June 13, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:11:16
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Thank you, Anu. | ||
| I'm really thrilled that we have this panel here today. | ||
| I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce this panel. | ||
| I want to put it a little bit in the context of ARI's focus on this issue of free speech, which really goes back to 1989 with the Salman Rushdie affair, which the Institute and many objectivist intellectuals took a pretty firm stand at the time on this issue. | ||
| And it has since become more and more and more of an issue, unfortunately. | ||
| It's sad that this is something we have to focus on. | ||
| And we've really gotten to the point where this is one of our key areas of focus. | ||
| So of all the issues out there, I can't think of an issue more important than the issue | ||
| of free speech. | ||
| If you're seeing in the panel, I'm sure we'll discuss all this, what's going on on campuses, | ||
| what's going on politically. | ||
| There is no issue more important. | ||
| When we are silenced, there is no more fight for a better world, for a better culture. | ||
| Our only way to win this is by the use of reason, and therefore by the use of speech. | ||
| When speech is gone, the battle is over, for all intents and purposes. | ||
| What you're seeing tonight is in a sense something that we are doing on campuses all over the United States these days, and as part of our focus on free speech, We have a traveling set of panels. | ||
| We've already done four. | ||
| Has anybody this year? | ||
| I think six. | ||
| Six this year. | ||
| And actually, Flemming and I did one in Copenhagen in December. | ||
| So, seven in recent times. | ||
| We've already got four planned for the fall at various universities. | ||
| And as long as this is a major issue, I think that we will be out there in the public, primarily at universities, fighting this fight. | ||
| Now, I'm going to say just a few words on each one of the panelists. | ||
| I'm not going to read a formal bio. | ||
| The formal bios are in your packets, so you can read them there. | ||
| As a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and is responsible really for everything we do in terms of free speech. | ||
| He's working on a book on free speech and is doing most, if not all, of our panels on free speech around the country. | ||
| He's a former Institute for Justice lawyer and we're very, very happy to have Steve on our team at the Institute. | ||
| Fleming and I go back. | ||
| 11 years to the publication of the Danish cartoons. | ||
| Fleming of course was responsible for the publication of those cartoons in 2005 and when all hell broke out in 2006. | ||
| Some of you might remember the institute did a series of events at universities where we | ||
| blew up the cartoons and traveled around the country with these big Mohammed cartoons and | ||
| presented panels like this on free speech. | ||
| And I got to know Fleming then. | ||
| He participated in a number of those panels. | ||
| And I'm proud to say that he's become a good friend, a good personal friend and a friend | ||
| of the institute. | ||
| We've had many, many events over the years together and I anticipate we will be cooperating | ||
| on a variety of different projects in the future. | ||
| Dave Rubin is a new friend. | ||
| I first met him when I interviewed with Dave about just over a year ago. | ||
| And if you haven't watched that interview, shame on you, but you should. | ||
|
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It's on YouTube. | |
| It's a really good interview. | ||
| And I really think Dave is probably the best interviewer of his generation. | ||
| And for those of you who are not subscribed to the Dave Rubin show on YouTube, you should. | ||
| Not just for my interview, but really all the interviews Dave has done are fascinating, interesting. | ||
| And he has a real ability, as I think you'll see somewhat tonight, but even more so I think on YouTube, a real ability to draw people out and get to the heart of issues with them. | ||
| So I think we've got a fantastic panel. | ||
| I think this is gonna be an exciting night and prepare questions. | ||
| We're gonna have an extensive Q and A afterwards. | ||
| And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Dave to take it away. | ||
| All right, well, give it up for Yaron, everybody. | ||
| First off, I really have to remember to have someone else do the intros for my show for now on | ||
| because that's the heavy lifting part. | ||
| Now we're just going to talk for an hour. | ||
| We are streaming this. | ||
| This is the first ever live Rubin Report on location anywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| So this is being streamed to my channel right now, and you guys know we've got a lot of classical liberals over there. | ||
| Also, there's nothing like the live YouTube chat that's happening right now. | ||
| Can you guys make some noise? | ||
|
unidentified
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Show those trolls. | |
| Show the trolls that objectivists are not to be messed with. | ||
| Can you make some noise? | ||
|
unidentified
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Look at this. | |
| A little wilder than I would have expected. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're getting a standing ovation. | |
| We didn't even do anything yet. | ||
| That is impressive. | ||
| All right, I'm very excited to be here. | ||
| Oh, and I just wanted to mention, on a personal note, Jero just mentioned that he did my show a little over a year ago. | ||
| It was actually, I know for sure, it was a year and two weeks ago, and actually today, June 13th is the one-year anniversary of us taking the Rubin Report independent, and one of the reasons we did it was because of my conversation with Yaron. | ||
| So if you have seen it, or if you haven't seen it, you can actually watch my thinking change, because he was talking about rational self-interest, and he was talking about individuality, and he was talking about getting rid of regulations, and I was at a nice network, and we had health insurance, and... | ||
| You know, all of those good things, and we had snack room and the whole thing, and I listened to Yaron talking about these ideas, and of course I'd been familiar with them, but once I had that conversation with him, it truly changed the trajectory of my life, and two weeks later we launched When Independent, and now I think we're doing okay. | ||
| So where's Yaron one more time? | ||
| I want to thank him. | ||
| Oh, he's right there! | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. All right. | |
| First up, we're going to need some more of that screaming and hooting and hollering while we're doing this. | ||
| All right! | ||
| That's good, too. | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
| We're going to talk about free speech. | ||
| If you do watch my show, I truly believe that the battle for free speech is the single most important issue of our time. | ||
| when I sat down with Yaron and Jim and Steve and some of the other ARI guys, | ||
| we very quickly agreed that we don't have to agree on everything politically, | ||
| but if we can agree on free speech, the absolute defense of free speech, | ||
| that we can go ahead and do a tour that we've started doing and that we're gonna continue in the fall. | ||
| And I really believe, from everything we're fighting on college campuses, | ||
| to what's happening in the media, to fake news, to things related to Trump, | ||
| that this is the issue of our time. | ||
| I think many of you probably agree with me on that. | ||
| So let's start the conversation. | ||
| Let's just do something just kind of simple first, which is, when we've talked about the battle for free speech, There's two things happening here. | ||
| There's sort of the chilling effect that's happening where people are silencing themselves, and then there's the government coming for free speech. | ||
| Now, I'm focused on the first one of those, generally, because I see that as a bigger threat right now. | ||
| Which do you see as a bigger threat in the current scheme of what's happening? | ||
| That we're doing it to ourselves? | ||
| These words of racist, bigot, homophobe, Islamophobe, that that is silencing us? | ||
| Or do you fear I think self-censorship right now and chilling ourselves is the bigger issue, and the way I would put it is that you can think of the attacks on free speech can come from, I mean, strictly speaking as a right, it comes from government, right? | ||
| The attacks on them. | ||
| The First Amendment is a protection against the government, right? | ||
| But you can also destroy your own free speech intellectually, or your own right to free speech and support for free speech. | ||
| So we have to think about free speech. | ||
| It's a right, obviously, an individual right against government. | ||
| We have the right to say whatever we want so long as we don't violate the rights of others, and we can talk about what that means exactly. | ||
| But we also have to treat it as a value. | ||
| And Yaron mentioned it's really a fight for the supremacy of reason, the supremacy of the individual thinking for yourself. | ||
| And there's a philosophical context that supports that. | ||
| And you can think of it really simply, and we'll elaborate on this, as the Enlightenment worldview. | ||
| The individual The individual mind, you know, we have to chart our own course in life, we have to think for ourselves, and part of thinking for ourselves and charting our own course is speaking our own minds. | ||
| It's a tremendous value. | ||
| I mean, we could not have the modern world without it. | ||
| And today you see a real assault on that, and it's coming from, I think, primarily it's a philosophical, intellectual assault. | ||
| And a lot of the things you talked about, and that we will no doubt talk about, because there's examples of this all over the place today, on college campuses and elsewhere, are really undermining the right. | ||
| I think people are willingly giving it up. | ||
| And we've seen people apologize for speaking out. | ||
| So that's the primary threat, but there are also government threats, too, that we can talk about. | ||
| So Fleming, Steve mentioned logic and reason. | ||
| You put Mohammed cartoons in a publication. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Were you using logic and reason when you did that? | ||
| Absolutely, but also instinct. | ||
| And in fact, that journalistic project was also provoked by what I saw as growing self-censorship. | ||
| Among intellectuals, writers, painters, illustrators and so on and so forth. | ||
| And the reason why self-censorship is so difficult to handle is that it is invisible. | ||
| And it's not very courageous to censor yourself, and therefore most people will lie when they commit self-censorship. | ||
| They will come up with all kinds of good reasons for not saying something that sounds rational, even though in a lot of cases you will suppose that they are driven by fear. | ||
| The tricky thing about self-censorship, which I define in the following way, you want to say something but you refrain from saying it because you are afraid of what might happen to you. | ||
| You cannot pass a law against fear. | ||
| You cannot protect people against fear. | ||
| And that is a crucial difference between censorship and self-censorship. | ||
| Censorship defines clear red lines. | ||
| Self-censorship does not. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| imply clear red lines, but you internalize an atmosphere or a sense of what you cannot say. | ||
| And it's very difficult to fight. | ||
| I'm curious, I'll kind of throw this to the audience. I mean, it's partly that we live in a diverse society. | ||
| I look out here, I see the diversity that the left loves in that I see white people and I see black people and I see Asian people and all sorts of gay people and straight people. | ||
| But what I care about is diversity of thought. | ||
| That has always struck me as more important than the immutable characteristics that any of us have. | ||
| So just to see diversity of thought, by a show of hands, how many Nazis do we have here? | ||
| Just a simple salute would be fine. | ||
| Nazis. | ||
| No, not that he did a half thing. | ||
| Okay, we'll talk to you later. | ||
| No Nazis here. | ||
| But that concept, though, of diversity, it's making people not want to offend anyone. | ||
| And that chill factor... I get emails every day. | ||
| People say, Dave, I don't want to post your video with Fleming on Facebook because I don't want someone to defriend me. | ||
| Now, again, we're not talking about some sort of state-sponsored censorship, but we're slowly eroding something that's very important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Individualism is the way I would put it. | ||
| And so, I mean, if you think about, you've got to be clear about what diversity means. | ||
| Diversity of thought, diversity of ideas, I mean, it's definitely has, it's a very important thing in many different contexts and certainly on college campuses and in other areas. | ||
| The way I would put, ultimately, the way I think about free speech and freedom of thought is, it's the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of knowledge. | ||
| Now, diversity of thought helps you along the way. | ||
| So debating, confronting ideas that are contrary to yours, I mean, I don't think you can learn without doing that. | ||
| And in that sense, diversity of thought is hugely important. | ||
| And in any event, we all have the freedom in a free society to say what we want, to engage with others, etc. | ||
| Diversity, the way it's used in common parlance today, I think it's diversity of, and then you can fill in the blank, but it's, the way I would characterize it, it's diversity of all sorts of non-essential characteristics. | ||
| It has nothing to do with individual thought. | ||
| It has to do with things like race, gender, etc. | ||
| So, I mean, I always think of this issue as, in terms of Martin Luther King's statement that you judge a man based on the content of his character, not the color of his skin. | ||
| And then by extension, nor all sorts of other non-essential characteristics. | ||
| But when you talk about diversity, it's a very collectivist, group-based concept, which is typically about gender, it's about sex, it's about race, which once you do that, you're forming people into tribes, and then you have to have a kind of thought police on them, and I think that's what we're seeing. | ||
| But there also is a paradox here, because the people who tend to celebrate diversity of culture, ethnicity and religion, they do not celebrate diversity of speech. | ||
| And I've always been of the opinion that if you welcome diversity of culture, ethnicity and religion, It goes with the territory that you will have to accept that if people are different, they will also express themselves in more different and diverse ways. | ||
| And the irony right now in Europe, where I spent most of my time, is that the majority of European politicians, they want to manage this growing diversity of culture, ethnicity and religion by limiting diversity of speech in order to keep the social peace. | ||
| And that's why in fact Western Europe for the past few years have passed laws that are very similar to laws that are being passed in countries that we usually don't compare ourselves with. | ||
| I mean Germany right now is about to pass a law criminalizing fake news. | ||
| And as someone who spent time in a dictatorship in the Soviet Union, where the truth was sanctioned by the government, it just runs down my spine when I hear that the government is to determine what is fake news and what isn't. | ||
| It's a way of trying to manage this growing diversity, and it's dead wrong, I think. | ||
| Is there any evidence throughout history that either one of you can think of where silencing or stopping an idea from being heard has actually worked? | ||
| I mean, that's the type of logic and reason I would like to use on the people that are trying silencing. | ||
| Is there any evidence of that? | ||
| Even in the Soviet Union. | ||
| which was a hard totalitarian dictatorship, they didn't succeed. | ||
| And I would say quite to the contrary, you don't kill an idea by banning it. | ||
| You kill an idea or you delegitimize an idea by allowing people to speak their mind and then take it apart. | ||
| Holocaust denial, for instance. | ||
| I think 13 countries in Europe right now have laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in a situation where Europe is experiencing mass immigration from the Muslim world, where you have a lot of Holocaust deniers. | ||
| So these people, they come to Europe, they have been taught that it was all invented by the Jews, and they are not being allowed to express these outrageous opinions. | ||
| And it means that we are just not able to educate them and fight them. | ||
| And they will just come to the conclusion that the Jews, they are ruling Europe in the same way they're ruling the Middle East. | ||
| It's just reinforcing their conspiracy theories. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| That's sad. | ||
| And once you go down that road, people will come up with all other kinds of memory laws, establishing certain versions of history as the truth. | ||
| In Eastern Europe, I think it's nine countries who have passed laws criminalizing denial of the crimes of communism. | ||
| Russia passed a law in 2014 criminalizing criticism of the behavior of the Soviet Union during the Second World War with a reference to the Holocaust denial laws in Western Europe. | ||
| They just said, you know, this is very sensitive to us. | ||
| Holocaust denial may be very sensitive to you, but this is sensitive to us, and therefore we pass these kind of laws. | ||
| Yeah, Steve and I actually had a pretty amazing moment on our tour We were at the University of Arizona and I did that joke that I did with you guys a couple minutes ago about diversity and I asked for a Nazi and literally someone in the back of the room stood up and said, I'm a Nazi. | ||
| And the crowd kind of groaned a little bit. | ||
| And then it was a woman, and she started talking about that she didn't believe Auschwitz had a door that would lock or something kind of nutty. | ||
| And we were with Michael Shermer. | ||
| Michael's been on my show a few times. | ||
| Some of you guys probably know Michael. | ||
| He runs Skeptic magazine, and he debunks these conspiracy theories. | ||
| So he could tell that she had a conspiracy theory waiting, and I thought, Well, this is a good teachable moment. | ||
| So I said to her, look, let us finish the speech and the panel. | ||
| And then at the end, when we do the Q&A, we'll give you the first question. | ||
| And that's what we did. | ||
| And her first question, she asked about some very convoluted, confusing question about the gas chambers. | ||
| And Michael fully debunked her, said he had been there, he knew exactly what she was talking about, laid it out with facts and logic and reason. | ||
| Now, of course, I'm sure that did not change her opinion in any way, but it got everyone else there to see that we were putting our money where our mouth is and we were using free speech and allowing someone else to use theirs. | ||
| The interesting part of this, it turned out the woman was also trans, which, how many of you know trans Holocaust deniers? | ||
| I thought that was a real niche thing. | ||
| Hitler was all about the trans people, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| But it was a great teachable moment of letting someone speak, even if you don't like their ideas, and then letting logic and reason dictate the answer. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| And that's absolutely essential to Have a free society. | ||
| It's absolutely essential to allow people the freedom to reach their own conclusions, true or not. | ||
| But the way you asked the question I think was interesting. | ||
| It's, have they ever worked? | ||
| Have hate speech laws or restricting thought or speech ever worked? | ||
| And my answer to that is, well, it really depends on what you mean by worked. | ||
| So in one sense, yeah, they have worked. | ||
| They've worked to enslave entire societies. | ||
| I mean, we look at totalitarianism. | ||
| They control thought because they need to control action and they need to control what everybody does. | ||
| So the first thing they do is censor. | ||
| The first thing they do is control what people can think. | ||
| Now, if you look at it from the standpoint of a free society, what we have now, both in America and Europe, is very much a mixture of freedom and controls, but you can't ever succeed in that way. | ||
| You cannot succeed to keep bad ideas down by outlawing them. | ||
| In fact, all you end up doing is you drive them beneath the surface, and then you cause | ||
| the very hate and resentment that you're trying to prevent. | ||
| And the reason for that is you can't force people to think. | ||
| It's just not possible. | ||
| You can enslave them, but you cannot force them to agree with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about the slippery slope of all this that I think you guys are | ||
| probably aware of. | ||
| If you look on Twitter these days, everybody's all about punching Nazis. | ||
| Like, people think that they're Indiana Jones and they have to be out there punching Nazis. | ||
| You guys can laugh louder if you want, if you're feeling it. | ||
| I can sense a little hesitation. | ||
| Remember that energy at the beginning? | ||
|
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There you go. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So Richard Spencer, who's this supposed alt-right leader, I guess he likes frogs. | ||
| It's a little unclear to me what the deal is with this guy. | ||
| But on Inauguration Day, I'm sure many of you saw this, some random person punched him and just a ton of people. | ||
| I saw a ton of Seemingly good, sensible people saying, yes, it is OK to punch Nazis. | ||
| And I was in the unenviable position of having to defend this person whose ideas I find abhorrent. | ||
| I had family members die on both sides of my family in the Holocaust. | ||
| These are horrific ideas. | ||
| But I had to defend him. | ||
| That slippery slope thing, I mean, you've been through Some of this. | ||
| I was accused of being also a Nazi in fact, but I didn't reply to your question when you asked if there are any Nazis out there. | ||
| People said to me, you know, you should be careful publishing these kind of cartoons because we know what happened in the 20s and 30s. | ||
| And it comes down to an understanding of the relationship between words and deeds. | ||
| That there basically is no difference. | ||
| That words are violence. | ||
| And therefore you can be violent or you can use words. | ||
| But to me, that is exactly the dividing line between civilization and barbarism. | ||
| And if you go back into history, I think the most crucial moment in the fight for freedom of expression was when, after the wars of religion in Europe, when Protestants and Catholics had killed one another for decades in the tens of thousands, Societies decided to establish a clear distinction between words and deeds. | ||
| That attacks on Christianity, on verbal attacks, were not being perceived anymore as physical attacks. | ||
| And you didn't put people on the stake for saying blasphemous or heretic things. | ||
| And establishing that dividing line is crucial to civilization, to democracy, to freedom of expression. | ||
| And unfortunately today, in fact, we are moving back into the Middle Ages in the sense that we are eroding this distinction between words and deeds. | ||
| And therefore people People can say it's okay to punch a Nazi, and they can also say that if you publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, it's like killing somebody. | ||
| And it leads its road into a very dark place, if you follow that logic. | ||
| That is the biggest issue with that logic, that the definition of a Nazi, or whatever label you want to use, will always expand. | ||
| So if one person says, it's okay to punch a Nazi, it's okay to punch Richard Spencer, will someone else, well okay, well if we can punch him, can we blow up his house? | ||
| I mean, what if his wife and kids are in there? | ||
| What if it's not a Nazi, but it's someone with equally abhorrent views? | ||
| It's just a train that you can't stop. | ||
| That's definitely part of it. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that I've been debating with people on Twitter and Facebook is, well, okay, you want to punch the Nazis, I guess we also should punch communists, right? | ||
| And then socialists, too, because look what's happening in Venezuela. | ||
| I mean, they're killing each other. | ||
| That's horrible. | ||
| So somebody go punch Bernie Sanders. | ||
| After that, it's, if you want to look back to the Middle Ages, look what the Christians did. | ||
| We got to start punching Christians. | ||
| Muslims are killing people in foreign countries. | ||
| Them too. | ||
| Punch list. | ||
| And pretty soon, the list is like, it's an endless list of everybody in history. | ||
| And so yeah, definitely, this idea that we go after people for their ideas is abhorrent, | ||
| even if their ideas are abhorrent. | ||
| But we have to understand there's a way to define the line that Fleming was talking about. | ||
| And I mean, this is vastly oversimplified, but the line is individual rights, and we have to make a distinction between the use of force, either to threaten or the initiation of force to threaten others, or actually using it against others, Versus the use of ideas. | ||
| So if a Richard Spencer, he can spout all of his nonsense as much as he wants. | ||
| What he can't do is put those ideas into practice because, yes, those ideas do lead to violence if you really take them seriously and you follow them. | ||
| He cannot go around and start attacking people or threatening people or banding together with other Nazis and saying, we're going to take over the country. | ||
| That is all illegal. | ||
| And thankfully, in free countries, we already have systems of laws that deal with that. | ||
| I mean, the criminal law does a really good job of that. | ||
| But as Fleming pointed out, we've gotten to a point now where I think in part we don't know where that line is, but also there are whole philosophies that hold that in effect. | ||
| Ideas are really threatening. | ||
| And part of the reason for that, I always put it as, look, if you want to defend the indefensible, if your ideas are stupid, if they're crazy, of course you're going to be threatened by other ideas. | ||
| And I mean, that's what we see with Islam and with a lot of the other ideas. | ||
| I think, you know, a lot of the people who are attacking Richard Spencer, they have a reason to fear this because their own ideas are crazy and they don't know how to defend ideas. | ||
| So they're going to go after him with force instead of persuasion. | ||
| Do you think that guys like us who do this for a living, that even we have certain limits? | ||
| I was thinking that just last week I did my direct message about Bill Maher. | ||
| And, you know, I'm sure you guys saw Bill Maher. | ||
| He said the N-word. | ||
| Now I have to say, even describe him, I can't even quote him right now because I have to say the N-word because if I was even to quote him, Which is what I addressed in my video, that even that would somehow be perceived that I was racist. | ||
| So in a weird way, we all accept certain limitations on our speech, even though I give Bill Maher 100% full-throated defense of what he was making a joke. | ||
| You could say it was a bad joke or whatever, but the idea that he was And that's fine. | ||
| I mean, you decide for yourself what kind of limits you want to impose on yourself, but that's something you do voluntarily. | ||
| those of us that are putting ourselves out there. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| I mean, you decide for yourself what kind of limits you want to impose on yourself. | ||
| But that's something you do voluntarily. | ||
| I think the problem arises when you would like to impose your limits on others. | ||
| I mean, I like when people speak nice to me. | ||
| I try to speak nice to people myself, but I'm not trying to impose my standards of civility on others. | ||
| And I think that's what, unfortunately, a lot of people are doing. | ||
| They are trying to impose their standards on everybody. | ||
| Even though we belong to different social, political, cultural, religious groups, where we have different social norms. | ||
| And there is a very good American constitutional scholar, his name is Robert Post, and he makes the point that, in fact, All hate speech laws, they are not passed in order to fight hate. | ||
| They are passed in order to enforce a certain social norm. | ||
| And, you know, that's easier when everybody are the same, when everybody believes in the same God, when they more or less follow the same rules. | ||
| But as society is growing more and more diverse, Then, in fact, it becomes very undemocratic in the sense that you are trying to impose one social norm on everybody, even though different groups may subscribe to different social norms. | ||
| But I think, basically, we shouldn't kid ourselves. | ||
| There is a reason why Free speech is in bad standing. | ||
| It is because it is very fragile. | ||
| And for the vast majority of history, mankind didn't enjoy free speech. | ||
| Because the instinct for most human beings is to shut down opinions and speech that they don't like. | ||
| It's just, in a way, it takes education, it takes reason, it takes the ability to not react instinctively. | ||
| And that's not easy. | ||
| It's very, very difficult. | ||
| For someone that's lived through what you've lived through, I think people probably view you as that you're somehow supernaturally brave. | ||
| We've discussed this on my show, but when you did this 10 years ago or so, 11 years ago, you weren't pinning your... This wasn't something that you even cared about that much. | ||
| You just felt that you were going to do this. | ||
| But now you're viewed as someone that's incredibly brave. | ||
| And then we have all sorts of other people out there that are afraid to post things. | ||
| But you really just view yourself as just a person that's picking this battle. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you don't pick your own battles in life. | ||
| Sometimes they're being imposed upon you. | ||
| And I didn't ask for this fight, in fact, because I didn't think that publishing those cartoons would Trigger the kind of reactions we received. | ||
| But that's when what you believe in is being tested. | ||
| And I think, I mean, I was very surprised that I didn't have more support around the Western world. | ||
| Because I believe that free speech is a fundamental value. | ||
| I understood along the way that because I had spent time in the Soviet Union, because I had worked at the Danish Refugee Council with dissidents from the former Soviet Union, I had a different approach to these issues. | ||
| They really meant something to me. | ||
| And I would say, you know, for me it was not a It was not a question about, you know, personal bravery on my part, because I didn't think about it in those terms. | ||
| It was more about, you know, I have some individuals behind the Iron Curtain whom I perceive as my personal heroes. | ||
| Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, people who really went to labor camps for what they believed in. | ||
| And having them as heroes, I could not look at myself in the mirror betraying their ideals. | ||
| So in a way it was very natural. | ||
| And I didn't think about the threats in the beginning. | ||
| I was more thinking about, you know, what are my arguments? | ||
| My worst nightmare was if somebody was able to confront me with something that I hadn't thought about and really pointing to a weak spot in my argumentation. | ||
| That was really my nightmare. | ||
| It may sound crazy, but that's the way it was. | ||
| It seems actually like it makes perfect sense because we see this deplatforming at college campuses and burning down Berkeley. | ||
| When Milo shows up and even some of the things that we've had to do where we've had to have extra security, I like what you said there because you were trying to strengthen your own ideas so that you would be able to have that intellectual challenge. | ||
| Is that the biggest problem of what's happening on the college campuses right now? | ||
| That these kids, I mean, we can make all the jokes about safe spaces and trigger warnings and all that stuff, but that they actually are stopping people from challenging their thoughts at the very place where that is exactly what it's supposed to be about. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's a big, big problem. | ||
| But the way I would put it is they don't want to pursue truth. | ||
| They don't want. | ||
| So one of the ways I would summarize what you just said is you were holding truth as your standard. | ||
| And I would call it virtue as well. | ||
| And you were pursuing the truth. | ||
| And so you were more concerned that you made a mistake rather than that a lot of people were criticizing you, | ||
| which is exactly the right mentality you should have. | ||
| I'm pursuing truth. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out the way to live my life. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out how to go through life and pursue my own happiness. | ||
| But that's not the standard anymore. | ||
| And it's part of the reason that you have to ask yourself, why did so many people criticize what Fleming did? | ||
| He criticized an ideology implicitly. | ||
| I mean, you can talk about whether I'm stating this the right way. | ||
| But the way I would put it is criticized a medieval ideology, a crazy ideology in my view. | ||
| A totally false ideology. | ||
| And by doing what? | ||
| Publishing some cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. | ||
| And people went berserk. | ||
| So we should criticize ideologies like that. | ||
| We should judge people's ideas. | ||
| That's an important part. | ||
| So you said we all have limits to our free speech. | ||
| I wouldn't quite put it that way. | ||
| I would put it as we all have to understand the world, and I think we pursue truth in our own lives, | ||
| but we should be prepared to judge ideas. | ||
| It's not, so this is where the idea of diversity of thought and diversity of opinion kind of breaks down, | ||
| because if I hear Richard Spencer speaking on the street, I wanna criticize the hell out of him and say, | ||
| look, this is evil. | ||
| What you stand for is evil, and we cannot abide by that. | ||
| We should also say the same thing about radical Islam or totalitarian Islam and I think Christianity and all kinds of other crazy ideas. | ||
| But the bottom line is people have to be willing... And not crazy ideas. | ||
| Yeah, and not crazy ideas too. | ||
| Challenge our own ideas. | ||
| But the standard ultimately has to be that we are willing to judge ideas because ideas can be good or bad. | ||
| If we take a non-judgmental position, toward the goodness or badness, the good or evil of ideas, then we essentially, it's a moral agnosticism. | ||
| And that's what allows bad ideas to thrive. | ||
| That's why when you get to a point of decades of doing this, there's a reason, I think, there's a kind of legitimacy in thinking, well, if we're not going to judge any ideas, if we're not going to go after these guys and criticize them, maybe their ideas will take off. | ||
| Maybe people will end up believing these crazy things. | ||
| Is there nothing we can do? | ||
| No, you can criticize them. | ||
| You can't attack them. | ||
| But criticize them. | ||
| We have confidence in the fact that the truth will ultimately prevail if you're a reasonable, rational person. | ||
| But I mean, there's a whole, I think, philosophical context to that. | ||
| But I guess my last comment will be, we have to have confidence in reason | ||
| and the ability of individuals to arrive at the truth. | ||
| So is- But come, just say- | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| They're avoiding reason. | ||
| Just coming back to your starting point about where does the threat from free speech come from. | ||
| It You said it used to be from the government and maybe it's not from the government anymore, but you could phrase it in a different way. | ||
| It used to come from all kinds of fundamentalism enforced by the government, but not only by the government, also by the church or by ideological movements and so on and so forth, that in fact believed that they were in possession of the truth. | ||
| And if you challenge the truth, I remember Ayatollah Khomeini, who was interviewed by Oriana Falachi after the Islamic revolution in Iran, he basically said, you know, as far as I remember, I never made a mistake. | ||
| Great comment. | ||
| And I think fundamentalism is pretty easy to figure out because people really challenge you and they don't want you to say anything. | ||
| The threat today comes from good people or the humanitarian argument that there are certain things that you should not say if you want to Stay a good person. | ||
| And if you say it, you're a bad person. | ||
| And that's far more difficult to challenge compared to fundamentalism, that is straight-out censorship. | ||
| This is also straight-out censorship, but it's packaged in, you know, That we have to be nice, we have to be good, and so on and so forth. | ||
| And I think what you basically said, I think it was Jonathan Rausch who formulated it in a brilliant way, I think, in his book Kind Inquisitors. | ||
| He basically said, you know, that the liberal scientific model is based on two principles. | ||
| That there can be no final say. | ||
| That the debate never stops. | ||
| You're always allowed to challenge, to ask critical questions, no matter what. | ||
| And there is no personal authority. | ||
| You cannot say, because I'm black, or because I'm the Pope, that I'm entitled to the truth, just because I am the person I am. | ||
| And these two principles are in fact the foundation of the Enlightenment. | ||
| And we have given up on both. | ||
| And that's why we are where we are now. | ||
| But I don't want to minimize, though, just really quickly. | ||
| I don't want to minimize, like when I said before, I think the primary threat is coming from, in a sense, ourselves and intellectual threats to free speech. | ||
| I don't want to minimize government. | ||
| Government is always a potential threat to free speech. | ||
| And it's an actual threat, both here and in Europe. | ||
| I think it's actually worse in Europe because you guys have hate speech laws, which are a serious, serious threat to free speech. | ||
| But, I mean, if you're talking about college campuses, we've discussed the impact of Title IX and the fact that And you can think about anti-discrimination laws. | ||
| I mean, campaign finance laws are a threat. | ||
| There are all kinds of governmental threats, both overt that are easy to see, and then more sort of covert. | ||
| I mean, the very existence of public universities, I see, as a threat to freedom of speech. | ||
| Because we're financing people's ideas, and then the question is, whose ideas do you finance? | ||
| And then you have a scramble for more government money. | ||
| And that kind of crowds out. | ||
| The truth sort of gets crowded out that way, where people stop caring about the truth one way or another, | ||
| and they just are fighting for funds. | ||
| So I don't want to minimize government. | ||
| The way I would put it is the primary threat to free speech, as with any other right, is the initiation of force | ||
| by criminals, governments, the pope, organized religion. | ||
| And in the olden days, it was criminal gangs, and the kings and the popes. | ||
| And these days, it's modern governments. | ||
| Or, if we end up allowing what's happening on college campuses now, which is essentially criminal gangs of students, that's the way I would put it, roving gangs of students who attack other people for speaking out, Is the inherent problem here that there's no end here? | ||
| have free speech anymore. | ||
| So we have to be really clear about the real threat is using | ||
| force against people, and whether that comes from government or private people. | ||
| Is the inherent problem here that there's no end here? | ||
| This movement sort of can't end. | ||
| If you were to look at what's happening right now at Evergreen State College, I'm sure many of you guys are | ||
| familiar with this, with Professor Brett Weinstein, who I had on my show. | ||
| He quite literally was opposing a day where they were going to tell white students not to come to campus. | ||
| So he was genuinely opposing racism. | ||
| But that didn't stop the bigotier brigade from jumping out, and now the campus has been closed for a couple days over the last few weeks. | ||
| He hasn't been back on the campus. | ||
| He's not getting a defense from the administration. | ||
| Does that show just how structural the whole problem is? | ||
| We have a problem with the student base. | ||
| that's sort of running the asylum. | ||
| We have a problem with academics who aren't stepping up and saying what's right. | ||
| We have a problem with administrators who have other pressures. | ||
| That it's really, it's many things at once. | ||
| It's many things, and I had a very educating experience earlier this year in Lancaster. | ||
| I spoke at the Franklin Marshall College. | ||
| I was allowed to speak. | ||
| In fact, I spoke the same night that Charles Murray was chased off stage in Middlebury. | ||
| So that was a great success. | ||
| But I was met with posters outside the auditorium, check your white privilege at the door. | ||
| And I didn't understand, in fact, in the beginning, but I was allowed to speak and there was a silent protest throughout my speech and then we had the Q&A and I tried to say to them that, you know, we should not focus so much on what our differences are. | ||
| As human beings we share the same genes, in fact, and we have far more in common than Divides us. | ||
| And they just laughed. | ||
| And they laughed in a very sinister and sarcastic way, as if I was engaged in some kind of cover-up. | ||
| And to me that was very educating. | ||
| And it's really, I think identity politics is a key word here, that basically they believed that we couldn't have a conversation. | ||
| Because I'm white and they were black. | ||
| Or I'm a non-Muslim and they were Muslims. | ||
| And we have so different experiences that we are just not able to share the same universe. | ||
| While in fact we know from art From marriages, from our traveling, that every human being has the capacity to put himself in another person's shoes. | ||
| Write about it, talk about it, play it on stage. | ||
| Ironically, that is actual prejudice. | ||
| I think this pigeonholing everybody into these boxes of religion or ethnicity and culture | ||
| is very, very bad. | ||
| Ironically, that is actual prejudice. | ||
| It is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is prejudging based on these immutable characteristics. | |
| It reduces you just to one part of who you are as a human being. | ||
| I mean, I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm a grandfather, I'm probably an atheist, I'm an expert on Russia. | ||
| I'm a senior fellow at Cato. | ||
| I'm a Tottenham Hotspur soccer fan. | ||
| I mean, I'm all kinds of things. | ||
| And I just don't want my identity to be reduced to just one aspect. | ||
| And that's what all these things are doing. | ||
| And that's also the way you can control people and tell them what to think and what to believe and so on and so forth. | ||
| Are you saying that we shouldn't apologize to everyone for being white? | ||
| Because there are three white guys up here. | ||
| You guys want to boo us or tomatoes or say sorry? | ||
| So, one point here. | ||
| What it reduces us to as members of a larger group, so this is a, and what we're talking about here, we are seeing the consequences of a long, you know, many, many decades, even centuries of very bad philosophy. | ||
| There's a lot that one can say about it. | ||
| Part of it is collectivism, and I think the best way to describe it in today's world is tribalism. | ||
| You are a member of a tribe, and you should say only what that tribe says. | ||
| If you look at the way tribes function, they always rigidly enforce tribal adherence, because the whole idea is there is no such thing as the individual. | ||
| There's only a member of a group, and your role as an individual Is just to give yourself over and sacrifice your life for the good of the group. | ||
| There's another element of this, which is, and I raised this before, it's an attack on reason. | ||
| I mean, the multiculturalists, the identity politics people, the intersectionality people, the postmodernists, which is a lot of what you're seeing on campus today, they deny the whole idea of an objective reality that we can know and that we can discuss and talk about. | ||
| If you deny objective reality, What is left? | ||
| I mean, what they say is reality is just a social construct and that we're all effectively, we're in effect created by the dominant views and that the world consists of oppressors and oppressed. | ||
| We're all just part of groups. | ||
| You have to have something to guide you in life. | ||
| And if you're not going to be guided by your own mind and your own individual thought process, you've got to be guided by something. | ||
| And the way they're guided by now is either it's emotional, it's emotion, or it's adherence to some group. | ||
| So they don't really, I think kids have been totally philosophically and intellectually disarmed. | ||
| They don't know how to approach the world. | ||
| And if you attack or criticize them, They immediately lash out at you because they've been intellectually deprived of the ability to think. | ||
| Is this also a condemnation of social media? | ||
| I mean, we all sort of pigeonhole ourselves, and I try to follow a wide variety of people so that I'm not just getting information that's confirming the things that I believe, but that we all sort of do this. | ||
| Our Facebook feeds start backing our own opinions that we already have. | ||
| We get rid of people that say other things. | ||
| That we're all part of the problem here in our own way. | ||
| Yeah, and it goes back to the beginning of our conversation, the difficulty of managing diversity. | ||
| Uh, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. | ||
| It also goes on on social media. | ||
| You like and share things that you like, which means that you will just get more on social media. | ||
| So it reinforces these bubbles and it's also about Diversity. | ||
| And our difficulty is living with diversity. | ||
| And to me, the biggest threat, in fact, to free speech today is the undermining of our understanding of the concept of tolerance. | ||
| Because tolerance is key if you want to be able to manage diversity. | ||
| Tolerance basically Means that you are willing to live with things that you hate without banning them through the law. | ||
| You don't try to shut them down through intimidation, threats or violence. | ||
| That is basically what tolerance is. | ||
| But unfortunately, tolerance has been turned on its head. | ||
| So today, tolerance means that you should not offend anyone, which is exactly the opposite of its original meaning, because it means that you had to live with things that are offensive to you, that you don't like. | ||
| But I think that's part of the problem with using the term tolerance. | ||
| It's a fuzzy idea to begin with, but I get what you're saying. | ||
| You're using it in the very Lockean sense of toleration means not killing people that you disagree with or not attacking them. | ||
| It's a way of managing disagreement. | ||
| And certainly, I mean, there's definitely an element to that. | ||
| Say, I mean, you're living in a society. | ||
| You have to be willing at times to walk away from people. | ||
| Maybe you want to learn from them. | ||
| You sort of think about, like, I'm going to give them the opportunity to talk. | ||
| I want to really listen and learn from them. | ||
| But we also have to keep in mind that part of what we need to be willing to do is judge other people, judge their ideas, and argue with them and say, look, I think this is true and that's false. | ||
| And now, what we need from government is a government that absolutely protects our right to do that. | ||
| And so, both are, I think, our conception of what free speech means is, it's clouded. | ||
| I think that if we reject the idea of judging other people and criticizing, holding truth as the arbiter, But I believe, Steve, that it's part of the concept of tolerance that you judge and that you speak out against things that you don't like. | ||
| You just don't try to ban them and you don't use violence and intimidation to shut them down. | ||
| And to me, tolerance and freedom are two sides of the same coin. | ||
| In our world today, there is a tension between tolerance and freedom, as if they are opposites and you somehow have to balance them. | ||
| But there can be no freedom without tolerance, which means that you allow people with whom you disagree to speak their mind. | ||
| And there can be no tolerance without freedom, that is, that people have the right to say things that others just don't like. | ||
| Let's shift a little bit to the government because we haven't talked about the government at all. | ||
| Is there a threat right now to free speech from the government? | ||
| I don't see a glaring one at the moment. | ||
| If I was to, you know, click the hashtag resist on Twitter, it seems as if there is a massive threat under Trump. | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| Now, there's an obvious tension between him and the mainstream media. | ||
| We also have, we just have a pretty crappy mainstream media. | ||
| We've got a ton of fake news. | ||
| I see threats there in that people are having trouble agreeing on what's true. | ||
| So to apply logic and reason is becoming more difficult if we can't agree on what the basic facts are. | ||
| But in terms of the government, do you sense right now that there's a unique threat, or what level would you say the threat? | ||
| I don't think it's unique to the Trump era, although there's one caveat to that that I'll get to in a minute. | ||
| But I mean, there's always, there's a greater threat from government when our categories are fuzzy | ||
| and we don't understand what the proper purpose of government is or what the scope of our freedom is | ||
| and how to think about that. | ||
| And the key concept here is individual rights. | ||
| And we've practically banished the idea or a coherent idea of what individual rights | ||
| are all about from our lexicon these days. | ||
| And this has been a long time in coming. | ||
| We've really diluted it or just destroyed the idea of it. | ||
| So it's much more an issue of who has the privilege to do, it's not just speak, but it's do all kinds of things. | ||
| And so we need to recapture the enlightenment view, but I mean, the founders are really the ones | ||
| that I think defined this, at least implemented in political terms. | ||
| But because of that, the government is always sort of hovering around as a threat. | ||
| And then when you get a guy like Trump in office, who seems like, I mean, he's crazy, I think. | ||
| He's a nut. | ||
| I think he's a nutball. | ||
| And he's just a dangerous person because he recognizes no limits to the authority of government. | ||
| But he hasn't done anything unique other than, I mean, he criticizes the media. | ||
| I think it's dangerous for a president to be criticizing the press as an institution. | ||
| In the same way that I thought it was very bad for Obama to be criticizing the financial industry or Wall Street as an institution. | ||
| Doesn't mean there aren't bad actors in there. | ||
| But when you damn an entire institution, that's a dangerous thing, especially from a government who has the power to actually regulate them and shut them down. | ||
| There are specific threats, Title IX we mentioned. | ||
| Let me mention one other sort of threat. | ||
| That is, I think the most terrifying thing happening in this country now is inaction by government when individuals or groups of individuals, and I think this is happening on campus primarily, when they start using force against people and we forget that the distinction Between freedom and totalitarianism, or freedom and not freedom, is the use of force. | ||
| So you look at Middlebury, you look at Evergreen as the two recent examples. | ||
| And in both cases, you have people getting attacked by bands of students. | ||
| You have students then justifying the attacks as self-defense, which is crazy. | ||
| It's not self-defense, it's offense. | ||
| And then you have the administration telling the police essentially to stand down, and we're not going to protect people. | ||
| If people come to view free speech in those terms, or if that's what they associate with free speech, no one will support the idea of free speech. | ||
| If they think that people have a right to attack others, and that we're going to look at that as speech or protest, I would reject the concept of free speech if that were the case. | ||
| But it's really scary to see College officials telling the campus police to stand down and do nothing. | ||
| Local officials doing nothing about it. | ||
| And essentially what you get then is replacing force with persuasion. | ||
| And you get that the dominant principle becomes the way we settle disputes in the societies through force. | ||
| That's anarchy. | ||
| And then you've lost the ability to speak. | ||
| You've lost the ability to deal with people on rational terms. | ||
| And that's an important step down the road to, you know, to statism. | ||
| I mean, I think you should always be on the alert when it comes to the government. | ||
| And the government will always be a potential threat to free speech. | ||
| And I think in the US, when it comes to the law, When it comes to the court's way of interpreting the law, there is no immediate threat to free speech when it comes to the First Amendment, because the Supreme Court right now is deciding the way it does. | ||
| But it's not a given, as Steve and I talked about before. | ||
| We started that you only have to go back 50 years, 60 years, where there was a very different interpretation of the first amendment, and that could happen again. | ||
| And if we talk about Trump, I mean Trump in fact called for enforcing libel laws. | ||
| He didn't know that there is no federal life law. | ||
| It's only state law. | ||
| So he doesn't have a chance to do it right now. | ||
| But if he had a majority in Congress, if he had five seats in the Supreme Court, he would be able to do it. | ||
| And I think, you know, if you... | ||
| I think that the digital technology, in a strange way, is also putting pressure on freedom of the press. | ||
| After New York Times versus Sullivan, I think it was 1964, it has been up to the media to determine what is relevant when it comes to protection of privacy. | ||
| The media had a right to To inform the public about almost everything. | ||
| But after Gorka they were convicted, in fact, for invasion of privacy. | ||
| They broadcasted, I think, a sex video of a wrestler. | ||
| And a good friend's wife and they were taken to court and they lost and they went into bankruptcy. | ||
| And this was possible because there was no, you know, maybe thorough editorial process like at the New York Times. | ||
| But it means that the courts are not willing anymore to provide to the media the sovereign right to determine What they have a right to publish. | ||
| And that is new. | ||
| And we don't know where this stops. | ||
| There will always be people in government who would like to use this to shut down speech that they don't like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I actually think Gawker was probably the right outcome, so maybe you and I could debate that a bit. | |
| I'm not judging the decision, I'm just revealing the principle, because this can be used in other cases in ways that you would not support. | ||
| Yeah, but part of the issue then, or I think the big issue, is we have to figure out correct and rational legal standards and principles, and that ultimately comes from a coherent view of individual rights, why we have individual rights, and how you violate them. | ||
| I don't want to go into all the details. | ||
| I mean, we can talk more about it, but I want to leave this up to you, and maybe people will question us about it. | ||
| Libel law is a hard one. | ||
| But I think Gawker was probably rightly decided. | ||
| But that doesn't mean it's not a threat. | ||
| And you're right that Donald Trump, again, I said he was not, you know, the idea that he thinks there's a federal law of liabilities. | ||
| He doesn't even seem to understand what any of this means. | ||
| It's just I want to go after the press. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And it's dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, on that crazy and dangerous note, I think we should kick this to you guys. | ||
| So give these guys a round of applause. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| That was literally, that was the fastest dash I've ever seen to a microphone for. | ||
| I thought we were going to have a pileup. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I do. | ||
| I've talked to a bunch of you guys over the last couple of days. | ||
| I know we've got some bright people here, but I sense, I sense we're going to have our work cut out for us. | ||
| Uh, all right. | ||
| So, uh, try to keep them relatively brief and we can do this for an hour or so. | ||
| And, uh, should we give them a list of topics that are approved to talk about or? | ||
| See what I did there. | ||
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I want to thank you three courageous men for all you've done in the fight for free speech, | ||
| especially Dave who inspired me to... | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Especially Dave who inspired me to get off my ass and speak my mind online for the first | ||
| time, so thanks for that. | ||
| My question is... I've been waiting for you. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Given the current climate at universities like Evergreen and the violence committed by groups like Antifa, how likely is it that our country will be thrown into civil war sometime in the future, or at least an even worse state of violence? | |
| All right, we're starting with the civil war question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, it's interesting because this topic has come up lately. | ||
| It came up at dinner last night with a few of us. | ||
| Is America veering towards civil war? | ||
| I don't think we're veering towards civil war. | ||
| But I do think we're veering towards a place where the way we communicate is breaking down in a very dangerous way. | ||
| That's why, for the last couple of years, what I've tried to do is explain to people that liberalism, classical liberalism, the rights of the individual, so many of the things that Steve was talking about, they have virtually nothing to do with the modern left anymore. | ||
| And I was a progressive, so I understand this world. | ||
| I was on The Young Turks, you can boo. | ||
| You know, I get it, and what I've tried to do is explain to people that if you really care about the individual, if you really care about logic and reason, and live and let live, which is a liberal principle, it's thought of as a libertarian principle, or it's thought of as some sort of principle of the right, but it really is a liberal principle. | ||
| So I don't think we're veering towards civil war, but I think we do have massive problems when in Berkeley the police don't arrest these Antifa guys. | ||
| They dress like Cobra soldiers. | ||
| They're the bad guys. | ||
| I mean, everyone should know that, and they should be arrested. | ||
| We have to have laws that we uphold, but I don't think we're veering towards a civil war. | ||
| People are much worse online than they are in real life. | ||
| And the things that we see, all of us are worse online than we are in real life, right? | ||
| And that's why it's so important to talk to people. | ||
| It's why I do what I do for a living. | ||
| If you get someone across from you and you disagree with them, it's a lot harder to say horrible things to them right there than it is online. | ||
| So I think challenging people that you know in your family and creating a YouTube channel or whatever you can do to just keep pushing people to go, all right, well, we live in a great pluralistic society and we don't want to give that up. | ||
| So I don't think we're veering towards a civil war yet. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| Let me try to say something positive here. | ||
| I think that the bad people, like Antifa, but it's really, I think, it's not really Antifa, strictly speaking. | ||
| It's the bad, call it ideologues, or people who believe really bad ideas. | ||
| I still think they're a vocal minority. | ||
| They're still a minority of people. | ||
| I don't think most People on college campuses agree that we should shut down other people. | ||
| The issue that we're facing is, or the question we all have to grapple with, is are we going to allow them to get away with it? | ||
| Are we going to allow this vocal minority to sort of set a standard for the whole country? | ||
| Or are we going to stand up to them? | ||
| And on all the free speech events we've had, I've been delighted to see how many students come out. | ||
| And it's usually filled with students who really care about grappling with ideas. | ||
| But what they need to do is they have to be willing to stand up. | ||
| They have to be willing to say, I disagree with this. | ||
| They have to be willing to say, this idea that you are no more than your race, sex, et cetera, et cetera, is utter nonsense. | ||
| We're all individuals. | ||
| I'm not part of your tribe. | ||
| I'm a thinking being. | ||
| Don't purport to speak for me. | ||
| I will speak for myself. | ||
| And I, God damn it, have a right to speak for myself. | ||
| So that's, I mean, that is what people have to be willing to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I'd like to echo my companion's statements about thanking each of you for the amazing work you guys do. | ||
| You guys are definitely an inspiration to myself and many other people, so thank you for that. | ||
| Now, my question is, and you guys brought up a little bit there at the end, but what are libel and slander laws, and what do you think, if anything, should be done about them, especially contra Trump? | ||
| What was the last part, especially what? | ||
| Well, I think we all basically agree. | ||
| I believe in libel laws. | ||
| I have no problem with what happened with Hulk Hogan taking down Gawker. | ||
| I was for it when he beat Iron Sheik in WrestleMania 4. | ||
| I was for it. | ||
| When he took down Gawker. | ||
| We have a right to privacy. | ||
| That is a guaranteed right that we have in the Bill of Rights. | ||
| And you have a right not to be libeled or slandered. | ||
| Now, I think those laws have to be extremely, extremely carefully combed through to make sure there isn't a chilling effect on free speech. | ||
| But as a general rule, I'm for them. | ||
| I have no problem with what happened with Gawker. | ||
| We can't just live under the threat of constantly being destroyed, especially in a time Yeah, exactly. | ||
| everything that you do, you put out there, you can't just be worried constantly | ||
| that somebody can just come and destroy your reputation and your family and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And, well, just an association. | ||
| In fact, in Europe, originally, hate speech laws, they were in fact semi-liberal laws. | ||
| And... | ||
| Meaning that if you said that Jews are drinking the blood of Christian children, you could be taken to court and have to prove it. | ||
| And if you couldn't prove it, you would be convicted. | ||
| Today, in Europe, You can say things that are literally true and be convicted of racism, which I think is outrageous, speaking about truth. | ||
| A lot of the laws, in my view, are proper. | ||
| It's a big, complicated topic. | ||
| The way I think about it is, you have a right to the value That you have created in your own reputation, or if you think about it from the standpoint of a company, in your brand. | ||
| Now, again, it's a complicated issue, but you can take an example of what happened to Johnson & Johnson in the 1980s when somebody poisoned Tylenol, and think about the damage that was done to Johnson & Johnson. | ||
| It took them years to regain their reputation. | ||
| Imagine if somebody now said across the internet, I've poisoned Tylenol. | ||
| Imagine how quickly the stock would plummet. | ||
| Nobody would buy it anymore. | ||
| There's real damage there. | ||
| So the ultimate issue is if you lie in a way that damages a value that somebody else has created, and in this case it's reputation, you can think of it almost like an intellectual property, right? | ||
| You can be sued for that. | ||
| But we have to set the right standards, legal standards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, the right to free speech doesn't mean that there's no consequences. | |
| But the problem with libel laws are usually in less democratic and free countries. | ||
| In Russia, for instance, politicians will take journalists to court for libel when they criticize what they are doing as politicians. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I have a comment and a question. | ||
| And that's why we need a very narrowly defined library. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I have a comment and a question. | ||
| My first thing I'd like to say is that I think the publishing of, you'd mentioned, | ||
| talked on this a little bit at the beginning. | ||
| I think the publishing of the Mohammed cartoons is less the heroic thing than what follows | ||
| and how you reacted in the storm. | ||
| That you didn't back down, that you stood up for the conclusions of your reasoning mind | ||
| and that you're still doing that now and for all of you. | ||
| So that's my comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| One of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes is that the smallest minority on earth is the individual | ||
| and that those who will not defend individual rights cannot be considered defenders of minorities. | ||
| I think that's sometimes interpreted to be About minorities specifically, whereas I think that's the secondary piece of that, and what it's really about is individual rights. | ||
| I think often when we talk about free speech, we talk around individual rights, and I wonder what your thoughts are on individual rights explicitly. | ||
| I mean vis-a-vis free speech. | ||
| Addressing individual rights explicitly when it comes to free speech instead of talking around it. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| I agree that the most important minority in any society is individual and it is individual rights that need protection, not groups. | ||
| And I think, you know, when it comes to this issue, it is very important because if you, for instance, take the Muslim community. | ||
| People who are talking about Muslims as a group and not as individuals, they provide a tool to the oppressors within that group, to say, you know, women, Gays, atheists, all kinds of people that they do not have a right to exercise their individual rights within that group because there are other norms and rules. | ||
| So the protection of individual rights in this context is also a protection of the right to dissent. | ||
| Within a group. | ||
| And that's crucial for the fight for freedom, and it's crucial for the kind of process that a lot of Muslim communities have to go through. | ||
| For instance, Sweden, that is close to where I live in Denmark, There is a ghetto in Rosengarden in Malmö. | ||
| And some years ago, the Ministry of Immigration in Sweden, they did an investigation on this ghetto area. | ||
| And there were women living there who said that they felt that they had less individual rights living in Sweden than they enjoyed in Beirut in Lebanon. | ||
| Because there was a religious police who were telling them that they had to cover themselves, that girls and boys were not allowed to use the same playground and so on and so forth. | ||
| And that is exactly because you have these communities and they believe that they have a right to enforce their own standards on everybody without protecting individual rights. | ||
| Yeah, I agree completely that this is an issue of individual rights. | ||
| We definitely have to defend it as an issue of individual rights. | ||
| It's absolutely crucial. | ||
| But I would also say that you have to understand that the whole point of individual rights is to protect our right to live and thrive and pursue happiness. | ||
| So I would echo the words of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| This is a positive value proposition. | ||
| It's not enough just to say, I want to be left alone. | ||
| I mean, it's true, strictly speaking, as a legal matter. | ||
| But if you really want people to get behind this, you've got to teach them that this is a value. | ||
| This is about living a good life. | ||
| It's not just about the right to say any damn thing you want, although that is your right. | ||
| So yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that rights have to be part of it, but we have to convince people that rights are good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much. | |
| I really enjoyed the talk. | ||
| I would have titled it the Free Speech Trifecta. | ||
| So my question is, you discussed how debating ideas with others is necessary for the development of actualizing our own views. | ||
| However, in high school, there's practically no debating. | ||
| I never really debated too many ideas in high school. | ||
| Do you think that the lack of debate education in high school has affected college students' paradigms on free speech? | ||
| And if so, how? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a great question, and it's not just high school. | ||
| I mean, it's college. | ||
| It's everywhere right now. | ||
| I mean, it's in our public discourse. | ||
| It's in cable news. | ||
| I mean, these aren't debates about ideas. | ||
| These are usually shouting matches, and I get a tremendous amount of email from kids in high school and in college who are saying that they've tried to challenge professors and have been, in effect, silenced. | ||
| Sometimes, I think one of the events that we did, there was a kid there who was He was talking about this whole issue with gender pronouns, and he was sort of taking the Jordan Peterson approach, which is that he wants to be respectful of trans people, but he doesn't want anyone telling him what pronoun to use. | ||
| He's not going to go out of his way to offend anybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've got to use they, right? | |
| Or they. | ||
| My Facebook page, I have a public Facebook page. | ||
| You literally can choose it. | ||
| I mean, that seems offensive to me, but all right. | ||
| But that this idea of not being allowed to debate these things, it's one... I mean, imagine you're a high school kid and you want to debate your teacher. | ||
| Well, that's tough. | ||
| Now you've got to debate the mob on social media, too, and everything else. | ||
| So those are the... Again, it goes to the individual. | ||
| These are the people that we have to strengthen, give them the tools to be able to debate. | ||
| So when they're doing these things with safe spaces and trigger warnings, They're quite literally stealing the tools that you need to live in life. | ||
| In real life, you're going to hear some things. | ||
| We're guaranteed rights, not the ability to not be offended. | ||
| These are the most important things you can have in your toolbox so | ||
| that you can go forward and live like a functioning person and | ||
| be able to use all of your faculty to do whatever you want in this world. | ||
| And they can take that from you. | ||
| So that's why I focus so much on the college stuff. | ||
| It's like you're taking it from the people that need it the most. | ||
| And by the way, it's just starting there. | ||
| It'll come for the rest of us. | ||
| Yeah, I think the issue, though, we shouldn't think of it strictly as, | ||
| you know, we need more debate. | ||
| And that's not necessarily to disagree with you guys. | ||
| I think, I mean, education is a mess for a lot of reasons. | ||
| It's a huge subject we could spend many hours talking about. | ||
| But ultimately, the purpose of education is to teach somebody how to think and then the knowledge they need to live a good life. | ||
| And that's not being done at any level of education. | ||
| So I don't think of it as we need more debate. | ||
| We need more good education that teaches students how to think, and critical thinking especially. | ||
| But if I were to just enact a halfway measure, I would try to create more diversity of ideas and more debating in schools. | ||
| But I look at that as a step toward ultimately good education that teaches people how to think. | ||
| I'll just toss in one little technique that I've learned, which is that if you are not a racist, and you are not a homophobe, and you are not a bigot, or whatever it is, then these words should have no power over you. | ||
| You're the one that gives them power, if they call you these things. | ||
| I was at Portland State University with Christina Hoff Summers. | ||
| They said that she was a misogynist, and that I was against the gay community. | ||
| I married a dude. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty pro-gay. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's not even enough for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| For the record, I'm not even gay. | ||
| I was just trying to prove a point with these people. | ||
| Just using their nonsense against them. | ||
| I just want to say one thing. | ||
| I agree with what Steve says, but I think there is an important psychological factor here, and that is when you are confronted with things that you don't like or with things that you disagree with, it makes you feel uncomfortable. | ||
| And I think it's very important that we, in school or at home, teach our kids to be in situations that make them feel uncomfortable. | ||
| And that's part of the unfree culture we are having now, that parents believe that their kids should only feel good. | ||
| And it's not part of life, you know, to expose them to unpleasant situations without being, you know, a masochist. | ||
| But it's part of growing up that sometimes there are things that you don't like to talk about or it makes you feel Not good, but that's important to cultivate this culture of freedom and tolerance, even though you don't like the word. | ||
| I try to make my kids feel uncomfortable constantly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm probably watching right now, oh yeah, absolutely. | |
| Good evening. | ||
| This question might be meant principally for Mr. Simpson. | ||
| You made a point during this session, one that I might be inclined to agree with. | ||
| You said that public universities could possibly represent a threat to free speech because they could open the door for government to regulate what we know and correspondingly what we think about and say. | ||
| But many of us, myself included, couldn't entertain the notion of paying private school tuition. | ||
| So my question is this. | ||
| Which do you think poses more of a threat? | ||
| The possibility that many of us might miss out on being educated? | ||
| Or the threat that government might use a university to manipulate what we think? | ||
| I don't think that those two things are, you know, there's no contradiction there, but this is a bigger issue about the nature of market economy and what you would get if people were actually free to, you know, spend their money as they wish and invest in what they wish. | ||
| I mean, look, Obviously, there's a huge demand for education. | ||
| The idea that the government needs to provide it, I think, is crazy. | ||
| It's wrong. | ||
| I mean, we've had over a century of it. | ||
| It's been an abysmal failure at the primary level, and we're seeing the consequences of it at the level of higher education. | ||
| But there's all sorts of market distortions there. | ||
| So yeah, private education is exorbitantly expensive. | ||
| Part of the reason is that government has gotten involved in the provision of education and bid prices up by pumping gigantic amounts of money into the market. | ||
| But that's more of an economic phenomenon. | ||
| In a really free market economy, I'm positive. | ||
| There'd be no question that tons of people would provide all kinds of awesome educational opportunities and that people would be able to choose different educational opportunities. | ||
| So I don't see that really as a fundamental threat or there's any contradiction here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Hi. | ||
| How would you apply the question of free speech to radical Islamic preachers like Anjum Chowdhury and people like that who are calling for the downfall of the West and sometimes directly inciting violence? | ||
| Should they be silenced or should they be free to say what they feel? | ||
| Well, I would say that on the direct call to violence, then there's a legal issue there. | ||
| There's no such thing as hate speech. | ||
| I don't know if you saw Governor Howard Dean a couple weeks ago talking about hate speech and saying that it was illegal, and this is just simply not true. | ||
| I've invited him on my show. | ||
| He has not responded. | ||
| Hate speech doesn't exist. | ||
| A direct call to violence is a criminal act, and then you can call the authorities, and then they can take action on that. | ||
| As for what's happening in England, I mean, it seems to me that you have to—Fleming, maybe I think you're going to agree with me here, but feel free not to—I mean, it seems to me you have to let these people speak. | ||
| Yeah, it's vile what they're talking about, and I mean, forgetting what they're talking That they want to do with other minorities, religious minorities, and gay people, and women, and all of those things. | ||
| They are trying to use the systems of tolerance that we have in the West to destroy the West. | ||
| I mean, that's what, you know, the difference between an Islamist and a jihadist who's using violence. | ||
| An Islamist is trying to use the systems we have against us. | ||
| I don't know that stopping them from speaking is the right way to stop their ideology. | ||
| I'm a firm believer that you let those ideas out there and you have to beat them | ||
| with better ideas. | ||
| But that one is as close to a place where I could possibly be convinced of something else. | ||
| I don't think so at the moment. | ||
| But what about using our own systems against us, which is so obviously what they're doing? | ||
| I mean, that's what the communists did during the Cold War, and we managed pretty well. | ||
| In Denmark, we had a communist party with is... | ||
| They were sitting in parliament. | ||
| They had their own newspapers. | ||
| They had their own schools. | ||
| They had their own unions. | ||
| They had their own political festivals. | ||
| And they wanted to destroy democracy and put in a government that was loyal to Moscow. | ||
| And I think we did pretty well. | ||
| Today we are going in exactly the opposite direction. | ||
| I mean, in Denmark the Nazi party was also not banned. | ||
| And it isn't. | ||
| So I think we have been pretty good at fighting totalitarian ideas in democracy by not banning them. | ||
| But with radical Islam, we are doing that. | ||
| And I think Anjum Chowdhury, it's a borderline question. | ||
| But in general, I don't think that you should prosecute people Because they called for, you know, the establishment of a caliphate. | ||
| Even when they say that unbelievers have to be killed, I don't think that should be a criminal offense because it means that you should ban the Koran. | ||
| That is a verse from the Quran. | ||
| So, I mean, I think the right way is to... And I would like to know if there are living people among me, in the society where I live, who support these kind of ideas. | ||
| I would like to know. | ||
| And that would not be possible if they are not allowed to speak their mind, as long as they do not incite violence directly. | ||
| Last year in Denmark we passed a law criminalizing the condoning of polygamy in a religious setting. | ||
| Which was specifically targeting imams. | ||
| Which means if I was an elected member of parliament, and if I said that in parliament, I would not be prosecuted. | ||
| But if I said it in a mosque, I would be prosecuted. | ||
| That's discrimination. | ||
| And I think it comes back to this lack of our ability to manage diversity of opinions. | ||
| The communists And the Nazis, they also support undemocratic means. | ||
| But they have more or less the same social values as we do. | ||
| At least the communists, not the Nazis maybe. | ||
| But, you know, they drink beer. | ||
| They go to the movies, they listen to rock music and so on and so forth. | ||
| But Muslims, they have different social norms and I think that's a huge challenge and it frightens a lot of people. | ||
| And therefore they think that we have to clamp down on all kinds of things. | ||
| By the way, the reason that's so interesting and so complex Is that you may have seen they did a documentary I think it was on the BBC about radical Islam and two of the killers from London just a couple weeks ago were in it. | ||
| So it wasn't that these guys were hiding they were talking about what they were going to do. | ||
| So in a way that that works against our defense of free speech they're using speech to tell us what they're going to do. | ||
| I think the way I would put the positive point is our systems can't be used against us if we understand and implement our systems correctly. | ||
| There's a lot of mistakes that I think our government is making in England, too. | ||
| In that example, I think the police should have followed those guys and investigated what they were doing. | ||
| In the current context, people who are talking about the fact that they want to destroy society, they want to kill people on the basis of any ideology, that There's a concept in law called probable cause and if you're going around saying I actually want to kill people and I think other people should kill people and being vague enough that it wouldn't be direct incitement, you know, the police should pursue you and pay attention to you and decide whether you are, the way I would put it, is a criminal gang or conspiring with other people to destroy or violate the rights of other people. | ||
| It can get complicated, but the basic way to think about this is that you have the right to speak and advocate even crazy ideas. | ||
| You don't have the right to threaten people, to incite violence, or to conspire to commit crimes. | ||
| If the police find that you're part of a group whose ultimate goal is to destroy our government or bomb people or kill people, I would think of it, and I think an easier way to think about it is, it's like the mafia. | ||
| We know what the mafia is, right? | ||
| Now, it may be hard to find out who's a member of the mafia, But if the guys at the, you know, the Italian Social Club are making a big deal about how they're going to rob a bank sometime, you don't just say, ah, there's nothing we can do because it's speech. | ||
| No, you, and, you know, sorry about the, if it offends Italians or anything, but, you know. | ||
| The Italian Social Club? | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, I'm going back to it. | ||
| What year do you think this is? | ||
| I grew up in New Jersey. | ||
| But the point is that governments don't have to stand for groups that are effectively | ||
| criminal conspiracies and just sit idly by and say, we can't do anything about them. | ||
| I actually think during the Cold War, if I'm correct about this, you can correct me if I'm wrong, | ||
| but as I understand it, the American Communist Party was directly working with the Soviet Union. | ||
| They should have been investigated, arrested, and prevented from essentially being an ally or helping, | ||
| aiding, and abetting an enemy of this country. | ||
| That's not a violation of free speech. | ||
| That's just basic criminal law. | ||
| So if we thought of it this way and we really understood, wait a minute, we can go after people who are planning to | ||
| overthrow the government or destroy people's lives or blow up buildings, and we thought of them as a criminal gang | ||
| rather than just ideologically motivated, it doesn't matter what they're motivated by. | ||
| Theft, destruction, ideology, it doesn't matter. | ||
| If you fit the terms of a crime or you're committing a crime, and there are a number of different potential crimes | ||
| that apply here, you're a criminal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| In fact, the Communist Party of the US was banned legally, but it was never executed in practice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Meaning? | |
| I think there was a court decision in 1952, but somehow it was allowed to exist more or less openly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My question is for Mr. Rose. | ||
| Had you known the scope of terrorism and crime that resulted from publishing the Mohammed cartoons before publishing them, would you have still published them, and what would be your reasoning? | ||
| First time I get that question. | ||
| Laughter No, I didn't know. | ||
| And the people who today say that I should have known that it was some kind of automatic reaction | ||
| as if you push a button. | ||
| They are just not honest. | ||
| . | ||
| In the fall of 2005, before all Hell broke loose in the Middle East. | ||
| A very prominent Danish expert on Islam said after the publication of the cartoons that this is never going to be a big international issue. | ||
| It's too small. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have been published before without triggering these kind of reactions. | ||
| If I say that in light of the violence that erupted, that I wouldn't do it, I think I would send a very bad signal to all kinds of violent people. | ||
| basically telling them that if you threaten, intimidate, and use enough violence, I will do exactly as you please. | ||
| On the other hand, of course, I'm not suicidal. | ||
| So... | ||
| As I said to David, it's not nice to receive death threats in the emails. | ||
| But, and I mean, I don't think that you should, if you know how people will react in advance, | ||
| you should think about the consequences of what you say. | ||
| But I just think here, I think the problem was that when the violence erupted, I became the scapegoat. | ||
| And it was as if a lot of people in the West thought that Muslims belonged to a different species. | ||
| That they don't have a mind and a brain to reason and make a decision about how they're going to react. | ||
| As if it's just, you know, they're like animals or like small children. | ||
| They're not able to make a decision for themselves about how to react to An offensive cartoon. | ||
| And therefore I was the perpetrator and not the people who committed the actual violence. | ||
| And I think that was the problem. | ||
| And there was an original sin. | ||
| I think that was the phrase Greg Lukanov from FIRE used at some point. | ||
| If most newspapers in the West back then had republished the cartoons. | ||
| Not as an act of support. | ||
| Because publication does not mean endorsement to a publisher. | ||
| You can still write an editorial saying, you know, we disagree with the decision to publish, but they are newsworthy, and people have to make up a decision for themselves what they think about these cartoons. | ||
| And you are not taking your readers seriously if you believe that you can only show them | ||
| things that they like. | ||
| And I think the New York Times, they made a huge mistake. | ||
| It reads on the top of the New York Times all the news that fit to print. | ||
| And February 1st, 2006, the cartoons, they were news item number one in the world. | ||
| But they decided not to publish them as most of the big American newspapers did, and I think that was a real mistake. | ||
| If everybody had published then as, you know, basically saying this is the right thing to do, we may not agree with the content of the cartoons, but it's important to publish them because they are in the news. | ||
| then you would have, we might have been in a different place now, because today nobody, | ||
| not even in Europe, publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, not the newspaper where | ||
| I used to work at, Juhland Sprugge, they don't do it anymore. | ||
| There's only one newspaper in Europe that did this, Charlie Hebdo, and they were killed. | ||
| As someone's saying, they don't do it anymore. | ||
| They've announced that they won't talk about radical Islam. | ||
| But the editor-in-chief, in fact, that was an interview with Der Stern in Germany, and the editor-in-chief said afterwards that he had been misquoted, and that they would still do it if they find it relevant. | ||
| I don't know if that's true or not, but he in fact corrected the quote. | ||
| But it's also true that Sineb, a female cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo, she left because she thought that they had gone soft on Islam. | ||
| But I mean, I will not criticize Charlie Hebdo. | ||
| I mean, 12 people were killed. | ||
| And so I think it's fair for them to say, you know, we've done our part of the struggle. | ||
| Now other people have to take over. | ||
| Even though I think it's very humiliating. | ||
| It's very, very humiliating for anyone as a publisher, as a journalist, to cave in to these kinds of threats. | ||
| And it works the other way. | ||
| I mean, if you show people that intimidation works, why should they stop? | ||
| Yeah, and what Fleming's talking about there is, I love the phrase, the soft bigotry of low expectations, because that's exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| You're saying that these people don't have the capacity to deal with a cartoon. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's a Broadway show, The Book of Mormon. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| There is not going to be the Book of the Quran. | ||
| And it would not be a hero. | ||
| It would not be this amazing thing to everyone on the left. | ||
| When the Pope, I remember a couple years ago in New York City, was it at the Met? | ||
| They had the Pope drawn in feces. | ||
| That was on the front page of the New York Times. | ||
| There's another image that they would not show. | ||
| So this is that you're saying, OK, we can offend certain people because we know they behave a certain way, but this other group, we're not even going to give them the chance. | ||
| And in a bizarre way, that's actual bigotry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Could you comment on the relationship between profanity, censorship, and hate speech laws? | ||
| Do they spring from the same source? | ||
| Profanity, you mean like the FCC? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, basically. | |
| Although, it's been in our culture for eons, it seems. | ||
| I mean, even our parents censor us. | ||
| And, of course, the media is censored by the FCC, yes. | ||
| Well, I would say you can say any fucking thing you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Shit. | ||
| Motherfucker. | ||
| Cunt. | ||
| Cock. | ||
| What were the other two? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The George Carlin list? | |
| Yeah, what are the other two? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| Piss. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Motherfucker. | ||
| Tits. | ||
| You left out tits? | ||
| I know this is the part of the show that'll get clipped and shared around, so. | ||
| Wait, what was it? | ||
| Come on, I got 500 people. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Piss. | ||
| Motherfucker. | ||
| Now I think they're just heckling us. | ||
| One more time. | ||
| The guy in the hat's got it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go. Good night everybody. Thank you. | |
| No, just kidding. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It sounds like poetry almost. | ||
| It is poetry. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like we answered that question. | ||
| Well, one point, though. | ||
| It's not censorship for your parents to tell you not to say that. | ||
| That's not censorship. | ||
| And it's wrong to think that that is censorship. | ||
| So what the FCC did was definitely censorship. | ||
| But saying, you know, I'm not going to say certain words in certain contexts, that's not censorship. | ||
| That's often good judgment, often bad judgment. | ||
| But we have to decide it in the context of having said that, I swear in front of my kids all the damn time. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| At the outset of the discussion, Dave made what I believe is a disparaging comment about someone who said, I'm not going to share this image from your page because someone might unfriend me on Facebook. | ||
| My question concerns people with more serious fears, justifiable fears of violence. | ||
| Would you call that self-censorship or something else? | ||
| And are you at all critical? | ||
| And I'm thinking of, for example, in certain Muslim countries, if you post on Facebook, there is no God, someone will kill you, the government will not protect you. | ||
| Or the college administrator who says, you know, it would be good to book that person, but my campus will be trashed and my people will be attacked. | ||
| Well, speech has consequences. | ||
| So if you're in a country that you know they're going to come get you or arrest you or whatever it is, or your neighbors are going to turn on you, That's not good, but it is a reality. | ||
| I don't judge those people for that. | ||
| I mean, look at Fleming, who lives still in a Western country, did something that by every standard is OK to do in a Western country, and the consequences he has to deal with it. | ||
| If I right now was just to literally quote Bill Maher from two weeks ago, just quote him. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| There would be consequences to me. | ||
| Everybody, I get a ton of email about this. | ||
| People are afraid to say what they think. | ||
| That's the issue right now. | ||
| That's what I believe to be the biggest issue. | ||
| Nothing that we were going to say up here, we did not censor ourselves in any way so that we suddenly hid our secretly racist or bigoted views. | ||
| But that doesn't mean we're just going to come up here and say every crazy thing that we can possibly do because we know there are repercussions. | ||
| I had a woman on my show That from Iraq, some of you may have seen this, about two years ago, she was an atheist in Iraq. | ||
| When she wanted to do my show, I said, you don't have to show your face if you don't want to. | ||
| She wanted to do it. | ||
| She said, if I don't do it, then no one's going to ever do it. | ||
| She ended up getting all sorts of death threats. | ||
| We had to take the video away. | ||
| I found out just yesterday that she's been admitted to the United States. | ||
| So, sometimes you have to be brave. | ||
| You have to be brave. | ||
| But I don't begrudge or judge the people that can't find the courage to do it. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| I have cameras outside of my house. | ||
| I'd prefer not to, but here we are. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you asked about the definition of self-censorship, and as I said, I commissioned those cartoons as part of a debate about self-censorship. | ||
| And many people have said to me, you know, we need self-censorship in order to be able to live together, because if everybody speaks What's on their mind all the time? | ||
| We would not be able to live together. | ||
| And I think that's a delusion of the concept of self-censorship. | ||
| To me, self-censorship means that there are things that I would like to say, but I refrain from saying them because I'm afraid what might happen to me. | ||
| If I say it. | ||
| And I think that's different from etiquette and it's different from good manners and certain social norms. | ||
| And I agree with Dave. | ||
| You cannot condemn people for refraining from saying things that will cause violence against them. | ||
| But you also have to remember that there are consequences if everybody keeps silent. | ||
| And a whole society start internalizing certain norms because there are things that, because the government has intimidated the public space. | ||
| So, and we also have to remember that the struggle for free speech and the struggle against censorship is not a free ride. | ||
| There are people earlier in history who really paid with their lives for our right to speak our mind today. | ||
| But I'm not calling on people to sacrifice themselves. | ||
| Everybody has to make a decision for himself. | ||
| But self-censorship does have consequences. | ||
| Yeah, I also think it's important to say, you know, one interesting thing | ||
| about the cartoons and violence, because a lot of people usually say, you know, | ||
| the cartoons that cause violence in the Middle East. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not the cartoons that cause violence. | ||
| People make decisions to commit violence. | ||
| And the funny thing here is that all the violence, in fact, took place in countries without freedom of expression. | ||
| Where it was a criminal offence to publish these kind of cartoons, while in countries with free speech, where it was not a criminal offence to publish these kind of cartoons, there was no violence at the time. | ||
| And there is still far less violence than there used to be, which is an indication of the fact that if you cultivate a culture of freedom of expression, it's easier to manage these kind of of disagreements and anger without resorting to violence. | ||
| And blasphemy laws... In fact, Denmark just got rid of its blasphemy law, and I think you signed the petition, and Jeroen did as well, just two weeks ago, which is great. | ||
| But the Danish government that wanted to keep it on the books used The argumentation that that was a way to make society more safe. | ||
| So if you criminalize certain kinds of speech, then people will not say it, and you will not offend people's religious sensibilities, and then they will not commit violence. | ||
| But it turns out that there is a very close correlation between blasphemy laws and terrorism. | ||
| and lack of freedom of expression. | ||
| If you look at Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria, you have seen an escalation in the application of blasphemy laws by the governments and an escalation in terrorist violence by groups like Al Qaeda, Boko Haram in Nigeria and a leading terrorist group, Muslim terrorist group in Indonesia. | ||
| So I would make the argument that blasphemy law is in fact inside violence. | ||
| Because the government basically tells society that it's okay to use violence against blasphemers, because this is a very, very serious crime. | ||
| In Pakistan, you have the death penalty for blasphemy, which means that you will get the same sentence if you publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, or publish a novel like the satanic verses by Salman Rushdie, or kill 500 people in a terrorist attack. | ||
| It's a similar criminal offense. | ||
| And that's why people take the law into their own hands and they kill blasphemers in prisons and in villages and so on and so forth. | ||
| I think it makes sense that you would see that correlation. | ||
| I mean, I haven't studied it, but, you know, because what blasphemy laws do, if you put them on the books, it just emboldens the irrational, violent people who want to shut down thought, and ultimately they want to enslave people. | ||
| Anytime you appease evil, you get more of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Related to this free speech issue, how do you differentiate between the political violence of college protesters today and organizations like By Any Means Necessary and the violence conducted by Americans during the Revolutionary War? | |
| That's quite a jump there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, in terms of using violence to achieve political ends as opposed to ideas and reason. | |
| So, the founders were right to oppose tyranny. | ||
| They had a good argument against it. | ||
| They were fighting for freedom. | ||
| And so they were morally correct. | ||
| They were opposing tyranny. | ||
| Those who are using violence today, they're not opposing tyranny, certainly not. | ||
| And they live in a rule of law society in which there are all kinds of ways you can deal with laws and government actions and other people that you disagree with, far short of violence. | ||
| It's crazy to resort to violence in a country like this, which is basically free and basically protects your rights. | ||
| It's not perfect by any means. | ||
| But you have to make a distinction. | ||
| The founders were willing to openly rebel against their government. | ||
| And then you have to judge whether any group that resorts to rebellion is doing so for proper moral reasons or horrible evil reasons. | ||
| So there's absolutely no grounds for resorting to violence in this country today. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And it will promote the very tyranny that they pretend to be against. | ||
| They're not against tyranny. | ||
| They're in favor of tyranny, because in effect, they're in favor of a kind of anarchism | ||
| and a lawlessness, and that always leads to tyranny. | ||
| So that's how you have to judge. | ||
| But I mean, I don't think the two things are really commensurate, | ||
| but you can't hold it as anybody who is opposing something on the basis of political ideas | ||
| and willing to resort to violence is somehow equivalent. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| You have to judge them. | ||
| Some of them are good and appropriate, the founders. | ||
| Some of them are horrible and evil. | ||
| French Revolution, Communist Revolution, Maoist Revolution, you know, all of the other revolutions that led to totalitarianism. | ||
| And the people who are resorting to violence today are crazy. | ||
| There's no justification for it whatsoever. | ||
| And I would say even in cases where there is a justification for using violence, if you're living in a totalitarian dictatorship, it's usually not a very effective way of fighting. | ||
| Gene Sharp, I think he's at Harvard, has studied these secessionist movements and People fighting for freedom, independence, and so on and so forth. | ||
| And it turns out that the non-violent struggle, in fact, is far more effective. | ||
| And the movements that are able to stay within the limits of non-violent struggles are quite often more effective. | ||
| And it's also the thing that if you go down the road of violence, it's very difficult to stop. | ||
| And usually it has very tragic consequences for even people who you would say they have a legitimate right | ||
| to use violence to fight for their rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| How can an individual promote freedom of speech on a college campus without | ||
| ending communications and conversations with peers by alienating them? | ||
| I mean. | ||
| This is the toughest one for you guys. | ||
| I'm actually really impressed how many young people there are here. | ||
| That's the toughest one. | ||
| When I had sort of my political awakening over the last couple years, I've lost a ton of friends. | ||
| I've gained new ones, but the so-called tolerant side doesn't seem to be that tolerant of ideas that they're not thrilled with. | ||
| And you're going to be confronted with that constantly. | ||
| If you fight for the individual, it will somehow appear in their minds, not in reality, but in their minds, it will somehow appear that you're fighting for other people's oppression, or you're fighting for the patriarchy, or just all these nonsensical buzzwords they come up with, and you just have to be clear that you're not. | ||
| One effective thing is you've got to look your friend in the eye. | ||
| Am I a bigot? | ||
| What have I done that is racist? | ||
| Have I said something or acted homophobic or whatever it is? | ||
| I think if you can get it down to that, I just happen to think something differently politically. | ||
| And that's okay. | ||
| Even just in the last couple weeks, for as much of this as I do for a living, I had a dinner with some old childhood friends that I went to elementary school with, and they know my opinions very well, and two of them are very far-left progressives. | ||
| One's a Trump guy, and we were at a restaurant in New York City, and it was getting heated, and we were screaming. | ||
| I wasn't screaming. | ||
| I was being screamed at, but there was screaming going on, and I just paused it, and I said, We've been friends for 30 some odd years. | ||
| It is not going to end at this table right now. | ||
| And we moved on to talking about basketball. | ||
| And then we started fighting again, because this guy thinks that Kevin Durant is better than LeBron, which is completely idiotic. | ||
| Finals notwithstanding. | ||
| But I think that technique, like, one of the biggest problems we have now is that everything's politicized. | ||
| Everything, everyone thinks that every conversation you have to have should be about politics and is somehow a referendum on what you think about everything. | ||
| And if you don't say something, that implies that you must think something and all of these crazy things. | ||
| So I think using reason and logic and really making it about you, I think, is the most effective way to fight it, which I guess is kind of, It's on you, it's on you. | ||
| I also think it's very important to try to clear up misunderstandings about what free speech implies. | ||
| Because a lot of people today believe that free speech is just a cover-up for the right of the powerful to attack the weak. | ||
| And there's a very important history missing here. | ||
| And it turns out that all the way through history that social, national, all kinds of movements for political and social change They have benefited from freedom of expression and they have insisted on their right as a weak minority to speak out against the powerful. | ||
| That's the civil rights movement, it's the women movements, it's the gay movement, All kinds of minorities have in fact benefited from freedom of expression. | ||
| And it's important for them, for the weak, to have freedom of expression, to speak their mind. | ||
| And these kind of misunderstandings, it's very important to clear these misunderstandings up. | ||
| Do we have a little flexibility on time? | ||
| I want to get to everybody if possible. | ||
| OK. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Granted that all ideas should be protected under free speech, | |
| and that bad ideas should and can best be combated by better, truer ideas. | ||
| What about speech that has no idea content whatsoever? | ||
| Things like insults, racial slurs, and maybe a picture of the Prophet Muhammad. | ||
| I don't think it's true that they don't have any idea content, but it is not ultimately up to government to decide what has idea content versus what doesn't. | ||
| It's ultimately up to government to enforce laws against, in my view, against the initiation of force and that protect rights. | ||
| The issue isn't, are your ideas good ones, or do they qualify as ideas, as opposed to just blabber? | ||
| Are they racist? | ||
| Do they have a lot of substance, or are they hollow? | ||
| That's not ultimately the question. | ||
| The question is, you have the right to speak. | ||
| You have the right to speak your mind. | ||
| You have the right pretty much to say anything you want, so long as you don't violate the rights of others. | ||
| It can be a complicated question of what constitutes a violation of rights, but it doesn't turn on the content of the ideas, and I think it's wrong to say that racist speech has no ideas. | ||
| It's not really true. | ||
| They're bad ideas, but they are ideas. | ||
| Even the cartoons, if right now we had a piece of paper, and I drew a stick figure, and on the bottom I wrote Moses, nobody would care. | ||
| If I wrote Jesus, nobody would care. | ||
| If I wrote Mohammed, you guys would be looking for the exits. | ||
| This shows you that it's not about the thing, it's about the idea behind the thing. | ||
| So you have to just not give those ideas... If that doesn't offend you, then don't give... | ||
| Someone else's offense power over your own mind and actions. | ||
| As he draws a stick figure right now. | ||
| I mean, I would say that the... Come on! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to step off stage for a moment. | |
| No, but the most famous of those cartoons that is of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. | ||
| It's very specifically expressing an idea. | ||
| It says that there are Muslims who are committing terrorist acts in the name of the Prophet. | ||
| And that's an idea. | ||
| But I think one of the beautiful things about the US First Amendment tradition is that here you can never criminalize speech exclusively because of its content. | ||
| I would love us to have that kind of principle in Europe. | ||
| You can talk about the effect of speech, but you cannot say just because of the content that something should not be allowed to be said. | ||
| I, by the way, think that that cartoon is brilliant. | ||
| I think it's a brilliant example of political cartoons, so-called political cartoons at their height. | ||
| I mean, it conveys precisely... Everybody knew what that meant the moment they looked at it. | ||
| Yeah, and the irony is that, you know, there are some Muslims who are saying, you know, if you say we are violent, we are going to kill you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, well, we're going to try to get to... okay, short questions, short answers. | ||
| Here we go, last couple of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I meant by racial slurs, insults, and I guess a picture of Prophet Muhammad, the common denominator there is kind of a provocation to violence in varying degrees. | |
| Now, I haven't seen these Muhammad cartoons. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm sure they had plenty of idea content behind them. | ||
| And the extreme of the, uh, provocation to violence. | ||
| Um, it seems like the Prophet Muhammad thing is kind of just grafted on to their ideology. | ||
| Like, it has no, uh, no real significance to their ideas one way or another. | ||
| It's kind of just this, like, categorical, like, imperative eyelet of, like, what they're most certainly going to get extremely mad at. | ||
| And, uh, Like, whether, like, you're aware of this or not beforehand, like, it seems to me at best that this is amoral at best to, like, in free speech to draw a picture of Prophet Muhammad. | ||
| Alright, well, you know what? | ||
| In the spirit of brevity, how about we all agree don't kill people over cartoons? | ||
| Can we agree on that? | ||
| We're good? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright, we do have to move on a little bit, so let's try to get to the last few people. | |
| Sorry, we gotta get on to the next guy. | ||
| to. | ||
| Yeah, so we got to get on to the next guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Hi, so getting back to Steve's comment that the biggest threat from government to free | ||
| speech nowadays is actually the failure of government to protect our rights. | ||
| I was wondering what you feel about, or Dave, if you have any opinion on the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie, which they renewed last year, and whether it's the responsibility of Western governments to do anything it takes to resolve that situation. | ||
| Well, I'm certainly against the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, obviously. | ||
| You are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You are? | ||
| I am against the fatwa on Salman Rushdie's head, yes. | ||
| I don't know that our government, I suppose we could use sanctions or pressure. | ||
| I wouldn't want to threaten military action to get a fatwa off one guy's head. | ||
| I don't know what our government can do about that, but what we can do for Salman is to offer him all of the protections we have in this country to come here and spread his great ideas, of which he has many. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they also encouraged violence against American bookstores right after the book was published? | |
| Yeah, I mean, look, plenty of countries promote plenty of bad things. | ||
| I don't think we can totally police the world. | ||
| I think we should have done something about it, but what exactly it would have looked like is open to question. | ||
| I'm not an expert on that. | ||
| on military things. | ||
| But definitely, we should have done something. | ||
| And if you look at it, think about it from now. | ||
| There's a direct line from the Salman Rushdie affair right up to Charlie Hebdo and beyond. | ||
| We could have stopped it back then. | ||
| That was appeasing evil regimes. | ||
| We definitely should have taken action. | ||
| All right, two more. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What should one do to challenge hate speech laws, especially | |
| in Europe? | ||
| And to which extent should you personally do something, even if you get into trouble for it? | ||
| What was the question? | ||
| To what extent should we challenge hate speech laws and what should we do? | ||
| To every possible extent. | ||
| I mean hate speech laws, I don't think that I'm against them as a matter of principle. | ||
| But also as a matter of what's effective to fight hate, whatever that means. | ||
| Europe or the European Union, the Ressentitra of the European Union, is that we somehow believe that if we eradicate hate, then eternal peace will erupt. | ||
| And it's just a utopia. | ||
| And as it happens with any utopia, when you try to put it into practice, its first victim is freedom. | ||
| And it's the same here. | ||
| I'm against hate speech laws, but unfortunately, instead of getting rid of them, more and more European countries are passing more and more of these laws. | ||
| And I think it's a reaction to the refugee crisis, growing tensions within our societies, but also a way of managing the digital technology. | ||
| But hate speech laws, they are bad. | ||
| I mean, it's not an effective way to fight bigotry. | ||
| It's really not a very effective way. | ||
| And as a matter of principle, as I said, I believe that hate speech laws, they are just an attempt to enforce one set of social norms. | ||
| They are not intended to fight hate. | ||
| If you really wanted to fight hate, you should criminalize a lot of things. | ||
| And not only the kind of speech that are being prosecuted within these hate speech laws. | ||
| They are bad, but they are proliferating. | ||
| And just to your notification, there has never been so much regulation of speech in the world as we have today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But would you agree that saying outrageous things actually alleviates these hate speech laws or makes them just worse in the response? | |
| I think we have to move quickly. | ||
| The one thing I would say, I don't think saying outrageous things is going to solve this. | ||
| We have to defend the freedom to think and the right to think and recognize how important that is. | ||
| And the second point I would make is that it cannot work to force people to think even what is true. | ||
| All you can do is destroy people and ultimately destroy society and enslave it. | ||
| And who is to define what is outrageous? | ||
| One man's hate speech is another man's poetry. | ||
| All right, the big finish. | ||
| First off, I believe you were the guy who gave us all seven dirty words, correct? | ||
| One more time. | ||
| One more time for the good people. | ||
| I say no! I say no! | ||
| I'm sorry, no. | ||
| I I can't tell if you're kidding or not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Self-censorship, right? | |
| Self-censorship? | ||
| All right, go ahead. | ||
| In the English lexicon, There are very few words as incendiary as... Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| I think you have to say it, actually. | ||
| Because I can't have one guy yelling no, so we're not going to say words at a free speech panel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I gotta say it? | |
| I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Seven words that you can't say on television? | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and... tits. | |
| Okay. | ||
| We're all okay. | ||
| Everyone's okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the English lexicon, there are very few words as incendiary as the word nigger. | |
| Now, why is it... Good evening to you, gentlemen, by the way. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Cut to the live stream. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is it that you gentlemen, the people in this room, and most people anywhere else cannot say this word without reproach? | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I mean, actually, this is exactly the conversation we were having at dinner before | ||
| this. | ||
| And I don't know that I can give you an answer that's going to be satisfying to you. | ||
| I think it's actually a major problem that I have no desire to offend people. | ||
| I have no desire to say a word to intentionally inflame people. | ||
| But should every protected group have a word that we can't say about them? | ||
| Or every, not protected group, minority group, or whatever it is, should everyone have a word that the rest of us can't say? | ||
| It's a real problem, but it's... | ||
| It's not an intellectual problem, I think, because I agree with the premise of your question, but it's a societal problem that this thing has become so politicized and sort of toxic that, again, Bill Maher, who has been the standard bearer of the left, I don't think anyone would say Bill Maher has been racist in any way or has promoted it. | ||
| You may not like his policies. | ||
| You may not like his leftist policies. | ||
| That would be fine. | ||
| But I don't think anyone's walking around going, Bill Maher's a racist. | ||
| And he basically had to apologize on his own show and kiss the ring of Ice Cube, Ice T, Arnold Palmer, I don't remember. | ||
| But you see my point? | ||
| I like what you're saying. | ||
| So Steve, take it away. | ||
| There are a lot of reasons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are a lot of reasons. | |
| So very quickly, I would say there are good reasons that that word is not said | ||
| and bad reasons that it's not said. | ||
| And it depends on the context. | ||
| But let's face it, it's a word with a really horrifying, bad history. | ||
| There are all kinds of reasons why it shouldn't be said. | ||
| But that's an individual judgment. | ||
| And I mean, there's a lot to say on this topic. | ||
| I think there's a lot to do with guilt and the entire kind of multicultural atmosphere that has prevented people | ||
| from talking about issues of race. | ||
| But, and while I don't think, and I'll be controversial and say, | ||
| I don't think Bill Maher should have apologized for that at all, | ||
| but that doesn't mean one should advocate that people say that word. | ||
| It's, it's, so there's a lot more to say about this, but, you know, | ||
| we have to ultimately be willing to think about the context in which words are used | ||
| and have conversations and evaluate and judge the people who, who speak them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| You know Fleming's a professional because that was an excellent use of head nodding | ||
| to get us through the question. | ||
| Thank you guys for joining us. | ||
| I hope you found this as enlightening as I did. | ||
| I totally enjoyed this. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, come on, you can do better than that. | |
| Give me that objectivist thing from before. |
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