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Why We Want Free Speech
00:06:56
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| Alan Dershowitz's newest book, and every one of his books is important, which is rare for an author, and utterly readable. | |
| The Case Against the New Censorship, Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech Progressives and Universities. | |
| When we left, I had noted that it is worthy of note that in the subtitle of the book, Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech Progressives and Universities, we don't see government. | |
| And you then... | |
| Well pointed out. | |
| Every case you had, a free speech against the government, you won. | |
| This is much more serious a threat, isn't it? | |
| It's much more serious. | |
| It's more serious than McCarthyism because we don't have the legal recourse against Google and Facebook. | |
| We don't have the legal recourse against private universities. | |
| We don't have the legal recourse against individual progressives. | |
| Who cancel? | |
| And there's another thing that's important, and your listeners may not appreciate this as much as some of my friends would. | |
| A lot of the people who are at the forefront of censorship are our friends. | |
| They're our friends' children. | |
| They're our grandchildren, our nieces, our nephews. | |
| You know, in McCarthyism, it was pretty easy because Joe McCarthy was not a particularly likable guy, and it was easy to see him as an evil force. | |
| The people who are censoring today, many of them are good people. | |
| Justice Brandeis once said the greatest dangers to liberty worked in people of zeal who have no understanding. | |
| Good intentions, but no understanding. | |
| And I think the new censors, the people on the hard left, think they're doing the right thing. | |
| And a lot of young people I know, good, decent people who are against racial discrimination, who are in favor of the environment, who are in favor of good values, don't understand the need for process. | |
| The need for procedures, the need for patience, the need for democratic values to get where they want to get. | |
| They just want to get where they want to get because they know they're right. | |
| And they're much harder to fight against than government. | |
| So, okay, the $64,000 question, and it didn't begin with PragerU, but, you know, there were four editorials in one year at the Wall Street Journal about our being censored. | |
| TikTok has just removed one of our most well-known spokespeople. | |
| Just removed. | |
| She has no more account. | |
| She's a young black woman who is extraordinary. | |
| Amalia is her name. | |
| It doesn't even resonate with people. | |
| So how do you fight if they are, well, are they really protected in doing this? | |
| Well, they're protected in some respects and not in others. | |
| I'll give you one more example. | |
| Some of you may have heard me say this before, but, you know, Bobby Kennedy challenged me to debate the son of a former attorney general who's an environmental lawyer, but also a vaccine skeptic. | |
| And I'm not a vaccine skeptic. | |
| I go with the science. | |
| And we had this great debate, and people watched it from all over the country. | |
| They loved it. | |
| Some people changed their minds. | |
| Some people didn't change their minds. | |
| YouTube took it down. | |
| They didn't want anybody to think that vaccines are a debatable issue in America or elections are debatable issues in America. | |
| How do you fight back? | |
| Number one, you take away their special privileges under Section 230 of the Decency and Communication Act. | |
| They can't both decide to censor and then be exempt from any defamation or other lawsuits. | |
| So that's the first step. | |
| Section 230 has to be changed. | |
| Every media company has to check a box. | |
| Either you check a box saying you will not censor, you're just a platform, anything goes. | |
| In which case you get the benefit of 230, or you check a box saying, no, we have the right to pick and choose, and then you don't get 230. That's one legal way of fighting back. | |
| The other way is to create a better mousetrap, and Rumble is trying to do that. | |
| They're competing with YouTube. | |
| They put up my debate with Kennedy. | |
| And, you know, people said to me, oh, you must be very happy. | |
| YouTube thinks you won the debate. | |
| I don't want to win the debate by censorship. | |
| I wanted to win the debate in the court of public opinion. | |
| I want people to hear both sides and agree with me or agree with him. | |
| That's what the nature of democratic open debate is. | |
| I don't want some kid who just graduated college or some machine making a decision that they can't hear me debating Bobby Kennedy. | |
| That's just so un-American and so wrong. | |
| And so we have to fight back. | |
| One of the ways I fight back is to write books and appear on shows like yours and thank God for shows like yours. | |
| Because you are part of the open marketplace of ideas, and you are part of the answer to the new censors. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, I want people to understand, well, I think my listeners do, that the threat is unique because it's coming from the private world, and that is, as you correctly point out, unprecedented since the 18th century. | |
| We've never had this since the 1780s. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But even in the 1790s, when we had the Alien and Sedition Act, that was the government. | |
| And they were able to rescind it. | |
| And Jefferson pardoned all the people who were convicted under the Alien and Sedition Act. | |
| What is your position on vaccination passports? | |
| Well, I wouldn't call them vaccination passports. | |
| I would like to know when I go into a restaurant or a movie theater or send my kid back to university, I would like to know what their policy is on vaccination. | |
| And if they don't require vaccination, I might take my business elsewhere. | |
| But the irony is that liberals want to make sure that you have ID that shows you've been vaccinated, but they don't want you to show ID to vote. | |
| And some conservatives take the opposite view. | |
| They want to show ID to vote, but not ID on vaccines. | |
| So I'm not saying they're in consistent positions. | |
| But in general, look, I don't like passports. | |
| I don't like show me your papers, please. | |
| But I do think that there are understandable reasons why people should want to know what the policy of an institution is. | |
| As far as vaccination is concerned. | |
| If you don't want to vaccinate, fine, but I really don't want you in my home. | |
| Well, we differ on that one, which is great, because I was getting worried that we might not have any differences. | |
| No, we have differences. | |
| Of course, of course. | |
| I know that. | |
| I voted for Joe Biden. | |
| Hey, I voted for Joe Biden. | |
| Yom Kippur is coming up, and you can repent. | |
| That's the beauty of it. | |
| I have repented so many times. | |
| I've repented mostly my votes for Barack Obama, particularly my second vote for Barack Obama, which I think I was tricked into doing, and I blame myself for doing that. | |