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Oct. 14, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
24:29
A Slice of Toxic Americana

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard leads off with a discussion of Alex Jones and the use of the civil courts to police speech. The gang then launches into a typically epic four-hour, Thursday-night discussion.

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Hey guys, how are you doing?
Good, how are you this evening?
Good.
I am doing well.
So, we have the situation where my kids are here, they're going to get sleepy soon, and then I will return.
Yes, they're making a Halloween house, you know, a gingerbread house.
All of that stuff has migrated to Halloween now.
Is there a war on Halloween?
Have conservatives claimed that?
Liberals just hate Halloween?
They want to take it away from you?
Yeah, there's a war on everything.
So I had a few thoughts about some things.
Let me grab this book that I was working on.
So, is the Alex Jones situation, does that interest you guys?
I find the whole thing, well, it's sad, but it's sort of fascinating.
Just as a preface, I feel terrible for the parents that lost their children in this horrific act of terror, and his jerk-off fans are basically harassing them.
I mean...
I just have no words, quite frankly.
Yeah.
I mean, I have some ambivalence about the whole situation.
It's interesting that all of the conservatives circled the wagons on Alex Jones.
And they basically said...
You know, they're attacking him because he criticizes the regime, which is a common tagline that they've picked up on.
It's to kind of, I guess, objectify the government.
It's, you know, the regime.
Similar to the globalists.
Exactly.
You don't know exactly what it means.
And they certainly wouldn't say that with regard to Trump.
It would be like, America.
I saw another line from Charlie Kirk, which is something that makes absolutely no sense and they always use, which is, if they could do this to Alex Jones, think about what they'll do to you.
So I guess the notion is, if there is a sense to it, that...
Alex Jones has made, you know, millions off selling people diet plans and, you know, brain muscle semen oils and who God knows what.
And so he has tons of money and can hire lawyers.
So, like, imagine what it would be for you who's living paycheck to paycheck and, you know, they would just crush you.
Well, of course, the answer to that is that they're not just going to go after random people on social media.
I mean, at the very worst, they're going to take away your Twitter account.
Whatever you want to say about that.
They're not going to just start going after you through the court system.
The other thing is that free speech is truly dead or whatever.
Well, free speech has...
Never been an absolute right.
And I've done my bit on this a few times.
Of my own ambivalence about the free speech legal notion that has been passed down from Oliver Wendell Holmes, at least the Supreme Court justice.
Those ideas weren't exactly his.
But I do think there are actually some problems to that notion of free speech.
But anyway, the Blackwell, the kind of common law notion, is something different.
It is about not preemptively taking away your ability to engage in speech.
It is not necessarily not punishing you for your actual speech.
And that is the original conception.
And Oliver Wendell Holmes, actually, in his dissent on, I guess it was Abrams versus the U.S. government, I believe, He acknowledges this, and he acknowledges that the United States is something new.
It's an experiment, a marketplace of ideas.
I mean, to his credit, he acknowledged that he was actually putting forth a new conception of law in a dissent to a Supreme Court decision that actually upheld a prosecution of anarchist Bolsheviks.
Handing out pamphlets in New York City or wherever it was.
But, you know, notions of defamation have never been protected speech.
Obviously, you cannot use speech to break the law.
You can't use speech to buy and sell drugs, say, and say, oh, this is my freedom, you know, my First Amendment right that you're jailing me for.
And things like defamation have been out there.
Now, defamation is much more, Strict in the UK, famously.
But it does occur here.
And the way it's, you know, things like libel and these kinds of notions, the way they're understood is reckless disregard for the truth or some kind of malice.
So, in effect, you have the right to be wrong, obviously.
So, you know, you're not, you can...
I don't know.
Someone is murdered.
You could speculate about that online.
Oh, I think it was his business partner.
And if you aren't maliciously trying to demean this person, that is, I would imagine, covered by free speech.
But just maliciously disregarding the truth and claiming that Jim Bob...
Womack, he actually, he murdered his wife or whatever.
If you're doing that without any evidence or any semblance of reason, then you are defaming him maliciously, particularly if you have a motive to do it.
I guess Alex Jones' motive was to just, you know, isolate a target and then get his fans whipped up into a frenzy.
Profit off that.
Just create a kind of team that is, you know, on to the truth and things like this.
I can see it.
And I can see how Alex Jones did absolutely engage in defamation.
And, you know, a billion dollars, that seems a bit much.
But, you know, there's no doubt if you put yourself in the shoes of these people, this unspeakable crime has occurred that affects you personally.
And then you have some blowhard online saying that you and George Soros were engaging in some elaborate scheme to take away gun rights.
I mean, I can totally understand that that would have caused hurt, heartache, sleepless nights, depression, outrage, etc.
So, I get it.
And I think with Alex Jones, it's hard to defend him in this instance.
But I don't think the conservatives are completely wrong when they suggest that they're going after him.
Because he is the grand poobah of conspiracy theories.
And even though this started before Trump, that's kind of thrown into the mix.
And it does become a kind of political and culture war.
And I think that's true.
It does have the feel of that, even if the technical, legal qualities of this are something else.
Now, obviously, Alex Jones does himself no favors.
He has apologized, I guess, but then he'll unapologize in some way and he'll attack the judge.
I mean, it seems like he's suicidal or he's just making it worse and playing up the fact that he's a victim when, in fact, this is an actual law.
This is not some...
Again, I'm not denying the political quality to all this, but it is a law on the books, so you've got to get real here.
But yes, it is a culture war as well.
But I guess what I was thinking about this is that we have these, and this is something that certainly affects me personally as well.
It reminds me of the Charlottesville.
I was never arrested during Charlottesville.
I might have, I don't know, preferred to have been arrested on some level because it would have taken me out of that situation safely.
I actually did escape Charlottesville in rather dangerous circumstances.
Putting that aside, the way that people tried to prevent another Charlottesville was to create this massive burden that a Damocletian sword that hangs over everyone's head, which is that we are going to sue you in civil court for something.
And we've got the big gun lawyers.
You idiots are going to be...
You know, impoverished, you're going pro se, and we're just going to crush you.
It is this civil...
I mean, again, this is what Alex Jones went through, what I've gone through.
It's civil matter.
It's not a criminal matter.
I was never arrested.
I was surprisingly never investigated or asked.
I think I was asked to participate in the Heapy Report, and I declined.
I actually kind of regret doing that.
Would have preferred to have participated, actually, because the Hefe report was very good and very serious.
But I also wasn't subpoenaed.
And he, I don't know if he could have done that or not.
Maybe he could have.
I actually regret not collaborating.
But, you know, when you go and talk about a situation, you are kind of putting yourself in jeopardy.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
Hefe report was good without me, and it didn't involve me.
But what I'm saying is this use of the civil court system in order for people to pursue things that are ultimately political.
Obviously, the Charlottesville case was outrageous and completely political or ideological or personal, however you want to describe it.
This one a little bit less so with Alex.
I'm having, I'm kind of struggling here to defend him.
As you can tell.
But there are just serious problems to the use of the civil courts like this for political ends.
And on some level, I would just appreciate an actual speech code.
And I've made this argument about Twitter and social media, which is that Why don't they just literally tell us what we can say and what we cannot say?
Wouldn't that just simply be better?
And you do see a little degree of that.
I think on Twitch, you kind of can't use any ethnic slander or whatever.
So I think Hassan got suspended for a week for using Cracker, and I think he used it in a...
Circumstance that I don't think would really offend anyone.
But they stuck to their, you know, the letter of the law, the letter of the TOS.
And I actually appreciate that in a way, not just because Hassan is horrible, but because I would prefer just explicit codes.
And as opposed to the idea that you're going to sue someone into oblivion, the civil court wasn't meant to be used in this way.
And there's an interesting case, let me find it here, that actually picks this up.
So this is New York Times versus Sullivan.
What a state may not constitutionally bring about by means of criminal statute is likewise beyond the reach of its civil law of libel.
The fear of damage awards under a rule such as that invoked by the Alabama courts.
This is when Alabama was prosecuting the New York Times.
By the Alabama courts here may be markedly more inhibiting than the fear of prosecution under a criminal statute.
The judgment awarded in this case without the need for any proof of actual pecuniary loss.
Was 1,000 times greater than the maximum fine provided by the Alabama statute for criminal libel.
And 100 times greater than that provided by the Sedition Act.
And so this took place, this case, which actually came about in the midst of the civil rights struggle, it was 1964.
What it's saying is that, let's say you had actual speech codes.
And so...
There was a criminal code on the books.
They're not going to...
There's no fine that's going to be a billion dollars for something like this.
And wouldn't you rather, in a way, pay a thousand dollars and go to jail for a month than be on the hook for a billion?
Or these sums that are just...
Kind of ultimately pulled out of thin air and that are, they are constitutionally controlled, but are ultimately awarded by juries.
That is morons.
And it's like we want to avoid, we're so afraid due to our obsession with free speech that no one supports actual speech codes.
Just saying outright.
You can't say this.
You cannot revise the Holocaust, for instance.
You can't just directly engage in a discussion of this or that.
We're so deathly afraid, and we pat ourselves on the back for the fact that you're free in the country.
I would defend your right to...
Talk about the Holocaust or race or moon landing or whatever.
I would defend your right, even though you're dead wrong.
You know, how amazing we are.
Now, if you're just, you know, revising the moon landing, I doubt anyone's going to sue you, although I guess they could on some weird level of, like, emotional distress due to this.
But it does create this...
Very strange atmosphere where, you know, marginal or extreme or unpopular political opinion is in a way litigated through the civil courts.
So again, this defamation is a real thing.
If you go out around and, you know, if you're just a private individual.
And you start spreading some vicious rumor about how, you know, Jerry murdered his wife or whatever.
That is defamation.
That will cause him harm.
And harm that maybe can't even be quite measured.
And if it's malicious, then that's absolutely defamation.
But let's just be honest with Alex Jones.
It wasn't just about some guy saying this.
It was about...
And just causing distress or maybe causing people to lose friendships or whatever.
It was about Alex Jones as this massive political force.
Remember, I don't know what his numbers are now, but Alex Jones was easily, when he was on the Genesis Network and all this stuff, he was easily getting higher ratings than Rush Limbaugh through the 90s and 2000s, which is remarkable.
There was an alternative media.
There's been an alternative media for decades.
And Alex Jones was really early on putting everything up for free on YouTube.
I remember him doing this in 2007, seeing some Alex Jones stuff.
So it was about Alex Jones, at the end of the day, about a toxic right-wing figure.
And to make all of this about the civil courts, It's just, I think it does just really bother me.
Because it, in a way, allows really marginal, anonymous people to just go and say whatever the hell they want whenever, because nothing's going to happen to them.
And then it has this kind of Damocletian sword over the head of someone who has a huge audience and has something at stake.
And to solve these problems through civil court, I just think is absolutely wrong.
And so I would much prefer that we simply have a speech code so that you can follow it and operate underneath that.
And if you break the code, the government ultimately is going to punish you at much lower...
The idea of the government finding someone a billion dollars is absurd.
Now, I'm saying just for speech.
Obviously, if you're engaged in fraud or whatever, I can definitely see a fine of a billion dollars happening.
But wouldn't things be better if things were just clearer?
Is all I'm saying.
And we didn't have this kind of pretense of like, freedom, you can say whatever you want.
Although, you know, if you get a little too feisty, or if you get a little too popular, we're going to figure out a way to sue you in civil court into oblivion.
I just think that's actually uncivilized.
And part of being civilized is just being, yeah, there are a lot of part of being civilized is unwritten rules.
Yes.
But part of being civilized is also written rules.
They're just simple things that are there.
If you're caught guilty of driving too fast, you pay a ticket.
It doesn't necessarily even mean you're a bad person.
And it does discourage you from driving fast the next time.
I just think that's a much better way of doing things than the way that we swear we seem to be going.
Particularly now that the alternative media is larger than the mainstream media.
Now, all of that being said, I do have a total lack of sympathy for Alex Jones.
And the reason for that is that, like, at his best, he is a slice of Americana.
And he is funny.
He's...
You know, has a charisma that's a bit like a car accident.
You can't keep your eyes off it.
They're tearing your shirt off and acting like a gorilla.
It's pretty funny.
It's very American.
And, you know, there's something about him that I kind of like.
But let's also not, you know, get into this mentality that...
We want to stick up for Alex Jones at every opportunity, that he's our guy, or if they weren't going after Alex Jones, they'd be going after us, or all of those things which are just simply wrong.
I mean, Alex Jones is extremely toxic.
Alex Jones is part of the alt-light.
The alt-light will endlessly defend Alex Jones.
And so the alt-light is understood as this Massive distraction, massive, I guess kind of you could say synthetic opposition to the system.
Something that will short circuit any serious dissent.
Getting rid of these people I think ultimately is a good thing.
So from an amoral perspective, I have no sympathy for Alex Jones.
From a...
Legal and kind of civilizational perspective, I guess you could say.
I actually do think it says something profoundly bad about our society.
So, there it is.
That's my feelings on the matter.
If they weren't going after Alex Jones, they might be going after us.
Literally us.
It's kind of important that these Silly people are out there absorbing all the, like, legal attention.
I agree.
I mean, I didn't even say it that way, but you could say it in that way.
It's, like, better him than us.
Like, I mean, obviously, like, the Charlottesville case was these white shoe law firms and really big guns getting together and blowing their wad on people.
And it did become kind of...
Ridiculous at some point where you're dealing with people who have, you know, the idea that they have the assets that can be turned over for however millions they wanted or whatever.
It's just ridiculous.
You're attacking marginal people.
I think actually the lack of attention on the Charlottesville case was interesting.
I think Charlottesville was increasingly irrelevant after J6.
So on.
I mean, I don't even know if it's worth talking about anymore.
But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, Alex Jones kind of is standing in front of us.
And it's ultimately fine for him to get knocked off because I don't see a lot of redeeming features to Alex Jones.
Outside of the, you know, slice of Americana or he's hilarious.
That's about as far as I could go with...
Praise.
That stuff is toxic.
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