Dave Smith and Robbie Bernsten dissect the MIT, UPenn, and Harvard congressional hearing regarding genocide calls, arguing these constitute incitement rather than protected speech. They contrast this with Elon Musk's reinstatement of Alex Jones, citing his accurate predictions on 9/11 and opposition to Iraq as evidence against cancel culture's effectiveness. The hosts conclude that while polls for reinstating controversial figures undermine true free speech standards, the shift toward platforms hosting skeptics like Tucker Carlson forces society to confront government overreach despite lingering concerns about misinformation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roll Back The State00:02:02
Fill her up!
You are listening to the gas human.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What's up, brother?
How are you feeling?
You just got back from your end of the year fucking spectacular show.
How was it?
I think it went great.
I'm excited to get it out.
It covered the fact that they've been paying to store the border wall.
I went in on the EV stuff, the rules of war, some stuff you kind of, you need the slides for.
So it was a good time.
It clicked.
I worked hard on it.
Very, very nice.
And that you were up in New Hampshire at the end.
Yeah, got to hang out at the shell with the Aggie.
No, the egg is in Albany.
I'm sorry.
The shell.
That's what I meant.
Yeah, what comes first?
You know, it gets confusing.
I had a good time with those guys, those lunatics drinking, just carrying their guns all over the place.
But they show up.
They appreciate what I do, and they're a loyal audience.
I like those guys up there.
I love it.
Happy to hear that.
Much love to the Free State Project and all the New Hampshire guys who support us.
We appreciate them.
And then, of course, me and you, we got our next big show is our New Year's extravaganza.
New Year's Eve, me, you, Chris Fega, a live stand-up comedy show and a live part of the problem and a meet and greet afterward, a whole New Year's Eve hangout in East Rutherford, New Jersey, right across the water from New York City.
If you're in the tri-state area and you don't have plans for New Year's Eve, make sure come on out, spend New Year's Eve with us.
Free Speech In New Hampshire00:10:48
It's going to be a great time.
The ticket link we will put in the episode description.
It'll be up on my website very soon, comicdavesmith.com.
So that should be a lot of fun too.
So yeah, we got some cool stuff coming up.
Hell yeah.
All right.
So the maybe the theme of today's show is going to be free speech in the United States of America and where exactly we are at, which is a pretty big deal.
There's a let me start with this.
So there's a concept of free speech that's pretty important to civilization, particularly to modern civilization.
And free speech is an interesting concept, isn't it?
Because there's obviously there's like, there's the First Amendment.
And as a lot of people say, it's first for a reason.
And the First Amendment is, well, it's not freedom of speech is not the only thing that's addressed.
There's several key freedoms, but even let me actually, you know what?
Let me just pull up.
Let me read the actual text of the First Amendment.
Okay.
So to be clear, because I want to kind of get into this, right?
So the First Amendment says, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people to peacefully people peacefully to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
And that sounds kind of in today's language, a little all over the place, but it actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it, that the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights is basically saying, okay, so the federal government isn't going to force any religion on you.
And they won't prohibit you from exercising any of those religions.
And they can't abridge the freedom of speech.
And they can't abridge the freedom of the press.
or the right of the people to peacefully assemble and to petition their government.
But it's all kind of attached to the same thing, right?
Basically, what it's saying is that if we are to be free people, then we have to have the freedom to think whatever we want and say whatever we want.
And whether that be what we believe the whole meaning of the world is, religion, or if that is just saying whatever we want to say, or if that is saying what we want to say, that might be complaining about the government, or if that might be saying what we want to say in the form of a press that's free to say what they want to say.
It's all kind of, even though it's said in several different ways, it's all kind of the same thing, right?
Different, but kind of the same.
The idea is that if you are free, you have to have the freedom to think and the freedom to speak and to say whatever you want to.
And that is, now let's be clear about this, okay?
There is also a difference between the First Amendment and freedom of speech, because the First Amendment says that the government can't interfere with this at all.
The government can't interfere with freedom of speech.
But freedom of speech itself is bigger than just that.
It's not just what the government can interfere with.
It's also, you know, just a thing.
So in the same way that like you might say, let's say you were to say that the government can't interfere with your freedom to marry whoever you want to.
That doesn't mean that other people, other maybe other people can interfere with that.
But there's something about this principle that the First Amendment says no one should interfere with this.
Now, it's not a violation of the First Amendment necessarily if somebody else just interferes with your freedom of speech.
But there still is something very important about freedom of speech.
So we all can interfere with individuals' ability to say what they want to say in lots of different ways.
We can, you know, we could not have someone on our podcast, Rob, if we don't like what they have to say.
You could kick someone out of your house if you don't like what they have to say.
And I think we all accept that this is true.
These abstract freedoms from the radical libertarian position don't really exist.
You don't have a freedom to say whatever you want to say, but you kind of have a freedom to not, I don't know, a freedom to be allowed to say what you want to say as long as you're on the property of someone who's willing to allow you to have it said.
But where that balance lands, I think means a lot to how healthy your society is.
So it's bigger than just the First Amendment.
There's, in other words, it's true that in my house, I have a right, if anybody says something I don't like, to kick them out of my house.
However, if I was having a discussion group in my house and I said, hey, let's come here and have a discussion group.
And someone said, Hey, Dave, I think you got something wrong on your last podcast.
And I said, okay, well, then get out of my house.
I think we'd all kind of agree that that's not healthy.
You know, like if they were completely respectful and just were like, hey, I want to talk to you about this thing you said.
I think I have an alternative way of looking at this that might be better than the way you're looking at it.
And I said, get out of my house right now.
We'd all go, there's something not positive about this and kind of not very civilized about this.
And so if you have a society where people are so unwilling to hear what you have to say, and I think we've all experienced this, say, over the last few years, where personal relationships are fractured by the fact that you might have a different political opinion than someone else.
I'm just saying, in addition to just the pure, like the government never has a right to interfere, I also think that says something unhealthy about a society if that's pervasive.
Does that make sense, Rob?
I'm on board.
Okay.
So free speech has been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, because I do think it's an indicator of where your society is at.
And in a lot of cases, when we're talking about this today, look, if we're talking about straight up First Amendment violations, like government interfering in freedom of speech, there's plenty of examples of that.
You know, you can think of Julian Assange or what was the guy?
I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who's looking at jail time over that meme about Hillary Clinton.
That's a horrible story.
I don't remember the guy's name, but it's a horrible story.
But so, right.
So that's, there's that.
And there's lots of other examples of this type of thing where you're like, oh, that is straight up a violation of the First Amendment.
Like the government is prosecuting something for saying something that they don't like.
In the case of Julian Assange publishing true things that they don't like.
Douglas Mackey.
Okay.
So anyway.
But then there's also other examples that are still kind of First Amendment violations or maybe debatable First Amendment violations.
But either way, they still say something very bad about our society.
So an example of this would be, say, big tech censorship when the government is colluding with these companies, right?
Now that's that I'd certainly say that's on the scale of government interfering with what you can and can't say.
But even if the government wasn't involved, as we know they were, you'd still go, that's still a pretty bad sign for a society if you can't express your political views on social media, right?
It's just not a good, it's not a good direction to go in.
It's not a good sign for society, as I recently said on Joe Rogan's podcast, that when TikTok has this hashtag Osama bin Laden's letter to America or whatever it was, Osama was right or something like that, that they, that the response is the guardian taking down Osama bin Laden's letter to America.
It's not a healthy sign.
It's not a good sign for your society.
And then you have examples like speech being stifled on college campuses, which is something we've been talking about for a long time and has been a major problem.
And this is also one of those gray areas where all of these college campuses either get direct funding from the government or, at the very least, their loans are guaranteed or, for the most part these days, given by the federal government, in which case, you know, the the students loans are given by the government,
in which case you can at least make a strong argument that this isn't just a private company banning certain speech, that this is.
You know, this is kind of at least the government's very involved in what we're talking about now.
Even if the government wasn't involved at all, you would, I think still it would be reasonable to say that if an uh, an institution for higher learning, someone was making a political argument and you were to say you're, that argument is banned or you're expelled for making that argument, it's not a great um indicator of what that institution of higher learning is really doing.
Defining Calls For Genocide00:14:34
Does that make sense?
I agree 100.
I'm digging this.
You're digging in deep okay, all right, I just wanted that as kind of like a preface.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So a few days ago, as i'm sure you saw rob, there were uh, there was a, a congressional hearing where three presidents of Ivy League universities uh, testified before Congress.
It was, uh, what were the colleges?
They, it was Harvard.
Uh U, PENN and uh, i'm blanking on the third, but we're about to see it anyway.
So uh, they were, they were asked.
There was this very pointed uh moment.
Sarah Night Live made a not very good sketch about this.
Uh, but there was.
You know, that's what Saturant LIVE does.
Uh, I was actually excited when I saw Sarah Night LIVE did a sketch about this.
I go, I bet they could nail this one, because this is so funny, and they didn't anyway.
Um, but so here here was the exchange.
Let's play it and discuss a little bit at Mit.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Mit's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
If targeted at individuals not making public statements, yes or no?
Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment.
I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.
But you've heard chance for Intifada.
I've heard chance, which can be anti-Semitic depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.
So those would not be according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules.
That would be investigated as harassment, if pervasive and severe.
All right, well, Miguel's at the perspective there.
I'm sorry.
So it's MIT, UPenn, and Harvard.
So, Rob, I see you smiling already.
Sorry, it's hard.
Listen, I do understand.
Here's the thing I want to express going into this.
There is so much ridiculousness and hypocrisy on all sides of this that it just shows you how bad.
It's like, wow, how have we fallen to this level as a society?
But so just with that as preface, but is there anything you wanted to say about that first exchange?
I mean, I, you know, I'm not a censorship person and I usually am like, go say whatever the fuck you want to say.
I think when you say, I want the genocide of a certain group of people where even I can understand, oh, I could see why you can't say that on a college campus.
Like, you know, I'm not saying Nazis should be taken off of Twitter and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to have whatever opinion you want to have.
But I would think if I got up in the middle of MIT and I said, why are there black people here?
These should be slaves.
These people should all be slaves.
And I seriously wanted to represent that opinion in the middle of the college campus.
I could see why I couldn't be on that college campus because that's actually a call for violence.
It actually.
But here's the crazy thing, dude.
It's not even here.
Here's what's so ridiculous about this is that, and you'll see as the other two college presidents give their answers.
These colleges and these are Ivy League schools, right?
Like these are people who are supposed to be way smarter than me and you, Rob.
This is MIT.
This is what you go to MIT for an education for.
No, but it's not even like these.
The students are supposed to be way smarter than me and you.
So the heads of these universities should be like levels beyond us.
But what's crazy is that they have so abandoned any semblance of reason long ago that they can't just have the obvious response to any of these questions because they're all just in this, They're all living well within the woke mind virus that they just so.
Here's the thing.
If you were to say, now, this looks really bad when any anyone from any Ivy League college, if you're asked the question, is calling for the genocide of Jews, you know, against a bullying policy, which means you have a bullying, bullying policy yeah, you're like.
Well, first of all, here's the thing is that if anyone and i'm not saying no one is, but if anyone is calling for the genocide, meaning they're saying hey, we should go, as what most people think of when you think of the term calling for genocide, you'd go.
They're saying hey, we should kill all the Jews.
Hey, right now, let's start killing all of the Jews.
What does it mean to you and not just you Rob, but you Listener, Viewer what does it mean to you if someone says they are calling for the genocide of Jews?
I, I think what comes to your mind is someone going hey, we should kill all of the Jews right now.
Now, if that's the case, then you don't really have to worry about what Mit's bullying policy is, because that is an incitement to violence that you could.
You shouldn't be talking to Mit.
Member of Congress, you should be talking to the FBI.
That's who you should be talking to about that right, because that is an obvious by by the Supreme Court's definition and everyone that's not protected free speech.
That is a direct call to violence.
So the only if you're a legislator, you don't have to go grill a someone who works at a university.
You can just go prosecute those people, right.
But so obviously almost that's not what we're really talking about here.
So when she says the, the response that the mit lady has is, she goes.
Well I, I mean, I haven't seen anyone calling for genocide.
I've seen calls for Anti-fadas, which could be Anti-semitic, because the definition of Antifada is just like an uprising, like or maybe even a violent uprising.
But that doesn't necessarily mean you're saying, kill all the Jews, so that anyway.
But they don't.
Here's the thing is that they can't just defend free speech, yet they're trying to in this instance.
They would in any other instance.
So you're saying the lady should just answer, yes, not only would that be a violation of our bullying policies, it would be against the law and we'd hope for the government to uh, to get involved.
The obvious, I haven't seen anything calling for genocide.
The obvious answer is, goes if anybody is making an explicit call to kill other people, then I would say, shouldn't you be doing something about this right, and have you seen such a thing in government?
Yeah obviously, forget our bullying policy.
That's against the law, but no.
So if this woman were like, not an insane, woke college person, she'd go, wait a minute, in a direct incitement and call to violence is illegal.
And if you have any evidence of that, then yes, go prosecute those people.
However, political speech is protected.
But she can't say that because they don't believe that.
Because if anybody ever said, oh, they're calling for a trans genocide or a black genocide or a Latino genocide, then she'd be like, oh, that's a violation of hate speech and blah, blah, blah.
We have to kick them out of there.
They're just not sure whether or not Jews qualify in the fucking, like the goddamn oppression special Olympics or whatever this is.
So that's why they don't know what to say.
But so they're all like, there's just hypocrisy all around.
But what she's saying is like just being caught in this thing where she's almost like, am I making the free speech argument, even though I've spent my career being against free speech?
Because we've kind of determined that we like to think that the brown ones are the more oppressed.
And so it doesn't really jive with our worldview that maybe the I guess what just really made me laugh is the concept of someone, the pervasive calling for genocide would create an issue.
Or also, isn't conceptually genocide worse than if it was on a personal level?
Because like wouldn't be kill one person ridiculous.
It's so ridiculous.
It's less violent than calling for not just the killing of the one individual, but everyone who has a similar likeness to the individual?
That's the idea of going, hey, we have to kill everyone in the group.
Well, it would be a problem if they said we had to kill one person in the group.
Yeah, then we do.
I don't think that's the way math works.
Aren't you?
I mean, give me a name and then sure.
Yeah, that's right.
All right, let's keep playing.
Ms. McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct?
Yes or no?
If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.
Yes.
I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?
If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.
So the answer is yes.
It is a context-dependent decision.
It's a context-dependent decision.
That's your testimony today.
Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context.
That is not bullying or harassment.
This is the easiest question to answer.
Yes, Ms. McGill.
So is your testimony that you will not answer yes.
If it is, if the speech is, if the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment.
Yes.
Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?
The speech is not harassment?
This is unacceptable, Ms. McGill.
I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
It can be harassment.
The answer is yes.
And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
It can be, depending on the context.
What's the context?
Targeted as an individual, targeted at an individual?
It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals.
Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?
Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism?
I will ask you one more time.
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment?
Yes or no?
Anti-Semitic rhetoric.
And is it anti-Semitic rhetoric?
Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation.
That is actionable conduct and we do take action.
So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct, correct?
Again, it depends on the context.
It does not depend on the context.
The answer is yes.
And this is why you should resign.
These are unacceptable answers across the board.
All right.
So that, I mean, I don't know what to say.
It's pretty wild, dude.
It's pretty wild that these college, like top-level administrators could sit there while you say, well, they couldn't answer this question.
You know, it's the, I think the proper way to understand this is that they just do see the world through this cultural Marxist, woke, identitarian lens.
And what they're trying to figure out is whether the Jews are the oppressed or the oppressors.
Because they go, well, look, because the thing is, if you go, is calling for the genocide of white people, you know, grounds to be suspended or whatever, they wouldn't want to say yes to that because they're like, well, no, that's kind of justified, you know?
And then they're like, Jews, well, where do they exactly do they fit into all of this?
And they can't just answer like the obvious answer, which is like, yes, calls for genocide.
If these people, if you were to just say boys are boys and girls are girls, they would defend you being suspended.
But they can't say it if you're just saying, is the genocide of Jews like an acceptable thing to call for?
They almost need to ask, like, excuse me, I'm sorry.
But before I answer that question, are Jews considered white?
The Woke Game And Definitions00:05:25
Yes, that is exactly it.
I'm a little confused because a lot of them look white and a lot of them are wealthy.
And they can't even like understand that the optics of someone going is calling for genocide too far.
And they wouldn't go, well, yeah, of course.
But okay.
So that's insane.
However, also you got to ask yourself, if you really want to understand this, to go, what do we mean?
What exactly do they mean are calls for genocide?
And so that's what you should kind of focus on.
And so, look, I don't know.
And I'm not saying that there's no college kids who have said all of the Jews should be killed or whatever would meet the technical definition of genocide.
A lot of the Jews should be killed or they should be sterilized or whatever, but I don't really think that's what's being said a lot.
I think what's going on is people are saying things like, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.
Now, what does that mean?
To some people, it probably means all of the Jews should be kicked out of Israel and they should have to go back to Europe or America or wherever.
And I'm certainly not saying that I believe that, but that's not genocide exactly, right?
Or if people are saying, whatever people are saying.
So here's the problem is that both of these guys, or both of these ladies, are kind of playing this woke game where they're going, like you know that even that woman who's saying oh, the calls for genocide of Jews well, now it's like okay, if you go oh well, that should get you, you know, if that violates your code of conduct and therefore you should be suspended or expelled or whatever, it's like okay, but how are you defining what is a call for genocide?
Are you defining a call for genocide if someone were to say, you know, if they were look, even something you might really disagree with, that I might really disagree with if they were to say um, Hamas are freedom fighters.
Is that a call for genocide?
Is just chanting from the river to the sea?
Is that a call for genocide?
Like, what exactly do you mean by a call for genocide?
Because now, aren't you just kind of playing the same woke game and going like oh like, that's kind of the point here right, is that all of these people are just dumb hypocrites.
So I I while I agree with you the mistake of the uh college professors or deans or whatever these uh ladies are um, is you?
You just got to answer the question.
The answer to the question of whether or not a call for genociding Jews is yes.
If the following question is, well, then why aren't you kicking kids off your campus for opposing Israel?
Then the answer is, well, we do not equate, of course, opposing Israel with genocide and there's no reason for that to be in violation of our policy, because we view it as free speech.
And then it's back on her to try and prove that.
Well, that is genocide, rob.
You understand that.
You understand the issue here, right?
Yeah, the reason why they can't do that is because they've spent their entire careers going.
If you say there's no such thing as a man who becomes a woman, then you support the trans genocide.
So they're people who have spent their life in this woke insanity right, where their definition of genocide is different, so that you're 100 right.
But they can't say that because they have a whole different lens of how to view the world.
So they're going like, i'm confused.
So they're going like, well, I mean the calling for a Trans genocide, which would be saying, you don't believe people can switch genders, that would be wrong.
But calling for a Jewish genocide which would be saying, from the river to the sea.
Well, that would be right.
And so they can't say that's not a call for genocide, because they use that as their example in everything that they talk about.
So they kind of like are, yes if, if they were sane rob, and they weren't trapped in this woke mind virus, they would just say what you do you're saying.
They traditionally have a loose definition of genocide.
Yes, to include uh uh, speech that just opposes to groups, because they're of the outlook that speech leads to violence.
Yes, exactly okay, speech is violence, rob.
That's their view.
And just for the sake of accuracy, do we like we know that?
I guess loosely, that exists on college campus?
Do we actually know that Harvard, or like these people uh, I guess purvey that point of view Okay, to be completely fair, I don't know that these three individuals.
I'm just saying typical colleges seem to have I know that these three universities have all suffered from this plague.
And I know that if these three people didn't have that view, they'd be able to just say, yes, obviously calls for genocide are over the line.
They, Rob, they have a code of conduct for bullying and harassment and they won't say that calls for genocide violate it.
I mean, what more proof do you need than that?
Rob, come on, man.
Moink Ground Beef Sponsorship00:02:21
I mean, you said it before yourself.
They're literally going, we have a speech code.
And they go, do calls for genocide violate your speech code.
And they go, if they turn into bullying, then yes.
If that, if those calls for genocide end up being mean to someone, well, then yeah, in that case, it would violate the spirit of our speech codes.
So that's where we're at.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Discriminating Against Asians On Campus00:08:10
There's here, this is what I heard Sigar Njadi said this recently.
I thought this was a very good way to put it.
And he's, I, he, I, I don't know what he is.
He's Asian.
He's Indian, which is Asian, right?
So he was talking about how, you know, there was this recent Supreme Court suit where Asians and I think Jews were involved in it too, where they won about, you know, discriminating against college admissions.
And he was talking about it like this.
And I thought this was a really good way to put it, where he was like, a lot of the Asian activists were kind of left in this position where they had two options.
And you could, for people who don't know, Asians are very smart and they do very well on SAT scores and they get very good grades and they're just, you know, for what I, you know, I'm not going to pretend I understand exactly why.
I think it has something to do with that.
They're smart people and something to do with family structure and things like that, but whatever.
So there's so many of these colleges are almost so overrepresented.
in their qualified Asian candidates that they and they're concerned with diversity and all this shit and quotas and like who's going to get in and who won't get in that they're actually discriminating against Asians because if they just went off merit, they would be like very high percentage Asians.
And they want to have a nice equal percentage of like Asians and blacks and Latinos and whites and whatever.
So it ends up in effect discriminating, discriminating against Asians to just be meritocratic about the situation.
So what they do is they try to keep it diverse.
So there was this lawsuit where a whole bunch of Asians were like, hey, this is fucked up.
And he was basically saying that the Asians had one of two options.
They could either say, hey, we believe in meritocracy and this is wrong to discriminate against us.
If we've done, if we have better grades and better SAT scores and all of this, then we should get in.
And you shouldn't discriminate against us just because you'll have too many Asians because that's racist.
And then the other option was they could have said, hey, us Asians are also an oppressed minority group.
And so we should also be given privilege.
You know what I mean?
And like, so they could have like gone into the woke battlefield and tried to win that.
Or they could have said, hey, I'm against the whole woke thing.
Like, forget this and just base, you know, and it seems to me what this congresswoman is saying is like, no, let me go into this woke battlefield and say, hey, if you're going to say this is a call for a trans genocide or this is a call for a black genocide, well, then I'm going to say when anyone chants River to the sea, that's a call for a Jewish genocide.
So, hey, how are you protecting your minority students and you're a racist for not, you know, agreeing with us?
That seems to be where they're settling.
And this is just so insane and just so like it's bananas where obviously, Rob, as you kind of alluded to before, the answer that anyone at any professor, let alone an administrator, let alone a president of a university, let alone the president of an Ivy League university, should obviously be able to say, look, political views are legitimate,
even really egregious ones.
And you have a right to say that.
Our college kids have a right to have their political opinions.
And yes, if they're advocating or inciting violence against anyone, then that should be over the line.
And by the way, that's a crime.
So government, go ahead and deal with that.
But we are not going to get in the business of policing the political views of our students.
That's obviously the correct answer.
But they can't, they can't say that because if they were to say that, that would undo everything they've stood for for decades.
So now they're left doing this nonsense.
I think it's just nice.
It's hilarious.
College deans are finally taking the stance against pervasive calls for genocide.
Finally, somebody.
Dude, you know, a one-off or a two-off.
We're all okay with that, but when it becomes pervasive.
Well, you know, here's the thing, right?
It's you can't let this be too much of a slippery slope.
And by the way, actually, as much as I am not a fan of the U.S. federal government or the Supreme Court or any of the U.S. federal institutions, the Supreme Court has actually been pretty good about this.
And they've defined what incitement to violence actually is and what free speech actually is.
And it's like, look, you have to have a direct call to violence.
This is why, by the way, even as everybody, including Congress and basically every left-wing pundit on cable news has said that Donald Trump incited an insurrection, there's a reason why for all the charges being thrown at Donald Trump, you have not seen him charged with inciting an insurrection.
And the reason for that is that they know they have no case.
They know they have no case because Donald Trump, in order to be charged with inciting an insurrection, he would have had to have said, I want you to go overthrow the government.
Like you can't be charged with inciting violence unless you actually incited violence in the United States of America.
It's still one of the few good things we have protections over.
Like I can't just go, if I go, Rob's a piece of shit and I hope bad things happen to him.
And by the way, I believe that.
And if I were to say that, but if I were to say that and then someone goes and does something to you, I can't be charged for inciting violence against you.
I could only be charged if I said, I want you to go, you know, assault Rob.
Then I could be charged with that.
And by the way, that I do not believe.
I believe the first part, but not the second part.
I believe Rob should be assaulted, but I don't want you to assault Rob.
Anyway, so that's America's pretty good about that.
But so that is like a pretty firm line in the sand that it's, it's like you can't incite, you can't ask someone to go assault somebody.
You can't give someone money to go assault somebody.
That is not free speech or protected speech.
We actually have a fairly reasonable interpretation of what is free speech versus what is incitement to violence in strictly legally speaking in our country.
Okay.
But the popular understanding of these terms has gotten completely out of whack.
So there are people all over who will claim that Donald Trump incited an insurrection.
They'll claim that that's what he was doing when he just said, go peacefully protest, but let your voices be heard.
And then that resulted in some people entering the Capitol building, whether or not there were feds who were escorting them in or encouraging them in, all of that aside.
Okay.
But so now we have this situation where on college campuses, anything can be determined to be inciting violence.
Drawing A Clear Line With Stalin00:06:10
It doesn't matter what you say.
If you say anything against one group, then that can be, but look, I'll say this, right?
What actually is the line when it comes to these type of conversations, like, or these type of declarations?
I remember I had a, there's, there's this guy, uh, Craig Pasta, who I've done several shows with.
He's a, he's a left-wing guy, and he's, I like him a lot.
He's hosted me and Clint Russell in panels with Jimmy Dore like a few times.
We kind of talked about where like the left wing and the libertarians agree on anti-war issues and stuff like that.
Um, we've had some great podcasts together.
So one time he uh he had a podcast with us and he said, he asked me, he goes, Hey, would you and Clint want to come on with an anti-war socialist and talk about where like the socialist left and the libertarian right agree on anti-war issues?
And I was like, sure, absolutely happy to do it.
So he came on and the guy who he had on, I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who he had on was not a socialist, he was a communist.
And he immediately, the point of the panel was supposed to be like what we agree on.
And he immediately started talking about how communism was great and Joseph Stalin was actually a really great leader and Mao Zedong was actually a great leader.
And they were really great people who are totally misunderstood.
And they were, you know what I mean?
Like everything they did was right.
And pretty quickly, I was like, all right, I'm not going to be able to just like talk about what I agree with with this guy.
And I was like, yeah, this is insane.
And like, you're just dying all the deaths.
Yeah.
Like, so anyway, it got into this.
And it wasn't even really a debate as much as much as it was just me being like, I'm just, I don't know.
This is stupid.
And I'm not going to like pretend.
I'm not even going to like try to find common ground with this guy.
It's like, okay, sure.
Stalin and Mao Setong were great people.
Whatever.
But look, he had his arguments.
They were really, really dumb arguments.
But I would never in a million years dream of saying that guy should be locked up.
You know, like if you want to stand up there and say, hey, I think Stalin got it right.
I think Mao Setong got it right.
Okay.
I think that's stupid.
And I'm confident that most people won't agree with you.
But that's not, but you see where if you don't have a clear definition of what is incitement to violence or what is supporting genocide, you could easily say that this guy should go to jail or something like that.
And that's crazy.
Like, I don't know.
It's crazy that that guy should go to jail.
Now, maybe you should disagree with him.
You should be able to fucking laugh at him or all of this, but it should be protected political speech that you can say, hey, I think Stalin was right.
And I don't think he killed all these people or whatever, or he did, but he was justified in doing it.
Whatever it is, that's not the same thing as saying, hey, you, I want you to go out and kill a bunch of people.
That's just a different thing.
And it's very important if you're going to have any sense of free speech to have an ability to differentiate between those two things.
Does that make sense?
I don't know.
Okay.
All right.
Let me know what you think.
I listen, I think you're putting a thought in my head.
I hadn't really thought about it.
So, you know, I lean towards what you're saying, but there's still even a distinction in your example, because I guess if someone adamantly is supporting, let's say, like we need a, I don't know, because I don't really think we should be rounding up neo-Nazis, but I somewhat understand that advocating for like, I guess there's a difference between a Stalin and a Mao or even like the ideas of socialism.
But I guess if you're saying we need someone like a Stalin to be in power here, and I guess you're including the death aspect, so you kind of are advocating for policies that include death.
So it's not that far removed.
Well, let me okay.
I get your point, but let me just say, short of advocating for, look, if you're advocating for another Stalin to rise up and do what Stalin did, then yes, but kind of then it would get into like, what do you believe Stalin did?
But if you're just discussing as a matter of historical record, what Stalin did and saying, I think he was good.
That's not advocating for anything to happen.
And my point about this with incitement to violence is that there's got to be a very clear line.
There's got to be a very clear line.
Because even if you were to say, or not you, I don't want to put you.
Someone were to say, I think it would be really great if all of the warmongers were killed and the only people left were the people who didn't advocate for war.
That might be an objectively true statement.
You know what I'm saying?
But they're just saying, I think this would be great if this happened.
They're not telling anyone to go do that.
So I'd argue that like that's, that should be, if we're going to have free speech, that is like you, you should have a right to say that.
Short of like calling for someone to actually go kill someone, short of calling for someone to go initiate violence against someone, I would say that's legitimate free speech.
Like in other words, saying, I'd like to see this person dead is not a problem versus you should go out and kill that person is an issue.
Real Conversations Without Violence00:03:17
Yes.
Okay.
That's that's that's how I describe I think I think that not even just is an issue.
Maybe both are an issue, but what's a crime?
And then when it comes to college campuses, I think the best thing to err on is the side of like, look, as long as they're not committing a crime, if they're just expressing a view, then the response should be in an institution of higher learning, then the response should be, well, I don't know, win the argument against that person.
I mean, how are you, if we're, if we're pretending that Americans are supposed to go for four years after they're 18 to go, you know, read books and study for four years because whatever, we've decided that's the proper course for all fucking 18 year olds, which is dumb to begin with.
But we're talking about MIT, UPenn, and Harvard here.
These are, you know, like they're supposedly the really smart people.
Well, then aren't they smart enough to go win an argument?
And aren't there going to be enough of those 19 year olds, even really smart 19 year olds who might believe some radical political ideology?
I just find that the idea that they should be kicked off campus is insane to me.
Anyway, does some of them, I know Gay, the black lady from Harvard, she had to write a big apology letter.
Was it stepped down?
Who stepped down?
I think the pen one just resigned.
Wow.
All right.
So there you go.
But the gay one had not the gay.
They were all gay, but the one named gay.
She's black, so she's okay.
She's wrote a letter.
She was like, I wish I would have taken the opportunity sooner.
You know, they're hearing from all the donors.
Yeah, that's right.
The donors do happen to not like you saying genocide against Jews is okay.
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Alex Jones Returns To Twitter00:15:03
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay.
So let's just transition here to a different topic on the same broader premise of free speech.
Elon Musk reinstated Alex Jones' Twitter today.
Quite an interesting development.
All these actors out there on notice.
That's right.
It's been a good four years of not having.
Oh, boy.
I will say, though, this one to me feels like one of the biggest.
This feels like one of the biggest moments in the battle for free speech.
And a lot of people maybe won't like this.
And, you know, that's the thing about free speech.
You don't necessarily like what people are saying with it, but it feels to me like a really, really big deal that Alex Jones is back on Twitter.
I don't know what your thoughts are.
I love it.
I mean, it was crazy.
That was the first sign of the tech censorship was they all took him off the internet at the exact same time.
And I'm not, you might be surprised with my interest in conspiracy theory.
He's not a guy I ever really listened to.
He became more of an internet sensation, I think, after being canceled.
For the most part, I don't follow him.
I listened to half that Tucker interview and I was shocked to hear, like, I was like, oh, these are mostly opinions I have in terms of, you know, what the World Economic Forum and others are trying to do.
So I guess his more the ideas he's putting out there now don't seem to be too far away from my current perspective.
But yeah, just the fact that you got Twitter being more of a free speech absolute place that even people with reprehensible opinions or people that have gotten things very wrong or offended or otherwise, I think I prefer the paradigm of free speech in an absolute.
Well, yes, I agree with you on that.
I'll say this.
I think that Alex Jones got some things wrong.
And I was a part of a Twitter spaces today that was, I think, one of the biggest Twitter spaces that there's ever been.
Alex Jones and Elon Musk went back and forth for a while.
I was not too involved in it, but it was interesting to watch.
I would have probably preferred to watch it later than be invited on as a speaker and not speak.
But anyway, that aside.
One of the things that's that was interesting to me, and I am somebody who has, let's say, more closely than you followed Alex Jones over the years.
And the reason why I know Alex Jones is because I was a big Ron Paul supporter back in the day.
And Alex Jones used to regularly interview Ron Paul.
And so that's how I found Alex Jones was from Ron Paul being interviewed on Alex Jones' show, which was a big show at the time.
And so this was Alex Jones during the George W. Bush administration, where he was a like, he was a much, he was a very interesting figure.
He was a guy who was kind of a libertarian conservative conspiracy theorist who was totally against the military industrial complex and the CIA and Washington, D.C., but from a kind of conservative, I love America perspective, which was very interesting in those days.
You didn't have a lot of that and with a huge audience.
So that was that was really interesting.
And so one of the things, so I know a decent amount about him, not everything about him, but I've listened to him a bit over the years.
And so one of the things that happens is that Elon Musk, and fair enough, but he was questioning Alex Jones today about Sandy Hook and what he got wrong about that.
And, you know, there were things where people would question him about what he got wrong.
And I think it's totally reasonable to hold him responsible for what he got wrong.
But if you're going to hold him responsible for what he got wrong, then it seems to me that what would be fair would be to also credit him for what he got right.
And what he got right was a lot.
And this is the issue with Alex Jones.
You can't take away what he got right.
And he, this is a guy who predicted 9-11 before 9-11 happened.
And even, I think, predicted that it would be the World Trade Center.
And this guy got, if you want to talk about what he got right over the last 20 years, I'll tell you what he got right was every war.
Every war he was against.
Totally against the war in Iraq, the war in Syria, the war in Libya, all of them.
He was totally against them.
He's look, Joe Rogan, who's a mutual friend of mine and Alex Jones.
You know, the reason why, this is what Joe has said publicly many times.
I'm not like giving anything away that he's told me privately.
But one of the things that, or one of the main reasons why Joe Rogan really respects Alex Jones, and he's said this, is because Alex Jones told Joe Rogan about Epstein Island like over a decade ago when no one else, way before any of us knew about this.
He told him, he goes, there's this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, and he brings all the powerful people to this island where they rape children and blah, blah, and like had this whole thing laid out.
And so I'm just like, hey, if you want to like knock him for what he got wrong, fine, but you got to also give him credit for what he got right.
It doesn't, it's not fair to do one, but not the other.
So there's that.
But anyway, the reason why I think Elon Musk bringing Alex Jones back onto Twitter is such a big deal is because as you kind of alluded to, Rob, this was like the biggest cancellation attempt.
This was, I mean, or it was up there.
I mean, there's a few that you could mention.
Alex Jones being booted off of all the major platforms in clear coordination within a very short period of time was a big one.
The cancellation attempt of Joe Rogan was a big one, and that failed.
The Alex Jones one seemed to have succeeded.
Look, the Andrew Tate cancellation was a big one, and that seems to have failed.
And now with Alex Jones coming back, it's almost like, oh, it seems like that one failed too.
And that's a really big deal.
That's a really big deal.
There are people.
Okay, so Milo Yiannopoulos.
Again, this is however you feel about any of these figures, because I have my issues with a lot of them.
I have things that I disagree with a lot of these guys on.
And I could do a whole episode on what I disagree with each one of these guys on.
But let's just remove that for a second and talk about what is really going on here.
Okay.
Like just analyze it.
Forget like commentating on it.
Milo Yiannopoulos was on his way to becoming a superstar.
He was on his way to being one of the most influential voices in American politics.
He had just gone on Bill Maher's show and crushed.
He won over Bill Maher to the point that Bill Maher was comparing him to Christopher Hitchens.
And then a couple days later, they pulled up all this shit on him about whatever, him saying that he had had gay, weird stuff with a guy who was overage when he was underage and he didn't think it was that fucked up.
And they just canceled them over it.
And they changed the course of that.
They changed the course of him rising to be a superstar to being someone who's kind of irrelevant in the broader scheme of things.
The canceling people thing used to really work.
And there's lots of examples where it's worked.
Lots of people have been canceled from, you know, corporate press positions where they're just not, they're not relevant the way they used to be.
Okay.
But now, but the biggest ones in the last couple years have totally failed.
And Rogan, Andrew Tate, those were big ones.
They totally failed.
They just got bigger after this big attempt to cancel them.
Alex Jones was one that seemed like it succeeded.
And now he's been brought back.
And not only has he been brought back, but on this Twitter spaces today, he said that he's bringing his show to Twitter.
And you see, Tucker Carlson, who was the biggest guy in cable news, was fired from Fox News and brought his show to Twitter and got even bigger than he was.
And now Alex Jones is back on Twitter and is at least it seems like going to bring his show back to Twitter.
And that's crazy.
That means that this guy with the most anti-government message and not just an anti-government message, not, you know, but the best kind of anti-government message.
A message that's like, not only should you oppose what the people in Washington, D.C. are doing, but you should be skeptical of them at every turn because there are evil people in there that are plotting against you.
That guy went from being denied any platform to being gifted the biggest platform.
That's a big deal.
I'm pretty interested to see where this goes.
And it's a stamp of approval for free speech.
Yep.
It's saying, hey, no, we're going to live with free speech.
And I think the machine has a hard time contending with it because people like truth.
They like information.
And I think the machine relies on being able to shorten the scope of available information to you so that you can pick between two of the same options.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And that I think the whole game relies on you not being able to speak and think.
And that's why, you know, Like, it's like, go again, to put a pin in this whole episode.
It's like, go read the First Amendment and not just the literal interpretation of it, but what they're getting at there.
You know, like, obviously, it's like the government shouldn't be allowed to do this.
But look, in order for you to be free, why is this the First Amendment?
Because in order for you to be free, you have to be able to like believe what you want to believe about what the nature of existence is.
You have to be able to say what you want to say.
And you have to be able to like get information from people who you trust.
And everybody involved in that has to have the freedom to say whatever they want to say.
That's kind of the essence of it.
And that is, to me, that's the essence of civilization.
It's the essence of like advancement of humanity is that everybody has to be able to say what they want to say.
And I think me and you, Rob, were a little biased in this area because this is what we do for a living.
And this is our, this is, as Tucker Carlson says, this is the currency that we trade in.
You know, both as stand-up comedians and as podcasters and general shit talkers, we're kind of like, well, what we rely in is the ability to be able to say what we think is right or say what we think is funny or say what we think and say it without fear of like heavy-handed consequences to that.
So anyway, I'm very encouraged by this development.
It's, I think two of the things that I see that are particularly interesting is one is, I mean, as comedians, we've seen some comics just skyrocket because of the exposure that they've gotten through social media.
And we've also seen other people who had traditional media outlets that have become less relevant kind of fall off.
We haven't seen Alex Jones get, you know, exposure past, I guess, people that directly go to his website, I think, in the last four years.
It's not that I never seen him, but, you know, he pops up here and there.
It'd be interesting to see if, you know, he has a second wave and you start seeing a lot of clips from him start making the rounds on Twitter.
And that kind of shifts the Overton window a little bit of what people are discussing as, you know, Alex Jones content.
And even if the content is as far as lunacy claims that people are going, hey, this is lunacy, it still stretches your imagination of, wait, what is government capable of?
And what are they doing?
It does, it does create exposure.
And I saw that the prospect of that excites me.
The other thing that excites me is, you know, Twitter, the entire point of Twitter is engagement, getting people onto your platform.
And so when they removed a guy like Donald Trump, you're taking the most famous and most interesting person in the world, who literally is the most powerful person in the world and can be discussing things like policy and getting engagement.
You're saying, well, we're not actually a business.
We care about censorship and placating the deep state and the censorship machine more than we care about the profit of people being engaged with our platform.
So now all of a sudden, when you take the two or two of the biggest people in media, you got Alex Jones.
I don't know what Alex Jones' following looked like, but from what I understand, it's still fairly substantial.
And you've got huge.
Yeah.
Right.
And you got like a Tucker.
And I'm sure his is substantial.
I mean, Tucker's is massive.
If more people with truth perspective and truth perspective is winning out, and then more people want to gravitate to the platform because there's more interesting things happening there.
It's also the prospect of the free market winning out of just for like true information.
And so I find I find the prospect of that and pulling more people away from bullshit towards seeking truth and being on the platforms where you like, that's how you kill off YouTube.
Free Speech Or Censorship Platforms00:03:31
You know what I mean?
When suddenly YouTube is not the place to go to to the most easily consume content, which it still is sometimes like I want to go to Fox the other day and watch the debate.
I can't find it on their website.
It's like sometimes like YouTube just streams better.
Sometimes it's easier to find stuff.
And by the way, to be honest, I don't find like I find I find a lot less show material on Twitter now.
And when I scroll it, it's more bullshit.
I've also noticed that.
Yes.
Yeah.
Like it used to be like two years ago.
The news tab used to give you way more of like the topics I wanted to talk about on the show.
Yeah.
Well, like three years ago, I would say I got a fair amount of the show clips from YouTube because there were specific YouTube channels that were very good at clipping the stuff.
They disappeared from YouTube.
They don't exist anymore.
Last time I went to YouTube and found a show clip, didn't happen.
Then I would say for a while scrolling my Twitter feed, if I was doing that, you know, in the morning and at night, I might come up with one.
Like it was serving me the things based off of what I followed that the algorithm was doing a pretty good job of finding the type of things that I was interested in learning about.
I find very little of the show topics on both run your mouth and part of the problem or that at least that I'm bringing here are coming from Twitter.
And more often than not, I'm mindlessly scrolling for about 10 minutes, realizing I didn't see anything and leaving.
But with all that said, I do find it quite exciting that, you know, there's a place that is potentially free speech absolute and that with people like Tucker and Alex Jones maybe doing regular content, only over there, there's more engagement.
And it just, it seems like a win to me.
Listen, I completely agree with you.
One thing I'm going to say before we wrap this show up is that I really did not like, and I thank Elon Musk for bringing Alex Jones back.
I think it was a good victory for free speech.
I think he's done some very good things with Twitter since he's taken over.
Not everything.
I wish the porn bots would go away.
Yeah, I hate that, by the way.
And I like porn.
I like porn.
Oh, and I'm not trying to look at it.
I'm like, my fucking Twitter mentions.
It's so annoying.
You know what?
Can I just say that?
I hate that he did this thing.
And I think part of it is just not a disclaimer, but something he can hide behind.
But stop doing these polls about like, should I bring Alex Jones back?
And then go, oh, the people have spoken.
Like either this is a free speech platform or it's not.
So what he said on the Twitter spaces today or the X spaces today when I was on it is like, hey, if you haven't broken the law, we're not going to kick you off.
Okay, fine.
But then why are we having these opinion polls?
Why?
It's like, oh, here's a poll.
Should Alex Jones come back?
70% said yes.
Well, the people have spoken.
So what does that mean?
If 70% said no, you wouldn't have him back on.
Like, look, just make your standards.
If you want to say you're a free speech platform, make your standards clear and then follow those.
It shouldn't be up to the whims of democracy because that's bullshit.
As you know, if you listen to this show.
Anyway, all right, listen, we got to wrap up the show.
Rob, you're the man.
Me and you will be out in East Rutherford this New Year's Eve.
Live stand-up comedy show, live part of the problem podcast, and a meet and greet afterward.
ComicdaveSmith.com.
Go there.
Ticket link will be up very soon.
By the time you're listening to this, the ticket link will be up.