Ep. 511 dissects The New York Times’ whitewashing of the FBI’s "Crossfire Hurricane" probe, exposing Peter Strzok’s "insurance policy" remark and Papadopoulos’ drunken intel as flimsy pretexts for a politically weaponized investigation. It contrasts this with Nadine Strawson’s defense of free speech, citing Matal v. Tam to reject hate speech bans unless tied to imminent violence, while warning private platforms like Facebook risk becoming censorial arbiters. The episode ties media bias—from misreporting MS-13 to distorting U.S. history—to a broader erosion of First Amendment understanding, where well-intentioned censorship backfires by empowering extremists and silencing dissent under the guise of protection. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has released a major new report on the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign.
The Times report proves conclusively that the investigation into Russian collusion was not a witch hunt, but merely a search for warty-nosed women in peaked black hats who fly on broomsticks and may have colluded with Russia.
The Times says the FBI did not have a spy within the Trump campaign, but merely an informant who secretly kept watch over the campaign and then reported back to the FBI in a non-spying sort of way.
Further, the Times reports that when FBI agent Peter Strzok wanted an insurance policy in case Trump got elected, he was not referring to the investigation, but rather to some other insurance policy, maybe fire insurance or something for the car, something like that.
Finally, the Times reassured its readers that the paper includes all the news that's fit to print.
If by news you mean blithering attempts to keep from exposing the corruption of the Obama administration, and by fit to print, you mean not.
Trick or warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
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It's a wonderful day.
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All right, we have Nadine Strawson with us today.
She was just reviewed today.
She was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
That is why the show is so prescient.
It makes me want to go look up the word prescient and find out what it means and what I'm talking about.
No, she wrote this book, Hate, Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.
She is not particularly a conservative, but she is a true friend of free speech, which makes her a true friend of the show.
And it's a really good interview.
She's really sharp.
And you'll want to stay tuned for that.
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You know, there's this new idea going around.
It's kind of the place I saw it was in this book, Sapiens by Yuval Harari or whatever his name is.
And this huge book, Bill Gates loves this book and all this.
And he puts forward, but this is now a meme going around, that what makes human beings different is we tell these fictions that lead us together.
What does he mean by fictions?
Honey's Unbelievable Revelation00:11:35
He means fictions that America is a country, or fictions that we have rights, or fictions that Jesus rose from the dead.
And what's really interesting to me about that is it's complete misunderstanding.
It's almost a Vulcan style misunderstanding of what fiction is.
I've written fiction all my life, and fiction is an attempt to describe truths that are immaterial.
But because Harare doesn't believe in truths that are immaterial, he can't understand that fictions can be a way of just communicating the truth.
You tell stories about things that you can't just say.
Ideas are not fictions.
Ideas are ways of trying to describe immaterial truths, things that are true.
If an idea is true, it in fact is what we call a good idea, and it makes things better for humankind.
I mean, science, the scientific method, good idea.
Love your neighbor.
People are equal.
The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We all share this and get it from God, not from government.
Capitalism, good idea.
All things, all those things have made life so much better in the last 300 years or so.
Bad ideas are like diseases.
Bad ideas make you sick inside.
They twist your brain.
They corrupt you.
Leftism is a bad idea.
Leftism corrupts, and absolute leftism corrupts absolutely.
And we have seen this this week.
This is the week that the media shamed itself.
And they shamed itself because they hate Donald Trump.
And they shamed itself because they hate you and me.
And they shamed themselves because they hate Israel and the West.
And leftism has corrupted them.
It has corrupted them absolutely.
And they have turned themselves.
The irony is, kind of God's irony, is they have turned themselves into exactly what Donald Trump says they are.
They are now fake news.
This was the week of fake news.
And I've really got to start with this New York Times story, unbelievable story.
Now, to set this up, this is the story they told about the, today, it was a huge, huge story about what they call it codename Crossfire Hurricane, which comes from a Rolling Stone song.
Codename Crossfire Hurricane, The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation.
Now, to set this up, you have to understand why they ran this.
The intelligence community has been using the New York Times as a line of defense all throughout this investigation.
They've been leaking stories to the New York Times before the stories came out as Devin Nunu or Nonez or Naoname or whatever his name is.
Devin Nunes has heroically, truly, heroically, this is, you know, I kid around about it, but he's actually doing a great job.
He's on the House Intelligence Committee.
He has been extracting, like dragging these documents out of the FBI and the CIA and the Justice Department.
And they keep sending him over redacted.
Poor Andy McCarthy over at NRO is reading these things.
He's like, his eyes are bleeding.
And they're all redacted for no reason except to protect the Justice Department.
They're not protecting sources.
They just are trying to keep this information.
And you remember Rod Rosenstein, right?
He had this thing, we're not going to be extorted.
You think like, wait, excuse me, this is congressional oversight.
It's not extortion.
It is not extortion.
New news or new nies or no names, whatever the hell he is.
He has been dragging this stuff out.
And now, on top of this, the inspector general is about to release his report on the investigation into Hillary's emails and the investigation into Trump's Russian collusion.
And remember, this is the same gang of Keystone cops that were investigating both things.
So we had one side where Hillary Clinton was like, come on over, Hillary.
You don't have to take an oath.
It's fine.
You know, who's that?
Well, that's my friend.
Oh, we'll say it's your lawyer.
So she has, you know, she has lawyer-client privilege.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, and by the way, we won't even take this to the Justice Department.
We'll just announce on TV with the FBI.
We'll announce on TV that you're innocent because you didn't mean to do it.
Thanks for playing, and we'll see you later.
And then they went over to investigate Donald Trump.
Now, so you have to understand what's happening now is Nunoz is getting this stuff out of the FBI and it's coming out.
And the IG report, which is reportedly really bad, they're saying it's worse than everybody thought, that it really is going to take the FBI to task.
So the FBI is leaking to the New York Times and the New York Times is spinning to protect the FBI.
That is what they're doing.
So listen to this.
Now, here's the other thing.
Remember, the whole thing was to prove at first, the whole thing was to prove that the steel dossier, this collection of Russian misinformation about Donald Trump with the hookers urinating on the bed and all this stuff, that that was not the reason they started this investigation.
That was the whole point, right?
So then the next thing that the Times sold us, actually the FBI sources talking to the Times sold us and the New York Times dutifully recorded it, was the next thing they said was, no, no, no, it was George Papadopoulos, got drunk in Australia and bragged to the ambassador that he knew that the Russians had Hillary emails.
And the ambassador called the FBI and said, listen, the Trump campaign must have something on.
That was the next thing they had.
Now, listen, that was the next time they were trying to tell us how the investigation got started.
Now listen to this, okay?
This is the opening line of this story, codename Crossfire Hurricane, The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation.
Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the FBI dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.
Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump's advisors knew in advance about a Russian election meddling.
After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador Alexander Downer to sit for an FBI interview to describe his meeting with the campaign advisor George Papadopoulos.
If you listen to that carefully, which you have to, the investigation had already started and they didn't talk to him until August 2nd.
And Nunes no names, Nunu, says no official intelligence was delivered to the FBI prior to July 31st, which means, so how did he know?
How did Downer, the ambassador, know and get these details, right?
What really, what started this investigation?
What started the investigation?
Now, here's the other thing, and this is truly amazing.
And listen to the way it's written, because all this whole thing is just to sell the idea that, oh, there wasn't a spy, because now they're saying there was a spy in the Trump campaign.
Well, there was.
There was a spy.
So here's what they say.
The FBI investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months.
Congressional investigators revealed in February.
The four men were Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Mr. Papadopoulos.
Current and former officials said the FBI obtained phone records and other documents.
So remember Trump said I was bugged.
Remember, he said they obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters, a secret type of subpoena, officials said.
And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials, said a government informant met, they had a spy, informant.
They had a spy in the campaign.
You know, this is an amazing, I mean, just think about this narrative for a minute, okay?
Because I know these conspiracy stories, these massive stories get so confusing, but just think about this.
Somebody says, oh, somebody in the campaign, George Popatov, is a minor aide in the campaign, says, oh, you know, I hear that the Russians have emails from Hillary Clinton.
And the FBI, which has just cleared a woman who clearly broke the law, clearly mishandled classified documents, the FBI launches a massive, massive investigation into the opposition candidate's presidential campaign.
I mean, this is truly Central American tin pop dictator stuff.
And this is the Obama administration.
And way down in the story, like this is like paragraph 70 or something like this.
It says a year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump's advisors to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government's disruptive efforts.
You know what else they've never proved?
They've never proved that the Russians accomplished anything.
I mean, this was, you know, we all, everybody, all the spies on both sides mess with each other's elections.
But this, so far, all they have gotten is this Rocky and Bullwinkle Boris Badenoff campaign on Facebook to try and put out a couple of ads about, you know, helping Donald Trump's campaign.
Now, today or yesterday, the Senate committee said, yes, they were trying to help Trump's campaign.
It wasn't equal on both sides, but they have never shown, they have never shown that this accomplished anything.
So it didn't accomplish anything.
Maybe this guy saw some emails.
Maybe somebody told him about this.
And they launched this massive, massive investigation.
And the New York Times is now, the New York Times, which has been relentless in attacking the U.S. government when it tries to defend us from our enemies, Abu Ghraib, Pentagon Papers, all these things that they have been relentless in CIA questioning of terrorists, all that stuff.
They've been incredibly, incredibly moralistic about.
Now suddenly they're defending it when the very nature of our elections is threatened by Barack Obama's administration.
Unbelievable.
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Here is the other thing.
Threats To Free Speech00:15:31
Do you remember Strzok and Page, right?
The lovers in the FBI, right?
And they're texting back and forth and they hate Donald Trump and they're so happy when the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails ends and they can start going after Trump because they know they can't do anything about Hillary because there's no way the Justice Department is going to indict her.
So their investigation is just a waste of time.
They're just pounding sand, basically.
But now they're going off to get Trump.
And remember he wrote this letter and saying, I want to believe the path.
This is Strzzok writing to Page.
He says, I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office that there's no way Trump gets elected.
But I'm afraid we can't take that risk.
It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40.
Now, what he's obviously saying is he's obviously saying that like this Russian investigation, just in case he wins, will be able to mess up his administration by investigating forever, which is exactly what they've done.
Now, listen to the New York Times on this.
Listen to them twist this around.
Mr. Trump says that message revealed a secret FBI plan to respond to his election.
We'll go to phase two and we'll get this guy, he told the Wall Street Journal.
This is the FBI we're talking about, and that is treason.
But, says the New York Times, officials have told the Inspector General something quite different.
They said Ms. Page and others advocated a slower, circumspect pace, especially because polls predicted Mr. Trump's defeat.
They said that anything the FBI did publicly would only give fodder to Mr. Trump's claims on the campaign trail that the election was rigged.
So they didn't want to get caught rigging the election because then it might rig the election against them.
Mr. Strzok countered that even if Mr. Trump's chances of victory were low, like dying before 40, the stakes were too high to justify.
And it's the same damn thing.
He wanted an insurance policy again.
And even the Times admits, even the Times admits that they were absolutely certain Trump was going to lose, and that is what powered them.
That is what powered him.
And again, these are the people who take such pride in exposing our security forces and our spies and our secret war plans as long as they're defending our enemies.
When they're defending the Vietnamese, the communists in Vietnam, they can release the Pentagon papers.
When they're defending the terrorists overseas, they can expose Abu Ghraib.
You know, they can expose secret CIA interrogation techniques.
Maybe went over the line.
Not to me, but they may have gone over the line.
As long as it's helping them.
But if it's an attack on the sacredness of the Democrats' right to own our government, then they're going to cover up for it.
Then they're going to cover up for it.
And what could be a greater attack on America than a sitting president and his administration launching a major, major investigation into an opponent, the opposing party's campaign?
What could be worse than that?
I do not understand it.
I do not understand how the reporters at the New York Times look at themselves in the mirror every day and say, oh, yes, I'm a journalist.
I'm a journalist.
My job is to make sure you think the right things.
My job, it's not the fact, facts, facts, facts.
Facts are great.
But my job is to make sure that my readers are doing right thinking.
You know, if you don't think this is powered by hatred of Trump, if you don't think this is a pollution of leftism, if this is not leftism corrupting and absolute leftism corrupting, absolutely.
Let me give you just another example of this thing that happened yesterday.
Donald Trump was doing one of those things where he sits and listens to people, right?
And he's listening to law enforcement officials, especially from California, where they've got all the sanctuary cities, right?
And the Fresno County sheriff, Margaret Mims, comes out and she says, look, MS-13.
Now, remember, MS-13, they beat teenagers to death with baseball bats.
That's who these guys are.
They come from Central America.
They're this gang that has come over here and Trump has gone after them, is waging war against them.
But these guys are savages.
They beat teenagers to death with baseball bats.
That's who they are, okay?
And so this poor sheriff is saying with the Sanctuary City stuff, we can't bust these guys.
And here's Trump's response.
There could be an MS-13 gang member I know about.
If they don't reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about them.
We have people coming into the country who are trying to come in.
We're stopping a lot of them.
But we're taking people out of the country.
You wouldn't believe how bad these people are.
These aren't people.
These are animals.
And we're taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that's never happened before.
And because of the weak laws, they come in fast.
We get them.
We release them.
We get them again.
We bring them out.
It's crazy.
The dumbest laws, as I said before, the dumbest laws on immigration in the world.
So we're going to take care of it, Margaret.
We'll get it done.
What's he talking about?
He's talking about MS-13.
He's talking about guys who beat people to death with baseball bats, kids, children to death.
That's who he's talking about.
Animals.
He calls them animals.
Virtually every mainstream news agency tweeted this out as if he were talking about immigrants.
Here's ABC.
They just took it out of context.
They tweeted out the words and that quote without the question from Margaret Mims.
ABC News, this is their tweet.
President Trump refers to some who cross the border illegally as animals, not people.
You wouldn't believe how bad these people are.
CBS News, these aren't people, these are animals.
President Trump used the harsh rhetoric to describe some undocumented immigrants during a California Sanctuary State roundtable.
NBC News did the same thing.
C-SPAN, President Trump during California Sanctuary Cities roundtable, these aren't people, these are animals.
New York Times, Trump lushed a former newspaper.
Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting calling those trying to breach the country's borders animals, right?
Animals.
This is unbelievable.
If you don't think, I mean, this is what leftism has turned these people into.
And you know, I got to play this one other from NPR.
This is reporting on the Israeli situation, the Israelis.
You know, now that they found out, now that Hamas has confirmed that 52, I think, of the 60 people killed were Hamas terrorists, they just dropped the story.
The story's over.
They're just not reporting it.
Oh, well, in that case, if we can't condemn Israel and pretend that they're killing children, then forget the whole thing.
NPR is interviewing a guy.
Listen to this.
NPR is interviewing a guy who's flying a kite with a swastika over the Israeli border and it's on fire.
They're trying to start fires in Israel, right?
And it's got a swastika on it.
Listen, who is this guy on NPR?
Stephen Innskeep, okay?
Listen to the way he interviews this with his gentle, sympathetic voice.
And listen to what the guy says in response.
He said it's designed to float over the Israelis and catch fire.
It was decorated with writing claiming Jerusalem for Palestinians and also with swastikas.
What does this thing mean to you?
Why do you put that on there?
The Jews go crazy for Hitler when they see it.
The Israelis know that people are flying kites with swastikas.
They know this.
And they use it to discredit you, to say this shows you're bad people.
What do you think about that?
This is actually what we want them to know, he says, that we want to burn them.
That is one of many views we've heard in the last few days in Gaza, where at least 60 people were killed yesterday in protests.
Can you imagine if that was a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville flying his swastika kite over a black man's church or something like that?
You know, they might feel that you don't like them.
Yes, we don't like them.
We're trying to burn them, they kill them, the Jews, like Hitler.
We want to kill them.
Well, you know, people may think you're a bad person if you say that.
Yes, we don't care.
This is what we, you know, what are they talking about?
It is leftism.
Leftism has corrupted their heads.
It corrupts people.
You know, Spike Lee, speaking of Charlottesville, Spike Lee is in Cannes, the film festival.
I guess he made a film about Charlottesville, and he went off on Trump and every other word is unprintable.
But then he said this about America, okay?
Forget the stuff he's, so he hates Trump, fine.
Then he goes off on America.
And this is what Spike Lee says, and it was defended on TV by some of the commentators.
This is his view of America.
The so-called mother creal democracy has some bullshit.
United States of America was built upon the genocide of Native people and slavery.
That is the fabric of the United States of America.
As my book and brother Jay-Z would say, facts.
I'm going to end with this, okay?
Let's say you had a town, a town in which everybody beat his wife.
Every single person beat his wife.
And one day in one house, one guy said, you know what?
This is wrong.
I'm not going to do this anymore.
I'm not going to do this anymore.
So he stopped.
He stopped beating his wife.
And then you had the kids going around in this house.
This house was founded on people beating their wives.
And you say, yeah, but this is the house where we stopped.
Everybody else is still doing it and everybody else has done it.
Everybody who stopped learned it from us.
He talks about genocide.
He talks about founding us on genocide.
He talks about our country being founded on slavery.
Until us, most countries were founded on taking land away from people, native people.
Until us, there was slavery everywhere.
Until the West came along, genocide was a way of life.
The West are the people who stopped this stuff.
It was endemic to the human condition, and we are the people who stopped it.
But leftist just concentrates always.
Leftism always concentrates on the bad things because that is the only attack you can make on freedom.
It's the only attack you can make on capitalism, freedom, dignity, human dignity, all the things that the West has delivered to humankind with America often in the lead.
Not always, but often in the lead.
And because they hate that and they find themselves hating themselves, basically, they have become incredibly twisted.
This is a week of disgrace for the media.
The media has dipped themselves in filth to get at not just Donald Trump, but you and me as well.
Hey, you know, the Daily Wire is where you can get the real news, is now on Apple News.
So add us to your news channels and you can get the latest stories as you're walking around on your phone.
We will just suddenly, you'll open your phone and Ben Shapiro will leap out, grab you by the throat, drag you into your device and tell you everything you need to know.
All right.
We have Nadine Strassen coming up.
Nadine Strassen is the author of the recently published book, HA, Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.
Nadine was the president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008.
I didn't get a chance to ask her what has happened to the ACLU since then, but she really has a lot to say on free speech and it is a terrific interview.
So please listen in.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
I'm so delighted to have the opportunity to be here.
Well, this is, I'm really happy.
I mean, I'm happy just to see a book with the title Hate, Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.
I'm all for resisting hate, and I'm all for free speech especially.
Let's talk about, I mean, one of the things that I really like about the book is how clearly it's written and how you bring so many issues into focus.
So let's try and do that here.
I mean, let's begin with the fact: is there, in fact, a legal definition of hate speech?
Is that something that exists in law?
Thank you so much for the compliment.
And as you well know, but I will now enlighten your listeners, your viewers, there is no such legal concept, even though we hear the word flung about profligately in the public sphere by politicians, even by lawyers who should know better.
And basically, as you know, Drew, precisely because there is no legal definition, people use it as an epithet to denounce whatever speech they hate or find hateful.
And that covers a very wide spectrum indeed.
So is there any speech that in fact the courts have restricted on the basis of hatefulness?
Absolutely not with one caveat.
I think the caveat is very small, but to be precise, the mere fact that speech's message or viewpoint is hateful is never enough to justify censorship.
And I think that's the point that you're stressing.
We lawyers call that bedrock principle of the First Amendment.
That's what the Supreme Court has called it, viewpoint neutrality.
That government, others who wield power, must remain neutral with respect to the viewpoint, idea, message, or content of speech, no matter how much we may loathe it and fear it and believe it to be possibly dangerous.
That is never a justification for censoring it.
Now, here's the caveat, Drew, and that is that even though hateful speech may never be punished because of its message, it, along with speech that conveys any other message, may be punished in particular contexts if in the particular facts and circumstances the speech directly causes certain imminent, serious harm,
which can't be averted in any way other than punishing the speech.
A good example would be a true threat, which is targeted at somebody, means to instill a fear that the person is going to be subject to a violent attack, which is likely to happen.
Another good example is intentional incitement of imminent violence, which is also likely to occur imminently.
Okay.
And what about if I'm in a situation where I'm actually in a fight already and I then utter hate speech, you know, maybe a racial slur while in that fight?
Does that make the crime worse?
Or is that?
Excellent question.
I know what you're getting at.
And the particular facts you throw out might not satisfy the definition, and this is the legal concept of a so-called hate crime or bias crime.
If you take something that's already a crime, and the example that you're using is an assault, presumably, although maybe it was self-defense.
I need to have more facts.
But assume it were an assault.
If the government could show that the crime victim was singled out for a discriminatory reason, such as race, religion, and so forth, then it could be treated as a more serious crime warranting a more serious offense.
But we have to be very careful that just because a racial epithet is uttered in the course of a fight should not automatically elevate it to a hate crime.
Okay, great.
So now I want to talk about some of the threats to free speech.
Before I get to that, I am under the impression that we are living in an actual golden age of free speech, that this court for a long time has been very, to use the now popular word, has been very robust in defending free speech.
Threats To Free Speech00:13:50
Is that a fair assessment?
That's really true that the United States Supreme Court, for all of its division on so many constitutional law and civil liberties issues, and despite its extremely broad ideological diversity from Sotomayor and Ginsburg on the left to Alito and Gorsuch on the right, they are almost unanimous on all of the important Supreme Court cases on free speech and particularly on hate speech.
If I may give you and your audience a very recent example, Drew, which I think they'll find interesting.
One of the court's most recent decisions, which was issued at the end of its last term in June, unanimously struck down a federal hate speech law that was contained in the trademark and trade name sections of the federal statutes.
Specifically, that law barred granting of federal trade name or trademark protection to a term that government inspectors deemed to be disparaging or demeaning on the basis of race, ethnicity.
So you remembering the case, it was called Mattal versus Tam.
It involved Simon Tam, an Asian American rock musician who had a band consisting of other Asian American male rock musicians, and they named their band the Slants.
Obviously, that's traditionally a derogatory term for Asian people of Asian descent.
Obviously, that was not the reason why Simon Tam and his bandmates chose the name.
Rather, they were seeking the opposite message, declaring their pride in their ethnicity, seeking to reclaim the term, as many LGBT rights activists have claimed, reclaimed formerly disparaging terms, and in some contexts, still disparaging.
It depends who says it, right, such as queer and dyke.
And so what was interesting, when the Supreme Court, you know, 9 to 0 struck down that law, they were respecting and enforcing not only robust freedom of speech, but also robust equality rights, that Simon Tam should have an equal right to express his pride in his ethnic heritage, regardless of some government officials' decision.
Well, the majority of the public might view it the wrong way as disparaging.
So the book is called Hate, Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.
I've traveled to universities.
There are many college kids and I presume they're professors who feel that hate speech should be shouted down or barred.
What does it mean when you say we should resist it with free speech, not censorship?
How do you resist it with free speech?
And I thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to stress that message because the only verb in the title of my book is resist.
I agree that we have much too much hateful attitudes and discriminatory action.
And those of us who are deeply committed to human rights have a responsibility to do what we can and advocate that our government does what it can to check those problems.
Interestingly enough, experience in this country and around the world shows that non-censorial alternatives are far more effective.
First of all, something that we in the United States may take for granted, but we should not, because many other countries that are comparable in other ways do not sufficiently have or enforce anti-discrimination laws, laws that make it illegal to actually discriminate in matters such as employment, education, housing, voting, and so forth.
So let's start with the fact that if somebody is actually engaging in discrimination, that is illegal and perhaps even criminal and has to be, those anti-discrimination laws have to be enforced.
We also talked about another important example, Drew, and that is when somebody is targeted for a violent crime, or for that matter, a property crime, such as vandalism of certain religious institutions, that has to be treated very seriously and prosecuted.
And in a number of countries that vigorously enforce laws against hate speech, they're not so effectively enforcing laws against racist violence.
And if I may use a historic example that will resonate with many people, certainly with me as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who almost died at the forced labor camp in Bruchenwald, Germany, the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany, many people wrongly assume that, oh, if only there had been an anti-hate speech law, that would never have happened.
The Holocaust could have been prevented.
Not true.
The Weimar Republic, during which Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, had very strict hate speech laws, very comparable to the laws that Germany still strictly enforces.
And those laws were repeatedly enforced, including against Nazis.
And in fact, the leading Jewish organization in Germany at the time said the laws are by and large being fairly enforced.
It's not as if there are weak prosecutions.
And the Nazis loved it, by the way.
This is one of the reasons why censorship is not only ineffective, but may even be counterproductive.
Like a lot of hate mongers in this country, they welcomed the attention and the martyrdom and the sympathy that they gained from the prosecutions.
And the failure was to protect against actual violence because the Nazis got away with actual murder, literally physical assaults and outright assassinations of their political opponents and critics and Jews and other minorities.
Beyond that, we should raise our voices in various ways to counter hateful messages.
And that includes proactively educating our society starting at very young ages in values of tolerance and mutual respect and decency and equal human rights.
It includes giving support to people and groups who are disparaged by hateful speech so that they know that the hate mongers are only a small minority in this society.
It includes refuting and rebutting arguments against the inequality of certain people, advocacy of legislation that will protect their rights against discrimination, counter protest organizing.
Basically, these are the tools that we have used in this country.
I would be the last person to say we've arrived at liberty and justice for all.
I spend full time trying to inch us closer to those grand goals.
But I would have to admit at a fairly mature age that we are much, much, much closer to those goals than when I was born in 1950.
And We're closer only because of the exercise of non-censorial counterspeech, anti-discrimination, and all the other positive measures that I've laid out.
That's, you know, it's so true.
I mean, political correctness itself, which I know is not a legal instrument, but it's still, it makes hateful speech funny, it makes it naughty, it makes it seem rebellious, and it just does the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do.
Everything you shut down comes back more powerfully.
What do you see now today as the biggest threat to free speech?
I think that the biggest threat to free speech today is what it has always been, and that is lack of public understanding of free speech and therefore lack of support for it, which is why I thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to try to put out some information.
I am very enthusiastic about all of the campus activism that we've been seeing in the past few years in support of human rights.
And I like to see the glass half full as an activist.
I always do that.
And even though I'm distressed by statistics and surveys that indicate that a substantial majority of college students, as you indicated, Drew, would support censoring hateful speech.
I know that that comes from a very positive, very commendable motive on their part, namely very strong support for and respect for the equality and dignity of their fellow students, members of minority groups, and real compassion to protect them from the slings and arrows of hateful words.
But I don't want to single out today's college students because throughout my entire adult lifetime, every survey of every group in our population has always showed a distressing lack of knowledge of even what the First Amendment is.
And when people hear what it is, they usually say, oh, we should get rid of that.
Sounds dangerous.
In all seriousness, I think the best way to sum up a very prevalent attitude was in the title of a book by a wonderful writer who died a few years ago, Nat Hantoff, and it was called Freedom of Speech for Me, but Not for Thee, How the Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
It's true.
Now, I mean, maybe this is my own bias.
I'm perfectly willing to admit it.
I'm a conservative, but it does seem to me, for instance, when I look online and I see Mark Zuckerberg posting who's going to be labeled hate speech on Facebook, I see Twitter shadow banning conservative voices.
I see Google dropping.
It becomes very hard to find conservative sources on Google.
I mean, do you see that as a threat that that kind of, when the social media has become so big, so monopolistic, do you see that as a threat to speech or is it them exercising their free speech?
Oh, excellent, very tough questions because as a literal matter, they are in fact as a private sector entity.
And I suppose you as a conservative would very much applaud that fact, and I certainly do too, as a civil libertarian, that the private sector individuals and companies that are engaged in the communications field have their own First Amendment free speech rights, and those include making editorial type decisions about what messages will be conveyed and which will not be conveyed.
On the other hand, if you look at the actual real world power that some of these companies have, and you used the word monopoly, we have antitrust laws to make sure that those in the private sector do not wield monopoly power that for all practical purposes would be at least as suppressive as government.
And I say at least as because by all accounts, Facebook is engaging in more censorship every week than all governments throughout history around the world have been able to engage in.
Last time I saw a statistic, and it was about half a year ago, so I'm sure the numbers have escalated.
Facebook said that it was taking down almost 300,000 hateful messages per month.
And that gets to the second part of your very astute and challenging question, Drew, and that is, is it a problem in terms of are they slanted towards taking down conservative messages rather than other messages?
Well, first and foremost, they can exercise their power any way they choose.
If they chose to rampantly censor Democrats, Republicans, African Americans, women, gay people, you name it, they would have a wide opportunity to do that.
Now, there might be some anti-discrimination laws that might kick in, but certainly not on the basis of ideology.
Secondly, however, those who have studied these patterns and complained about it have complaints all across the political spectrum.
There is a group of almost 80 civil rights and civil liberties organizations that for years now have been complaining to Facebook that it disproportionately takes down as allegedly hateful speech, speech that's engaged in by Black Lives Matter activists, people who are protesting against police abuse and other injustice in the criminal justice system, pipeline protesters.
Some of these critics actually call it race book.
That's how disturbed they are.
So I think wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you should be very wary of this enormous power, which so far is not being checked by any antitrust enforcement and cannot be and should not be checked by the First Amendment itself.
Really Interesting Conversation00:05:12
I have to stop you there.
I am out of time, Nadine.
Really interesting conversation.
The book is Hate, Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.
Any friend of free speech is a friend of the show on the left or the right.
It's really nice talking to you and I appreciate it.
A delight to be here.
Thank you so much, Drew.
Thank you.
All right.
Got to get to stuff I like.
This is stuff and you hate it.
Where did we get that?
That is great.
That is great.
We should get his name so we can give him credit for that.
All right.
You know, we talked about Tom Wolfe who died this week, a great American writer.
And I just want to recommend if you have never read the book, The Right Stuff, this 1979 book on the space program, the beginnings of the space program, the Mercury Astronauts, you really should read it.
The movie is okay, but the book is terrific.
And one of the things about it, and one of the things that Wolf did that was so great is he reinvigorated American patriotism with a slight dash, not a slight dash, with a major dash of irony by being ironic about American know-how, by being ironic about the right stuff, even coining the phrase the right stuff.
He reminded us of what it was that was great about that time in America.
It was the right stuff.
So even though we were laughing and even though we were making fun of, you know, Chuck Yeager, the way Chuck Yeager talked, he has a wonderful thing about how Chuck Yeager's calm during emergencies informed the way that airplane pilots speak today when you get on the plane and say, this is your pilot speaking.
We're going to have a little bumpy ride.
That's all that kind of comes from Chuck Yeager's cool while he was a test pilot.
And he writes about how all of this stuff informed, was created by the media, you know, purposely created by the media, but also had a reality, especially in the person of John Glenn.
John Glenn, one of the great Americans, a great fighter pilot, I believe in the Korean War, maybe he was in the World War II as well.
I can't remember.
But he was a great fighter pilot and then became a great pilot and then finally a great astronaut.
He was known for the fact that his heartbeat never sped up no matter what was happening to him, including when he had to do things.
I don't want to get too graphic, but they had to do some sexual things to test so they could test their fluids and all this stuff.
And he would just be completely calm during the whole thing.
But my favorite, one of my favorite scenes of John Glenn in the book is that he's on top of this rocket, right?
I'll read you a little portion of it.
John is up on top of the rocket, the Atlas, a squat brute.
This is from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.
Twice the diameter of the Redstone, he's lying on his back in the human holster of the Mercury capsule.
The count keeps dragging on.
There's hold after hold because of the weather.
The clouds are so heavy that will make it impossible to monitor the launch properly.
Every day for five days, Glenn has psyched himself up for the big event only to have a cancellation because of the weather.
Now he's been up there for four hours, four and a half hours, five hours.
He's been stuffed into the capsule, lying on his back for five hours.
He's drained.
He makes his way back to Hangar S, and they start taking the suit off and unwiring him.
And he's sitting there in the ready room with just the outer covering of the suit off, and he's still on the mesh lining underneath.
NASA comes trooping, a delegation from NASA comes trooping in to confront him with the following message from on high.
John, we hate to trouble you with this, but we're having a problem with your wife.
And he says, my wife, yes, she won't cooperate, John, cooperate, John.
Perhaps you can give her a call.
There's a phone hookup right there.
Now, John Glenn's wife, Annie, had a severe stutter, a severe stutter.
And what was happening was Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, wanted to do a hit with her on TV, and he was trying to get in.
And they wanted John Glenn to talk his wife into letting her on TV.
And she was terrified because she couldn't speak well.
And this is the scene from the movie in which Ed Harris doing one of his great performances, many great performances, but this is one of his best, as John Glenn talks to his wife on the phone about the vice president.
Annie, it's me.
Are you all right?
Tell me what's wrong.
J-Johnson on TV.
Vice President?
Tell her to let him in with the networks, John.
It's coverage, you know.
It's important, John.
Means a lot.
Huh?
Go ahead.
That's it.
Annie.
Listen to me.
Anna.
If you don't want the vice president or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that's it, as far as I'm concerned.
They are not coming in.
And I will back you up all the way 100% on this.
And you tell them that.
Okay?
I don't want Johnson or any of the rest of them to set as much as one toe inside our house.
Okay.
You tell them that astronaut John Glenn told you to say that.
Vice President Ban Order00:01:29
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