would be a lot of long days trying to get through all potential subjects.
You're attending a news conference with Dr. Steve Hatfield, who is the Justice Department's so-called person of interest, whatever that who is the Justice Department's so-called person of interest, whatever that in the anthrax investigation.
I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the eye and declare to them I am not the anthrax killer.
I know nothing about the anthrax attacks.
I had absolutely nothing to do with this terrible crime.
Sir, is Stephen Hatfield still a suspect in the anthrax case?
Mr. Hatfield is a person of interest to the Department of Justice, and we continue the investigation.
None of the hearsay or coincidences could be linked to Hatfill being the one behind the 2001 anthrax attacks.
It would take nearly five years before Hatfill was officially cleared.
He won a $5.8 million judgment against the United States government.
The FBI reveals brand new details about the main suspect who killed himself last week.
Newly released FBI evidence makes a strong circumstantial case.
Bioweapons researcher Bruce Ivins was a delusional sociopath.
As you know, the prime suspect committed suicide just as the government was getting ready to charge him with the attacks that killed five people and made 17 others sick.
Federal investigators now say the man solely responsible for the 2001 attacks took his own life just last week.
Bruce E. Ivins was responsible for the death, sickness, and fear brought to our country by the 2001 anthrax mailing, and that it appears, based on the evidence, that he was acting alone.
Did the FBI get its man when Bruce Ivins, the government microbiologist linked to the deadly anthrax mailing seven years ago, committed suicide?
Or is Ivins the new Steven Hatfield, the former army scientist the Justice Department investigated for years in the anthrax case but never indicted?
A joint frontline ProPublica and McClatchy newspapers investigation raises serious questions about the government's case.
Now a new National Academy of Sciences report false the FBI's scientific methods in the case, saying it's not possible to reach a definitive conclusion.
The FBI jumped to a conclusion back in 2002 and 2003, and Stephen Hatfield was their man.
in 2003 and Stephen Hatfield was their man.
Then they jumped to another conclusion in 2007 and Bruce Ivins was their man.
Now both of those conclusions have been shown to be demonstrably false and unsupported by evidence.
The FBI was really under a lot of pressure because, you know, if it wasn't Bruce Ivins, then they've driven an innocent man to his death.
And so we have this pronouncement, flat out pronouncement, that he's the guy and that's the end of it.
But there is a lot of questions.
There are a lot of questions that still persist.
The fact that no spores were found, the smoking guns that you would have expected to see if he had been the perpetrator weren't there.
That's an aspect of the investigation that I think represents a big hole.
But with the suspect now dead, the government will never have to prove that case in court.
There's so much that video shows that's very, very relevant to what's happening today in terms of the United States and Israel and what they're doing and the mentality that they're fostering in their populations.
And this actually is the anniversary of the first anthrax attack in September 18.
But you see there, first of all, the capacity of governments to just disseminate lies.
Immediately, with no evidence, they definitively stated that this could only have come from Saddam Hussein because the bentonite that they found in the anthrax was a hallmark only of the Iraqi weapons program.
And that obviously intensified, in the panic of 9-11, the great fear that Iraq was somehow a grave enemy of the United States.
And then once the war was launched, they accused one scientist who ended up not only being cleared but being paid millions of dollars and then accused another who to this day they insist was the only perpetrator of the anthrax attacks who worked in a, not in an Iraqi facility, but in an American military lab in Fort Detrick.
But because he killed themselves, the FBI never had to present the case at trial.
And many, many scientists and media outlets, including the most mainstream, that usually are very willing to believe the FBI, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Science Magazine, a lot of different
Research scholars and scientists at America's leading academic institutions through great great skepticism on the case against Bruce Ivins and having done in-depth reporting at the time I did too and I just think it's so important that when something like this happens we Take a moment to understand a how easily it is how easy it is for governments to just disseminate false Information designed to escalate the panic even further to convince people that whatever they do in the name of protecting them is justified
But go and ask people on the right, and certainly liberals as well, who supported in the beginning parts of the war on terror, then into the years of the war on terror, and most people will say they regret it.
But as I watch so many of those same people mindlessly cheer what the Israelis are doing in the wake of October 7th, we're now almost a year in, and they've opened up another front.
Even when they kill children, as happened over the last two days.
Even when they bomb funerals, as happened over the last two days.
There is an instantaneous justification of it on the grounds that, oh, this is against terrorism, these are against terrorists, even though there's absolutely no evidence for the number of people who are actually described as terrorists who have been killed.
It is a mindset, a propagandistic framework that we could anticipate right after October 7th was going to be launched.
And at the very least, I think having reviewed this history, a great deal of skepticism is required when governments start launching very new means of violence, like intercepting electronic devices in the supply chain or by collaborating with the manufacturers and implanting them with thousands of bombs that go off instantaneously, regardless of where they might be.
That is obviously a technique that not only the Israelis can use and the United States, but also many non-state actors and governments can use against us as well.
It's a new means of warfare.
That not seeming very discriminant and targeted as has been suggested, but seems quite indiscriminate given they have no idea where those instruments are going to be, that they're exploding, who's going to be near them, and who they're going to end up killing.
So we thought this was the anthrax attacks anniversary, a perfect opportunity to remind you of the climate that was so deliberately and carefully cultivated, the violence that it justified for the next decade.
And most importantly of all, the mentality and mindset that was generated on purpose to justify everything the government did, which I think is what we're seeing exactly from America's most fervent supporters inside Israel and from the Israelis themselves.
I talked before about the role that the ACLU played in the early development of my legal and political framework, how I saw them defending the free speech rights of even the groups and people with whom they most vehemently agreed.
They often did that with great self-sacrifice.
There were primarily Jewish leftist lawyers who, in the late 1970s, defended the neo-Nazi party's right to march through Skokie, Illinois, even though there was a heavy Presence of Holocaust survivors there.
They lost a lot of donors.
They almost went bankrupt.
The organization was almost destroyed.
They survived and they had the conscience, a clean conscience, to know that they stood on their principle of defending free speech, not when it's politically easy or advantageous for their political ideology, but free speech as a principle, which is the only way to defend it.
I've been quite critical of the ACLU's abandonment of that view, very disappointed because we need an organization like that, but also very gratified that there is an organization that seems to have embraced from its founding and I think increasingly defended that very apolitical, non-ideological principle-based view of free speech, and that's thefire.org,
which we've talked about many times before, and we are very delighted to have one of the most important people in that organization, which we've talked about many times before, and we are very delighted to have one of the most important people in that organization, the Executive Vice President Nico Perino, with us Nico, it is great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Happy to be here, Glenn.
So for people who aren't so familiar with the identity and mission of FIRE, I think for a lot of people you became known early on as defending because you were so focused on campus speech where primarily it was conservative and right wing students whose free speech was being abridged and people assumed, "Oh, this is just a right wing group carrying on this right wing narrative about conservative students this is just a right wing group carrying on this right wing
And never really kind of looked at the full picture of what the work that you were actually doing.
So could you just talk about how FIRE began, what the kind of motive and purpose of it was, and how it's evolved over the years?
Obviously the sort of synopsis of that.
Yeah, that's a totally incorrect narrative.
FIRE, from its founding in 1999, was founded to be a nonpartisan organization.
We have two co-founders, Alan Charles Kors, a professor at Penn, conservative libertarian leaning, and Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney based out of Boston, friends with Allen Ginsberg, very much a man of the left.
And bringing these two folks together really kind of created the DNA and the identity of the organization, which is a nonpartisan organization.
And as you mentioned, for the first 20 some odd years of our history, we're devoted to fighting for civil liberties on college campuses.
We're most well known for our defense of free speech, but we also defend due process rights and religious liberty and free press rights.
But in 2022, we expanded our mission off campus, seeing a need for a nonpartisan Defender of freedom of expression a defender that isn't going to throw clear or genuflect before other values before it issues It's full-throated free speech defense and that's what distinguishes us from other groups that do free speech advocacy is that we don't take positions on the issues and the speech that we defend and Right?
How could we?
We have a staff that includes liberals, progressives, maybe communists, socialists, you know, we're all across the political spectrum.
We couldn't come to a consistent position on the issues of the day.
For us, if it's protected, we defend it.
No throat clearing and no apologies.
So that's really what separates us from other groups that are out there.
Yeah, I know even as a First Amendment lawyer, when I was defending the free speech rights of highly unpopular groups or people with, you know, views that, you know, I don't mind admitting I consider rancid now, back then I refused to opine on or denounce my views of the ideology in question, because it was just completely irrelevant to the question of free speech.
And I didn't want to have to jump through a hoop and say, I don't agree with this, or I do agree with it, because it didn't matter in the slightest.
And I wanted to keep the attention on the principle itself.
And not on the question of whether this view was a good or bad view.
I don't want to invite you to speak pejoratively of the ACLU, unless you want to.
So I'm not asking you to do that.
But I do wonder, given the ACLU's long-stated mission that I thought had kind of been fulfilled, which is more or less exactly what you described, they weren't so focused on campus abridgements, but they also did defend the religious liberty rights of students, the free speech rights of students, a lot of Christian groups and Christian students.
Why did the founders of FIRE.org think there was a need for a new free speech and civil liberties organization given the very large presence of the ACLU?
Well, they did see that there was a need to do this free speech work on college campuses, do this due process work on college campuses.
So they did see a need.
And whether the ACLU could have done more of that work, I'll leave that to the founders to speak to.
But there was a need.
And as I said, with our expansion in 2022 off campus, we saw there a need for our particular brand of free speech advocacy.
And I will say a lot of the old school civil libertarians from the ACLU are working at FIRE or are FIRE supporters.
For example, former ACLU president Nadine Strawson is a senior fellow at FIRE.
Ira Glasser was the executive director of the ACLU for 23 years from 1978 to 2001.
He's on our advisory board.
David Goldberger, who was the lead attorney in the Skokie case, which I thought I used to be able to just reference without having to explain what that is, but I've been giving some speeches lately and people have no idea what the Skokie case is.
This is a case stemming from Skokie, Illinois in 1977, where a group of neo-Nazis wanted to rally in a town of 6,000 Holocaust survivors.
And the ACLU came to the defense of those neo-Nazis' rights to rally in a town of Holocaust survivors.
And the lead attorney on that case was David Goldberger, a Jewish man, and the executive director of the ACLU for that first year of the case was a man by the name of Aryeh Nair, who was himself a Holocaust survivor.
So talk about going out there and making free speech arguments in the most difficult circumstances.
Aryeh Nair a few years later published Yeah, I was about to mention that.
Let me just say, that's a documentary that I watch with great interest.
Ira Glasser was a hero of mine as well.
disagree with and see as a broader threat to society.
These are my heroes.
I made a documentary about Ira Glasser called...
Yeah, I was about to mention that.
I hope people go...
Let me just say that's a documentary that I watch with great interest.
Ira Glasser was a hero of mine as well.
I think he took over the helm of the ACLU sort of in the wake of the Skokie controversy, which really did weaken the organization, brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.
He sort of saved the organization.
And to this day, he's a Jewish civil libertarian.
He is a vehement defender of what the ACLU did.
And I think your documentary, which is called Mighty Ira, that sort of...
And we interviewed Ira too at the time of the documentary.
I really hope people will go watch that because as you said, you know, for me this is almost like assumed way of thinking.
It was indoctrinated in me and I thought all Americans and increasingly it's becoming almost like an extremist or radical view that you do have to constantly go now and re-explain it because that history has been Deleted so yeah, and I think so so let me ask you about fire specifically with regard to that principle that you've just enunciated Because like I said yeah You can only defend the people's free speech rights whose rights are being abridged.
And on campuses, because campuses tend to be more left-wing institutions, over the last, say, 10 to 15 years, that just happens to have been a lot of conservative groups, a lot of conservative speakers.
I mean, even when I was in school in the 90s, we didn't call it woke ideology, but we called it political correctness.
There's been this trend over many years.
And so FIRE did defend a lot of right-wing student groups and right-wing students.
And I always, whenever I would promote your work, I would hear leftists come and say, why don't they defend left-wing causes and where are they on Palestine and Palestinian groups who are being banned?
And I was like, they're all over the place here and here and here.
So can you talk about some of that work that you've been doing well before October 7th in terms of not only defending right-wing student groups and right-wing speech, but also Palestinian groups and Palestinian students whose speech rights have been targeted by campus administrators as well?
Yeah, you're exactly right.
I mean, we don't pick the people we represent or the people we defend.
The government picks the people we need to represent or we defend.
Or these colleges or universities pick the people we need to represent or defend.
So it just so happens that on college campuses, the student body and the faculty and the administration are predominantly liberal.
And censorship almost always targets the dissenter, right?
And so on these college campuses, you're going to have a lot of conservative dissenters who are going to be punished.
But it's not universally that way.
For example, as you know, pro-Palestinian advocates on campus for years have been the subject of censorship on campus, and there's been discussion this year about the Antisemitism Awareness Act and its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
That's an issue that we've been seeing percolate in state legislators.
States have been adopting this definition, and we've been fighting against for a decade, and now we thankfully have a chorus behind us, but part of me is asking, where have you been all these years when we've been fighting these efforts.
And, you know, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is a very dangerous piece of legislation.
The IHRA definition that it adopts says that there are 11 different ideas or beliefs that could constitute anti-Semitism.
And to my knowledge, this is the first time that Congress will pass a law specifying specific ideas or arguments that could constitute unlawful discrimination.
And some of these arguments are things like denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination or applying double standards to Israel or comparing the Israeli government's actions to Nazi Germany, which may be ideas that you think are wrong, bad, whatever, but they're so clearly protected speech.
And this legislation is really a full frontal assault by listing specific politically protected ideas that now can be deemed illegal in the educational context if It's really a kind of a kind of a remarkable thing.
Um, you know, go ahead if you want to just talk about that first.
Some of the bizarre ways in which this post-October 7th censorship has manifested are shocking even to me.
For example, there was a student group at the University of Pennsylvania that wanted to screen a documentary critical of Israel called Israelism.
And the university prevented them from doing so on these kind of amorphous security grounds, which are these security justifications we see all the time trotted out by university administrators.
There's never any evidence behind them.
Often when we do public records requests at public universities, we find that there's no evidence behind them.
But the students went and hosted the screening anyway.
It's amazing to think on a college campus, you need to engage in an act of civil disobedience to screen a documentary on a hot button political issue.
And guess what happened after they screened it?
Nothing.
A discussion ensued.
Exactly the sort of thing you want to have happen on a college campus.
And I have to be, I have to be kind of frank with you as well, Glenn, you know, this has been a difficult year for fire, right?
You expand off campus, you have people, and you take on cases that don't involve conservatives, or you are taking on cases that involve pro-Palestinian activists, and people are like, "Oh, no, no, no, we won't go there." The day after October 7th, I sent an email to our staff, and I said, "Things are gonna get hot.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a source of tension on college campuses." But we have a motto here at FIRE, We'll drive this bus into the wall if it means remaining principled.
And remaining principled in this case means we're losing supporters, we're losing funding, but we have to do the work as we see it.
And we think that once passions and factions have changed, people will come to appreciate standing on principle.
Just in the same way that when the ACLU defended the Nazis in Skokie, I was really tough on them in the beginning.
They almost went bankrupt for it.
They lost a huge amount of their donors, a huge amount of their supporters.
But I want to delve into some of the specifics, including Governor DeSantis' banning of a pro-Palestinian group throughout the University of Florida system, which we reported at the time fired really instantly and quite vehemently denounced, even encouraged administrators to ignore it because of how egregious of an unconstitutional assault it was.
But just on this principle that you were just so eloquently and passionately defending, namely that You know, if you don't stand on it on principle, including in the instances where it may politically alienate a lot of your funders, a lot of your supporters, it really doesn't have much value.
Can you just expand on that a little bit for people who I think 30 years ago would have understood it was shorthand, but now it's a much more delicate and controversial proposition that does need exposition, unfortunately.
Yeah, Jon Stewart, the comedian, has a line that if you abandon your principles when they're challenged, they're not principles, they're hobbies, right?
And I don't think an effective Advocate for free speech is going to be a free speech hobbyist.
That means adopting that principle attributed to Voltaire that I might disagree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
And when you talk to old school civil libertarians like Ira Glasser, like Aryeh Nair, they talk a lot about this idea of neutral principles, that these are principles like free speech that need to be applied to all.
people.
And I was speaking with a man named Norman Siegel, who executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
And he said, if I could get anything tattooed across my chest, it would be the phrase neutral principles.
That's just such an eloquent articulation of what it means to be an old school civil libertarian.
And he represented the Klan in his practice.
And he said, he would hear from critics who would say, you're a Norman Siegel, you're a lawyer.
And he said, No, no, no.
I'm a lawyer for the First Amendment, and the First Amendment applies to everyone, including the Ku Klux Klan.
And this is something that even Congresswomen like Eleanor Holmes Norton, who used to be an attorney for the ACLU, would go out there and defend the right of George Wallace, the segregationist, to speak at Shea Stadium after he was banned.
I mean, this is something that used to be doctrine amongst old school liberals, but I think is increasingly and worryingly being abandoned and fighters trying to reinvigorate this stand for neutral principles.
But in our increasingly polarized time, you're seeing people abandon principles in favor of political expediency.
So, you know, I just urge your listeners join this free speech movement and stand on principle, especially when the speech at issue is speech that you disagree with.
Trust me, they hear that from me pretty much every week.
One of the things that I love so much about that documentary on Ira Glasser, Mighty Ira, that I actually did not know before was this history in the 1960s Where you know, you have this always had this very interesting relationship interaction between black civil rights leaders on the one hand and Jewish leaders on the other.
It's oftentimes been a great alliance in defense of common principles.
There's always been some tension as well.
But one of the things I did not know is that there were Civil rights leaders, black civil rights leaders who were explicitly supportive of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK and racists, the free speech rights, on the grounds that exactly as you said earlier, and I think this is so often misunderstood, is that censorship is not a weapon for protecting the marginalized.
Censorship is a tool of the majority to crush dissent and if you can abridge the free speech rights of neo-Nazis or communists or the KKK, you could very easily then abridge the rights of Jews or of African Americans.
And that was really well understood in the 60s.
And it's amazing how, especially in left liberal politics, that idea has really been lost.
To the point that I want to ask you about this victory that you had, because when I saw this video, and I'm so glad when I heard that you guys intervened immediately, in one way, it was kind of shocking to see
People who are elected officials who have sworn an oath to the Constitution, who are not young people, they're, you know, in their 60s, 70s, who I thought would have been indoctrinated with just kind of a reflex or an instinct of free speech, just so flagrantly and explicitly violate it at a kind of temple of democracy, which is the ability of citizens to come and criticize or petition or lay bare allegations against their government officials.
So let's watch the video because I found it, On the one hand, not surprising, but on the other hand, shocking.
So let's take a look at this first.
You're violating my First Amendment rights.
I have certain inalienable rights, and they were not only trampled on, but the mayor essentially weaponized the police force to shut me up.
I've got to interrupt.
There are oral communications during the city council meeting that may not be used to lodge charges or complaints against any employee of the city.
This is your warning.
A warning for what?
A warning for attacking the city attorney personally.
This is what you agree to when you First speaking.
This is the forum.
It is unconstitutional, Mayor Hall.
Well, it's not unconstitutional.
It is.
Chief, could you have somebody come down here and escort Ms.
Massey out?
Really?
Is that necessary?
Um, I'm... No.
I'm expressing my fear.
Do not touch me.
Do not put your hands on me!
I'm out with you now before you get arrested.
Are you detaining me?
Yes.
Why am I being detained?
under what target?
So there's a lot going on there.
That's the fire video, but it showed it very faithfully.
And there's so much going on there, including while it's shocking to hear a mayor of a city specifically say you're banned from coming to public meetings and criticizing or launching allegations against elected officials.
I do think it reflects this kind of erosion of the instinct of free speech, this constant normalization of censorship.
But on the other hand, it was very inspiring to watch her just stand so firm and so informed about what her rights are.
And she was just so offended by the idea that she would be told she can't express that.
So what was, obviously I understand what motivated your involvement, but talk about what you ended up doing and what the outcome was.
Yeah, a baseline free speech principle is that the government can't engage in viewpoint discrimination.
And Rebecca, in this case, went to her city council meeting, criticized the salary of a city employee, and for that faced criminal charges and expulsion from a meeting.
Right?
You can say nice things about city employees, but you can't criticize them, as the city council person was saying.
There.
I think it was the mayor.
I think it was the mayor, actually.
The mayor.
Yeah, the mayor.
It was a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.
And I just got word, actually, that it seems like the city has revoked that rule.
But our lawsuit is still ongoing.
We jumped in and filed a lawsuit as soon as we saw this, because it was absolutely absurd.
And we have represented other people across the country who have been subject to these rules restricting what can and can't be said during public comment periods of city council meetings.
In East Point, Michigan, for example, there were a number of residents who were restricted from criticizing the mayor there.
We filed a lawsuit, it's settled, and now actually in East Point, Michigan, they have an annual First Amendment Day as part of the settlement as a way to kind of educate and celebrate the First Amendment.
that was ignored when the citizens were previously trying to speak out in the form of democracy.
But, Nico, I want to ask you this question, not because I'm trying to make a rhetorical point, because I genuinely don't understand and want to see what insight you have into it.
Like I said, I understand that if, like, there's a 19-year-old or 20-year-old who has been steeped in TikTok left-wing culture and arrives at a left-wing academic institution where they're hearing about the evils of free speech, or rather hate speech and the need to have speech codes, maybe there's not, like, a developed instinct of what America is and what we're told it a developed instinct of what America is and what we're told it is, which leads with the idea that we allow for That's, like, so fundamental to the American identity.
And I was watching that video.
I just couldn't believe not only that the mayor was saying you're not allowed to criticize us, that's against the rules, but everyone on that podium who was members of city council.
These are elected officials who are mature.
It would have been previously unthinkable to me to hear somebody in such an explicit way Impose this rule that is so antithetical, not even like a debatable or kind of limited case, but just so core attack on what we're taught to believe.
What do you think?
And like I said, it's not even that it was shocking.
It's kind of almost normal now.
You see this mentality arising in so many places.
Why do you think that is?
Well, it's hard to say, and I'm reluctant to say it was better at one time than it was at another.
But I think there's just a lack of understanding of what the First Amendment is and what it protects.
You've got to assume good motives that people actually believe that what they're doing is constitutional, even if they don't understand the Constitution.
But I think we're educating a generation and maybe The generation that's tasked with educating younger generations because they don't understand First Amendment principles, these principles aren't being passed around.
Alan Charles Kors, FIRE's co-founder, said a nation that does not educate in liberty will not long preserve liberty and will not even know what it's lost.
And FIRE recently conducted a survey of 59,000 college students, the largest ever survey conducted of college students on free speech issues.
And it found that 32% of students said that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree.
That's up from 27% last year and 20% two years ago.
So not only are students not learning the values of the First Amendment, you know, we have adults that aren't teaching it, and as you see in that video with the mayor, clearly not reflecting those values or respecting them.
So one of the things that I really respect that gave me a lot of even more fortified belief in your organization is that not a year after October 7th, but just a couple of months after October 7th, the very popular conservative government, the Republican in Florida, Ron DeSantis, issued the ruling that for me was very similar, this order that was very similar to what we just watched from this mayor in Arizona, on that level of how egregious it was, where he just said,
Palestinian Students for Justice and I think one other Palestinian group is hereby banned from operating anywhere in the Florida system.
There was no allegation of criminality in the sense that they were helping terrorist organizations with money raising or funding.
It was merely that their speech constituted material support for terrorism.
Just their words criticizing Israel advance the terrorist cause and therefore they need to be shut down.
No due process, no trial, nothing.
And your group, despite, I think, having a fairly substantial base of donors and supporters who identify as conservative, but who most definitely are pro-Israel, watched you, as I said, not just criticize Governor DeSantis, but do so in a continuous, sustained, and very aggressive way to the point where you, as I said, you urged administrators to engage in a sort of form of civil disobedience, saying, we're not going to follow this order.
It's so flagrantly constitutional.
Why was that case so important to you?
Well, because students are allowed to form associations around shared beliefs, and if the government's going to say that it's material support for terrorism, they need to have some sort of evidence that it's more than just a vocal support for the actions of some terrorist organization, right?
Like, there needs to be some there there, and the government didn't put any arguments forward to show that there was.
And unfortunately, we see Previously, you know, supportive of free speech governors, in this case, Governor Ron DeSantis, and in Texas's case, Governor Greg Abbott, totally capitulate surrounding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, right?
And in Florida, you have the unilateral ban on students for justice in Palestine, which fortunately some administrators did ignore and say, no, we see this would be a violation of the First Amendment.
We can't do this.
You know, if it's clear that something's a violation of the First Amendment, you get sued for doing it anyway.
You risk losing what's called your qualified immunity and can be held personally liable for violating someone's constitutional rights.
And in Texas, for example, they adopted that IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to state law.
And you actually had at the University of Texas, San Antonio video of college administrators saying that there are certain words and certain chants that student groups can't use in their protests on campus.
Without any context, certain words, certain chants that they can't use.
And I think that's a really good question.
in their protests on campus.
And fortunately, there's a lawsuit being filed there that CARE is leading.
We really wanted that case.
We didn't get it.
But CARE is fortunately filing suit, and we're going to be watching that one closely.
But you see it as well with the Stop Woke Act that was passed in Florida, where the state legislature there passed a ban on making arguments surrounding race and sex.
And it becomes so absurd that you can't even make an argument for affirmative action if you're a faculty member or you're invited speaker by a faculty member on a public Florida campus.
And the state's attorneys in the Florida litigation, which we are suing over, admitted that.
Justice Sotomayor can't go to the University of Florida and read her dissent in the fair admissions case because arguing in favor of affirmative action would violate the plain language of the Stop Woke Act.
So what we need is free speech consistency and no double standards.
And that's unfortunately in short supply in our state and federal legislatures.
Just a couple more questions while I have you.
When I started writing about politics and journalism in 2005, I was doing so from a perspective almost entirely of a civil libertarian, namely concerns about the attacks on civil liberties, not just free speech, but due process in particular as part of the war on terror, the warrant requirement of surveillance as part of the war on terror, but due process in particular as part of the war on terror, the warrant requirement And I would say most of my audience was composed of leftists, of liberals, and libertarians.
No conservatives wanted to hear a critique of George Bush and Dick Cheney's war on terror.
And that was what those values were associated with at the time, because it was a Republican administration doing it.
Fast forward, say, 10 years later, and it's conservatives who are more aggressively raving this banner of free speech.
I've had a result.
I've had a lot of new allies and a lot of new readers, a lot of new viewers who really seem to center this idea of free speech in the wake of things like big tech censorship that has targeted mostly conservative students, academic censorship.
And then suddenly on October 7th, everything changed, where not all, but a good number of those conservatives who had been mocking this left-wing discourse about safe spaces on college campuses, about how certain hate speech is too insightful and uncomfortable to allow to be, started adopting and embracing that exact narrative to try and justify the suppression of anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech on campus.
Maybe it was naive of me, But it actually surprised me just how flagrant and blatant and pervasive that turnaround was from a movement that had planted the free speech banner as their principal cause for 10 years to just flip on a dime.
Did that surprise you or is that something that you sort of expect?
It did surprise me, right?
I mean, I'd be curious for your perspective on the college president's testimony in front of Congress last December, right?
You recall that Elise Stefanik asked the college presidents whether calls for Jewish genocide would be protected by their student codes of conduct.
And immediately preceding that question, she was asking them about phrases and chants like from the river to the sea palestine will be free or intifada so the presumption is that those are calls for jewish genocide and she asked the college presidents to respond in one word and the college presidents went used a little bit more than one word and said well context matters and That was jarring for some people, but it was actually the right answer if you're adopting First Amendment standards on your college campus.
Context always matters when you're talking about unprotected categories of speech.
Just think about how an amorphous call for genocide would be wheeled against any side's political opponents, right?
At the time, the allegation was that Hamas was committing a genocide against Israelis, but now Israelis are accused of committing a genocide against Palestinians.
So you can see how that would easily be reversed.
You have people who oppose gender affirming care being accused of committing genocide against transgender kids, or you have...
Pro-lifers who say that abortion is a form of genocide.
You have to be careful that the standards that you set for your speech restrictions are narrowly tailored and that they can't be wielded as political weapons to go after your ideological opponents.
So I went on Jake Tapper's show to make this argument and I think it shocked a lot of people because at the time everyone's like these college presidents.
The response was so crazy.
What are you saying?
You can call for genocide?
It's like, well, what does genocide mean?
And what is the policy that's actually going to be put in place to ban calls for genocide?
And it's almost certainly going to be chants like, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and intifada, which on their own constitute protected expression.
So, you know, I was disappointed with that testimony.
Of course, two of the three presidents later resigned.
But I wish I could say, I'm surprised principled free speech advocates are hard to come by.
Yeah, I mean, of course context matters in that case.
There's a huge difference between publishing an editorial in a local newspaper or in the student newspaper saying, I think Palestine should be free, Palestinians should be free from the river to the sea, meaning they should be free in Israel, they should be free in the West Bank, they should be free in Gaza, and You know, banging on the door of every Jewish student you can find, and in a very physically threatening way, screaming in their face.
Those are very different acts, as well as, you know, walking up and down saying, murder all Jews, as opposed to using standard resistance terminology for Palestinians.
I think the problem there is that there was a perception that they were not very principled free speech activists until it came to this issue.
And I think that was one of the problems.
I'll ask you this one last question.
There's always seems to be these new theories to justify attacks on free speech.
So, you know, when I was describing earlier what was called the politically correct movement and political correctness on college campuses, principally the focus there was what was called hate speech.
And obviously the difficulty is who defines hate speech?
All speech can be hateful.
And that's always the case with censorship is who gets to define it.
Much more recently, I would say since 2016, there's been this effort instead to kind of create this pseudo-scientific justification around censoring what's called disinformation, which of course, again, is purely in the eyes of whoever wields the power to define that.
How concerned are you Not so much more along the lines of trying to censor based on hate speech, which is still with us, but even more so this idea that we can censor false ideas once we label it disinformation.
Yeah, there are always trends for censorship, right?
In the early part of the 20th century and late part of the 19th century was over morality and obscenity, right?
You had the Comstock Act.
You fast forward, you get to the Red Scare and it's all over kind of national security concerns and the influence of, you know, foreign malign, you know, groups like the Communist Party.
You fast forward and then you have concerns surrounding decency and indecency on the Internet.
And then you get the hate speech codes that became popularized on college campus.
And now it's mis and disinformation, which are sort of euphemisms for things that we've always had, right?
Lies and truths.
And the First Amendment has never really carved out an exception for lies, right?
You can have fraud in certain contexts, but out and out lies?
I mean, you can lie about getting the Medal of Honor.
That was a Supreme Court case.
The problem with policing misinformation, disinformation to a certain extent, is you got to determine what is missing disinformation.
All we need to do is look back at what we experienced during the pandemic when masks didn't work, and then they worked, and then they didn't work again.
The virus leaked from a lab, or maybe it didn't, I don't know.
Tech companies policed this speech, and I think it actually created a crisis of trust because some of the things that were policed and censored ended up being true in the long run.
So the only way to actually effectively police it, if you're the government, and I don't think there is a way to effectively police it, is to be able to determine what should be censored in the first place, which is essentially, I guess, to set up some sort of ministry of truth to determine what misinformation is.
And there's not a person in this world with whom I would entrust the power to determine what is true or what is false, at least within the government, right?
Of course, anyone who might occupy that position of power who you do trust is mortal, and so you might get Barack Obama One year, and then you get Donald Trump the next year, right?
So who are you going to trust with this power?
But it is the tool of the day right now to justify censorship.
And of course, just like hate speech, people don't like lies, they don't like untruths.
And so they're willing to look to the government for a solution to solve it.
But one of the unique characteristics of being a civil libertarian is you think about the second and third order effects and ask yourself, Is the solution, or perceived solution, is the medicine worse than the disease?
And I think giving the government this wide latitude to censor based on misinformation is definitely worse than the disease.
Yeah, the Ministry of Truths would be literal verbatim term that George Orwell used in the book that we all read in high school in their college of 1984 where he warned about tyranny.
One of the features of the Toronto government in that book was a Ministry of Truth that determined truth and therefore banned ideas that were false.
And we seem to be copying that and kind of treating it as like a blueprint rather than something we were supposed to be adverse to.
A big supporter of FIRE.
I'm so glad you guys exist.
I cover your work all the time.
I hope people will go to the site and look for ways that they can support it.
I think your work is excellent.
I really appreciate your taking the time to come on our show and talk about it.
Yeah, thanks Glenn.
Happy to come on anytime.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Nico.
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