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April 22, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:48:15
Facts, Fads, and Censorship
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Hey guys, welcome to Left, Right, and White.
I'm, of course, Gregory Hood.
I'm here with my co-host, Chris Roberts, and today we will be discussing censorship, particularly more broadly than we did last week where we kind of spun off into a discussion about the very meanings of the terms left and right.
Which is appropriate enough, given the literal name of this podcast, but all the same, my big dream here is to actually talk about censorship and not even once talk about left-wing hypocrisy or double standards or evolving views.
Absolutely everybody listening to this podcast even the liberal lurkers are well aware of These arguments and everybody kind of knows the score on the airline It's hierarchy not hypocrisy and complaining about it.
It's kind of a waste of time.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's also Well, maybe maybe we can use this to sort of kick kick things off.
I'm also not crazy about Us defending ourselves by portraying ourselves as free speech absolutists?
Because if your argument is that you shouldn't be censored because nobody should be censored, then you're sort of giving away the possibility or at least implying that what you have to say is awful or just really difficult to defend generally.
You're really leaving that door open.
It's actually much better to say, I shouldn't be censored because there's, you know, because what I'm saying is good.
And objectively correct.
And true, yeah, exactly.
This is something that actually, so an intra-left conflict that happens all the time these days is the existence of TERFs, which is an acronym for Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists, which are feminists who are not crazy about the whole trans thing because they think that the impetus to change from one sex to another is caused by patriarchal biases or patriarchal assumptions.
That's the reason why people flip, and as such they're opposed to it.
They're creating sort of a caricature of women, right?
Right, right, right.
They find it somewhat disrespectful to women that a man who's inherently patriarchal and bad can just one day declare himself to be a woman without having the lifetime experience of feeling oppression as a woman.
Right, right.
So TERFs get hit really hard by their fellow lefties because, you know, trans stuff is really fashionable right now.
And something that TERFs explicitly say they hate...
is when censorship of themselves is compared to censorship of, like, Holocaust revisionists, or race realists, or what have you, because NoTurf, being that they're radical feminists, you know, very far-left people, they're not in any way opposed to censorship generally, and they don't want to be locked in with us, because they hate us, and they don't feel that we have anything in common with them, which is true.
The only thing that ties us is censorship itself, And so they argue always, like, no, it's not that I shouldn't be censored because all censorship is bad.
Censorship is often necessary.
It's that I shouldn't be censored because what I'm saying is true and good.
And that angle is much better.
Just from like a PR perspective, TERFs would do themselves absolutely no favors if they said, yes, we as TERFs should be uncensored and also Jared Taylor should go uncensored.
I mean, that would only earn them More enemies.
I will say this.
I don't want to fall into this, but again, I don't want to concede that maybe I am something of a free speech absolutist, except in the sense of obviously, you know, porn and obscenity and things like that.
But.
And there could be a whole debate about what counts and all that sort of stuff.
But in terms of political speech, I suppose I am close to a free speech absolutist simply because my takeaway from 2016 was that if there is anything close to a level playing ground, we win the truth.
And but I think you're right that we need to advance our argument not as we need free speech for any views, no matter how fringe.
Now, I will say Christopher Hitchens, of course, not only and quoting John Stuart Mill, Not only said that free speech, so-called fringe views should be given protection, but they actually deserve more protection than any other kind of view.
Obviously that and he was explicitly citing the David Irving case.
So that's neither here nor there.
We all know he'd be canceled now, but I do think that the advance.
I mean, the best thing he did was die when he did because, I mean, he would be... It's a smart political move.
Yeah, it was the best political move he ever did.
I mean, every single one of his friends and, you know, whoever else would be calling him Hitler and everything else if he had lived.
We do ourselves a disservice when we say we deserve to speak because justice is free speech.
Instead, I mean, the line really should be everyone's talking about misinformation.
Well, the biggest, single most destructive lie is the denial of race, racist, real racist consequences.
Every single institution in this country is operating pretty much exactly how we would expect it to in terms of schools, in terms of police, in terms of who commits crime, in terms of who is a net Beneficiary to the government and who is a net expense.
I mean everything is Backing up what we say and yet we can't say these things and we can't say these things not because the fringe but because they're true and because They're so obviously true that I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the structure of American society is basically a One very long, complicated attempt to try to get around the consequences of these truths, because if we speak them out loud, the whole stupid experiment falls apart.
Okay, so what do you think generally of banning fake news or disinformation on social media, given our understanding of what is fake and what is real?
It gets back to the question of who determines it.
I mean, I think that would really you're asking who is sovereign, because the sovereign is he who makes the exception.
Sovereign is he who determines what is truth and what is misinformation.
I think Barack Obama is speaking on that topic today, actually, about, you know, how not controlling information destroys our, quote unquote, our democracy.
Which is a phrase that really should sound like, you know, people's republic in people's minds now.
I mean, every time someone says, our democracy, just immediately acknowledge you're looking at a totalitarian and there's no reason to listen to the argument because these people just want to hurt you and it's all just sophistry after that.
But I actually, I mean, I hate to Sound somewhat weak here, given that I'm the supposed authoritarian, but I actually am closer to a free speech absolutist when it comes to political speech.
And I actually do think that the best, especially as we get into an age where deep fakes and video technology and all of these things are going to make it extremely difficult for any authority in real time to be spitting out what is true and what is not.
And especially after COVID-19, where you had What is true and what was false and what the science told us changing day by day, seemingly hour by hour sometimes, I think the best way to handle it is to allow those kinds of speech and have that argument and something resembling a public square where non-criminal speech is allowed.
And if we can't do that, if we can't have that because When our democracy breaks down, unless information is carefully curated, then we should dismiss with the fantasies that people can govern themselves, that they have agency, that they're capable of understanding ideas.
And it's obviously a really stupid idea to let people vote if apparently they're too irresponsible to even process information.
So, I mean, my position is given that we aren't going to get Free speech, free speech in the sense of allowing all political speech that is nonviolent.
I think we should go further and just swipe away all the lies that we live in anything close to a free society or a democracy or a republic or any of the other nonsense that surrounds classical liberalism.
Because classical liberalism ingredient number one is having the ability to discuss ideas.
And if you don't have that, then the entire premise of democracy is wiped out and If that's what the left wants, then we should go with it and say, all right, this is stupid and you've condemned it by your own words.
That's something that I think is so interesting about all debates about, you know, fake news and good information, bad information.
Now, because of the internet and social media specifically, money has been taken out of the equation and having to pay for information is basically the best way Making sure that good information travels faster than bad You know like to give an example of you know, if you were if you're publishing a newsletter That was just saying something.
It was just absolutely false You know like like take take this supplement and you will never get cancer, right?
Of course, there are plenty of people out there who would like that Sure, sure, but none of you know, there's no There's no major publication like in print circulation that that advocates for you know these kinds of things like sure they're definitely they're definitely minor ones um but people over the long haul are going to stop paying for information to be that proves false and moreover if you've if you've paid some like if somebody sells you a supplement that will cure your cancer
And you take it and it doesn't cure it.
I mean, you have a right to sue them for false advertising.
Right, we have a legal framework for this stuff.
Right, for giving you bunk.
And all of that is great, and it's again another way of protecting good speech or good advice as opposed to bad speech, bad advice.
But when everything is just free, Litigation and incentives get all sort of screwy.
If you just tweet, you know, take X supplement and it will cure your cancer, and that tweet goes viral for whatever reason, it gets retweeted by the right people who decide to retweet it for whatever reason, there's no real mechanism for those people to kind of fall flat on their
face, especially if they're not actually selling the supplement that they recommend, if they're just
saying it's a good idea to take it because it will cure cancer, there's no legal mechanism in
that scenario, right?
You can't sue somebody for saying something that isn't true.
There has to be some kind of transaction.
It's much more difficult.
You might not even know who the guy is.
A class action lawsuit against somebody who didn't sell anything.
That's really tricky.
And again, maybe within the next couple of decades, There will be some sort of new realm of law in which you can do that, but at the exact moment, you know, in time that we're living right now, there really isn't.
And again, it's like, although it's easy to envision that kind of tweet going viral, it's impossible to imagine, you know, a book saying that, becoming a bestseller, you know.
Listen, maybe if you published a book, I'm sure people have published books with You know, garbage medical advice that have sold relatively well over probably like a short span of time, like there's a there's sort of a flash in the pan, right?
But again, over the long haul, misinformation is going to lose because there's this because of the money factor.
And social media just completely does away with the money factor.
And that's what makes censoring it or not censoring it so much more difficult.
Because, like, we're used to sort of thinking about all of this in terms of money.
Right.
Well, one of the things, let's go back to, especially as people were discussing things like social media, let's talk about obvious fake news, meaning manipulated images that are saying things that are just not true.
Not something we can argue about, not like, well, because even any medical thing, you could be like, well, actually, this study, whatever.
Right.
Just something that is purely wrong.
So, in 2016, obviously, you would see images on Twitter of, I believe, there was one of, like, Harrison Ford, like, holding up a sign saying, vote Trump, or something like that, and there was a brief thing about, like, the Pope even supporting him, even though, of course, he didn't.
Yep, that's right.
Yeah, that was one of the, like, the original, like, fake news stories that did go viral, because the Pope definitely didn't endorse Trump in 2016.
This is obviously made up, and although they all blame Trump for the term fake news, I mean, that was originally their term, and he flipped it on them.
And then after he started using it, they started saying, oh, well, you can't say this anymore.
But I suppose the difference, to take your money example, if we have something like, say, hands up, don't shoot.
Where, insofar as we know anything, and this is coming from Barack Obama's Justice Department, when they did the investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown, they said that the hands up, don't shoot line was, it never happened.
Yeah, nobody said it.
It's not, it's not true.
This, CNN had their anchors, their female anchors, doing this phrase.
Now, best case scenario, maybe they didn't know, they didn't keep up with it.
Maybe they were just going on the one witness who supposedly said it happened, and maybe they still have an argument there.
But you have to ask yourself, what was more destructive?
Some celebrity saying that he's going to vote for Trump, when he actually wouldn't, or something where you're essentially saying a police officer shot someone for no reason, and that directly incites people to violence and chaos, and for some reason the latter The idea of people being held responsible for it is just so ridiculous that you can't even think about it.
I mean, people today at BLM rallies are still using the hands up, don't shoot, lie.
The fact, and again, we can't really blame the Prestige Press for this.
I mean, the Washington Post did a very detailed thing about how, yeah, this didn't happen.
So we can't say, oh, they're covering it up.
But there's a narrative that becomes More powerful than any specific reporting.
It's sort of how after the 2016 election, even though you never really had any reputable newspapers saying that Russia literally hacked the election.
I mean, in the sense of like hacking into voting machines and changing votes.
You had polls showing a large amount of Democrats immediately after the election literally believed that's what had happened.
Now I remember looking into that and it was it was really hard to figure out the origin of this myth because yeah no no there's certainly no major or even you know fairly minor left-wing outlet that was making this literal claim.
Yeah it's it's not like the New York Times was out there they would blame Russia and they would You know, kind of just get this idea out there, but it's not like they literally said the KGB or the FSB, whatever it is, was changing these vote totals.
But yet, you do see the connection between people putting out kind of a larger, because we don't interpret reality just in terms of facts.
We interpret it in terms of stories.
We interpret it, and what is a narrative?
A narrative is a story that helps you make sense of reality.
Again, the way the narrative is curated is not just in terms of what they choose to emphasize, but in terms of what they choose to ignore.
And certainly if you're talking about black-on-white crime, this is something that frankly it makes me kind of uncomfortable to talk about simply because it just seems so lurid, right?
I mean, you're writing a story about a five-year-old white kid who got shot in the driveway by some black guy, and the media just kind of, oh yeah, this happened, but it has no political importance.
And you should question the motives of anyone who even talks about this stuff.
Right.
It is tough writing about that stuff, Just because it seems so like rubbing people's face and the ugliness and everything else.
But if we don't do it, nobody else will.
And that was what Colin Flaherty did.
The way Colin Flaherty did was just reporting on these stories that happened.
And he would talk about in his book that.
I'm actually got it right here.
Don't make the black kids angry.
That was essentially a quote from a government official who said, well, we have all this violence and we have all this disorder and coming from these groups of black kids, but if we do anything about it, it'll just make them mad.
So therefore we're not going to do anything about it.
And there was sort of this conspiracy of silence among local media where they just said, all right, well, we're just not going to talk about it.
Yeah.
we're just not gonna interview anyone who actually suffers from these attacks. And in a media-driven
age, if nobody's talking about it, it never happened. It doesn't exist. And so if we're
talking about fake news, if we're talking about censorship, you know, Trikoff's gun here, like,
the thing that you have to ask is who determines this?
I mean, someone has to be the arbiter of what is true and what is false if you're saying that the government or even a social media company should be determining what gets censored.
And what ends up happening, I think, is sort of an outgrowth of the don't make the black kids angry.
I think that they understand they can censor whites and conservatives simply because they'll put up with it.
But if they allowed speech about racial realities, you would have potentially violence, you would have riots, you would have coordinated political action directed by the media.
And so determining truth or falsehood really just comes down to a question of who has political power.
And in many ways, it just comes down to an identity politics battle.
Because, you know, as I think Sam Francis said, whites Exist objectively but not subjectively.
Yeah, so and that's so well put.
Yeah, right And there's no until whites act at I mean and I've said this It's not that whites are unrepresented in the government.
It's whites have no representation zero representation Not one single person and the reason I say that is because there is not one person and if I'm wrong I would love to be corrected here.
Not one person is Who is in a position of power, who is white, who says, I am acting for the benefit of white people.
And every other group, their representatives can count on people talking in that fashion with very rare exceptions.
And until that changes, it's not just going to be something we see in government.
It's also going to be something we see in media.
And that's more important because if we can't discuss facts, and as you say, we should be talking about facts, not necessarily just free speech in the abstract.
But if we can't talk about facts, if we don't have the freedom to say two and two is four, then frankly, let's just cut the nonsense.
Let's just be governed directly by tech CEOs and spare ourselves the trouble of having elections and campaigns, because clearly they don't matter.
And we'd probably just save a lot of money and time just by admitting that we're governed by a laundered oligarchy, which is all that I think democracy is or was.
Alright, we're headed towards right versus left and identitarian versus non, so I'm going to re-steer us here.
Something that I find interesting in the debate about censorship is that right now, everything, every conversation about censorship is focused on fake news or misinformation or disinformation, whatever you want to call it.
All three of those concepts are basically interchangeable.
That is viewed as the ultimate ill that must be prevented somehow.
But before social media, and I guess before the current iteration of the culture war really got going, the biggest cases for censorship were around true information.
It's information that's correct, but bad to have, such as one great question for free speech absolutists is whether or not it should be legal to publish instructions on how to commit suicide.
Right.
Because way before there were warnings on Twitter about, you know, like, oh, the headline doesn't say it all, like, you know, don't retweet things so quickly.
Kind of the original version of that is if you go to Google and you search, like, anything, basically anything that contains the word suicide, This warning pops up.
I actually just tested it again for the sake of this podcast.
I googled the word suicide and at the top, like before there are results, there's just this kind of splash message from Google that says, help is available, speak with someone today, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, hours available, 24 hours, languages, English, Spanish, and then a huge font, the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
This was kind of the original You know, we hate all of these warnings now of like, oh, you can't, you know, on Twitter, like you can't link to that New York Post story about that mansion, like the Black Lives Matter woman bot, or about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
But the original version of that, like the first time anybody did something akin to that, was actually precisely these sorts of warnings, like in regards to To suicide, because Google probably correctly assumes that if you're googling about suicide, you're not interested in just the abstract facts about it or the statistics.
Like, there's a decent chance that you're searching for information on how to do it.
And that's basically a given, because actually the most common type of Google search is people will just search Like, the things that they find in their fridge in hopes that, like, a recipe will pop out.
Like, they'll look at all of the stuff that they've got in their kitchen, but they don't know how to put it all together, so they will just type out each individual item and, like, add the word recipe and hit return.
So given that that's the most common thing to Google, that would imply that if you were to type suicide, You're also looking for a recipe, so to speak.
And I'm actually totally comfortable with Google's imposition in this.
I think it's actually very good that Google has this warning and puts up this prevention lifeline.
It's way better that they do that than let the top result be like, oh, do you want to kill yourself?
Here are 25 household items you can use.
This is a superb form of censorship, near as I can tell.
I mean, Google, well, debatable whether we can consider Google a truly private entity.
I mean, I don't like it.
And I can think of many reasons why you might be searching it, particularly with what we do, when I'm writing something about deaths of despair.
And I'm googling suicide.
I'm not googling suicide because I want to blow my brains out.
I'm googling suicide because I'm trying to find statistics about who's committing suicide and why.
The results do include that.
It's just that the top one is this warning.
Yeah, but I got a deal with six pages of people telling me that if I pay $3,000 to go to a counselor, all my problems will be solved.
And it's like, I don't, I don't care about any of that.
I just, I want to find like peer reviewed studies that have factual information.
Like I don't need you to pat me on the head.
I need, you know, and I guess I'll do you, I'll do you one better.
Suicide is obviously an extreme thing.
And I am, I am certainly not going to be one to downplay Severity of it, particularly as a parent, but let's take another controversy, which I think may predate even this when I believe Tumblr was first kicking around.
You had this trend of people who were skinny girls who did this kind of pro anorexia.
Okay, so I was going to bring this up too.
Yeah, yeah.
It's called Thinspiration.
Inspiration, right.
Compound word of thin and inspiration.
At some point, somebody made the call that this was just not going to be allowed anymore.
And it was just gone.
And all these pages got wiped out and everything else.
And I find this interesting, of course, because, and obviously, again, anorexia is a serious condition.
It can lead to death.
It's not something you cheer on.
But that said, these same groups then turn around and talk about the glories of body positivity.
And by body positivity, they don't mean average bodies.
They mean grossly obese people like, uh, what's her name?
Tessa Owen, I think is her name.
Some model, you know, somebody who's, it's clearly unhealthy, just as unhealthy, I would argue as anorexia.
And, You have people who are advocating on behalf of fat people and saying that this is good and this is something we should champion.
And we actually, I remember one article where it said, we actually need to deconstruct Western civilization to get around these questions of body image and things like that.
And so when you see something like that, we get back to first principles because we say, all right, it's not really about health.
It's not really about making people feel good about themselves.
It's actually about something different.
And so any kind, this is why I'm more of a free speech absolutist, not so much even in terms of belief, but just because I think it's the most practical way to do these things.
And because I have enough confidence as a white advocate that we're simply right and others are wrong.
And it doesn't matter what they think about it.
They're just wrong.
I think that when you have something like this, the best thing to do is let all the information be out there.
And if people are so easily led that they're going to do destructive things, then they shouldn't be trusted with the freedoms of an adult anyway.
But I would add to that that This is sort of the whole NPC meme, right?
That people are so easily programmed, they go from COVID-19 to Ukraine to whatever comes next.
There's still unhealthy messages being pushed, but now there's nothing pushing back against it.
And so we could say, well, social media or the government or whoever has a responsibility to protect against Destructive information coming to people who might lead them to do bad things.
What I would say is that people are getting that information Anyway, I mean, I think a lot of this trans stuff is being deliberately Curated and it's gonna have a horrible toll in the years ahead in terms of suicide in terms of people who regret it in terms, I mean that's something that Might be censored even there look at people who had some sort of gender reassignment surgery and then regretted it I mean that's They get it almost as bad as Muslims who become ex-Muslims and start talking about how they don't like Islam anymore.
That is seen as offensive.
That's a really great analogy, yeah.
So, I don't concede the point that anyone should be curating this information, and I think that even stuff that is very controversial and potentially destructive should be out there.
As long as you have information left, as long as you have the ability to combat it with other information, because right now, I'd say just as much destructive stuff is being pushed.
We just have no way to push back against it.
And I'm not talking about anything with race.
I'm not even talking about stuff about politics.
I'm talking about basic stuff about health and about what it means to be happy.
There was a poll that I saw just a little while ago where it showed that members of every group Both sexes, every race, particularly Generation Z, and then particularly homosexuals and trans, you know, the kind of catch-all category with the ever-expanding list of letters.
Big Ten queer, yeah.
Yes, but don't forget the plus.
The rates of self-reported unhappiness are skyrocketing, and so the situation is that we've created this social media environment where everything is about safety.
You can't say certain things because that constitutes harm.
But yet, everybody is miserable.
And the people who are at the top of this progressive stack, the people who are supposedly the most fragile, and who need to be protected the most, they're just becoming more miserable.
And I'd argue they're becoming more radicalized because they just keep getting pushed with more and more stuff about, oh, You're not actually happy after doing this?
Well, it's because there's even more social systems that you need to tear down and destroy because they're standing in the way of your true self.
And then they do that and they find out they're still unhappy.
Also, too, if we're talking about destructive information.
I have to turn the race, but I think the single most destructive piece of information that's gone out over the last few years is this idea that the police are just shooting black people for no reason.
And as a consequence, police have been pulling back, black crime rates have skyrocketed, people of all races have paid the price for black crime, but of course it's blacks themselves who usually pay the heaviest price, but nobody cares.
Certainly the communities don't care, the local politicians don't care, the journalists certainly don't care.
As far as I can tell, they seem to enjoy it.
And That's destructive information that has a real human toll.
It has a real human toll on people that aren't really part of our coalition a lot of the time, but nobody cares.
And the people who run things aren't even going to concede that that's destructive information.
So how do you counter that?
What's the only practical counter?
Again, Maybe this means I still have some residual liberalism eye of all people to shake off, but I am a bit of a free speech absolutist just because I think it's the only workable solution.
Yeah, I really did not expect this podcast to reveal that I'm more in favor of censorship than you are, but yeah, nothing but surprises on left, right, and white.
Well, let's think about military stuff.
I mean, here's a question where we might disagree a bit more.
Take the Pentagon Papers.
Now this was factual information, right?
For those of you who don't know, the Pentagon Papers were leaked during the Vietnam War and they basically revealed that what the government had been saying about the war was false.
That the government had a very different understanding of the real picture on the ground than what they were telling the public.
But taking this information and leaking it was illegal.
And this is also what led Nixon to go nuts and try to control all information, and you could argue ultimately culminated in Watergate.
Which, you know, compared to what politicians do now is barely even worth mentioning.
If you said, okay, free speech absolutism, but there every single war in modern history, every single state censors information.
Not just to protect things like, you know, a ship is going to be in this area and we can't let the enemy know because there could be military casualties, but they will also lie about things to protect morale because morale is a military resource just like ammunition or body armor.
And you could argue that during war, Saying things that are defeatist, saying things that are telling people not to fight the war, are harmful because the worst thing imaginable is if you lose the war and the political community is destroyed and then you don't have any rights at all.
Some might argue that that's also what's happening with Ukraine now, both with Ukraine and Russia, in terms of what you can believe, in terms of what information is being provided.
I think We've sort of in a liberal democracy where we're in a kind of permanent revolutionary state, a kind of permanent war, because if the enemy is defined as hate, you know, an emotion, this is the kind of thing leftists used to make fun of when they would make fun of the war on terror, waging war against a tactic.
Now we're waging war on hate.
If you say things like, well, actually, These Nazis that you're looking for who are supposedly beating up and murdering people don't really exist.
The real problem are all these groups that you're actually backing who are unleashing all this violence.
And furthermore, these racial differences exist and maybe you should be looking at that instead of trying to come up with ridiculous explanations about white privilege to explain why test scores are the way they are.
They will counter that that is a kind of Violence because you're enabling crimes against so-called marginalized people.
Marginalized people meaning the people who get government preferences.
That's right.
Marginalized people being the people that people fake their races to belong to.
Yes.
Marginalized people being the ones lionized by the media.
Right.
Marginalized people being that like you can have an entire career just being that person and not actually having to do anything.
I think that if you agree That the government can censor during wartime, and I think even I would concede that yeah, any state worthy of the name is going to have that power because you have to do it if you're going to fight a war successfully.
You can see how that bleeds as if a war is being fought as a moral cause and almost all of America's wars are sold to us as highly morally righteous causes.
We're not a country that goes in for real politic.
You can see how that kind of bleeds over into peacetime.
And it's especially important because the Biden administration.
And Kamala Harris during the campaign.
Has been saying even this before the invasion of Ukraine that the Russian government was basically poking at diversity and the things that divide Americans to increase social tensions.
And this constituted a national security threat.
And so it wasn't just.
Oh, we need to prevent foreigners from manipulating information or manipulating our elections.
But if you echo some of these narratives, you're essentially serving the interests of foreign power.
I mean, this is and we see this now.
I mean, we see this is the kind of argument they use to try to get certain people taken off the air or denied a platform.
And there, I think my position has some holes because I would Concede that the government has the right to censor during wartime but at some point somebody does have to be in charge to say what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say because At this point it's sometimes hard to distinguish when you're at war and when you're at peace there's always the cultural war doesn't end and I
The other side clearly sees it that way, which is why they feel justified in censoring, whereas our position, or my position, I should say, might be a bit weaker in that regard.
So I haven't quite figured out where the line should be.
I just don't think that a country should constantly be operating as if it's at war.
I think that there is a War is a special state that comes with special rules, and it needs to be a decision that is taken by the people.
Right now, we essentially are operating sort of a wartime bureau of censorship in this country, even though we're not technically at war with anybody.
Well, so it's interesting that you bring all of this up, because I think it's a very, very rare bird.
Who explicitly says that the government should never censor or just like not make public troop movements or, you know, weapons updates or anything like that.
I mean, I think, I mean, I feel like it's pretty, I think there's a pretty strong consensus that like, yeah, that's, you simply have to do that.
I mean, there's no, There's no way you can just broadcast to the world not where all of your troops are I mean the only people who would say that that has to be done Would would probably be like left-wing anarchists because they don't believe in like government or the military itself, right?
So it still wouldn't be like a very principled You know argument against and of course those would be the more for abolishment entire right, right and of course those would be the same people who think that even a Somehow, when we all live in left-wing anarchist communes and there's no government, there still have to be rules telling us what we are and are not allowed to talk about.
We could talk about, like, troop movements, but we can't talk about the fact that, like, no, you will never be a woman.
I'm sorry.
Um, so I don't know.
I mean, that's, I don't think that that's entirely that, that big a deal.
I mean, there's nobody, is there any, I mean, like, not even the ACLU, like, sues the Department of Defense for not saying, you know, exactly where, you know, like every American soldier is across the globe.
I mean, that's... Well, considering the Pentagon papers, I mean, that was, that's a kind of borderline case because you could say, you, first of all, it was legal, right?
These things were not supposed to be, they were confidential, they were not supposed to be published.
Well, legally it turned out it was illegal to obtain them, but it wasn't illegal to publish them.
Right, right.
That's basically what the courts decided.
But if we're, if we're talking about, in terms of the larger principle, the Pentagon Papers were not the kind of thing where you're saying, we are going to launch an attack in two days in this place, and if you publish them, everybody involved in the attack is going to be killed.
It was more a question of policy, and it was about politics, not about military tactics.
But still, by publishing this, you're undermining the war, you're undermining the ability to achieve political objectives, and thus you're keeping American servicemen in harm's way for longer.
A better example of this might actually be the leaks that Chelsea, nay, Bradley Manning did.
I mean, because that really did reveal, like, troop positions and stuff.
It's actually incredible.
I've never been able, actually, like, I looked into this when it first happened and then followed up, you know, however many months later, but it doesn't seem like it actually led to anybody's death.
It just really could have.
Right.
And on some level, I mean, for both that and for the Pentagon Papers, I'm going to accept just The inevitable reality of there being a kind of a push and pull dynamic regarding this stuff in real life, I mean, it makes sense that the government doesn't make all of this information public, and it's inevitable that insiders or outsiders who have moral qualms with whatever the conflict is are going to leak information about it.
That doesn't mean it should be legal, but it is going to happen, and there are instances in which Just because you're morally on the side of the leaker, that you're going to feel as though it is okay, even though you don't necessarily want to change the law about it.
It's kind of the same way.
That's the macro version of the fact.
It should be illegal to run reds, but it's okay that people sometimes do that at three in the morning when there's nobody around.
It's not like a problem that that happens.
But the fact that it does happen isn't reason enough to abolish the law regarding red lights.
Yeah, yeah.
In any kind of, even somewhat, free society, there has to be some sort of ambiguity.
But let's think, let's take this, what you just said, and think of where it was probably the most prominent example, something that's going on right now.
Julian Assange, when he was with, well not when he was, with WikiLeaks, when he was talking about American foreign policy and talking about wars that the left Generally opposed, and I would say they generally oppose them simply because supposed conservatives were in power.
That's just sort of, you know, whatever the right is doing, we're against it.
He was a hero.
I mean, you can they made a movie about him.
You can go watch it.
And, you know, he's the great this is this is the story that the left always tells itself, right?
This is the.
The plucky independent reporter who's standing up to the structures of power and he succeeds through the truth alone.
Edward Snowden, same sort of thing, breaking down the way that the government is spying on American citizens, movie about him, the government actually is the bad guy, it actually is spying on you doing all these things.
But suddenly, once they started saying things about Leftists, how quickly they became Russian agents, how quickly they became traitors, how quickly it became a vital need for the government to get these guys back and punish them, even though what they were talking about later was not really tied to military operations, could not really be blamed for jeopardizing American lives.
It was simply questioning an official narrative, but that got people People who matter, people with power, far more riled up than leaking the details of American intelligence operations or military operations.
I mean, how many leftists thought guys like Assange and Snowden were heroes maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but who think they should be executed as traitors now?
I'd say that there's a pretty large percentage of people who have moved in that direction.
My argument would be I think we can.
It's always going to be a little gray and it's always going to be tough, but I think we can draw a line between peace and war, military decisions and political debate.
And for the latter, I'm Fairly free speech absolutist, as I said, just because I think that any other method leads inevitably to tyranny and arbitrary judgments.
And more than that, because I think the people who rule us are both hostile and stupid, I think that it leads to you being forced to accept lies and not lies in the Soviet system of oh, The factory met its production quota when it actually didn't, but far more serious lies like saying that the only possible explanation for racial differences is white racism, because then when those differences manifest anyway, you've essentially given license to an entire group of people to rob, rape, and kill because you've told them that they're oppressed and that they can strike back and feel righteous about it.
I mean, what is the argument they use against us, right?
Why are you so convinced?
I'm surprised I didn't know this about you.
Why are you so convinced that good speech and correct information will always and almost inevitably push out bad speech and misinformation so long as the playing field is even?
I'm not confident that it always will, but I'm confident that it will do so more often than now.
And I still, rather naively perhaps, believe in the original vision of the internet, which is that every person could be a content creator, that we could dismiss with the very idea of journalism, because everyone could be a citizen reporter, that we don't need these people.
And I think that if you look at, say, YouTube Forget even politics for a second.
If we look at YouTube even a few years ago, I think culturally and in terms of the content that was being produced and in terms of the entertainment, it was just better.
It wasn't this corporate slop being served to us from the top down.
The whole idea of the Internet was to break down power structures.
And I favor that.
Not just because generally I think it's a good thing, but also because I believe people who don't like us are in charge of those power structures.
And so bringing them down is a good thing, both from a general point of view and from my personal political point of view.
That doesn't mean that it's going to win every time, but it means at least you have a chance.
And yeah, there are going to be people out there who say obvious lies.
But at least you can push back against those lies.
You can't push back against lies told by the Biden administration when, if you put a video up, it immediately gets taken down because some corporate guy says it's misinformation.
And that's not a system that I think is worth defending.
And I know we didn't want to get into hypocrisy, but At this point, I just, I feel an almost violent contempt for anyone who's still, not for leftists, because I actually have a kind of curious respect for them because they, they know what they're doing, but against conservatives who still talk about America like it's a free country when you're already operating underneath this system.
And people who talk about this system as something that should still be a beacon of light to the world, as opposed to a cautionary warning about what not to do.
Hmm.
I mean, I think, yes, you're saying that, yeah, America isn't free, but it ought to be basically.
Well, I'm saying that even if it was maybe it was never fully free in the sense of what the founders envisioned.
I mean, if you want to talk about freedom and say the freedom to do, We also don't know how many laws exist.
I know this sounds crazy.
I mean, obviously since the Civil Rights Act, that's all gone out the window.
Another reason why when conservatives, well, you know, this is a private company,
like yeah, that argument hasn't mattered in 50 years, so don't even bother.
Same thing when they're, oh, the rule of law, like okay, there are what, 20 million illegal immigrants?
Like, don't talk to me about the rule of law, that's a joke.
Well, we actually, we also don't know how many laws exist.
I know this sounds crazy, I didn't believe it the first time I heard it,
But Google, how many laws are there in America?
And there have been various attempts to count them all up.
And nobody can figure it out.
Whether you know it or not.
It's like, well, yeah, that's part of the reason.
I mean, that is the reason why you don't know.
You know, whether or not you're breaking a law, or if every day you're breaking a law or something, it's because the number of laws is not known, actually.
Yeah, and it's designed that way, so they can always get you for something.
There's, you know, that famous thing, again, if we want to talk about something that you could argue jeopardizes public order, And leads to more crime.
There's a very famous thing, and I think it was from, I believe, Regent University, which was, I think, Pat Robertson's, like, Christian Conservative University.
Very famous YouTube, which is, don't talk to the police, where lawyer comes in and basically says, there is nothing to be gained from talking to the police ever, even if you're completely innocent.
And a former policeman is in there with him, and he says, yeah, like, that's, that's true.
Now you could argue that if everyone in the country knew this and internalized this and never spoke to the police, things would pretty much instantly break down into total anarchy.
Because most cases, if they are solved, they're solved when guys take a plea.
And guys generally take a plea because they inadvertently snitched on themselves or somebody else did.
They said something they shouldn't have done.
They didn't just clam up when the police came, and so they have something on them.
And they cop out because they'll face something worse if they don't.
Now, if everybody just shut up and stopped talking to the police, we'd probably have more crime and murder and robbery and everything else.
So, you could argue, I think very convincingly, that this video, if everyone watched it and everyone internalized its lessons, would be a social disaster.
But does that mean we should take down the video?
I would say no.
Well, okay, so the most, I mean like, a fundamental structure of Left, Right, and White is you will go on like a 15-20 minute rant about seven different things, and then I want to try and see if I can't peddle us back to something you brought up on minute two.
I mean by rant I thought like you would mean like an eloquent discourse that reveals the nature of truth.
Yeah, like that big speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
But something, I mean something that I... I don't really know how to stick the knife in, dude.
I think that's the worst thing anyone's ever said about me.
I mean, something, so you're basically saying, I mean, okay, your example about this video, this viral video on YouTube about this guy talking about why you should not talk to cops.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
It's a good video, and I would recommend that listeners of this podcast go and watch it.
It's super easy to find on YouTube, and yes, I would oppose it being taken down.
And yes, I'm also aware that, yeah, perhaps if literally every human being watched that and then never spoke to the police, going so far as to never call the police, that could be pretty disastrous.
Although it's worth noting that the guy isn't talking about never calling the police, like if you see a crime, right?
Right.
He's saying if you're if he's saying if police question you.
Right.
In regards, there's nothing to be gained from talking.
But on this subject of, you know, you believe that bad arguments can be bested by good arguments so long as there's an even playing field, which we don't have but should have, etc., etc., etc.
We'll never have, but we can have a more equal one.
Right, and it's something worth striving towards.
Yeah, and for people who will say, well, you're a hypocrite because you're always talking about the glories of hierarchy and everything else, I mean, like I said last week, I mean, I am I'm a right winger because I think hierarchy and greatness is better than equality.
But or as John Randolph of Roanoke said, I love liberty.
I hate equality. But that doesn't mean that I want all social order to just remain stagnant and in place.
I mean, I do think that you, you do need, dare I say, kind of a leftist element, a chaotic element, something that breaks things down, uh, just to keep a society from being totally stultified.
And media is the most important thing.
And even though we'll never have an equal marketplace of ideas, and that's always been a myth.
I do think that, especially given our current situation, the closer we can come to that, the better things will be.
And I'm not saying that the truth wins out.
The truth obviously does not win out.
Usually the better story wins out.
And the story that people want to hear wins out.
But at least we have a chance.
If we're allowed to speak back to obvious lies.
Right now we don't have that.
You have to kind of go out of your way to find arguments.
I'm not even going to say arguments.
To hell with that.
You have to go out of your way to find factual information, basic truths, things that remain true regardless of what anybody else thinks about them.
It's very hard to find that stuff now compared to the way it was a few years ago, because every time you try to search for something, 20 million NGOs jump in your way and start telling you either you're not allowed to look at this, you should look at this stupid lying propaganda instead, or we're going to report you to somebody for even looking for this stuff.
Slow down for a second here, though.
One of the things that got you started on this was we were talking about Finspiration on Tumblr.
For those of you who don't know, Tumblr was an incredibly popular blogging platform when Greg and I were teenagers and into our early 20s.
Everybody had Tumblr from What, like 2009 to 2013?
Well, not me, but I didn't have a cell phone until after college, so... Okay, anyway, and it was, there was a sort of, there's a sort of social, social media app, like, kind of dynamic to Tumblr, even though it was blogging.
I'm not gonna go into the nitty-gritty explanation, but it was, it was really popular with, with the kids, and, and Finspiration was, was this big thing on it, and yes, the powers that be at Tumblr eventually did put the, the kibosh on it.
Now, you know, you were talking about how You know, back then, or at least in that particular sphere, the negative information was about how to make yourself too thin, but now we have negative information about why it's okay to be fat, and both things are equally unhealthy.
So where do you start to censor one and not the other?
The big thing with Thinspiration on Tumblr was that it was being accessed by minors.
This is another thing that social media and the internet has really complicated when we talk about, you know, free speech and what to censor.
Because before the internet and before social media, it was much easier to create barriers so that minors could not get to something that adults could get to.
And that made things a lot simpler in terms of what to censor and when and how.
That's sort of what we decided with pornography in the 1970s and 1980s.
It became legal for adults to consume it, but you needed an ID to show that you were in a minor in order to buy it or to go into the movie theater or what have you.
Now, with Tumblr and everything, and Twitter and what have you, I mean, all of that has been thrown out the window.
Now, it's monumentally more complicated, just from a logistical standpoint, on how to keep minors from accessing something that you begrudgingly think should be legal for adults.
And that was kind of the deal with Finspiration, of like, I suppose, in the abstract, We could agree that, like, yes, if an adult wants to be anorexic or wants to be, you know, weigh only 90 pounds even though they're 5 foot 11, I suppose in some sense that is their right, you know, I guess?
I mean, you know, and I mean, how would you, how would you ban that anyway?
I mean, would you make it illegal to be under a certain weight and then, you know, have government bureaucrats force-feed anorexic people?
I mean, it gets weird fast.
However, You know, the same way we don't allow 13-year-olds to get tattoos or to smoke cigarettes, it seemed really prudent to not let 13-year-olds access information about how to be anorexic, why it's great to be anorexic, why you'll be more attractive if you're anorexic, and, you know, guides on how to get away with being anorexic or, you know, guides on how to be a stealth bulimic.
You know, the big problem there was that Tumblr was so popular with young people, especially young women, And, and Tumblr, you know, shut it all down because who wanted to, who wanted to defend free speech to such an absolutist point that you're willing to let 14 year old girls access details on the, you know, the benefits of anorexia for free 24 hours?
Well, here, here's my response.
There is already going to be a message pushed To minors.
So, for example, Tumblr, I would argue, and I'm not alone in this, a lot of, I think, left-wing analysts would agree with me.
Tumblr, I think, was probably one of the more influential things in making LGBTQ Ideology more prominent and more accepting well Americans so generally I would say well I mean not not so much gay stuff, but but woke politics well Yeah, certainly way more popular on tumblr before before there was Vox before I and it's op-ed page got really woke Yeah, and it and you if you look at Young people who are now minors are
Leave aside the questions of teachers and groomers and all that kind of stuff.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that these people we see on libs of TikTok are an exception.
Maybe that's a bit too much of a concession, but let's just say it for the sake of argument.
You're still going to have this stuff on Tumblr.
You're still going to have this stuff on social media.
You're still going to have this stuff on TikTok.
Now, people do a lot of dangerous things because of what they see on social media.
There was that blue whale challenge which supposedly led to stuff, uh, deaths.
On Netflix, you had that show, 13 Reasons Why.
I've seen the evidence that showed that correlated with a spike in teen suicides.
But again, but again, all these examples are talking about the people most affected are minors, are minors, they're kids.
Right, right, but this is my point.
These things are happening in an environment where the information is already being curated.
It's just being curated to a certain way.
So given that, I don't think you can, I mean as you say, there was a time when you could more easily put a barrier between minors and adults and say adults can view this stuff and make judgments, minors by their very nature can't.
Now we're in a situation where minors can more readily access this content The powers that be have responded to this by curating it in a certain way and essentially directing these miners to adopt certain behaviors and certain political attitudes.
I would say a better approach would be to have to get rid of the ability to curate that information and be able to push back and that would actually lead to less unhappiness that would lead to less political extremism that would lead to.
People who are more emotionally mature because they can handle differing arguments without regarding it as a violent attack upon themselves.
Listen, okay, so you're arguing that generally or over the long haul, good information will be out bad on a human playing field.
I think that's arguable with a bill.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that it creates the potential for certain things to be One, in terms of truthful information winning out over bad information.
Whereas right now it's just bad information wins because there's no way to push back against it.
But bad information hurts minors more than adults.
But I think a culture of argumentation and conflicting information is better for minors.
It's better for minors to be exposed to these things than what we have now, which is a culture that supposedly protects them.
But actually pushes them into tremendously destructive directions and we see it as objectively as we can measure such things and that's a separate argument, but we see it in terms of the rates of unhappiness and the rates of depression and the rates of suicide.
We see these things happening and yet.
They don't acknowledge the fact that the information that they control, the information that they determine can be pushed onto minors is leading to all these destructive things.
And they're never going to admit it.
And so I think the best counter to that is to fall back on the idea that free speech is a positive good in and of itself, because there's something to be said for people having to deal with information they would rather not confront.
I mean, I don't like it.
That I see things that I feel attack me as a white man and there are certain facts or things that I acknowledge to be factual that don't make me happy.
Like I don't, I'm not happy that Asians outperform us on standardized tests.
Like that doesn't make me feel good as a white person, but that's the reality.
And until someone provides better evidence, we have to live with that reality and living with reality is what it means to grow up.
And if by trying to prevent young people from seeing conflicting information in the name of protecting them, you're not actually protecting them.
You're, you're preventing them from growing up.
You're turning them into people who are more self-destructive, more fragile, and more incapable of handling the challenges of adulthood.
And I would say the defining aspect of being an adult and being a parent, having families, is understanding that you just can't have everything you want, that the world isn't fair, and that you just have to deal with it anyway.
Okay, so what do you think of the fact that it's really easy right now for minors to access pornography?
Do you think that's like a win for free speech?
I think that it's a win for the people who Consider it a political goal to push sexual degeneracy on young people while at the same time making sure they don't see right-wing memes.
I think you're looking at it backwards.
I think that it's not a question of, oh, they're seeing pornography, therefore it's free speech.
I'm saying, no, that's what's being pushed.
That's what they're allowing.
And I'm I'm not going to get into somebody like E. Michael Jones or something like that.
You know, he debated our boss, obviously, so obviously I watched that and that's how I got those ideas.
But I think he's on to something when he linked sexual liberalization with the loss of political freedoms.
Well, okay, so are you saying then that so long as minors Ideally, we would have it where they can't access pornography at all.
Renaissance, say the American Renaissance was no longer banned on, like, you know,
the Internet when you're using Wi-Fi at public schools or something like that.
If all of that were done away with, would it then be not as big a deal that
minors can access pornography because they could also access mainstream... Ideally, we would have it
where they can't access pornography at all. The question is, is that even
possible? Well, whether or not it's possible is a separate question.
I don't like I don't like this idea of... I'm not trying to dodge it.
What I'm saying is that there's a reason why minors can access that, but things that are far less destructive, including factual information about race, culture, political arguments, are made unavailable.
Like, if you go to a school... Listen, I 100% agree with you.
Yeah.
On that, yeah.
But I also, just like I said, I think there's the distinction, and we can, you know, there are gray areas here, and that's, but you know, that's another reason we need free speech, because we need the freedom to argue about where those gray areas are.
There's, just like I think there's a difference between a government in war and peace, in terms of what it should be able to censor and what it should control, I'm not willing to concede.
I think pornography has political effects, But I'm not going to defend it as political speech.
So, for example, I would counter to you.
I would not.
I would say that even minors should be able to read Marx and Bakunin and whoever else, as long as they can also read right wing ideas.
But pornography is not.
I don't consider that speech in the same way as I consider even extreme left wing argument speech or to put it.
Further, if you had a leftist who was arguing for sexual liberalization, whatever policy, like a minor reading about that argument, the political reason why we should allow that, that has more value and may be worthy of toleration more than just pornography itself, which I don't think is speech.
I totally get what you're saying, but if you'd be okay with Finding a way to make it much more difficult for minors to access pornography, then why not also put the kibosh on things like thinspiration?
Because to me, it's actually really similar.
I mean, it's its way of, you know, both porn and stuff like thinspiration and also the kind of New sort of photo negative of dense bracia, you know fat acceptance or you know The the Joker card and all of this of like trans stuff I mean, I think all of that stuff is really similar in that it can influence really young people and
Who just don't know better, and they can just fall into this sort of weird kind of internet subculture where they think everything they see in porn is normal and acceptable.
They think being anorexic is great because nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, etc, etc, etc.
Listen, I'm all for adults being allowed to make decisions about these sorts of things, but I'm way less comfortable with minors doing it.
I'm just trying to understand why you would be more okay.
My argument here, I think you're coming at it backwards.
I think in some ways you've actually kind of answered your own question.
The reason why they cracked down on certain subcultures and pushed other ones is because they want miners to see these things.
So it's not a question of should miners Have the right to see this or that.
The question should really be.
Miners are currently having this message broadcast to them directly by those with power.
They are doing it for these reasons.
How can we counter it?
And I would say the best counter to it is to break up the monolithic messaging that they're receiving now through free speech.
And that would include right-wing political arguments.
I think that pornography is in a separate category because in and of itself, that does not constitute speech.
And I would be in favor of trying to restrict minors access to it.
But frankly, I have a hard time seeing how you can do that from a governmental point of view.
And it really does come down to sort of a parental thing of don't let your kids have A tablet when they're young.
Don't let, you know, don't let them have a cell phone when you don't think they're ready for it.
And the reason why I'm, I'm just kind of, I have no hypothetical barriers to just banning porn outright.
It's just, it won't work.
And what you will end up engendering as you try to ban it will be worse.
And what I'm basing this on is I was reading studies about like what people look for, uh, different internet searches and everything else.
And in Saudi Arabia, you know, which you would think was the like the most socially conservative thing ever, and this is before recent reforms that they've been tilting away from that somewhat, the most common thing, of course, was pornography.
And this is something where the consequences for being found with something like that are very severe.
So it's sort of like something like prostitution where I would rather it not exist, but it's going to exist, so we should kind of keep it in the gutter and keep an eye on it so we can sort of control it somewhat.
But the idea of trying to stamp it out entirely, I think, is a fool's errand.
In contrast, when it comes to political speech, right now, minors are being hit with just one message, and it would be better if we had free speech online to push back against that.
Because right now, it's not a question of do minors have the right to look at this or that.
It's that minors are being forced to look at one thing and they can't see anything else.
But what if the solution to the censorship that you're bemoaning is not free speech but is actually just better censorship or simply different censorship?
I mean, to me, whether or not A high schooler using a school computer or school Wi-Fi can access AMREN.
It has pretty little bearing on whether or not...
A girl in that same school can look at Thinspiration blogs.
Thinspiration isn't really a political issue.
No, no, no.
I doubt anorexia afflicts people more of one political leaning than another.
And it's the same with the distortions that people get from watching porn.
I don't think that happens more or less to conservative viewers as opposed to liberal ones or Marxist ones as opposed to fascist ones.
It's just not a terribly...
I just don't see it as a very political thing.
It's more of a health thing.
I mean, we do a lot to protect the health of minors.
And I think in a lot of ways... I mean, I guess that's kind of my counter, is that we Don't.
Yes, we really do.
Well, it's family.
But it's family.
You can't buy cigarettes if you're under 21, right?
You can't drive a car alone if you're under 16.
You can't join the military until you're 18.
We do all kinds of things to protect minors, because we categorically
consider, like, the ability of minors to make good decisions
is way less than that of adults.
And I'm sure it's like somewhat ambiguous, like, you know, where you draw the line, obviously, on your 18th birthday, you don't magically become smart.
Yeah, but... But you've got to draw it somewhere, because like, yeah, 13-year-olds shouldn't be allowed to get tattoos, which is a pretty... And if you believe that, I mean, why not also censor thinspiration?
I mean, it just seems like the same argument.
Because, again, I think you're overlooking what's happening now.
We ban all these things.
We do all these things to ban minors.
But what we don't do is we say if a child, a very small child, seven, eight years old, says, I feel like the opposite sex, government institutions are now saying not only Do you have the right to make this irreversible decision, but we are also going to conceal this from your parents?
That's what's happening now.
So like, I'm not... We should stop doing that, just like we should stop the inspiration blog.
Yeah, but that's my point, when you're saying like, we should... What they're seeing now is not a product of free speech, it's a product of power.
And so, it's not a question... So if, you know, we do lots of things to protect minors, I don't...
Even concede the point.
I think that what's being pushed on children now, particularly white children, particularly the kind of internalized self-hatred that you get with critical race theory, is destructive, is meant to be destructive, they know it's destructive, and they do it because they think it's funny and good.
So it's not, and you could say, should we use better censorship to protect against these kinds of things?
Yes, if we had state power, I would wield it differently.
But that's not the same thing as saying, therefore, we're going to hit free speech from another direction.
We're just going to ban different things.
You know what I mean?
I think there is something that We shouldn't lose sight of, which is that the Anglo-Saxon norm of freedom of speech as a social norm, not just as a legal construct, not just as something that the federal government can't mess with, but something that powerful corporations should also not be able to mess with, that has a positive good in itself.
And being able to argue about certain issues serves as a check on insanity.
Because you're actually allowed to push back and people hear these different things That's something which young people are being denied now and it's very emotionally destructive and I think it's being done on purpose Okay, so if you were if you were king if you did have state power Which of these sort of various things that we've talked about would you and wouldn't you censor?
well for I think the biggest thing again with with censorship, I think it's I Less a question of what I would ban and more a question of what message would I target young people with?
Because they're going to get something, right?
Unless you're going to privatize education totally, you're going to have kind of a basic standard of these are the social norms and these are the things that we want people to learn as they grow up in our society.
I think that in terms of publication, I mean publication, in terms of public education, I would obviously eliminate critical race theory and I would cultivate feelings of pride in one's history and ethnic identity and national citizenship as a basis.
When it comes to the private sphere, in terms of what I would censor and what I would not, I would probably do a lot more to Sensory pornography not through the British approach where they're going to try to You have to like prove what's being discussed and maybe they actually implemented it I apologize if I am a little behind on it.
You have to essentially prove you're a certain age before you go online Which also means that I don't think it's online.
I think it's to a pornographic website Okay, like you have to put in information for like right right right charge it because I'm right I wouldn't I wouldn't do Something like that.
Instead, I would start looking at the standards of the industry and a lot of the unseemly things that are associated with it and start looking to see if you can make it less profitable and start cracking down on some of the harm that's being done to people in that industry.
I think that would be a better way to do it than trying to censor the Internet because any top-down approach like that Is going to be.
It's not so much even that it's just not going to work.
It's that it provides an easy target for people to mobilize against.
You know what I mean?
Like if you have a top down government policy where you're saying you are not allowed to look at this, people are going to want to look at it.
One thing I don't think the left has done right is that they don't necessarily ban you.
I mean, they don't ban American Renaissance, but.
They throw all sorts of little obstacles in the way to make it impossible for you to operate.
And I think that kind of approach would be much more productive in terms of cracking down on things that I think are harmful, as opposed to just outright censorship, which I don't think works when it comes from a government entity.
And you could say, yeah, you're being arbitrary and you're being discriminatory when you say that you would essentially persecute certain industries while leaving others alone, to which I would simply respond, yes, I would.
Because I think the presence of these industries or these businesses are inherently depraved and inherently negative.
But I also don't think they're going to be stamped out.
I think that any attempt to stamp it out utterly would probably do far more harm than good.
And it's better to have some sort of control on it.
And if people are going to indulge in that kind of thing, at least have it in a somewhat controlled and safe way, as opposed to just shoving it in everybody's face.
I think that's the best way to handle a lot of things that would be considered.
It's the same thing with cigarettes or drinking or something like that.
I mean, we could, when you're talking about minors, I mean, one of the things that of course, you know, when you go to Europe, people are always astonished at is the fact that 19 year olds can't buy a beer in the United States.
Right.
Now, or for that matter, if you look at drunk driving laws, I mean, even within our lifetimes, It is now the BSC has been reduced.
I mean, I don't really drink anymore.
So it doesn't affect me.
But you know, 10 years ago, if you had split a bottle of wine with somebody at dinner, if you're driving home, the BSC is now so low, you have to seriously, if you see sirens behind you, you got to worry like, am I over the limit or not?
Because The attempt to protect people has now gotten so extreme that everyday conduct becomes impossible and simple things that you could take for granted you can no longer do.
I'm enough of I guess an American and some residual libertarianism that I don't like the idea of government directly forbidding these things and if I'm going to err I'm going to err on the side of Personal freedom and independence from central authority.
I just think that.
People who talk about these things now, like libertarians who say, oh, the government shouldn't crack down on porn.
The government shouldn't crack down on this or that or the other, because we're all independent and free.
My response would be, but we're not independent and free that the libertarianism that people are talking about hasn't existed in a very long time.
And that things that minors are being exposed to now.
Both the powerful media companies and via state institutions, notably public education.
That's not free speech at work.
That's a deliberate political program, and it's being done on purpose, and it's more destructive than the so-called dangerous things that they keep trying to ban.
OK, I mean, like, let's.
And I want to, you know, ask you kind of the same question.
Right now.
We are engaged in a social experiment that essentially has never been done in human history.
I'm not even going to get into declining testosterone and all the stuff where they talk about the way people's biology is being changed by the food and drugs and everything else.
But let's just talk about the trance stuff specifically.
Right now you have people being taught, people teaching this stuff.
Not just to teenagers, but to children, essentially.
And you have adults, you have mothers, making declarations.
And if you don't believe me, just go on social media and you'll see that, you know, their two-year-old is trans and setting them up for hormone blockers and things like that.
Do we allow this to continue?
If we can point to figures that say, you know, look, actually, this is associated with very negative outcomes in terms of mental health.
And I would argue that it's not.
These negative outcomes are not resulting because of persecution resulting because you're you're warping somebody's body and you're screwing them up in a fundamental way.
And you're doing it at an age where they really can't make any decisions.
So.
I guess my counter to you would be, do you think, this is a political issue now, do you think that schools should not be discussing sexual issues at all?
And if the answer is they should be discussing it, at what age should that begin?
Oh boy, defend, I mean.
I mean, that's a political issue that's taking place right now.
Slow down, slow down, slow down.
You're using the phrase, I mean, I don't think trans stuff should be taught, I mean, in the context of, say, like, a sexual education class or, you know, a sexual education unit in a health class, say, in, like, the seventh grade.
I mean, I wouldn't make it illegal for the teacher to, like, mention the existence of Of trans people, but I don't think minors who declare that they want to be the other sex should have legal rights or something.
I mean, I don't think that's at all.
Right.
I mean, I think that's outrageous and nor do I think it should be taught to minors at any age that they can just select a sex and then just go for that.
Right.
Right, but I mean, banning it is, I mean, again, they're logistical issues.
It's the same way, I mean, it's again, it's weird that this is even an issue, because it's like, would you make it illegal for teachers to encourage 13 year olds to get face tattoos?
It's like, yeah, teachers obviously shouldn't do that.
Like, that's a bad teacher.
Like, you should fire a teacher if he does that.
But like, the fact that we're at a point like, you know, how you would precisely construct a law to make it illegal For a teacher to do that, it's like, because you wouldn't want to make it illegal for a teacher to note the existence of people with face tattoos that might come up somehow, you know what I mean?
Right.
You know, you wouldn't want anybody to get in trouble for, you know, I don't know, showing a video or like a photo with like Mike Tyson in it or somebody else with a face tattoo.
Like you would want to be careful about the overreach.
Yeah.
But no, I mean, I don't know.
You know, minors who declare they or the other sex don't have a right to anything any
more than a minor who declares that he's joining the military tomorrow. The minor doesn't
have that right. The minor does not have a right to get a face tattoo. The minor does not
have a right to amputate his arm. This just isn't common. This isn't complicated on that level.
Here's the difficult question, and I don't have an answer to this. First of all, obviously,
when someone is an adult, When is someone not?
Obviously, any line drawn is going to be somewhat arbitrary, but whatever.
Like, I mean, that's, there's no way around that.
I mean, you have to draw a line at some point.
It's sort of the same bad faith stuff.
Oh, race doesn't exist because the margins are like, okay.
But you know, families exist, even though if you tried to define precisely who is family and who's related to you and who's not, there's always going to be somewhat of a gray zone that doesn't invalidate the concept.
So, that's one.
But any society, and I think this is the main thing that I'm trying to get through, any society has certain fundamental precepts that a vast majority need to share for it to even be considered a society, or a people, or a nation.
And right now, what is being pushed deliberately Is particularly when it comes to sexual stuff is something that I think is very destructive now the question Is this it's not even?
Who has the fundamental right to teach the children parents or teachers?
Because even if we say parents, which I think you know as a parent I would default to but We see these issues now where you have parents oftentimes probably Affluent white liberal women addicted to social media who are saying that their very young children, and I'm talking like under five, are trans and that they're setting them up for certain medical treatments or anything and other things which really can't be undone.
Yeah.
It should be illegal to perform any kind of sex change operation on minors.
That should be illegal.
Doctors who do that should go to prison.
Right.
And this is sort of the, at some point it does come down to, like I've said that I, if not quite a free speech absolutist, I'm closer to that, but there is always going to be a point, and this is the point where I guess sovereignty is really established, Where you simply say, no, this is bad because it's bad.
And this is good because it's good.
Because if you say something like parents don't have the right to change their children's sex, because they think so.
Now you're admitting that the government has a right to deal with the way families are run.
Does that extend to say, Amish families and the way they treat their kids.
Should the federal government be snooping in there to prevent child abuse or whatever else?
Does that include people who, in our circles, who, you know, are bringing up their kids and say like, hey, actually, you shouldn't be ashamed of being white.
I mean, I'm sure leftists would be screaming at the top of their lungs that that shouldn't be allowed and they should not be allowed to be homeschooled or anything like that.
And they should be taken to public schools to be taught about how evil they are.
If you try to define it, I mean, this is why it ultimately comes down to who, not what.
There are principles at stake, and it is fair to talk about big concepts like free speech as a good in and of itself, or the sovereignty of the family over the power of the government.
But at some point, you do just have to make calls where you simply say, no, I think this value is better than what you're trying to do.
And that's more important than any larger abstract principle.
And when you get down to those sorts of questions, I think that's when you see who people really are and what they really value.
So, I mean, that's sort of the tough question with censorship is that I'm erring on the side of free speech in terms of Not supporting censorious programs directed by the government, not just because we are out of power now and not out of any.
You know generosity, because I think when we take power will somehow not use state power or something like that.
It's because that a lot of these questions can't really be decided via an abstract principle.
They have to be settled.
With direct moral judgments and.
Those sorts of things can't really be established by talking about legal norms like does the government have the right to censor this or does the government have the right to interfere with the family?
Sometimes a specific issue is more important than a general principle.
Sometimes a specific issue is more important than a general principle.
It's an interesting way of putting it.
I mean, well, if you had a kid, right?
I mean, if you had a child and The welfare of your child would somehow violate, you know, the Kantian moral imperative that you're supposed to act in a certain way.
You would still put the welfare of your child above some universalistic moral commandment.
I think most people would.
And you're right to do so.
And so, but that doesn't mean that we don't have common codes of morality.
That doesn't mean that We shouldn't talk about these kinds of things or that they're of no importance, but it does mean that there are certain human instincts and there are certain primal, I don't want to say drives, but certain primal values that transcend any legal norms.
And when you're talking about issues in terms of family, in terms of what information people are allowed to see, we get into gray zones where I think we need to err on the side of free speech simply because these questions are so difficult to answer sometimes.
Listen, so long as, so long as it's just adults, I think that's, I think that's fine.
I mean, I'm, I'm, you know, something along the lines, I mean, certainly free speech ebbs loose when it comes to political speech, like you mentioned in the beginning.
I think we're in agreement.
In the beginning of the show.
And, you know, generally, I mean...
You know, I tend to err on the side of free speech, I guess I would say.
I wouldn't say I'm a free speech absolutist or close to being a free speech absolutist, but I lean more towards free speech than censorship generally.
But the thing is that, like, in the history of the debate about free speech, there's been very little consideration given to minors, because before the internet, it was just so much easier to protect minors from certain things.
In the 1970s, when there was this debate about pornography and the pornographers won, nobody in that debate was saying that minors should be able to go into these movie theaters.
And then in the 80s and 90s, nobody was saying that minors should be able to rent VHS porn.
That just wasn't part of the debate, because everybody was in agreement that the answer to that would be no.
But the internet just changed all of that so fundamentally, and it makes it so much more complicated now because with social media, minors and adults are on the exact same platforms most of the time, right?
Everybody's on Facebook, everybody's on Twitter, everybody's on Instagram.
And like we just don't have, you know, and because of that, like because of just like the technological reality of the internet and social media, you know, the Constitution and John Stuart Mill's letter on toleration and all these things really stop being the useful guides that they once were.
We're just in a new environment.
I guess I'm really showing how much of not a conservative I am, even though I'm the one arguing for more censorship than you, of just like Our kind of timeless principles, or like the Anglo-Saxon tradition you were talking about, you know, all of this was always just took for granted that they were talking about grown-ups.
And that made sense to do at the time, but you just can't do that anymore.
You know, so now in order to protect minors the way we historically have, the sensorious things we're gonna have to implement to protect minors is going to bleed over onto Adults it would be like impossible to you know to ban the
hashtag Inspiration for you know Facebook users under the age of 18
or 21, but not for those above I mean, this is you know this is just become impossible. It
was just beyond complicated. You know even we've even worse on Twitter
I Just think we're in a brand new world and we need to
we need to acknowledge that in a way that like I Mean just a lot of people haven't
I know.
Basically, nobody has, as far as I'm concerned.
Ultimately, obviously, law is downstream from power, and the cultural changes that we are experiencing Are the result of deliberate choices made by those in power.
I don't think this is just spontaneous order or any kind of libertarian nonsense like that.
Not all of it is this big conspiracy.
Let me give you an example.
Let me give you an example that just popped up just now.
So this is this is Ann Coulter just commented this on Twitter.
So it just kind of popped up in front of me even as we're just talking from Redux Mag.
I don't know what that is Westminster College in Utah.
We'll be offering a porn studies course in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Somebody, a mutual friend of ours texted me about this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is, this is in Utah.
And so.
Yeah.
So college students will watch and interact with their professor and then discuss it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it raises certain questions too here when we say like, okay, this has clearly more of a, How to put this a claim to be considered speech.
Obviously there are college students and I would even go so far as to say that you could, I mean, what, what is being an English major liberal arts major except for like looking for power dynamics and certain messages implicit in certain forms of media.
So you could even hypothetically be like, Oh, I see where they're going with this and everything else.
You know what this is.
You know this is just a deliberate attempt to deconstruct social norms.
You know that this is just a deliberate attempt to drag the culture down because the same people who would be pushing something like this would lose their minds if somebody started talking about Not just racial reality, but the basic social norms of the people who created Utah and probably still have it today.
And so there is, you know, behind all of this, behind everything we're talking about, and maybe this is one of the problems, is like you and I can have a debate because we disagree on fundamental things, but we still have a A vague sense of being part of a shared culture, and we still agree on the end goal of a lot of these things.
But with people who are pushing certain messages that are inherently in bad faith, that are inherently designed to just deconstruct, there's no debate to be had.
And so it's not that I don't think these people should be allowed to speak.
It's not that I want to take their right to free speech away, it's that I don't think what they have to say is of any importance, and I don't think we should even have to live in a society with them, because if you don't share a certain cultural framework, you're not part of the same people anyway, and these people should just be expelled or let go do their own thing.
Right, well, and yeah, I mean, on some level the solution to a lot of these questions is for America to become multiple different smaller countries.
There's a shared value system.
But again, you've got to slow down here.
You've just got to slow down.
So in regards to this college class, like, listen, yeah, whoever's teaching that, that
class is, you know, not on our side.
Yeah, they're definitely, whatever, you know, whatever analysis they're putting into it
is definitely just going to be, you know, left-wing culture war stuff.
And it's, you know, on some level, weird, this is happening.
But you know, again, because it's all grown ups, and it's a private institution, I'm of
the kind of classically liberal opinion of like, well, listen, that class is definitely
not required.
There's no way that you have to take that class to graduate.
And so it's like, so yeah, don't take the class, don't go to college, whatever.
But again, that is just so different from just the fact that like 10 year olds can and
do watch porn with all kinds of, you know, bizarre stuff happening in it.
And you know, moreover, I mean, I think, I don't think that you can say, you know, the
trans stuff is super political.
And like, yeah, the attempt to teach it in public schools, you know, to little kids,
like, that is very politically motivated.
Yes.
But like over, I mean, but like the broader existence of like free Internet porn is not somehow a political conspiracy.
Like, that was spontaneous order, I guess, if you want to use that word.
I mean, that was just people looking to make money with new technology, and it worked.
I don't think there was any kind of... I don't think George Soros, you know, created porn tube websites to mess with fertility rates.
I think that's a pretty difficult argument to make.
And sure, you can even say, you know, you can go down this sort of E. Michael Jones argument of, like, sexual liberation.
Maybe there's some truth to that.
Listen, pornographers are by and large motivated by money.
This is a money thing.
There's just money to be made on it.
I think there are things government can do to change the financial equation.
But at the same time, let's have a much simpler case.
We don't need to just get mired in talking about filth and porn.
This report coming now, Austria, now again, I gotta look more into this, but I've seen some reports along the lines of this in the last couple of days, so this doesn't surprise me.
Austria will fine 50,000 euros to anyone who broadcasts videos or news from Russia today in Sputnik.
Now again, you could say, oh, but you said, you know, war and stuff.
It's like, yeah, but Austria is not at war with Russia.
You know, so like... Austria isn't even part of NATO!
No, it's not, right, so it's not... Is it not part of NATO?
Well, I mean, I know it was neutral during the Cold War.
I didn't know if they joined NATO.
They're like Finland and Switzerland.
They're non-members.
Right, so now we're at a position, so like, even forget, you know, porn and grey areas and stuff like that, we're in a position now where, you know, in Europe they just ban political parties, nationalist political parties, if they don't like them.
If you brought if you apparently show a video from a country that you're not at war with that's enough to have you be fined a large amount of money or possibly be put in Some more stringent form of punishment.
I'm not gonna say put in jail but I think remember when President Trump was still in office and he RT'd something from a British Nationalist Party and The UK government responded with outrage, and I think that woman who put up the video had to do some time in jail or pay a fine or something.
And these are the kinds of things that we need to be focusing on.
Like, even before we start talking about grey zones, even before we get into first principles surrounding censorship and everything else, we just need to point to stuff like this and be like, look, basic political speech, you don't have the right to Discuss.
And again, as you said at the very beginning, it's not because people are telling lies that they're being banned.
It's because they're telling truths that could blow up this whole stupid fake our democracy garbage.
And that, I think, is where we need to just be focusing all of our fire.
Not on saying, oh, the system is being hypocritical, but saying, no, the system is tyrannical and based on lies and not one stone should be left upon another until we at least have a right to political speech back and then we can get into these tougher issues.
No, I guess I would simultaneously call for more free speech for adults, you know, especially when it comes to freaking posting a video from RT.com while simultaneously pushing for much more censorship for minors.
I just don't think there's a contradiction at all.
No, I don't think there's a contradiction.
The only great stuff is when we get into the area of Does the government have the right to intervene?
I mean, we kind of already have conceded this because we have family courts and child abuse laws and stuff like that.
But does the government have the right to intervene in a family if parents are teaching children destructive things?
Because I think people like us would say, well, when you have Well, again, listen, this is, again, I think this is somewhat simpler than you think.
and everybody involved should be in jail. But I think a lot of other people would
say, you know, if you teach a white kid that he shouldn't worry about accusations
of racism, that that also should be like a criminal offense.
Whereas the trans stuff should be mandated or something. Well again, listen,
this is, again, I think this is somewhat simpler than you think. I mean, I don't think we
should make it, we should, you know, if like woke parents tell their little
kids...
You know, gender is a social construct.
Anybody can be any sex that they want to, and we will love you if you decide to flip sexes when you're older.
I mean, I don't think that should be illegal, but there's a huge difference between just, like, teaching them that sort of thing, which is, you know, dumb and it's wrong and it's destructive, but there's a huge difference between that and, you know, giving them the surgery or giving them the hormones or blocking the hormones or, you know, however it is that it goes.
I mean, the same way it's like, You know, I don't think, you know, if there's, like, a child being raised by neo-Nazis and he was being taught, you know, Nazi stuff, I mean, I don't think the court should take away the kid by any means, but, like, if those parents then, like, tattoo a swastika to their 10-year-old son's face, it's like, well, yeah, at that point the government should be able to go in and take the kid away from the parents, you know?
I mean, there's a real, I mean, it's about, it's really about physical harm.
I'm not, I'm not actually like a liberal.
I don't think, I don't think words do harm.
I think, you know, physical things do harm.
Tattoos are, you know, in a lot of ways, just literally scarring skin.
And again, I don't, you know, I don't think tattoos should be illegal.
Adults should be able to get tattoos.
I don't care.
But, but again, there's just these sort of categorical differences.
So.
I think that's, that might be the best.
distinction and the best way to look at it.
And perhaps, as you say, that these issues are simpler than I'm making it seem.
But we do have to, at some point, we have to confront some of these gray zones.
And at some point, we have to confront some of these first principles.
But I think right now, the battle lines are very clear and the immediate goals are very obvious, which is obviously to be allowed to express political speech That does not violate any current laws online, and that we should demand that as a right.
And you could say, well, you don't even really believe in inherent rights.
Well, yeah, but under the current system that we have, which is what they're pretending to operate with, we should demand these things because we are entitled to them under the current system.
And if they take them away from us, Then at that point, we are legitimate in saying that this entire system is fake and everything they say is wrong, and we don't owe it anything other than defiance.
Hey, let's close with that.
I like ending with defiance.
Absolutely.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Hopefully you all enjoyed the fact that Greg and I actually weren't in full agreement this time.
I know some of you like it better when we argue, which is Yeah, which is what we're doing.
I'll think of more things to fight about.
Okay, deal.
And we'll see you all next week, huh?
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