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Aug. 30, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:16
Flashback 2017 - Is Hate Speech Free Speech?

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Important Issue: Hate Speech Punishments 00:08:46
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
And Daniel, good to see you.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
I am doing fine.
And I'd like to talk about a very important issue.
It's in the news, and we've heard about it for a long time, and it's fully discussed, but poorly understood.
And that has to do with hate crimes and hate speeches.
And there's lots of excuses to punish people for hate speech.
And I'd like to sort of get in a discussion on what hate speech really is, and does it deserve to be punished, and what is protected under the First Amendment.
And quite frankly, I think they're too loosely defined, especially the hate speech and what should be done.
But I happen to have this belief, which is a very libertarian constitutional belief, that speech should be protected.
It's an individual right, and that we shouldn't use it as an excuse to punish people differently than anybody else.
But we should have the right to free speech.
And that means you can't slander and you can't libel people.
So there are those kind of limits.
But when they start talking about political correctness and speech that shouldn't be not permitted, and then turn these into crimes, you have to deal with the idea of subjectivity.
Can you define it?
And of course, a libertarian should be able to draw lines a little bit better than the Republicans and the Democrats and draw the line that the crime occurs when violence is occurring.
And sometimes there's fuzziness in there, and you have to work that out.
But for the most part, it's pretty easy to define it when somebody throws the first stone or throws the first bunch, and then it's offensive versus defensive.
But it certainly has come up on this recent episode in Virginia, you know, the demagoguing going on and the blame gang going on and Republicans understanding versus the Democrat understanding.
But I think we have heard not a whole lot about the libertarian position on this issue.
Yeah, and as you pointed out too, the right to free speech is not something granted by government.
It's granted by the Creator.
So the idea is that there's a restriction of government restriction on speech.
But the incident in Charlottesville, and especially the aftermath, has led a lot of people to call for more criminalization of so-called hate speech.
But you point out it's very subjective.
Nobody knows what it is.
And there's a tendency, whoever says something I don't like, well, that must be hate speech.
Yes, and that's the main problem with it.
It is subjective.
A crime should be objectively defined.
You know, if you steal, rob, kill, injure people, yes, that's very, very objective.
But motivation, and this whole thing is there was a time in our history, and some people seem to want to revive it.
It was a time when certain groups were punished more than others.
Obviously, during the early years of our country with slavery and blacks, they were punished more severely.
But now the effort is to take groups, blacks and minorities and different groups, and say they should be the perpetrator of a crime against them.
They should be punished more severely.
But from my viewpoint, they're actually using the same principle.
If you can punish more so one group and then all of a sudden, you know, add on because of that, it's a sort of a reverse of what they've been doing.
It doesn't solve the problem because if you have one crime against a group and you say, well, it was motivated by hate and therefore we're going to punish you more.
Well, what if the identical crime was committed against another group?
Why should one group have a greater punishment than the other group?
So there's nothing fair about it.
And I think it all comes because we have been conditioned and it's getting worse.
We see people in groups and I think they do it on purpose.
There's people in this country that want to see this come together.
This whole political correctness issue, this cultural Marxism is stirring this up.
And I think they don't want individual liberty and they can stir up racial conflicts and political conflicts and then partisan conflicts.
And then there's the charges made and then you throw into the mix the media and you end up a real mess because they drift away from some principles that aren't complicated.
You have a right to your life.
You have a right to say what you can say something controversial and you can say things hateful, matter of fact.
And you can, and you don't go to prison for that.
It might be stupid and you might be rejected socially and people might not like what you're doing.
But just to say something controversial, that was the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to be able to say things controversial.
Because if it's, well, we know what hate speech is, but that's different than about your government.
Can you say anything you want about the government?
What if I decided that the hate speech is against all those people who have perpetrated our wars in the last 15 years where hundreds of thousands of people have died and there has been hundreds and thousands of people collateral damage and they just brush it off.
Why aren't those hate crimes?
Well, I don't believe they're necessarily motivated by individual hate and you punish the hate.
That is a policy problem.
You know, it's an understanding.
But I think that our problem is that not enough people really understand what free speech is like and it can be controversial.
Just go to the college campuses and who knows what it is because right now the universities, the university police and the professors and the directors of the college, the board of directors, they permit the closing down of people who want to give a speech and there's something not right about that.
Yeah.
And you know the events of Charlottesville really are perfect for the enemies of free speech because if you take the position and the ACLU has been very good on this and they have a history of protecting of you know standing up for speech even if it's very unpleasant they've been under attack because people misrepresent what happened and say that the ACLU was defending Nazis, therefore the ACLU was pro-Nazi.
And so it's perfect for the people who don't like free speech because if you point this out, oh, well then you agree with the Nazi protests?
No, I think they're horrible, but they do have a right to say things that are very unpleasant.
You know, one thing that happened, we think it's real reason, but it's been going on, you know, for several decades, this whole thing about hate speech and all.
But not too long ago, it has been converted into a federal crime.
So even if you're dealing with a state issue, and if there's a crime committed and it looks like, oh, this is a hate crime, he was motivated because he didn't like him because he was of a different color.
It becomes a federal matter.
You know, just automatically, oh, the federal government should come in if the states are abusing this.
So it becomes a federal matter.
And they also use the word perceived.
If somebody is perceived to have hate, it can be used.
Perception is very important.
That's how arbitrary this is.
But I still will emphasize the fact that if we saw rights as individuals and that we wouldn't see people as members of groups, that we would be a lot better off.
There's no rights that come to us because we belong to a group.
If one group is benefiting in contrast to another group, that's wrong and you should stop that.
But individuals should be treated the same.
And I think all that's going on now is it's divisive and it's political and it's getting very serious.
And the lines should be sharply drawn.
Even this past weekend, I think it was pretty easy to say there was violence on both sides.
But just think of the grief that Trump got.
Just say, well, you know, and he said it in not a bombastic manner like he might do on some other issue.
I thought he had a reasonable speech.
Now I'll probably be ostracized.
But he said that both sides probably committed violence.
What's so bad about that?
I believe that to be the case.
And where were the police?
I mean, if anything, it needs investigated about why the police stood down.
Sharp Lines Drawn 00:03:32
You know, who gave them the order to stand down?
And that is probably a true statement.
You know, I can't prove it, but it's certainly been reported by people who said that the police were told to stand down.
Would people be shocked if they thought that someone was trying to get political advantage by doing something like that?
Oh, boy.
But how would a problem like this be solved?
You've got a group, you've got one group.
Take aside the reason, put aside the reason for the protest, was protesting against taking down historical statues.
But take a look at what actually happened.
There's one group of people, a lot of them carrying Nazi flags, a lot of them doing things that are very unpleasant.
And then you have this other group against them.
How do you solve this problem of free speech?
A libertarian would talk about private property society, but how would you solve it in the situation here?
Yeah, that's always messy when you have government property.
How do you solve the problem of the proper books in public schools?
Because that's propaganda so often.
So it's a mess.
In a public school issue, what you would hope for is local control of your schools and your local school board, and people could have a reflection on what that is like.
But when it comes to something at a university, the university should be responsible.
And they do.
They have not anybody can close down a road and get out and demonstrate.
You get a permit.
It's pseudo-private property.
The school is supposed to run their school and have rules.
So you get a rule.
The person, the group that comes to try to disrupt is bordering on committing a crime.
Because if they prevent you from doing this, let's say they just come in and actually they never even got to the point of having their speeches this past week.
But let's say they're indoors or someplace and they're out there and they're having their speeches and the speeches start and a couple people sneak in and they cut all the wires.
So there are no, there's no, nobody can hear them.
People could see that as a crime.
But what if they have an organized effort to hoot and holler and blow whistles and drown them out?
Yes, I think they've overstepped the line.
They don't have to throw the stone.
It's equivalent if they prevent it from happening by purposely disrupting and preventing people from saying it under this situation, then it's equivalent to coming in and cutting the wires to the microphone.
Private property is an easy thing.
Remember Ronald Reagan when he had a little debate, I paid for this microphone?
Private property is a solution to so much of this because they're still so far, even though there's been hints of it, that you can still go and say things in your churches and they don't invade.
There's been a few times where an incident was that people said, Well, we want a copy of your sermon before you give it.
And that's been there.
So people would like to do that.
And I said, Well, what if you're preaching hate?
You know, who knows what?
They won't give you the benefit of the doubt, but on private property, you can say it.
That means that the media, we complain about the media, but we can't walk into the studios and say, I want equal time.
I have free speech.
That doesn't work.
So there are times when I think it's borderline.
You have to think it through.
But I tell you what, I bet you 99% of all this can be solved by individual liberty and trying to find who initiated the violence, who initiated the force.
Two Sides of Authoritarians 00:07:40
And of course, the libertarian principle is the non-aggression principle.
Don't use aggression.
But our big problem in society and who teaches this and sets the standard is the government.
They're always using force.
All these rules and regulations and affirmative actions and hate crime legislation.
They're always trying to orchestrate, you know, and pretend they know what motives are.
And they don't take the line and divide the line and say, are you committing violence or not?
And that to me is the real problem.
And unfortunately, until people understand what the libertarian message is all about, this is going to get a lot worse because the country's falling apart economically.
The foreign policy is in shambles.
And this is part of my thesis that this is an end of an era.
It's the end of the Keynesian era.
It's going to be the end of our foreign policy era.
So there's going to be more conflict because some of this is orchestrated by the far left, the cultural Marxists, and that radicalizes other than they fight over the loot because they know it's, you know, if you look at the statistics to show what's in the pension funds and Social Security and medical care, it's all failing.
So that's why it's going to get much, much worse, believing that, see, they both believe in the use of force.
Conservatives use it just every bit as much in medical care and everything else.
They use force.
So it isn't a contest between those who like force and those of us who understand it to be property and volunteerism and no force and property rights.
No, they're going to fight it out to control a dwindling pie, and that's why they're going to get very vicious, and that's where they are now.
I mean, I read for so many years, you know, of the history of Europe of Europe mainly, you know, where communists were fighting the fascists.
And you see that in our mail, you know, in our literature, in the reviews, every single day it's popping up.
But I think it's done purposely to cause the conflict, cause the clash, and thinking that, you know, the Marxists especially have done this for decades, you know, of stirring up trouble, have chaos, and then people move in and have the solution.
That's why you see people saying, yeah, this is disruptive.
Maybe we need a socialism.
You know, and socialism becomes, you know, a word that people say, yeah, I guess so.
I guess maybe we'll settle this is socialism.
But we have too much government interference, whether it's communism, socialism, or fascism, or corporatism.
It's all governed force.
And this is why you have these conflicts.
And we have a job on our hands to try to get people to think more in tune with what we're talking about.
Yeah, and you know, Lenin, I mean, he benefited so much from World War I. If there hadn't been a war, he probably would never have been able to get into power, but he benefited from that to but the other thing is, you know, each side, unfortunately, of the debate, as far as I see it, they take one side or the other.
The left would go with the Antifa people.
They're shutting down fascists.
We've got to support them.
And a faction of the right would agree with the people who are fighting against taking down statues, what have you.
And they're fighting the more viciously they fight, it seems, the more government wins.
Because government will come in and say, We'll take more power than away.
We've got to stop this fighting.
I think that might fit into my argument.
Yes, they both want power.
Some want conservative power because they're the ones who project their power and force and goodness around the world.
And of course, they participate in the welfare state as well, in the corporate state.
And the other side wants a different system, but that's exactly what they're looking for to stir up trouble and hope they can pick up the pieces.
And where is the concern?
In all this stuff we've heard the last month, two, three, or even in the last campaign.
How often was it, you know what?
What I want to do is emphasize the importance of personal liberty.
And it's a moral issue.
It's a God-given right for us to have our privacy.
And that there is another way.
But unfortunately, they don't talk about liberty.
They talk about, you know, forcefully redistributing wealth is what they're talking about, or benefiting one group versus the other.
We're, you know, if you had a libertarian society, we wouldn't have lobbyists.
Sometimes people argue with me because I don't think you should regulate lobbyists that they can't lobby because we're lobbyists, we're lobbying our government for a libertarian society, so you don't want to regulate speech.
So that I think is a lot different, you know, to allow people to speak out and try to change the system.
And that is indeed what we need.
Indeed.
Well, let's hope that the violence stops ratcheting up.
But I do want to remind our viewers once again: get your tickets for our conference coming up next month, September 9th, in Washington, D.C. I've got an announcement, Dr. Paul, if you don't mind.
Jacob Hornberger is going to join us.
Future Freedom Foundation, great friend of yours, great friend of ours for a long time, probably one of the best speakers out there.
Very motivating.
He was there last year and he brought down the House really with a great speech.
He's just agreed to join us.
So Jacob Hornberger is going to be there.
Get your tickets right away.
We look forward to seeing everyone.
Very good.
We have some seats left, but we are at a point where there's not an unlimited number of seats.
So please call in and get your ticket if you're inclined to come.
And I do want to thank everybody for tuning in today.
I know this subject is not an easy subject for a lot of people because I don't think you hear what a libertarian principle would be from the television.
You're hearing two sides of authoritarians.
Many are authoritarian.
But like I said in our little talk here today, I did not think that Trump was way off base and the criticism he got was way out of proportion because he did lean in the direction of a libertarian answer because he says, you know, why don't we look at this at who created the violence?
And that is the right thing to do.
All the violence didn't come from one side.
And the other thing that we have to remember is let's say, for instance, that from the cultural Marxists, let's say they do 10 times more violent acts than the other side.
Well, would they get 10 times more criticism in the media?
No way.
No way.
I mean, the media is definitely biased.
But I still want to remind people that even the option, generally speaking, toward the left who offers government solutions are not getting the libertarian answer to it.
They're generally getting a conservative approach to the use of government to try to mold people's personal lives and mold the economy and Manage the world empire.
So, we have a lot of work cut out for us.
But in spite of it all, I still think a lot of people are listening to what a libertarian message is all about.
And even though this may be a difficult subject, I think it does give us an opportunity to introduce ideas to people, realizing that liberty is individual and that we should not think of people as just belonging to a group.
They neither should be punished nor rewarded because they belong to a group.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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